The “Perfectionists” or “Bible Communists,” as they otherwise called themselves, are only one of the many unwholesome products of the great religious excitement which swept over Western and Central New York in the late twenties and early thirties of the last century, finding its way in the early thirties also into New England and thence over the world. Albert Barnes defines a revival for us as “the simultaneous conversion of many souls to Christ”; adding, in order to give completeness to the description, “and a rapid advance in promoting the purity and zeal of Christians.”⁶ If this were a complete description of the phenomena which may display themselves in revivals, they would always be such unmixed blessings that they could scarcely be connected with an earthly origin; and they certainly could leave behind them nothing but good effects. In point of fact, however, human elements are always mixed with them; and these human elements may on occasion be so predominant that any divine ingredient which may be hidden in them may be negligible. Accordingly Albert Barnes proceeds at once to speak of them, as actually experienced, as also periods of religious “excitement”; and to liken this excitement in its nature and effects to the excitement which tears men in a political campaign or sweeps them off their feet on the approach of war. Here is something quite out of the focus of his former description; for excitement, even though religious, has no necessary relation, whether as cause, accompaniment, or effect, with the converting or reviving operations of the Spirit of God. “A revival or religious excitement,” Archibald Alexander tells us,⁷ “may exist and be very powerful, and affect many minds, when the producing cause is not the Spirit of God; and when the truth of God is not the means of the awakening.” “Religious excitements,” he accordingly adds, “have been common among Pagans, Mohammedans, heretics and Papists.” W. B. Sprague similarly warns us in the opening pages of his classical “Lectures on Revivals of Religion,”⁸ not to “mistake a gust of animal passion for the awakening or converting operations of God’s Holy Spirit.” Great excitement may no doubt attend a true revival, but it is not part and parcel of it; and it may be very great and yet there be no true revival at all. “It may be an excitement produced not by the power of divine truth, but by artificial stimulus applied to the imagination and the passions, for the very purpose of producing commotion both within and without.” Let us remember that God declares Himself the God of order, and that disorder can therefore never be the authentic mark of His working. If God is working where disorder is, it is in spite of the disorder, not because of it; the disorder is itself only the cause of evil. “A real work of the Spirit,” says Archibald Alexander,⁹ “may be mingled with much enthusiasm and disorder; but its beauty will be marred, and its progress retarded by every such spurious mixture.” “All means and measures which produce a high degree of excitement, or a great commotion of the passions,” he therefore advises, “should be avoided; because religion does not consist in these violent emotions, nor is it promoted by them; and when they subside, a wretched state of deadness is sure to succeed.… Fanaticism, however much it may assume the garb and language of piety, is its opposite.” “The Church,” he also says, “is not always benefited by what are termed revivals; but sometimes the effects of such commotions are followed by a desolation which resembles the track of the tornado. I have never seen so great insensibility in any people as in those who had been subjects of violent religious excitement; and I have never seen any sinners so bold and reckless in their impiety as those who had once been loud professors, and foremost in the time of revival.”

It is with these evils in mind that, in face of the possibility that a sinner here and there may nevertheless chance to be really converted through the action of this excitement, Joel Hawes of Hartford declares¹⁰ that “a sinner may be converted at too great an expense.” No more awful arraignment of the religious excitement, which sometimes accompanies and sometimes serves as a substitute for revivals, could be phrased. In point of fact such excitement has no Christian character whatever; its affinities are, as Archibald Alexander has already reminded us, with the universal religious phenomena which Elizabeth Robins sums up under the name of mænadism,¹¹ a term which she defines broadly enough to make it include “all intoxicating, will-destroying excesses of religious fervor in which ‘the multitude’ have taken part.” When we remember the “exercises” which have often attended revivals and the moral delinquencies which have sometimes stained them, we shall be compelled with bowed heads to recognize that they too may be so perverted as to be included in her observation:—“It is a remarkable fact in the history of religion that men of widely differing creeds and countries have agreed in attaching a spiritual value to hysteria, chorea, and catalepsy on the one hand, and to a frenzy of cruelty and sensuality on the other. Diseased nerves and morals have often been ranked as the highest expression of man’s faith and devotion.”

The intrusion of this debasing excitement into revival movements, with the effect sometimes of destroying them altogether, sometimes of only greatly curtailing and marring their beneficent results, is ordinarily traceable to one or the other of two inciting causes. One of these is found in the character of the population among whom the revival is propagated; the other in the character of its promoters and the methods they employ in promoting it—methods better adapted to lash the nerves into uncontrollable agitation than to bring the sinner to intelligent trust in his Saviour. Both of these causes were present and operative in the great revival movement which swept over Western and Central New York in the late twenties and early thirties of the last century.

It has been thought that the character of the population of this region, derived from that of its first settlers, laid them particularly open to fanaticism. The earliest stratum of settlers, entering the Palmyra country from Vermont in the second decade of the nineteenth century, was, we are told, of “rather unsavory fame”; and although this stratum was overlaid in the next decade by a virile, intelligent, industrious class of settlers from Eastern New York and New England, the earlier settlers remained, and by mixture with the newer comers gave a psychological character and a psychological history of its own to this region. It has been, therefore, it is said, on the one hand “a center of sane and progressive social movements,” but on the other hand a veritable “hot-bed of fanaticism,” and the two tendencies have entered into every possible combination with one another, some of them startling enough. It seems hardly just, however, to ascribe the whole of the evil to the earlier and the whole of the good to the later immigration. There were many men of the highest character among the earlier immigrants, and the newcomers themselves brought with them that tendency to eccentricity of opinion and extremity of temper which seems to be in the New England blood, and which has made New England, along with its intellectual and moral leadership of the nation, also unhappily the fertile seed-plot of fads and extravagances. Central and Western New York was in effect only an extended, and, because of its isolation and the hardness of its pioneer life, in these respects, an intensified New England.¹² The period, moreover, was one of universal excitability.¹³ “The great improvement in the mechanic arts, and the wide diffusion of knowledge,” says Albert B. Dod, writing in 1835, “have given a strong impulse to the popular mind; and everywhere the social mass is seen to be in such a state of agitation, that the lightest breath may make it heave and foam.” Men stood in a condition of permanent astonishment. Everything seemed possible. They did not know what would come next, and thought it might be anything. They lived on perpetual tiptoe. It would have been strange if a raw population like that of Central and Western New York had retained its balance in such a time. That it did not may be observed from the long list of fanaticisms into which it fell, some of which are alluded to by the writer on whom we were drawing at the opening of this paragraph; and the waves of most of which it sent washing back into the parent New England.

