Henry Cooke (minister) - Early Career

Early Career

His 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 pittance of £25 Irish. Here his evangelical fervour met with no sympathy. On 13 November 1810 he resigned the post, and became tutor in the family of Alexander Brown of Kells, near Ballymena. He speedily received a call from Donegore, County Antrim, and was installed there at Temple-Patrick presbytery, on 22 January 1811. 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. Cooke began at Donegore a systematic course of theological study; and by leave of his presbytery he returned, soon after his marriage, to Glasgow, where he spent the winter sessions 1815-16 and 1816–17, adding chemistry, geology, anatomy, and medicine to his metaphysical studies, and taking lessons in elocution from Vandenhoff. He had been in the habit of giving medical aid to his flock. In 1817-18 he attended classes at Trinity College and the College of Surgeons, Dublin, and walked the hospitals. He was a hard student, but with his studies he combined missionary labours, which resulted in the formation of a congregation at Carlow.

Shortly after his return from Dublin, Cooke was called to Killyleagh, county Down, and resigning Donegore on 6 July 1818, he was installed at Killyleagh, at Drornore presbytery on 8 September. The lord of the manor, and the leading Presbyterian at Killyleagh, was Archibald Hamilton Rowan. Rowan's younger son, Captain Rowan, an elder of Killyleagh, was attached to the older theology, and secured the election of Cooke, who was allowed to be 'by no means bigoted in his opinions'. In fact, while at Donegore he had been 'led to join in Arian ordinations', a laxity which at a later period he sincerely lamented.

In 1821 the English unitarians employed John Smethurst of Moreton Hampstead, Devonshire, on a preaching mission in Ulster. Favoured by Rowan (the father) he came to Killyleagh, where Cooke and the younger Rowan confronted him at his lecture in a schoolroom. Wherever Smethurst went Cooke was at hand with a reply, inflicting upon the Unitarian mission a series of defeats from which it never recovered. In opposing, later in the same year, the election of an Arian 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). He preached in the spring of 1824 as a candidate for First Armagh, but was not chosen.