A Hundred Years of Keswick

The scene: the little Lakeland town of Keswick, in the heart of the most beautiful mountain scenery in England. The time: the last week of June, 1875. From all over the United Kingdom a few hundred men and women converged for an informal convention of Bible readings, addresses, and prayer meetings designed to “promote practical holiness.”

They came because the vicar of Keswick, Canon Dundas Harford-Battersby, had issued a general invitation. He and the close friends at his elbow offered no elaborate plans; indeed, the intended principal speaker, Robert Pearsall Smith, had canceled his acceptance and was about to sail back to America after a nervous breakdown compounded by suspicion of infamous conduct. But Harford-Battersby refused to give up. A year previously his Christian life had been transformed by a discovery that he wanted to share. He would have been astonished and gratified had he known that what he began in 1875 would become an annual event, and celebrate its hundredth birthday, and turn a placename into a universal word.

The Keswick Convention arose in an England stirred by the evangelism of D. L. Moody, but the first steps owed nothing to him and everything to a Quaker glass manufacturer from Philadelphia, Robert Pearsall Smith, one of the oddest characters to blaze briefly across the religious scene. He arrived in London’s rich and cultured Mayfair in the spring of 1873 to create a quiet sensation with his message that a devout Christian need not lead an existence of gloom and defeat. Most of his early disciples were clergymen and upperclass laymen—the only people in that age with leisure to attend “conversational breakfasts,” where Pearsall Smith and his wife, Hannah Whitall Smith, expounded Scripture to prove the possibility of an unbroken walk with God. This, as the title of Hannah’s famous book put it, was The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.

The following year a large number, including students, met at the Hampshire mansion of Broadlands, which had lately been the home of that jaunty pagan prime minister Lord Palmerston, and today is that of Earl Mountbatten. They met again at Oxford a few weeks later with many more. To that conference the shy, sensitive vicar of Keswick went with grave disquiet and doubts about this “higher Christian life.”

Harford-Battersby noticed at once a distinction from other conferences: “a definiteness of purpose and a direction of aim.” At first he dismissed the teaching as scripturally unsound, but while a London clergyman, Evan Hopkins, expounded a New Testament passage, Harford-Battersby wondered for the first time, “Has not my faith been a seeking faith when it ought to be a resting faith? And if so, why not exchange it for the latter? And I thought of the sufficiency of Jesus and said I will rest in Him—and I did rest in Him.” Despite a rooted distrust of emotion, he found next day an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Lord Jesus, a desire for full consecration, and afterwards a new effectiveness in daily living and parochial ministry. His had been a classic “Keswick” experience.

In 1875 a conference took place on an even larger scale at Brighton on the South Coast, where Pearsall Smith reached the pinnacle of his fame and toppled soon after into a sad anticlimax that does not invalidate his right to a niche in Christian history. Meanwhile smaller conventions, as they were beginning to be called to distinguish their specific purpose, sprang up in many parts of the country. That first Keswick of 1875 and the Keswick Conventions of the following years were not unique. But the beauty of their surroundings, the calibre of their speakers, and the wise leadership they had in face of misunderstanding and hostility from eminent evangelicals gradually gave them pre-eminence, until exposition of the “higher Christian life” or “the life of faith” became known as “Keswick teaching.”

It arose at a time when evangelicalism held apparent dominance in British religion. Yet joy too often gave way to anxious conformity; too many calling themselves evangelicals were like the clergyman Patrick Bronte, whose daughters, the novelists, had a grim childhood; or like the foster-mother whom the young Rudyard Kipling justly loathed.

Such a parody of the New Testament faith was well described by one of the early Keswick leaders, Hanmer Webb-Peploe:

Was not the old Evangelical teaching something like this: that I was perfectly justified in a moment and had then a standing before God; then at that moment sanctification commenced and I had to go on, struggle and strive and call in the aid of the Holy Ghost—which one too often forgot to do. I was continually expecting defeat and if I conquered, I thought it wonderful.

Against this dreariness Keswick set the truth of Christ the Victor.

The difference He made soon caused Webb-Peploe’s parishioners to comment that the rector did not seem “as fidgety as he used to be.” It was even more noticeable in Henry Bowker, the elderly retired schoolmaster who became chairman of Keswick on Harford-Battersby’s death in 1882. Bowker was a layman, and had once been so cantankerous that later a friend visiting his home was astonished at the contrast between the face of his kindly host and the portrait hanging behind him, taken in pre-Keswick days.

The teaching was not new. In all ages men and women had discovered it, here and there, for themselves. Hudson Taylor had entered this “exchanged life,” as he termed it, in 1870 in China, and he later became Keswick’s warm supporter. Dwight L. Moody had learned it during his spiritual crisis in New York in 1871.