“The earliest agitation which helped to reveal the unfortunate strain in the blood,” he writes, “was the crusade against the Masonic Fraternity in 1826, originating in a wide-spread belief, unconfirmed by sound evidence, that one Morgan had been foully dealt with at the behest of the Order whose secrets he was accused of revealing. A single and mighty wave of indignation nearly obliterated the fraternity from that part of the United States. In the early forties the Rochester country was one of the two chief centres of the propaganda and excitement associated with the predictions of the Vermont farmer, William Miller, with respect to the approaching judgment and the destruction of the world. In western New York it became a thoroughly irrational epidemic. Men and women forsook their employments and gave themselves over to watchings and prayer. They hardly slept or ate, but in robes of white awaited the coming of the bridegroom. The result in very many cases was utter physical and mental exhaustion, ending in the horrors of insanity.… In the late forties the delusion of spiritualism entered upon its epidemic course with the ‘Rochester rappings’ of the Fox sisters. It spread by imitation to New England, and thence to Europe, and many of the phenomena attending it,—the trance, the vision, the convulsive movement, the involuntary dancing, the many indications of mental and nervous instability—had closest affinity to the extraordinary revival effects which we have elsewhere observed.… I wish to remark upon one other strange and base spiritual product of this unique population. Of course it is generally known that Mormonism had its beginning in this region, but it is not so generally understood, I think, that Mormonism was literally born and bred in the unhealthy revival atmosphere which has just been described.¹⁴ In fact the sect of so-called Latter-Day Saints might never have existed except for the extraordinary mental agitation about religious matters which pervaded Western New York in this period. Mormonism has two main roots, the one to be traced into the mental and nervous characteristics of the personality of Joseph Smith, Jr., the other into the revival environment in which he lived and moved—and neither is a sufficient explanation without the other.”¹⁵

A population like this could be trusted to produce spontaneously all the evil fruits of spurious religious excitement. In point of fact it did so. The writer upon whom we have been drawing, speaking of the period preceding that to which we wish to direct particular attention, points out that during it “an unbridled revival activity characterized the ordinary religious life of western New York.”

“Before Finney’s personality issued upon the scene,” he says,¹⁶ “before any particular individual assumed the leadership, this fanatical restlessness, this tendency to spiritual commotion, was in the mind of the population, and periodically broke forth in fantastic and exciting revival. There were whole stretches of country in those parts that for generations were known as the ‘burnt district,’ and which Finney found so blistered and withered by constant revival flame that no sprout, no blade of spiritual life, could be caused to grow.¹⁷ Only the apples of Sodom flourished in the form of ignorance, intolerance, a boasted sinlessness and a tendency to free-love and ‘spiritual affinities.’ ”

But this fanaticism-loving populace was not left to the spontaneous manifestation of its tendency to religious excitement. It was sedulously incited to it by its religious leaders, and naturally its last state was no better than the first. If anyone wishes to enjoy the illusion of actually “assisting” at an average revival meeting of this period, he has only to read Mrs. Trollope’s painfully realistic descriptions, alike of a town revival and of a camp meeting.¹⁸ Albert Barnes warns us,¹⁹ to be sure, against trusting the testimony of “the Trollopes, and the Fidlers, and the Martineaus”—“persons,” he says, “having as few qualifications for being correct reporters of revivals of religion as could be found in the wide world.”²⁰ It would be absurd, of course, to resort to Mrs. Trollope for the religious interpretation of revival phenomena; but the general trustworthiness of her report of revival occurrences, actually witnessed by her, is unimpeachable, when allowance is once made for the one-sidedness of her observation, due to her unsympathetic attitude. She describes only what she saw; she does not herself generalize on it. But what she describes might be seen anywhere in the western country at the time, sometimes no doubt in less, often unfortunately in much more, offensive forms.

Of course we are not confined to the testimony of Mrs. Trollope and writers of her type to learn what revivals at this period were like. We have, for example, a very sympathetic summary account of them from the pen of Andrew Reed, one of two very competent observers sent in the early thirties by the Congregational Union of England and Wales, to visit the American churches.²¹ Reed does not doubt that the revivals were in themselves a work of God, the results of which by and large were for His glory.²² But neither is he able to close his eyes to the evils which accompanied them; especially the opportunity afforded by them and eagerly availed of, for vain, weak, and fanatical men to exploit for their own ends the emotional excitement which was aroused. That there were serious evils intrinsic in the very manner in which the revivals were conducted, he is compelled to recognize; but that, he says, was not after all the worst of it—“they seem to have the faculty of generating a spirit worse than themselves.” “Rash measures attract rash men,” he explains:²³ “and their onward and devious path is tracked by the most unsanctified violence and reckless extravagance.” “They are liable to run out into wild fanaticism,” he explains further.²⁴

“A revival is a crisis. It implies that a great mass of human passion that was dormant, is suddenly called into action. Those who are not moved to good will be moved to the greater evil. The hay, wood, and stubble, which are always to be found, even within the pale of the church, will enkindle, and flash, and flare. It is an occasion favourable to display, and the vain and presumptuous will endeavor to seize on it, and turn it to their own account. Whether such a state of general excitement is connected with worldly or religious objects, it is too much, and would argue great ignorance of human nature, to expect, that it should not be liable to excess and disorder.”²⁵

These somewhat general reflections are brought nearer to the point of most interest to us by the testimony of James H. Hotchkin, the historian of Western New York, and a most cautious and sober-minded man, speaking directly out of his own experience.²⁶ He, too, of course, is sympathetic to the revival movement in itself. But he feels constrained to note explicitly that “circumstances have occurred in connection with these revivals, which give the most painful exhibition of the wickedness and folly of man, when, leaving the divine word, he imagines himself wiser than God.” He is led by his experience to the generalization that “whenever the religious excitement has been strong, a spirit of fanaticism has been induced, and greatly hindered the good work, and marred its beauty.” He has observed further that these evils have been particularly apparent, when the revival-work was carried on, not by the settled ministry, but by outsiders called in because of some fancied particular adaptation to this work. No doubt there were among these “revival men” or “revival preachers” men of true piety, whose usefulness was demonstrated by the results of their labors. Of others, however, Hotchkin declares himself “constrained to believe, that, if they were not impostors, they must have been self-deceived fanatics”; and, certainly, he declares, “their operations and influences were destructive in a high degree, and brought discredit on the revival.” One and another of these men are mentioned and described; and it is pointed out that while mighty men in stirring up excitement, they failed, under the test of time, in bringing men really to Christ. Thus they proved themselves to be mere religious demagogues; for does not Gustave Le Bon tell us,²⁷ when describing demagogues and their ways, that, “it is easy to imbue the mind of crowds with a passing opinion, but very difficult to implant therein a lasting belief”?

It is not, however, until we turn to the portion of his book in which Hotchkin records the life-histories of the individual churches that we realize the amount either of the excitement stirred up by these men or of the evil wrought by it. Yet, as he is speaking only of the Presbyterian churches, which suffered least of all the churches from this disease, we are looking through his eyes only at the outer fringes of the evil. Even in the Presbyterian churches it certainly was bad enough.²⁸ One Augustus Littlejohn²⁹ seems to have been the evil genius of the Presbytery of Angelica, one Luther Myrick³⁰ of the Presbytery of Onondaga, one James Boyle³¹ of the Presbytery of Geneva. These were all famous revivalists, enjoying high favor not only in Western New York, but to the East as well, and running through great careers; and only when they had wrought their ruin, did they fall at last under the ban of the church they had distracted and whose people they had harassed and misled. It is appalling to observe the number of churches of which it is recorded that they were disturbed, injured, or destroyed by the activities of these men and their coadjutors. We need not repeat these records here: let that of Manlius Center Church serve as a single example—it was, we read,³² “torn to pieces, and became extinct, through the influence of Mr. Myrick and other errorists.” We prefer to transcribe merely the long record of the experiences of the church of Conhocton,³³ as particularly instructive of the state of mind induced by the prevalent religious excitement.

