A rubicon was crossed at the weekend. For the fourth year in a row the Orange Order, and by extension all the forces of the "old" unionism which believes in its natural right to rule Northern Ireland, massed its forces to intimidate the British state and its security forces into giving way at Drumcree.
For the first time, they failed. They failed because of the atrocious murder of three little boys, burned alive in their home in the middle of the night. The counter-forces of Protestant decency, personified by the County Armagh Orange chaplain, the Rev William Bingham, asserted themselves. His Sunday sermon to his own congregation in Pomeroy, which has seen the killing and intimidation campaign of the IRA at first hand for more than a quarter of a century, was actually an appeal to the wider Christian conscience of Protestant Northern Ireland.
The "evil" act at Ballymoney "disgraces the very name of Protestantism", he said. No 15-minute walk down the Garvaghy Road was worth a single life, let alone the lives of three innocent children.
His message was heard and heeded. Within hours the Ulster Unionist leader, Mr David Trimble, was quoting the Orange chaplain. He said the "only way" for the Orangemen at Drumcree to show the world that they repudiated those who had murdered young children and used Drumcree as an excuse for doing so, was to pack up and go home.
He added that he and the Deputy First Minister, Mr Seamus Mallon, had just come away from a "very helpful and useful" meeting with the Orange Order leaders. They too were anxious to get off the hook of impending confrontation.
Those of us who know about Northern Protestantism knew when we heard Mr Trimble's words that the mass Drumcree protest was effectively over, and the Orangemen had lost. The response of the hard-line Portadown men might have been predictably negative. But even they were forced to tell Orangemen not to gather at Drumcree yesterday, and instead to attend their own local Orange demonstrations.
That served to defuse what had only a few hours earlier appeared to be an unstoppable drive towards massive and violent confrontation outside Drumcree church during yesterday's Twelfth gathering.
People started to drift away from the fields around the church. The threat of the great blusterer, the Rev Ian Paisley, that yesterday would be the "settling day" at Drumcree, was pre-empted by the murder of the Catholic children in his own constituency. It must have stuck in the throats of many Northerners to see Dr Paisley, who has been stirring up Protestant hatred of Catholicism for nearly half a century, condemning the Ballymoney atrocity and visiting the scene of the burned-out house on Sunday. It is one of the remarkable elements of 30 years of the Northern Ireland conflict that it has never, despite many cliff-hanging crises, tipped over into the kind of widespread massacres and "ethnic cleansing" of one community by the other that we came to know in Bosnia. The Protestants, with their siege mentality and inclination to view every Catholic as a nationalist enemy of Northern Ireland, were always more likely to start such a pogrom. There were moments during the sectarian killing campaigns of the mid-1970s in Belfast and elsewhere when many Catholics must have thought it had already started.
But it did not happen. People have often wondered why. I believe it has been because of the basic Christian values of the people of Northern Ireland. Those were the values which William Bingham - in the weekend's most crucial and courageous intervention - appealed to in asking the Orangemen to withdraw from Drumcree.
What the Bible teaches is still very important in Protestant Northern Ireland. Despite appearances to the contrary, most Orangemen try hard to follow those teachings. They take seriously commandments like "You shall not kill" and "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour"; they declare their personal faith in Christ. These were the deep religious chords touched by William Bingham on Sunday, chords which more important church figures had patently failed to reach.
Northern Ireland has seen little courageous leadership from its churches in the past fortnight; in fact, with a few outstanding exceptions, it has seen little such leadership during the past 30 years. But at times when total mayhem and massacre seem imminent, appeals by ministers of religion to people's basic Christian instincts do appear to have some effect, and they pull back from the brink of Armageddon.
The other key intervention this weekend was by the RUC Chief Constable, Mr Ronnie Flanagan, when he said that the burning of Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn in their beds was not protest, but sectarian murder. Northern Protestants are not only God-fearing people in a way that is out-of-date and unfashionable in late 20th century Europe, they are also old-fashioned in their obedience to the law. That obedience is itself biblically-based, on a famous passage in St Paul's letter to the Romans.
Others acted throughout the Drumcree deadlock with great courage. David Trimble bravely resisted the arguments of the fearful unionist people - and there are very many of them - who genuinely believe that the ban on the Orange march down the Garvaghy Road was the latest and most compelling evidence that Irish republicans are determined to destroy their culture and identity.
Seamus Mallon bravely ran the gauntlet of the equally narrow and fear-filled people of the Garvaghy Road. I believe there has been a real bonding between these two very different men as a result of their joint handling of this crisis.
Perhaps most important of all, throughout the events of the past two weeks, the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, has stood firm against the threats and intimidation of the Orange Order and their violent fellow-travellers. Unlike last year, when Dr Mo Mowlam was in office less than three months, and was hugely dependent on the advice of her civil servants and security chiefs, the British government never wavered in its determination that the rule of law would be upheld. That was another key difference between the North and a country like the former Yugoslavia.
Northern Ireland will never be the same again. Nationalist demands that the Orange Order be "faced down" have been acceded to. As a result, the "new" Northern Ireland has gained an unprecedented new legitimacy in the eyes of its Catholic citizens. Now is the time for an act of reconciliation and generosity from the nationalist side. What a perfect moment for the IRA - or Sinn Fein on behalf of the IRA - to declare that the war is finally over.