The elites in the Church of Ireland, in other words, had abandoned their heavenly duty to win souls and had embraced a worldly political Protestantism subservient to the interests of the British Empire.2 The accuracy of Darby’s account is debatable. There is only a sparse record of Protestant conversions in Ireland in the mid-1820s. The archbishop of Dublin, William Magee, did write a policy statement in mid-1827, one which Darby angrily responded to in an unpublished letter, but Magee hardly said what Darby thought he did. Moreover, just two years later the Roman Catholic Relief Act, part of
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