“In the summer of 1832,” we read, “Rev. James Boyle held with this church a protracted meeting, which was continued through a number of days. The measures which were common with him and others of that class of evangelists were employed, and a state of high excitement was produced, and many professed to be converted, and no doubt some souls really were born again. A large number were received into the church, swelling its number to one hundred and ten members. It might seem that the days of the mourning of this church were now ended, and that she must now have acquired such a measure of strength as to be able in all future time to enjoy the stated ministrations of the gospel. But such was not the case. Very little pecuniary strength was acquired, a spirit of fanaticism was infused into the minds of many, and a state of preparation to be carried away with any delusion was induced. With respect to the converts, so called, the writer is unable to say what has become of them. He believes very few of them give satisfactory evidence of having been born again. In the winter of 1837–8, a very singular state of things existed. Mrs.——Conn, who had been a member of the church a number of years, and highly esteemed by some, at least, as a woman of piety and activity in promoting the cause of Christ, began to take a very conspicuous part in the meetings for social and religious worship. She professed to have special communications from God, and to know the secrets of the hearts of those with whom she was conversant. She assumed an authoritative position in the church, and gave out her directions as from God himself, denouncing as hypocrites in the church all who did not submit to her mandates. She predicted the speedy death, in the most awful manner, of particular individuals who opposed her authority, and manifested a most implacable rancor against all who did not acknowledge her inspiration. In her proceedings she was assisted by a young man, who for his misconduct had been excommunicated from the church of Prattsburgh. A number of the members of the church of Conhocton were carried away with this delusion, and acknowledged Mrs. Conn as one under the inspiration of the Almighty. So completely were they infatuated, that they seemed to suppose that their eternal salvation depended on the will of Mrs. Conn. They were ready to obey all her commands, and to assert as truth anything which she should order. Some of them became permanently deranged, and one or two families were nearly broken up. Nor was this delusion confined wholly to the church of Conhocton. Mrs. Conn and her coadjutor went into the county of Wyoming, and some in that region were brought under the delusion, and received her as a messenger sent from God. Whether to view Mrs. Conn as an impostor, a wild fanatic, or a deranged person, the writer will not assume the responsibility of determining. Many circumstances would favor the idea of imposture. The writer is informed that she has become a maniac. This circumstance may favor the idea of mental aberration. But the consequences to the church were most disastrous.”

One of the most distressing accompaniments of revival excitements has been a tendency which has often showed itself in connection with them to sexual irregularities. This tendency does not seem to find its account, solely at least, in the low level of culture of the populations which have furnished the materials on which these revivals chiefly worked. And it certainly is not to be confounded with the opportunity taken by evil-minded persons from the conditions created by the revivals for corrupt practices. The opportunity has been afforded and improved, the camp meetings of course supplying the most flagrant instances. R. Davidson, describing the great Kentucky revival at the opening of the century, feels bound to consecrate a section to the “too free communication of the sexes,” and, although he excuses himself from giving details on account of the delicacy of the subject, he tells us plainly that dissolute characters of both sexes frequented the camps “to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the prevailing license and disorder.”³⁴ This, however, was only incidental to the revivals themselves. What needs to be recognized is that the nervous exaltation, which was the direct product of the revival methods too frequently employed, seems not merely to have broken down the restraints to the unchecked discharge of other than religious emotions, but to have opened the channels for their discharge, and even to have incited to it—so that, as W. Hepworth Dixon puts it in vivid phrase, “the passions seemed to be all unloosed, and to go astray without let or guide.”³⁵ It was the participators in the revival excitement themselves who went astray. John Lyle, reviewing the case of the women who had been the subjects of the “falling exercise” prior to November, 1802, found several “by the most unequivocal proofs, to have since fallen still more wofully; no fewer than four individuals having transgressed in the most flagrant manner.”³⁶

Occasion has of course been taken from such facts to confuse emotions which differ toto cœlo. There is actually a theory extant that the religious emotion is nothing but the sexual ecstasy misinterpreted,³⁷ and it is quite common to represent “the human love passion and the spiritual love passion” as lying in particularly close contiguity, if not even as “delicately interwoven.”³⁸ There is no justification for such representations. They rest on an incredible confusion of the movements of the human soul set in the midst between two environments, and accessible to influences alike from below and above. Not even all love of man is sex-love; no love of man is religious love; religious love is not the entirety of the religious emotion. We are in the presence here of nothing more mysterious than the obvious fact that man’s emotional nature is a unit, and violent emotional discharges may readily be deflected from one to another direction. The phenomenon we are witnessing is only the familiar one of the peril of abandoning control of ourselves. When once we drop the reins and give unbridled play to our passional movements, there is no telling what the end may be. We cannot act the mænad in religion and expect our mænadism to manifest itself nowhere else. If religion becomes synonymous to us with excess, all excess is very apt to come to seem to us religious. It is in this sense only that it is true, when Baring Gould declares that “spiritual exaltation runs naturally, inevitably, into licentiousness, unless held in the iron bands of discipline to the moral law.”³⁹ Davenport’s wider generalization is truer:⁴⁰ “Wherever reason is subordinated and feeling is supreme, the influence is always in the direction of the sweeping away of inhibitive control.”

It is, moreover, not merely into licentiousness that religious mænadism tends to run, but into all forms of lawless action. J. H. Noyes shows an insight unwonted to him, therefore, when he represents revivals—of course, as known to him, that is to say the revivals of “religious excitement”—as intrinsically subversive of the whole social as well as moral order. Defining them from the true mænadistic point of view, and even in language strongly reminiscent of heathen modes of speech, he declares⁴¹ that a revival is the actual intrusion of the power of God into human affairs: that is to say, says he, it is the entrance into the complex of active causes of “the actual Deity.” This entrance of “the actual Deity” into human life is conceived after the fashion of the intrusion of a universal natural force, only more powerful than other natural forces.⁴² Conservatives fancy that its operations are restricted to the conversion of souls. That, says Noyes, is absurd: you cannot cabin and crib such a force in that way. Once set in motion, “it goes, or tends to go, into all the affairs of life.” A revolution is really inaugurated in every revival, and if it does not overturn and reconstitute all the life of the world, that is only because its action is prematurely checked. “Revival preachers and Revival converts are necessarily in the incipient stage of a theocratic revolution; they have in their experience the beginning of a life under the Higher Law; and if they stop at internal religious changes, it is because the influence that converted them is suppressed.” The term “higher law” here is ominous: the first effect of revivals is conceived as emancipation from the laws which now govern life; and if redintegration follows it must be under a higher law than they. They do and always must leave social disintegration in their train.