When the rediscovery caught on in London and Broadlands, rail travel allowed a sharing to thousands together for the first time in church history. Keswick teaching had a tenuous, barely recognized link with the American “camp meeting” and with Wesleyan perfectionism; yet the emphasis differed. Methodist holiness taught the believer to aim at the entire eradication of sin; Keswick taught him to rely on the counter-action of the indwelling Victorious Christ to defeat sin. Sin would not be destroyed in this mortal life, and so every Christian could, like Simon Peter, fall, however close he had walked with Christ. One of Keswick’s opponents who later became its foremost theological spokesman, Handley Moule, bishop of Durham, described this paradox succinctly. Looking back in old age he said: “God knows how imperfectly I have used my secret. I repent before Him in great humiliation. But I know the secret, His open secret of victory and rest. And I know how different life has been for that secret.”

Keswick quickly forged strong links between Christians of different denominations. The text “All one in Christ Jesus,” a sentiment much ignored in that day of warring sects, became the motto at the convention. Keswick saw itself as the servant of every Protestant church, not the hub of a new one. Moreover, Keswick attenders have not regarded themselves a conscious elite within the denominational framework, in the manner of the Oxford Group (Moral Rearmament.) Although Keswick speakers are asked to teach no opinions from the platform that are not held generally amongst them all, they do not subscribe to any code of doctrine or polity: in unity, not uniformity, lies strength.

Keswick also emerged, more slowly, as a strong force in overseas missions. The early leaders excluded missionary advocacy on the supposition that this would disrupt devotion, until in 1885, in the aftermath of the young Cambridge Seven, they were forced by popular demand to admit the Great Commission, rather gingerly and unofficially. Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission had long taught that the best way to evangelize the world was to deepen the consecration of those already evangelized. He would have been amused had he read a letter of 1888 from his friend the chairman of Keswick to the lay secretary in the Church Missionary Society: “A new thought has been given me: Consecration and the Evangelization of the world ought to go together.”

Thereafter the last full day of each convention saw one of Keswick’s most influential features: the Missionary Meeting. Its first organizer’s brilliant strategy is still followed while the hours flash by: no long addresses by missionary statesmen but a succession of briefly recounted personal experiences, and the pinpointing of needs known at first hand. Thus hundreds of listening young men and women over three generations have come to the moment of their response to God’s individual call to serve beyond their own shores. As the growth of overseas churches gradually changed the pattern of world evangelization and made Keswick an increasingly international gathering, the Missionary Meeting became a platform for presenting the claim of the Great Commission, whatever each speaker’s color or race or homeland.

Keswick further helped world evangelization by financing annual tours by Keswick missioners to carry the distinctive message to Australia, the United States, India, and many other parts. Thus the world became familiar with the idea of a “Keswick” for the deepening of spiritual life; for as someone wittily put it, “any conference has a subject but a convention has an object”—to bring every participant to learn for himself the “open secret.”

But Keswick stood aside from Pentecostal phenomena such as divine healing or speaking in tongues. The Welsh Revival of 1904 stemmed from “a Keswick in Wales”; yet when three hundred Welshmen came to the Keswick of 1905, and paroxysms were experienced in the Young Men’s meeting, and enthusiasts ran through the town throwing up windows of the lodging houses crying “All-night prayer meeting tonight!,” the leaders, ably helped by wise old A. J. Pierson from the United States, channeled the intensity into a sober, quiet consecration. Whether Keswick should have let the Welsh tide flow unchecked is one of the imponderables of history. Perhaps the Welsh revival would have become an all-British, or even world, revival.

Keswick shared the doldrums of the period between the First and Second World Wars, and at times it seemed that Keswick had added to its basic teaching a lesson that holiness involved conformity to the cultural habits of middle-class England. Yet the convention, and especially its attraction for students, undoubtedly helped keep alive throughout the world the claims of the Great Commission, the authority of Scripture, and a grasp of the larger possibilities of Christian consecration. Thus by the 1950s, when all Britain was stirred for Christ by the Billy Graham crusades, Keswick was well placed to fulfill an important role in nurturing converts, and in spreading and strengthening the spiritual forces released by Harringay and after. Keswick has traditionally invited at least one North American main speaker for each convention. It is fitting that Billy Graham, so often invited, will attend for the first time in 1975.

As it celebrates its hundredth birthday with the two consecutive conventions that large numbers have made necessary for some years now, Keswick may aptly express its role for the future with a comment from the past, by Handley Moule: “Keswick stands for … a message as old as the Apostles but too much forgotten: the open secret of inward victory for liberty in life and service through the trusted power of an indwelling Christ.”

Sonnet XVIII

Today is a day for praising the sun in the meadow,

And the high wind, the sky-wind that’s blown from snown peaks to our faces;

A day for the swift-gliding races of cloud-cast shadow,

For leaf-wing, bird, all things that move to be put through their paces.

A day for the laughter of maidens, the giving of graces;

A day for the splashing of singing-stream, rock-tumble water,

And the blooming of sweet mountain-laurel in seldem-seem places.

A day for hot sun in the desert to shine even hotter,

A day for clay cliffs to be shaped by the wind-handed potter.

Today, is a day for the thunder and lightning to battle.

And roar in high passes until the great stone-boulders totter,

And send down the swift-ending rain while the storm windows rattle.

It’s a day for singing, for telling the oft-told story,

For parising the ancient, twy-nature Enfleshment of Glory.

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