Henry Cooke (minister)
Henry Cooke (1788–1868) was an Irish Presbyterian minister, an opponent of secularisation, and, in response to Catholic mobilisation under Daniel O'Connell, an advocate of "Protestant unity".
"[1] He was the youngest son of John Cooke, tenant farmer of Grillagh, near Maghera, County Free derry, by his second wife, Jane Howie or Howe, of Scottish descent, and was born on 11 May 1788.
Owing to illness he did not graduate, but he completed the arts and divinity courses, not shining as a student, but taking immense pains to qualify himself as a public speaker.
Fresh from Glasgow, he appeared before the Ballymena presbytery in the somewhat unclerical attire of blue coat, drab vest, white cord breeches and tops, proved his orthodoxy on trial, and was licensed to preach.
[2] Cooke's first settlement was at Duneane, near Randalstown, County Antrim, where he was ordained on 10 November 1808, though only twenty years of age, as assistant to Robert Scott, with a salary of £25 Irish.
This congregation, vacant since 1808, had chafed under an Arian ministry and had shown its determination to return to the old paths by rejecting the candidature of Henry Montgomery.
In opposing, later in the same year, the election of the Arian William Bruce to the chair of Hebrew and classics in the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, Cooke was unsuccessful, and he was discouraged by the result of his appeal on the subject to the following synod (at Newry, 1822).
[2] The proceedings of the next synod (at Ballymoney, 1826) were not favourable to Cooke, who did not see his way to support a motion for subscription to the Westminster Confession; his proposal that an abridgement of its doctrines should be drawn up as a standard of orthodoxy was turned down.
By exacting from all members of synod a declaration of belief in the Trinity, and appointing a select committee for the examination of all candidates for the ministry, he cornered the Arians.
He lashed out oratorically, and, as reported by William Dool Killen, dominated popular feeling on the personal level, as well as the synod debate.
[2][3][4][5][6] Cooke's de facto expulsion of the Arian leaders was followed up by the enactment of unqualified subscription to the Westminster Confession (9 August 1836), extended to elders 8 April 1840.
The calls upon his pulpit services elsewhere were not infrequent; hence the story, told by Classon Porter, that 'his people once memorialled their presbytery for an occasional hearing of their own minister'.
Established in Belfast, he became not merely the presiding spirit of Irish Presbyterianism (he was elected moderator of assembly in 1841 and 1862), but the leader and framer of a Protestant party in the politics of Ulster.
[2] At the Hillsborough meeting (30 October 1834) Cooke, in the presence of forty thousand people, published the banns of a marriage between the established and Presbyterian churches of Ireland.
The alliance was to be politico-religious, not ecclesiastical, a union for conserving the interests of Protestantism against the political combination of the Roman catholic, 'the Socinian, and the infidel'.
Pooley Shuldman Henry; to Cooke was given the agency for the distribution of Regium Donum, a post worth £320 per annum, and on the opening of the Queen's College in 1849 he was appointed Presbyterian dean of residence.
On becoming professor Cooke was compelled by the law of the assembly to resign the pastoral office; but at the urgent desire of his congregation he continued to discharge all its duties, being appointed by his presbytery 'constant supplier' until the election of a successor, John S. M'Intosh, who was installed 4 March 1868.
He had a noble presence and thrilling voice; he was a master of the art of stating a case, had an unexpected reply to every argument of an opponent, seldom failed to make an adversary ridiculous, and when he rose to vehemence the strokes of his genius were overwhelming.
Cooke's habits of work would have been impossible without the aid of an iron constitution: he rose at four, needed little sleep, and traveled, spoke, and wrote with incessant energy.
[2] Cooke's biographer, who was his son-in-law Josias Leslie Porter, quotes from Lord Cairns the saying that for half a century his life "was a large portion of the religious and public history of Ireland".
Orangemen carry his likeness on their banners (though he was not an orangeman), and his statue in Belfast (erected in September 1875) is still a symbol of the Protestantism of Northern Ireland.
Cooke's first publication was a charity sermon preached at Belfast 18 December 1814, which went through three editions in 1815; of this discourse Reid says 'it is remarkable for the absence of evangelical sentiment'.