The prominence particularly of sexual irregularities in the train of the revivals of “religious excitement” is probably in large part due, therefore, only to the large opportunities and immediate temptations to irregularities of this particular order offered by revival intimacies. The period in which the revivals of the late twenties and early thirties took place was, moreover, one of widespread unrest with respect to the relations of the sexes, and of relaxation of the strictness of traditional habits; and the communistic experiments incited in the middle years of the twenties by Robert Owen no doubt also brought their contribution to the result. With respect to these particular revivals, however, we must not underestimate the influence of the fantastic apocalyptical theories, by which a large part of their unhealthy excitement was produced, and which by persuading men that they no longer lived on the earthly plane or under earthly law, gave to sexual irregularities a religious sanction or even made them appear a religious duty. Being mænads, men and women committed adultery for the Kingdom of God’s sake—as the victims of the atrocious Cochrane were doing in Maine and New Hampshire a short decade before,⁴³ and the associates of the unspeakable Matthias—himself a product of these revivals—were doing contemporaneously in New York and Sing Sing.⁴⁴ Thus arose the shocking theory of “spiritual wives” which was intimately connected with the perfectionism that constituted, after all is said, the most unwholesome product of the revival excitement. There is no reason to suppose that the “spiritual wives” at the outset were anything other than the name, strictly taken, imports—intimate spiritual companions and fellow workers in a common task.⁴⁵ The hot perfectionist, living in the new order, attached to himself a like-minded female companion who shared his labors at home and abroad; they lived together, traveled together, worked together, in a fellowship closer than and superseding that of husband and wife. It was a renewal of the “spiritual wives”—the agapetæ or virgines subintroductæ—of the early church;⁴⁶ but it required only a few months to run through the development that its earlier model consumed some centuries in traversing. What was in the first instance only an incredible folly and dangerous fanaticism soon became an intolerable scandal and dissolute practice. “Spiritual wives” became carnal mistresses: here and there injured husbands avenged their wrongs by physical assaults upon the clerical offenders, and when the husband was complaisant the outraged community was apt to treat both legal and spiritual husband to a coat of tar and feathers and a ride on a rail.⁴⁷ Though actually only sporadically practiced, the advocacy of this indecency was widespread in perfectionist circles. Its roots were planted in the prevalent notion that the “saints” had advanced beyond the legalities of the worldly order, and that it behooved them to be putting the freedom of the resurrection life into practice.

The perfectionism of which this deplorable practice was one of the fruits was pervasive, and everywhere it went it worked destruction. It was intensely individualistic in its temper and operated accordingly as a disintegrating force in the church organizations into which it found entrance. This effect was increased by its affiliation with a powerful unionistic movement which was vexing the churches of this region. Like other unionistic movements, this one also was much more effective for tearing down the existing organizations which stood in its way, than for realizing its own professed Utopian ends.⁴⁸ At all events ruin marked the pathway along which the combined perfectionist-unionist forces moved. Here is a typical notice: “Rev. A. Hale, from the Black River Association, distracted the church with perfectionism, and Rev. Luther Myrick with unionism. Twenty male members broke away from the church at one time as perfectionists.”⁴⁹ There was an active organization, vigorously at work among the churches, calling itself “The Central Evangelical Association of New York,” which consisted, as Hotchkin tells us,⁵⁰ just of “a body of Perfectionists and Unionists.” The Synod of Geneva at its meeting in October, 1835, warned the ministers and churches under its charge against it, because, as it said, it “does not sustain the reputation of an orthodox body,” and “the course of proceeding adopted by most of their ministers is calculated to divide, corrupt, and distract the churches.” The Synod therefore declared that it deemed it “irregular for any minister or church in our connexion, to admit the ministers of said Association to their pulpits, or in any way to recognise them, or the churches organized by them, as in regular standing.”⁵¹ Such a deliverance was necessarily a mere brutum fulmen. Even had it taken a more authoritative form, it was locking the door after the horse had been stolen. Nor is it easy in any event to see how the closing of Presbyterian pulpits to perfectionist agitators could have been expected to protect the people from the flames of wild religious excitement flaring up hotly in churches of other connections half a block away. The communities were small, and the people therefore in close contact and intimate intercourse with one another; the religious excitement that was raging was the property of no one denomination, but pervaded all; it was the professed object of one of the most active organizations engaged in fostering it—and the actual effect of many with no official connection with that organization—to obliterate all dividing lines and to reduce the whole Christian body to an indiscriminate mass of fanaticism.

Certainly perfectionists swarmed over the land, drawing from all churches, forming none. No doubt the ever-present fact of Wesleyan Perfectionism lay in the background and supplied everywhere a starting-point and everywhere gave a certain dignity and stability to the movement. A number of the perfectionist leaders were of Methodist origin.⁵² But the most effective forces in the production of the prevalent perfectionism were derived from quite different quarters, particularly from the Pelagianizing theories of the will emanating from New Haven.⁵³ The perfectionism actually developed⁵⁴ ran, however, in point of fact, into mystical molds. “These Perfectionists,” as a contemporary writer⁵⁵ very fairly puts it, “believe that they have the inward Christ—can do no wrong—that to the pure all things are pure—that Christ is responsible for all they do—and other such blasphemous absurdities.” Their chief or, at least, their most obvious, characteristic accordingly was less correctness in conduct than freedom in the Spirit. And this in fact constituted their main attraction to the populace. J. H. Noyes fully recognizes⁵⁶ that “some doubtless joined the standard of Perfectionism, not because they loved holiness, but because they were weary of the restraints of the duty-doing churches. Perfectionism presented them a fine opportunity of giving full swing to carnality; and at the same time, of glorying over the ‘servants’ under law.” Nothing was further from their intention, of course, than to submit themselves to the restraints of organization. Each wished to be a law to himself—and as far as he could compass it, a law also to everybody else. They erected what Noyes calls “disunity”⁵⁷ into a principle and denounced organization as in itself an evil—a slavery to which free men in the spirit would not submit. “To perfectionists generally,” writes William A. Hinds,⁵⁸

“the idea of discipline, organization, submission one to another, was intolerable. Were they children of the convenant, that ‘gendereth to bondage’? they asked themselves, or were they called to ‘stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free’? Were they not living in the very days foretold by the prophet, when all were ‘to know the Lord from the least unto the greatest,’ and when no one ‘should teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, Know the Lord’? ‘Perfectionists,’ said the eloquent James Boyle, ‘stand as independent of each other as they do of any anti-Christian churches—they will not be taught of each other, as they are all taught of God, nor will they acknowledge any man as a leader or chief or any thing of the kind.’ ”

Such extreme individualism as is here announced cannot really maintain itself in practice. The perfectionists, too, of course found leaders and showed sufficient coherence to hold conventions at which a common platform was proclaimed and joint undertakings inaugurated. Even centers of activity were formed from which perfectionist influences radiated after a fashion which suggested at least the beginnings of institutional organization. One of the earliest of them was established at the little cotton-mill village of Manlius, where the little Presbyterian Church (Manlius Center) was stamped out. Hiram Sheldon was recognized by the Manlius perfectionists as their leader and expositor, but there were associated with him such men as Jarvis Rider, Martin P. Sweet, and Erasmus Stone. In this coterie originated most of the extravagances which characterized the perfectionist movement. “At Manlius,” says Dixon,⁵⁹ “the chosen took upon themselves the name of ‘Saints.’ Here they announced their separation from the world. Here they began to debate whether the old marriage vows would or would not be binding in the new heaven and the new earth.” It was Albany, however, which became the real distributing center of the movement at least for the East; and the house of the Misses Annesley there became the center of the center.⁶⁰ Thence missionaries proceeded into New England and groups of perfectionists were established here and there—at Southampton, Brimfield, New Haven.⁶¹ At Albany, of course, the same ruin was wrought as elsewhere: the churches were greatly troubled. The Fourth Presbyterian Church, E. N. Kirk’s, was required to put into action extensive disciplinary proceedings;⁶² and even the classroom of the little theological seminary which E. N. Kirk had established was invaded by the fanaticism.⁶³ We hear of its being carried from this center as far as the extreme western border of frontier Wisconsin.⁶⁴

II. The Beginnings

It was into this atmosphere that John Humphrey Noyes was plunged by his conversion in August, 1831. He was an opinionated, self-assertive young man of twenty,⁶⁵ who had been graduated from Dartmouth College the year before (1830), and meantime had been studying law in his brother-in-law’s office at Putney, where the family had been resident since 1823. The great revival of 1831 seems fairly to have rushed him off his feet. He took his conversion hard, yielding with difficulty; but when he yielded he yielded altogether. He himself sums up what happened in a rapid sentence, which is no more rapid, however, than the rush of the events it describes. “The great Finney revival found him,” he says of himself, “at twenty years of age, a college graduate, studying law, and sent him to study divinity, first at Andover and afterward at New Haven.”⁶⁶ He entered the Seminary at Andover four weeks after his conversion, and in less than three months after it he had placed himself at the disposal of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. But nothing that organized Christianity could offer could satisfy his morbid appetite for excitement, and in a little more than two years more he had turned his back upon it all and was seeking thrills along a new path.

