The little incident which has led to such momentous results came about in this way: the Reverend David McKee of Ballynaskeagh was the minister of the Presbyterian Church of Anaghlone. He had built his church, and he was largely independent of his congregation. One Sunday he thought fit to preach on _The Rechabites_. In the sermon he ridiculed and denounced the drinking habits of the time. The sermon fell on the congregation like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky. Blank amazement in the audience was succeeded by hot indignation.
On the following morning an angry deputation from the congregation waited on Mr. McKee. He listened to them with patient courtesy while they urged that the sermon should be immediately burnt, and that an apology should be tendered to the congregation on the following Sunday.
When the deputation had exhausted themselves and their subject, Mr. McKee began quietly to draw attention to the happy homes which had been desolated by whiskey, the brilliant young men whom it had ruined, the amiable neighbors whom it had hurried into drunkards' graves, and then he pointed to the Brontës as an example of the baneful influence of the trade on the sellers of the stuff themselves.
The deputation, some of them Orangemen, were in no mood to listen to radical doctrines, subversive of their time-honored customs, and they began to threaten.
Mr. McKee, who was six feet six inches high, and of great muscular power, drew himself up to his full stature, and calling to his servant, then at breakfast in the kitchen, told him to saddle his best mare, as he wished to ride in haste to Newry, to publish his sermon in time for circulation on the following Sunday. Then, turning to the deputation, he thanked them for their early visit, which he hoped would bear fruit, and bowed them out of his parlor.
He rode the best horse in the whole district, and he never drew rein till he reached the printing-office in Newry, and he had the sermon ready for circulation on the following Sunday, and handed it to his people as they retired.
In 1798 Mr. McKee, then a youth, watched from a hill in his father's land the battle of Ballynahinch. He had in his arms at the time a little nephew who had been left in his charge. The little nephew became the great Doctor Edgar of Belfast, who used to boast playfully that he was "up in arms" at the battle of Ballynahinch.