• A Sermon Preach’d at Belfast, the Ninth of December 1719, by John Abernethy, Minister of the Gospel (London: J. Noon; printed by James Blow 1720).
• Religious Obedience Founded on Personal Persuasion (Belfast & London 1720) [to the text, ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind’ - Rom. 14:5].
• Sermons on Various Subjects [...]with a Large Preface Containing the Life of the Author, by [ed.; James Duchal with a short ‘life’], 4 vols. (London: D. Browne; C. Davis; A. Millar 1748-51);Do., another edn. (London: D. Browne; T. Osborne; A. Millar 1762).
• Discourses Concerning the Being and Natural Perfections of Godin Which That First Principle of Religion, the Existence of the Deity, Is Proved (Dublin: for the author 1740), 400pp., 8o.;Do. (Dublin: J. Smith 1742), 8o., 440pp.;Do., 2 vols (London: H. Whitridge 1743), 8o;Do., 2 vols. (London rep. for H. Whitridge 1746), 8o.;Do. (London H. Whitridge, D. Browne, etc. 1757), 8o.;Do., 2 vols. (Aberdeen: J. Boyle 1778), 12o. [see details- infra.]
• Scarce and Valuable Tracts and Sermons,Occasionally Published by the Late [...]John Abernethy [...] Now First Collected Together (London: R. Griffiths 1751). 8o., 7, 288pp.

For further examples of ‘commodious’ in Irish colonial texts, see under Edmund Spenser > Notes > Texts > ‘commodious soyle [soil]’ - as infra.)

• John Duchal, a life prefaced toSermons on Various Subjects [...], 4 vols. (London: D. Browne; C. Davis; A. Millar 1748-51);
• Richard B. Barlow, ‘The Career of John Abernethy (1680-1740): Father of Non-subscription in Ireland and Defender of Religious Liberty’, in Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 78, No. 3/4 (July-Oct. 1985), pp.399-419 [Cambridge UP - available in JSTOR -online; accessed 21.09.2020];
• Godfrey Brown, ‘John Abernethy, Scholar and Ecclesiast’, inNine Ulster Lives, ed. George O’Brien and Peter Roebuck (Ulster Hist. Found. 1992), pp.125-39.
• M. A. Stewart, ‘John Abernethy (1680-1740)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (OUP 2004) [entry in Dictionary of Irish Biography by same author].

[...] In 1705 the General Synod of Ulster had strengthened its requirement for subscription of the Westminster Confession. That same year, John Abernethy (1680-1740), minister in Antrim, helped found the influential Belfast Society. On 9 December 1719 Abernethy preached a sermon before the Society which was published in both Belfast and London as Religious Obedience Founded on Personal Persuasion (1720). The text for this sermon was ‘Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind’ (Rom. 14:5). Abernethy was arguing against the authority of church courts to require subscription of a man-made confession of faith. For Abernethy, such a requirement was an overextension of ‘the just limits of church-power’ and an attack on the guiding principle of following conscience. Abernethy reasoned that to do so would make ‘arbitrary enclosures within the Church of Christ’ by ‘the rigid test of an exact agreement in doubtful and disputable points’.

For Abernethy this was more than simply an abstract question about the extent of ecclesiastical power - his sermons reveal evidence of a personal commitment to doctrinal anti-Calvinism. Furthermore, Abernethy saw himself as a victim of the abuse of church power. In 1717 the Synod of Ulster had instructed him to accept a call to the Dublin congregation of Usher’s Quay. Abernethy thought that the very idea that he could be told to move against his will depended on ‘servile notions of ecclesiastical power’.

One of Abernethy’s critics, the minister of Dunmurry, John Malcome, coined the term ‘New Light’ to describe the non-subscribers. In his Personal Persuasion no Foundation for Religious Obedience (1720), he argued that Abernethy was undermining Presbyterian polity by putting ‘personal persuasion’ in the place of ‘church government and discipline’. For Malcome, Abernethy’s claims to ‘new light’ undermined the government which Christ himself had established in the church.