He has himself described for us the stages of his progress.

“After a painful process of conviction, in which the conquest of my aversion to becoming a minister was one of the critical points”—it is thus that he describes his conversion,⁶⁷—“I submitted to God, and obtained spiritual peace. With much joy and zeal I immediately devoted myself to the study of the Scriptures, and to religious testimony in private and public. The year of 1831 was distinguished as ‘the year of revivals.’ New measures, protracted meetings, and New York evangelists had just entered New England, and the whole spirit of the people was fermenting with religious excitement. The millennium was supposed to be very near. I fully entered into the enthusiasm of the time; and seeing no reason why backsliding should be expected, or why the revival spirit might not be maintained in its full vigor permanently, I determined with all my inward strength to be ‘a young convert’ in zeal and simplicity forever. My heart was fixed on the millennium, and I resolved to live or die for it. Four weeks after my conversion I went to Andover and was admitted to the Theological Seminary.”

This was a typical conversion of the “revival-of-excitement” order, issuing not so much in sound religion as in restless activities, and filling the mind only with strong delusions—in this case chiliastic delusions—which prepare it for everything except sane religious development. It is interesting to observe that, as he tells us more than once, most of those who followed him in his further vagaries had begun with him in these. “Most of those,” he says, writing in 1847,⁶⁸ “who have become Perfectionists”—he means the term in the narrow sense in which it describes only his own followers—“within the last ten years, had previously been converts and laborers in such revivals,” that is to say, had been victims, as he was, of the “revival of excitement.”

Of course no one in his inflamed state of mind could find satisfaction at Andover. The students there were merely Christians, and seemed to him from his exalted point of view a good deal less than what Christians should be. In the censoriousness which naturally accompanies such exaltation of spirit he accuses them of indifference, levity, jealousy, sensuality—of everything which as Christians they ought not to be. Only in a few who were touched with the enthusiasm of missions—Lyman, Munson, Tracy, Justin Perkins—did he find any congeniality of companionship. He was taken into a secret society which they maintained for mutual improvement, and learned from it a method of government by criticism which he afterwards employed in his communistic establishment.⁶⁹ The classroom instruction, also, was not wholly without effect upon him; in particular Moses Stuart’s exegesis of the seventh chapter of Romans, and of the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, supplied him with points of departure from which he afterward advanced to the two hinges on which his whole system turned. He remained at Andover, however, only the single session of 1831–32. The autumn of 1832 found him at the Divinity School at New Haven. His motive for making the change, he tells us, was that at Yale, he “could devote a greater part of his time to his favorite study of the Bible”; by which he appears to mean that the classroom work at Yale was less exigent than at Andover. In any case he preferred to prosecute his study of the Bible without, rather than under, the direction of, his teacher. “I attended lectures daily,” he writes, “and studied sufficiently to be prepared for examination; but my mind was chiefly directed with my heart to the simple treasures of the Bible. I went through the Epistles of Paul again and again, as I had gone through the Evangelists at Andover; and in the latter part of the time”—during which he was at Yale—“when I had begun to exercise myself in preaching, I was in the habit of preparing the matter of every sermon by reading the whole New Testament through with reference to the subject I had chosen.” He also found time for many external activities. He worked among the negroes of the town and took part in the organization of one of the earliest anti-slavery societies in this country. He even became instrumental in building up a struggling church. There were about a dozen “revivalists” in the city, he says, and their fervor attracted him. “For,” says he, “I was burning with the same zeal which I found in them (but nowhere else in the city) for the conversion of souls.” As they grew in number they had organized themselves as the “Free Church,” and, on Noyes’s recommendation, they now invited James Boyle to preach to them. He was thus provided with church associations of the hottest revivalistic character.⁷⁰

These new associations were not calculated to moderate Noyes’s fanatical tendencies. The censoriousness which he had exhibited toward his fellow students at Andover he now turned upon Christendom at large. How many real Christians are there in Christendom? he asked himself; and he felt constrained to answer, Not many. From his higher vantage-ground he looked out upon Christianity, as exhibited in the churches, and found it fatally wanting. His missionary zeal naturally cooled: with all Christendom lying in the evil one, what were the heathen to him? He saw his task now in the Christianizing of nominal Christians; the lost condition, not of the heathen but of Christians, was heavy on his heart.⁷¹ And now his sedulous study of the Bible in careful seclusion from his natural advisers, began to bear fruit—though he did not get so far away from Moses Stuart as to impress us with the originality of his thought. In the summer after his first year at Yale—the summer of 1833—he settled it with himself that our Lord’s second advent had already taken place; that it took place, in fact, within a generation of His death. We say “he settled it with himself,” for his confidence in his new conclusion was characteristically perfect. “I no longer conjectured or believed in the inferior sense of these words,” he says, “but I knew that the time appointed for the Second Advent was within one generation from the time of Christ’s personal ministry.” Oddly enough he appears to have been led to this conclusion chiefly by John 21:22: “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” “Here,” said he, “is an intimation by Christ himself that John will live till His Second Coming; the Bible is not a book of riddles; its hidden treasures are accessible to those who make the Spirit of Truth their guide; and how is it possible to reconcile this intimation with the accepted theory that Christ’s Second Coming is yet future?” If we are inclined to wonder a little at the mental struggles which Noyes seems to have undergone in reaching this conclusion, we should remind ourselves that it involved a very considerable revolution of thought for him; and revolutions of thought were not easy for Noyes. He had hitherto been, we must remember, a hot chiliast, looking for the Second Coming not only in the future, but in the immediate future; and expecting from it everything he was setting his hopes upon in his inflamed fancy. It was a great wrench to transfer this Second Coming back into the distant past, though, as we shall see, he managed to soften the blow by preserving his chiliastic hopes for the impending future and carrying only the Second Coming itself back into the past.

In August of this same summer (1833) he was licensed to preach by the New Haven West Association, and spent the six weeks that intervened before the reopening of the Seminary in the autumn, preaching in a little church in North Salem, New York. He was as yet not a perfectionist; only a fanatical chiliastic revivalist—if we can use the word “only” in such a connection. But perfectionism did not lie outside the horizon of his vision. Those “New York evangelists” who broke their way into New England in 1831—to whom he also had fallen a victim, and James Boyle among the others, who had been a Methodist and whom he had brought to New Haven, where he had formed with him a close intimacy—came from a region plowed and harrowed by perfectionism, and can scarcely have been ignorant of it; they may even have in their own persons borne more or less of its scars. He found also on his return to the Seminary some zealous young men, newly entered, who spurred him on to higher attainments in holiness. He diligently read such works as the “Memoirs” of James Brainerd Taylor⁷² and Wesley’s tract on “Christian Perfection.” He naturally found himself, therefore, through the autumn and early winter months making steady and accelerating progression toward perfect holiness. No lower attainment would satisfy him, and he became ever more and more eager to reach the goal; this effort, in the end, absorbed all his energies. At last the blessing came, and he received his “second conversion.”

