THREE vignettes will help us to understand Ian Paisley. For the first we go back to 1969 and his first election victory. Instead of the customary thanks to his election workers, Paisley delivered the following extemporised prayer:

"O God, save Ulster from popery!

O God, save Ulster from apostasy!

O God, save Ulster from going into an Irish Republic!

Save Ulster from being sold down the river!

O God, give us a great deliverance.

In those five sentences we have the entire gospel according to Paisley: the threat from popery without; the treachery of the liberal Protestant churches within; the evil south of the Border; the fear of betrayal by Westminster; and, in the last line, the solution of divine intervention.

Forward to January 1986. All the unionist MPs resigned their seats to use the subsequent by elections as a protest against the hated Anglo Irish Accord. Ian Paisley and James Molyneaux campaigned together in a show of unionist unity. The point of the elections was to maximise the unionist vote.

But the night before polling, a small crowd of Paisley's ministers and church members infiltrated an ecumenical service in the Church of Ireland's St Anne's Cathedral in Belfast, and barracked the guest speaker, Cardinal Suenens. For Paisley, making a stand for his religious beliefs was worth the risk of alienating Church of Ireland unionists.

Then to this summer, to the opening of the Stormont talks on the future of Northern Ireland. While the media scrum in the car park concentrated on the excluded Sinn Fein leaders, the DUP delegation gathered in its office to prepare for what might have been the start of a new era.

When Paisley arrived to brief his troops, he called them to order, took out of his pocket a very well thumbed Bible, and announced: "Let us begin with a reading from God's word."

CONOR Cruise O'Brien (himself a bizarre presence in the UK Unionist delegation at the Stormont talks) once memorably said that, if religion was a red herring in the Northern Ireland conflict it was a herring the size of a whale.

Given the size and physical presence of Dr Ian Paisley MP MEP, that analogy is no bad place to start trying to understand the man who regularly collects almost 250,000 votes in the North's European elections.

For Paisley, the Northern conflict is virtually a religious war. He has been in parliament for 25 years but he has been a preacher for twice as long and his politics comes from his faith. His mental map is that of the 16th century Protestant reformer. Not for nothing is his church called the Martyrs Memorial.

At times Rome uses subtle weapons - its influence within the EU or its insistence that the children of mixed marriages be raised as Catholics. At other times it has been brutal - the Spanish Inquisition, the persecution of the French Huguenots, the Gunpowder Plot. Though the tactics vary, the project remains the same. Rome has never given up trying to win back what it lost at the Reformation and Ulster, with its proud history of evangelical Protestantism, is an affront which must be destroyed.

THIS IS where the religion joins the politics. The Home Rule movement in the 19th century was Rome inspired, as was de Valera's Catholic Constitution for the Republic. Whatever the Pope says about peace, the IRA is doing his work for him.

Add to that the general supposition that the Protestant religion inspires a variety of civil virtues - temperance, diligence, loyalty, democracy - while Romanism inspires subservience, authoritarianism, intemperance and, through the unnatural institution of "bachelor priests", sexual perversion, and one can understand why Ian Paisley is a unionist.

The core of Paisley's political support shares his religious interpretation of the struggle. A majority of the DUP's activists are members of his Free Presbyterian Church and most of those who belong to other denominations insert in their election literature phrases such as "active in church work" and "Bible study leader" so as to locate themselves in the evangelical camp.

But if Paisley depended on conservative evangelicals, his party would not win a seat outside the rural heartlands of north Antrim. He is supported also by many "secular" Protestants because, he is seen as the most resolute unionist political leader: not just "No Surrender" but "Not in the least bit likely to think of Surrender".

Even those unionists who do not share his pessimistic analysis of imminent British sellout can find virtue in voting for Paisley. The British government's Northern Ireland policy depends, as it did with the power sharing executive in 1974, on creating a middle ground of Alliance Party, SDLP and most of the Ulster Unionist Party.

Voters who are at heart closer to Trimble than to Paisley may vote for Paisley to keep Trimble honest and to let London know that there is a limit to what it can get away with.

But there is a more subtle appeal to "secular" Protestants. Orange lodge meetings are conducted with an open Bible on the table and start and conclude with prayer. It is too simplistic to accuse Orangemen who are not regular church goers of being hypocrites. It is more accurate to recognise that, like many Catholics in the Republic, their religion may not be tightly binding upon them yet still has a strong hold on their affections.

EVANGELICALISM has a powerful place in the history of Ulster's Protestants. Its hymns, its symbols, its language are deeply embedded in the culture. Many who find it too confining, or who, can no longer accept its theological claims, nonetheless regard evangelicals with a grudging respect.

Most working class men do not go to church but they speak with pride of their mothers who did, and of their wives who are "good living" and they send their children to Sunday schools.

Much of Paisley's appeal comes from the fact that his profoundly pessimistic prophecies have come to pass (although his critics argue that he has created what he predicted by preventing peaceful change in Northern Ireland).

Paisley said appeasing nationalist demands was self defeating and civil rights gave way to the IRA. Paisley said London would betray Ulster and it closed down Stormont and signed the Anglo Irish Accord. Paisley said the 1994 ceasefire was sham and the IRA went back to war. Each time the future turns out as badly as he predicted, Paisley's stock rises.