[Rt. Rev.] Thomas M. Johnstone

Life
1876-[?]; ed. QUB; minister of St James, Ballymoney, and of Newington Church, Belfast; Convener of Presbyterian Temperance Soc.; Moderator of Gen. Ass. of Presbyterian Church in Ireland; works include Ulsterman, Their Fight for Fortune; Faith and Freedom, et al. A novel, Where the Foxglove Glows (Belfast: Quota 1946), deals with Ireland passing from Druidism to Christianity viewed sympathetically by a modern Ulsterman; set in monastery at Nendrum, romantic plot concerns Duirtlechet and Eithne, the former a lay brother who falls out with the abbot and leaves - but returns from abroad, so that they are married in the Royal Chapel at Tara. IF2

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Works
Newington Presbyterian Church, Belfast: These Fifty Years, 1876-1926 (Belfast: The Witness Office 1926); Northern Ireland: The Crisis In Industry (Belfast: Graham & Heslip 1930); The Vintage Of Memory (Belfast: Quota 1942); Where the Foxglove Glows (Belfast: Quota 1946); Sunset Soliloquy (Belfast: News-Letter1956); Ulsterman, Their Fight for Fortune; Faith and Freedom [q.d.]

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Notes
Where the Foxglove Glows (Belfast: Quota Press 1946), 282pp.; a discursive novel on Ireland, with epigraphs on the importance of national history from Thomas Davis [q.v.] and Arthur Quiller Couch - incl., Davis [t.p.]: ‘This country of ours is no sandbank thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honoured in the archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valour, and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the rivers of the Irish mind. Long wars, vast organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading virtues, and self-mighty men were here. If we live influenced by wind, and sun, and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we are a thriftless and hopeless people.’

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