He writes to his mother: “The burden of Christian perfection accumulated upon my soul, until I determined to give myself no rest while the possibility of the attainment of it remained doubtful. At last the Lord met me with the same promise that gave peace to my soul when first I came out of Egypt: ‘if thou wilt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.’ By faith I took the proffered boon of eternal life. God’s spirit sealed the act, and the blood of Christ cleansed me from all sin.” His “second conversion” consisted then in his pressing the promise of “salvation,” the assurance of “cleansing from all sin,” into a promise and assurance that the “salvation,” the “cleansing,” shall be completed as soon as begun, consuming no time and running through no process to the promised and assured end. The parallel between his first and second conversions was complete. Not only were both accomplished through the instrumentality of a single text—understood partly then, perfectly now—but in both cases alike he was driven by his temperament at once into publicity. The atmosphere of propaganda was his vital breath: he gave not a moment to meditation, testing, ripening. As, on his “first conversion,” he tells us that he “immediately” devoted himself (along with the study of Scripture) “to religious testimony in private and public”; so now, on the evening of the very day of his “second conversion,” he preached at the Free Church on the text, “He that committeth sin is of the devil,” and proclaimed the doctrine of perfect holiness—how such a man would do it from such a text we can well imagine. “The next morning,” we are availing ourselves now of W. A. Hinds’s narrative,⁷³ “a theological student who heard the discourse of the previous evening came to labor with him, and asked him directly, ‘Don’t you commit sin?’ The answer was an unequivocal ‘No.’ The man stared as though a thunderbolt had fallen before him, and repeated his question, and got the same answer. Within a few hours word was passed through the college and the city, ‘Noyes says he is perfect!’ and immediately afterward it was reported that Noyes is crazy!”⁷⁴

There is no mention made, in Noyes’s account of his “second conversion,” of any influences working on him in that direction from without. We have seen that there cannot have failed to be such. Noyes himself, however, speaks in this connection only of his study of perfectionist literature of the Wesleyan school; to which, no doubt, we must hence give much of the credit of the change in his views. The perfectionism which he adopted, however, when he worked himself through, was not specifically Wesleyan in type, but was rather of that mystical kind which was at the time prevalent in Western and Central New York. As there was nothing in Noyes’s previous intellectual history to prepare us for this particular mode of thinking, we naturally conjecture that he must have derived it from the New York men, channels of communication with whom, as we have seen, existed in abundance. A writer of the time, who shows himself in general very familiar with what was going on, tells us explicitly that he owed his indoctrination into perfectionism to one of the young men who had gone astray in E. N. Kirk’s school at Albany. “Chauncey E. Dutton,” we read,⁷⁵ “had breathed the afflatus. In 1833 he left Albany and entered the theological department at New Haven, Connecticut. Here he infused the new enthusiasm into John H. Noyes, a young man from Putney, Vermont, with whom he had become familiar. Thus began the logos of New Haven Perfectionism.” The date is right, and the general circumstances; it was on his return to New Haven in the autumn of 1833, Noyes himself tells us, that he found a number of zealous young men just entering the Seminary, to whose “constant fellowship and conversation” he attributes, along with the Wesleyan literature which he read, his “progress towards holiness.” The difficulty lies in the absence of the name of Dutton from the general catalogue of the New Haven Divinity School, and indeed from that of the University also. It may be of course that a mistake has been made, only, in connecting Dutton with the institution as a pupil. There is no doubt that he was in New Haven not far from this time propagating his perfectionist faith. We find him there, for instance, only a couple of years or so later on this errand, and Noyes was in close intercourse with him a year earlier in Brimfield.⁷⁶ The tone of Noyes’s reference both to him and to his companion in these ministries, Simon Lovett, however, leaves an impression that this intercourse with them belongs rather to 1835, and later, than to 1833–34. And we can scarcely avoid the feeling that he means us to gather that he was self-converted to his perfectionism.

Lyman H. Atwater, who was a fellow student of the next lower class with Noyes at Yale, seems to think of him merely as one of the Pelagianizing perfectionists who sprang up in his student days at New Haven under the teaching of Nathaniel W. Taylor. He is giving a general account of the rise of this class of perfectionists, and permits himself this bit of personal reminiscence:—⁷⁷

“When we were students of theology, a little coterie, becoming wiser than their teachers or fellow students, strained the doctrine of ability beyond the scope contended for or admitted by its most eminent champions, to the length of maintaining, not only that all men can, but that some do, reach sinless perfection in this life, of which, so far as the students there were concerned, a trio or so were the principal confessors. The net result of the whole was that the leader, instead of going forward into the ministry, ran into various socialistic and free-love heresies, on the basis of which he founded the Putney and Oneida communities, over the latter of which he now presides. Other sporadic outbursts of the distemper appeared here and there in the Presbyterian and Congregational communions, or among separatists and come-outers from them, these often uniting with the radicals or advanced reformers of other communions.”

This statement informs us that Noyes was not the only student at New Haven at the time who lapsed into perfectionism, but had a few companions, or, we may possibly suppose, converts. That his perfectionism arose simply from an overstraining of the Taylorite doctrine of ability seems, however, from his own account of it, not altogether likely; and we may perhaps not improperly suspect that Atwater has merely included him in the general movement which he was describing, without stopping to inquire as to any special peculiarity he may have exhibited. He himself, in giving an account of his mental and spiritual growth leading up to his conversion to perfectionism, has nothing to say of N. W. Taylor; but speaks rather of John Wesley as a guide and instructor. There was no doubt a Taylorite element in his thought,⁷⁸ which came out especially in his teaching as to the “first conversion” and as to the act of faith in general, concerning which he seems to have no other idea than that it is an act of our own in our own native powers.⁷⁹ But he certainly did not find the account of the perfection to which he supposed himself to have attained on that fateful twentieth of February, 1834, in the sheer ability of his will to do what it chose, and therefore (if it chose) to be perfect. He referred it, on the contrary, directly to the effect of communion with Christ. The affinities of his doctrine, in other words, were less Pelagian than mystical. By “the apprehension” of the facts concerning Christ and His saving work—“his victory over sin and death, the judgment of the prince of this world, and the spiritual reconciliation of God with man”—he explains,⁸⁰ believers are brought “into fellowship with Christ’s death and resurrection,” and made “partakers of his divine nature and his victory over the evil one.” “The gospel which I had received and preached,” he had written a few months earlier,⁸¹ speaking directly of what had happened on February 20, 1834, “was based upon the idea that faith identifies the soul with Christ, so that by his death and resurrection the believer dies and rises again, not literally, nor yet figuratively, but spiritually; and thus, so far as sin is concerned, is placed beyond the grave, in ‘heavenly places’ with Christ.” He goes on to say that three months later he felt compelled to extend this doctrine so as to make it include the redemption of the body as well as the soul—to abolish death as well as sin—by participation in Christ’s resurrection so that though we will “pass through the form of dying” (sad concession to the appearance of things!) we who are believers indeed will not really die. This doctrine, not only in form but in substance, is extremely mystical.

