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Phoebe Palmer: Did You Know?
Interesting facts about the American Holiness revival
Chris Armstrong | posted 4/01/2004 12:00AM
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Reclaiming John
Methodist holiness advocates said their movement had started with John Wesley. They were just reminding Methodism of its founder's teachings on entire sanctification or "perfect love"-the complete orientation of the heart toward God and away from sinning.
Camping out (in style) for Christ
During its post-Civil War "camp meeting phase," the holiness revival spread quickly beyond Methodism's bounds. In 1887, Presbyterian minister A. B. Simpson founded the non-Wesleyan Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) on the teachings of Christ our Savior, Sanctifier, Healer (a common holiness theme by the 1890s), and Coming King. For many years, the C&MA held annual camp meetings at a former temperance campground in Old Orchard, Maine.
Hoofing it
The Methodist holiness folk were known for their traveling evangelists-male and female. One day, on the "gospel trail" with her organist Treena Platt, evangelist Mary Cagle's pony became ill. Having heard that John Wesley had once prayed successfully for the healing of his horse, Cagle decided to do the same. "I don't know how to pray for a horse," Platt protested. "Pray just like you would for a person," said Cagle; "we need her in the service of the Lord." Cagle wrote in her autobiography that they "prayed through to victory" in the house and then went to the barn to find the horse already mending. (Contributed by Jennifer Woodruff Tait.)
Reaching the lowest of the low
Many holiness workers followed in the footsteps of Phoebe Palmer, bringing spiritual and physical help into such poverty-stricken and seemingly godforsaken places as the tenement described in an 1854 report of New York's Five Points district: "Open that door-go in, if you can get in. There is no bed in the room-no chair-no table-no nothing-but rags, and dirt, and vermin, and degraded, rum-soaked human beings."
Just do it.
Charles G. Finney and the Oberlin perfectionists (p. 22) were the earliest 19th-century non-Wesleyans who taught an attainable holiness. Hear the Gospel, exercise your will, and you could fulfill Jesus' command: "Be ye perfect as your Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). Oberlin perfectionists found the teachings of Phoebe Palmer and the Wesleyans ethically weak and sentimental.
Harriet before …
Uncle Tom's Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, no Wesleyan herself, echoed the yearning of thousands in the holiness movement: "I have often thought 'Why am I thus restless? Why not at peace? I love God and Jesus and in general I mean to conform my life to Him.' The more I groaned in spirit, and longed and prayed, the more inveterate and determined and unsubdued seemed every opposing desire."
… and after
Stowe felt God answered her prayers: "Whereas once my heart ran with a strong current to the world, now it runs with a current the other way. The will of Christ seems to me the steady pulse of my being. I am calm, but full, and find I can do all things through Christ."
The saints go marching out
In 1877, Methodist holiness preacher John P. Brooks denounced the "easy, indulgent, accommodating, mammonized" kind of Methodism that "erected gorgeous and costly temples to gratify its pride." Brooks wrote The Divine Church, the textbook for the "come-outers" who left their churches to form new denominations.
The Pentecost connection
Many holiness "come-outers" moved right through their new denominations and into the Pentecostal movement (p. 25). William Seymour, the black preacher whose Azusa Street Revival (1906) birthed Pentecostalism, had been an evangelist with Daniel S. Warner's "Evening Light Saints" (p. 33). After Azusa, some holiness churches moved wholesale into Pentecostalism.
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