[...] Matters came to a head in 1719 when John Abernethy preached a sermon before the Belfast Society on Romans ch.14 v.5 – “Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” This sermon was strongly influenced by the ideas of Bishop Benjamin Hoadly who had preached before King George I two years earlier the idea that Christ sanctioned no visible Church authority.

Abernethy entitled his sermon Religious Obedience founded on Personal Persuasion and it was to plunge Irish Presbyterianism into a struggle that was to last for seven years and end with the expulsion of the liberal wing of the church. The sermon was published in 1720 and it immediately caused a storm. Abernethy took his stand on the sufficiency of scripture but with it the right of private judgement and the individual’s responsibility to employ the God-given faculty of reason in their religious opinions.

Abernethy argued that it was the Christian’s duty to examine all the evidence carefully and to act it on the basis of their own conscientious conviction. He and his supporters saw themselves as following very directly in the reformation tradition by emphasing the right of each individual believer to search the scriptures for themselves.

So with this emphasis on individual decision went an increasing questioning of the place of creedal formularies and with them the authority of the ecclesiastical bodies that upheld them. For presbyterians it meant that the traditional criticisms that they had directed at the Papacy and episcopalian churches were now being directed at their own synods and the Westminster Confession of Faith.

The whole matter rapidly moved from being a theoretical and theological discussion to one of direct practical import with the installation in Belfast of the Rev Samuel Haliday. On 28 July 1720 the presbytery of Belfast assembled at the meeting house of the first congregation to install the new minister. However, Haliday refused to subscribe the Westminster Confession in any form and instead substituted his own declaration. Four members of the presbytery objected to Haliday’s installation but under James Kirkpatrick’s direction the event went ahead. What is usually referred to by historians as the first subscription controversy was now underway.

[...]

Out voted by the orthodox side, which had the overwhelming support of the eldership, the non-subscribers were all placed in the newly created Presbytery of Antrim at the Synod of Dungannon held in June 1725. The following year the non-subscribers drew up a list of propositions which they presented to the Synod as “expedients for peace”. The non-subscribers were heard but the subscribing majority was not satisfied with their suggestions and the end result was the separation of the Presbytery of Antrim from the General Synod.

[...] During the 1720s Francis Hutcheson, ‘father of the Scottish Enlightenment’, his cousin William Bruce, a noted publisher, Revd John Abernethy and Revd Thomas Drennan (father of William Drennan, the United Irishman) formed a group of philosophers and clergymen linked to the Wood Street meeting-house [founded by Puritans escaping persecution under Elizabeth I; later moved to Strand St.]. They collaborated in publishing Hutcheson’s work, but they also republished the works of English Civil War republicans and Commonwealthmen such as John Harrington and the notorious heretic John Toland.
 Francis Hutcheson left Dublin in 1730 to take up a post at Glasgow University. There he instilled in his students a liberal, democratic and anti- slavery philosophy. Many of the Presbyterian clergymen within the ranks of the United Irishmen, including four who lost their lives in the 1798 Rebellion, were graduates of Glasgow. Revds James Porter, Alex Gowdy, Archibald Warwick and Boyle Moody were associated with the liberal Presbyterianism then known as New Light but these days known as non-subscribing Presbyterianism. Today in counties Antrim and Down and in Belfast non-subscribers are known within their Protestant communities as Unitarians.
 When the Dublin Society of United Irishmen was founded in 1791, members of the Strand Street congregation such as William Drennan and Archibald Hamilton Rowan were prominent in the new venture. Oliver Bond and Henry Jackson were Presbyterian businessmen. Their secret republican committee in the Strand Street/Pill Lane area was referred to by the infamous informer and newspaper publisher Francis Higgins (aka‘the Sham Squire’) as the ‘king-killers of Pill Lane’. Several informers referred to Bond as Oliver ‘Cromwell’ Bond. Higgins may have been referring to the execution of King Louis XVI of France but the epithet could equally have been applied to the Cromwellian executioners of Charles I, a point rammed home repeatedly in United Irish counter-propaganda.
 Strand Street had a long-standing special relationship with First Presbyterian Rosemary Street, Belfast. William Drennan was born ‘a son of the manse’ there in 1751. Leading United Irishmen Samuel Neilson, Sam McTier and William Tennant worshipped at Rosemary Street. Revd William Bruce (nephew of the publisher) had left Strand Street, Dublin, in 1791 after twenty years when “called” north to Rosemary Street. Later that year, Wolfe Tone came to Belfast for the inaugural meeting of the United Irishmen. Having imbibed a few glasses of wine, Tone quarrelled with Revd Bruce over the issue of immediate Catholic emancipation. Tone described Bruce as ‘an intolerant high priest’. He knew that Unitarians abhorred intolerant high priests.

Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies, Vol.I [of 2] (London & Dublin 1819; 1822), pp.1-6.

AN eminent presbyterian divine, was born on the 19th of October, 1680, at Coleraine, in the county of Londonderry. His father was a dissenting minister in that town, and his mother of the family of the Walkinshaws, of Renfrewshire in Scotland. After remaining under the care of his parents for nine years, he was separated from them by a chain of circumstances, which, in the end, proved highly favorable [sic]. His father had been employed by the presbyterian clergy to transact some public affairs in London, at a time when his mother, to avoid the tumult of the insurrections in Ireland, withdrew to Derry. Their son was at that period with a relation, who in the general confusion determined to remove to Scotland, and having no opportunity of conveying the child to his mother, carried him off along with him. Thus he providentially escaped the dangers attending the siege of Derry, in which Mrs. Abernethy lost all her other children. Having spent some {2} years at a grammar school, at the early age of thirteen he was removed to the college at Glasgow, where he remained till he had taken the degree of master of arts. [...]

In 1716, he attempted to remove the prejudices of the native Irish, in the neighbourhood of Antrim, who were of the popish persuasion, and induce them to embrace the protestant religion. His labours in this design. were attended with but moderate success, for notwithstanding several, who were induced to abandon popery, continued firm in their attachment to protestant principles, yet others, to his great discouragement and mortification, reverted to their former persuasion. In the following year he received two invitations, one from Dublin, and sitter from Belfast; and the synod (whose authority at that time was very great) advised his removal to Dublin; but so strong was his attachment to his congregation at Antrim, that he {3} resolved to continue there at the peril of incurring their displeasure. The interference of this assembly was diametrically opposite to those sentiments of religious freedom which Mr. Abernethy had been led to entertain, both by the exercise of his own vigorous faculties, and by an attention to the Bangorian controversy which prevailed in England about this period. Encouraged by the freedom of discussion which it had occasioned, a considerable number of ministers and others in the north of Ireland, formed themselves into a society for improvement in useful knowledge; their professed aim was to bring things to the test of reason and scripture, instead of paying a servile regard to any human authority. This laudable design is supposed to have been suggested by Mr. Abernethy, and as the gentlemen who concurred in the scheme met at Belfast, it was called The Belfast Society. In the progress of this body, and in consequence of the debates and dissensions which were occasioned by it, several persons withdrew from the society, and those who adhered to it were distinguished by the appellation of non-subscribers. Their avowed principles were these, “First, that our Lord Jesus Christ hath in the new testament determined and fixed the terms of communion in his church; that all christians who comply with these have a right to communion, and that no man, or set of men, have power to add any other terms to those settled in the Gospel. Secondly, that it is not necessary as an evidence of soundness in the faith, that candidates for the ministry should subscribe to the‘ Westminster confession, or any uninspired form of articles or confession of faith, as the terms upon which they shall be admitted, and that no church has a right to impose such a subscription upon them. Thirdly, that to call upon men to make declarations concerning their faith, upon the threat of cutting them off from communion if they should refuse it, and this merely upon suspicions and jealousies, while the persons required to purge themselves by such declarations cannot be fairly convicted upon evidence of any error or {4} heresy, is to exercise an exorbitant and arbitrary power, and is really an inquisition.” (pp.1-4)