The effect of Noyes’s proclamation of his perfectionism was, naturally, the loss of the countenance of the several religious organizations with which he was connected. He was dismissed from the Divinity School and requested to withdraw altogether from the premises. The New Haven West Association, by which he had been licensed to preach the previous August, now recalled its license, “on account of his views on the subject of Christian perfection.”⁸² His church membership was still in the Congregational Church at Putney, and that church subsequently excluded him from fellowship “for heresy and breach of covenant”—supporting the charge apparently, however, by specifications which are drawn from his subsequent teaching.⁸³ His real church home was, nevertheless, the Free Church at New Haven, and a vote was passed at once by that church requesting him to discontinue all communication with its members. He represents himself as feeling very isolated. “I had now lost,” he writes, “my standing in the Free Church, in the ministry, and in the college. My good name in the great world was gone. My friends were fast falling away. I was beginning to be indeed an outcast. Yet I rejoiced and leaped for joy. Sincerely I declared that ‘I was glad when I got rid of my reputation.’ Some persons asked me whether I should continue to preach, now that the clergy had taken away my license. I replied, ‘I have taken away their license to sin, and they keep on sinning; so, though they have taken away my license to preach, I shall keep on preaching.’ ” The isolation complained of, however, had of course only relation to, and meant no more than an enforced change in, his associates. There were plenty of perfectionists within reach, and they of the most aggressive character. Noyes was soon, if he were not already, in close intercourse with them. But there can be no doubt that the effect of the announcement of his new views was something of a surprise to him, and brought on a crisis in his career. He tells us that in conversation with his father one day, during the short interval between his conversion and his entering the Seminary at Andover, he had propounded an interpretation of some Scripture, concerning which the older man uttered a warning. “Take care,” said he, “that is heresy.” “Heresy or not,” rejoined the son, “it is true.” “But,” warned the father, “if you are to be a minister, you must think and preach as the rest of the ministers do; if you get out of the traces they will whip you in.” “Never!” rejoined the son hotly: “never will I be whipped by ministers or any body else into views that do not commend themselves to my understanding as guided by the Bible and enlightened by the Spirit.” Now that the crisis had come, the “fighting spirit” he had announced in this program did not fail him. He had so little thought of yielding to the admonitions of his mentors, that he rather threw himself unreservedly into the conflict and seized the reins of leadership of the perfectionist party. “I resolved,” he says, “to labor alone if necessary, to repair the breaches of our cause.”

The immediate fruits of his propaganda at New Haven were not altogether inconsiderable. He was able to count James Boyle himself among his converts; and the two together carried on for a time a vigorous literary campaign, including the publication from the summer of 1834 (the first number bears the date of August 20) of a monthly journal called The Perfectionist. A number of the members of the Free Church also left the church, and joined Noyes’s party. Some converts were made also here and there outside of New Haven, especially in New York. Every effort was made by Noyes to compact his followers into a definite sect with its own doctrinal platform and organization. It was in this that his peculiarity consisted. We have already had occasion to point out the extreme individualism of the perfectionists of his day. Noyes was determined that he at least should not stand off by himself, but should be the head of a body which reflected his thought and obeyed his will. Everywhere he asserted his leadership; and although he was able to make it good with the completeness which he desired over only a small coterie, a certain deference appears to have been shown him in a surprisingly widely extended circle. Looking back upon these early days from a point of sight thirty years later, he tells us how they then appeared to him.

“The term Perfectionist,” he tells us,⁸⁴ “was applied to two classes who came out from the Orthodox churches at about the same period. They resembled each other in many respects (both classes apprehending alike the great truth, that the new covenant means salvation from sin, the security of believers, the substitution of grace for law and ordinances, etc.), but there was yet this fundamental and important distinction: one class appropriated these doctrines in the interest of individualism, the other in the interest of unity; one class scorned the idea of subordination and discipline, the other joyfully received the idea of organization, and were willing to submit to such discipline as organic harmony should require; one class were all leaders, a regiment of officers, many of whom were for a time eloquent champions of the new truths, but the majority of them rushed into excesses which dishonored the name Perfectionist; the other class, led by J. H. Noyes, have persevered in a course of self-improvement, overcoming many obstacles, and finally have developed a system of principles and a form of practical life which at least challenge the attention of the world.”

This formal difference—organized or unorganized—was not, however, the only thing which divided Noyes’s followers from outlying perfectionists. He was not only prepared to impose upon them his personal leadership, but his personal doctrinal views also. And, young man in his twenty-fourth year as he was, he had his doctrinal views even now in their formative ideas already in hand. They were evolved from the two fundamental assertions to which he had now attained—that Christ’s Second Coming took place in a.d. 70, and that no one living in sin is in the proper sense a Christian. Working out the details of his system rapidly from these two underlying principles, he as rapidly developed a very acute sense of the uniqueness of his “New Haven Perfectionism.” Consciousness of the points of agreement between his and other perfectionism grew faint: the settled persuasion that he, and he alone, possessed truth took possession of him. “New Haven Perfectionism,” he writes in his journal,⁸⁵ “is a new religion … has affinity with no sect this side the primitive church.… As a system it is distinct from all the popular theologies.” And again:⁸⁶ “New Haven Perfectionism is a doctrinal system, standing by itself, distinct from Wesleyan, New York, and Oberlin Perfectionism, as it is from non-resistance, ‘come-outism,’ etc.” … “Perfectionism in other places” than in Putney, “so far as I know, (individual instances excepted,) has been mixed up with New York fanaticism, Boyleism, Gatesism, non-resistance, etc.” His immediate purpose in these last words is not directly to assert doctrinal peculiarity (although that is asserted), but rather to repudiate any entanglement in the immoralities which persistent rumor was laying to the charge of perfectionists, at Southampton, Brimfield, and other places where the indecency of “spiritual wives” was in practice.

It is worth while to turn aside to point out that one of the peculiarities by which Noyes separated himself from the perfectionists of the time was that he did, in point of fact, keep himself free from complicity with this evil. He makes it quite clear that it was in his mind a characteristic of what he calls “New York Perfectionists,” and he declares with the utmost emphasis that he himself never gave it the least countenance. It was brought into New England from New York, he tells us, by Simon Lovett and Chauncey E. Dutton, who circulated at Southampton, Brimfield, and afterward at New Haven itself, as a sort of missionaries; and though beginning in mere “bundling,” passed on into actual licentiousness.⁸⁷ As for himself, he asseverates that he had no connection with such things—whether at Brimfield, Rondout, or New York⁸⁸—except to reprove them.⁸⁹ It must not be imagined, however, that it was what we should call the immorality of the practice which kept Noyes thus free from this iniquity. He speaks of it as “licentiousness,” it is true; but he fully shared the “antinomianism” of which it was the expression. His chief concern was that the premature practice of this antinomianism should not prejudice the spread of the doctrine. And then again, the idea of spiritual wives did not go far enough to satisfy the demands of his antinomianism. It still was held in the bonds of law. He stood for promiscuity in principle. And spiritual wives are just as incongruous to the principle of promiscuity as are “legal wives”; they are “spiritual dualism.” “The only true foundation is that which Jesus Christ laid,” he writes, “when he said, that in the good time coming there will be no marriage at all”—meaning not that celibacy will rule, but “promiscuity.”⁹⁰

Noyes himself tells us that he had already adopted this theory of promiscuity in general in May, 1834,⁹¹ that is to say, on the very heels of his “second conversion”—or conversion to perfectionism—and at the very beginning of his propaganda for the formation of a perfectionist sect. One gets the impression that it held from the first in his mind the place of an essential principle—we might even say of the essential principle—of his system, while the whole doctrinal elaboration led up to it and prepared the way for it.⁹² Meanwhile, however, he kept it in the background, putting it forward only tentatively and as men, having absorbed the doctrinal preparation, were able to bear it. As he himself expresses it:⁹³ “I moulded it, protected it, and matured it from year to year; holding it always, nevertheless, as a theory to be realized in the future, and warning all men against premature action upon it.” How he was accustomed to propagate it is, no doubt, fairly illustrated by his circumspect and veiled, and yet perfectly clear, presentation of it in a letter written in January, 1837, to his friend David Harrison of Meriden, Connecticut—a letter which has acquired the name of “the Battle Axe Letter” from the circumstance that Harrison, acting on a suggestion of Noyes’s (who was eager to make quiet propaganda), showed it to Simon Lovett (who liked it), and Lovett showed it to Elizabeth Hawley,⁹⁴ who sent it to Theophilus R. Gates,⁹⁵ who published the salient parts of it in his paper The Battle Axe (August, 1837)—and thus forced Noyes’s hand, and drew him for the first time to make public acknowledgment of this central element of his teaching. In this letter he writes:—⁹⁶

“I will write all that is in my heart on one delicate subject, and you may judge for yourself whether it is expedient to show this letter to others. When the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no marriage. The marriage-supper of the Lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarrelling, have no place there, for the same reason as that which forbids the guests at a thanksgiving dinner to claim each his separate dish, and quarrel with the rest for his rights. In a holy community there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be; and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other. God has placed a wall of partition between the male and the female during the apostasy for good reasons, which will be broken down in the resurrection for equally good reasons; but woe to him who abolishes the law of apostasy before he stands in the holiness of the resurrection. The guests of the marriage supper may have each his favourite dish, each a dish of his own procuring, and that without the jealousy of exclusiveness. I call a certain woman my wife; she is yours; she is Christ’s; and in Him she is the bride of all saints. She is dear in the hand of a stranger, and according to my promise to her I rejoice. My claim upon her cuts directly across the marriage covenant of this world, and God knows the end.”

What is proclaimed here is complete promiscuity among the perfect; those that are perfect are already living the “resurrection life.” Noyes could not repudiate his letter, and, with characteristic courage, declared his purpose thenceforth to publish the doctrine taught in it from the housetop. But with his equally characteristic caution he kept it still in the background, and put in the front those doctrines which he appeared to value more and more, chiefly because they led up to this; but which meanwhile produced less scandal to talk about. A typical example of his dealing with the matter may be seen in the attempt which he makes in June, 1839,⁹⁷ to explain to a correspondent how his brand of perfectionism differed from that of the Methodists, Friends, and Asa Mahan. They all agree, he says, that “perfect holiness is attainable in this life.” But the “Perfectionists”—that is, his own sect—are discriminated from the others by certain primary and also by certain secondary tenets. The primary ones he enumerates thus: “1. Their belief that perfect holiness, when attained, is forever secure.… 2. Their belief that perfect holiness is not a mere privilege, but an attainment absolutely necessary to salvation. Holding this belief they of course deny the name of Christian to all other sects.… 3. Their belief that the second coming of Christ took place at the period of the destruction of Jerusalem.” On this third point of doctrine he remarks: “Perfectionists insist upon this doctrine as the foundation of the two preceding”—that is to say it stood with them as the fundamental doctrine out of which all else is deduced. Out of it ultimately come then the “secondary consequences,” adherence to which also characterized “Perfectionists.” These he enumerates as “their ‘Antinomianism,’ their belief of a present resurrection, their peculiar views of the fashion of this world in respect to marriage, etc.” The promiscuity for which “Perfectionists” stand is not left here, it is true, unsuggested; but it is not obtruded. It is made a mere secondary result of their most fundamental doctrines.

We perceive that Noyes, beginning in 1834 as a perfectionist among perfectionists, had rapidly drifted into an attitude of open antagonism to all perfectionists except that small number who were willing to receive from him a totally new doctrinal and ethical system, and to subject themselves to his unquestioned authority. He no longer disagrees with them only in standing for organization over against their atomizing individualism; nor indeed only in reprobating the tendency to cloak licentiousness under a show of close spiritual relationship, which was showing itself among some of them. He declares them not really Christians, and he takes infinite satisfaction in pointing out his differences from them. He exhibits, indeed, a real predilection not only for explaining the differences between the several varieties of perfectionist teaching and his own, but in general for pointing out the defects in the teaching of all whom he supposes might be imagined to have been in any way before him advocates of holiness. As to the “ordinary class of pietists in the carnal churches,” no doubt, he considers it unnecessary to say anything.⁹⁸ They are “confessors and professors of sin,” and therefore certainly not Christians. He adduces David Brainerd as a “fair specimen” of the “more distinguished spiritualists of the churches,” but thinks that enough has been said when it is said that “his general experience is in essence a transcript of the seventh chapter of Romans”—in which chapter is depicted, according to Noyes, a carnal not a spiritual condition. “It is evident,” he says, “that he was, through life, under conviction, panting after freedom from sin, but never reaching it.” With Brainerd, he classes Edwards, Payson, and “nearly all of those who have obtained the highest distinction for piety in the churches.” James Brainerd Taylor’s experience, as we have seen, he is willing to allow to have been “of a higher grade.” “He came apparently to the very borders of the gospel,” he says, and “saw clearly the privilege and glory of salvation from sin.” “He even confessed, at times, in a timid way, that he was free from sin,” and in doing so really “condemned the routine of sinning and repenting which was the only experience allowed or known in the churches before him.” His biographers, he asserts, “suppress the clearest part of his testimony in relation to his own salvation.” Nevertheless he was only “the John the Baptist of the doctrine of holiness” and, not knowing the gospel of the primitive church, “was not born of God in the Bible sense.” There is nothing better to say of the Mystics—Madame Guyon, William Law. They lose themselves in a “spiritual philosophy”: Law is the best and his “Address to the Clergy” his best book. It is he who is the real father of the semi-perfectionism which the Methodists profess. The Methodists—like the Moravians and Shakers—and Asa Mahan and his companions with them, fail because they make holiness not the main point of religion but an appendix to something else, and have denied or suppressed the most essential element of the new covenant, viz. “security.” Oberlin may stand as the illustration of a semi-perfectionism like this: it represents the stage a man comes to when, seeking holiness, he has a gleam of it—and stops.⁹⁹ “We,” he says in another place,¹⁰⁰ differentiating his “Perfectionists” from Wesleyans and Oberliners—“we believe in the ‘New Covenant,’ which enlists soldiers for life; or, in other words, for perpetual holiness.”

We must not exaggerate the success of the propaganda for his perfectionism which Noyes inaugurated at New Haven in the spring of 1834. Its success, although, as we have said, not inconsiderable, was not great; and what was gained at the outset was soon largely lost. It was not long before James Boyle cast off allegiance, and the converts from the Free Church also soon returned to it.¹⁰¹ Noyes himself remained in New Haven, after his adoption of perfectionism, only a year. When he left it, in February, 1835, never to return except on occasional visits, his departure bore a somewhat dramatic appearance. Simon Lovett, he tells us,¹⁰² had come “as a sort of missionary from the New York Perfectionists” to convert him to their ideas; but he on the contrary converted Lovett to some of his, “especially to the New Haven doctrine of the Second Coming.” Lovett took him, however, to Southampton and Brimfield to make him acquainted with the groups of perfectionists which had sprung up in those places under the New York propaganda. He won his triumphs among them also, he tells us. “Their leader, Tertius Strong, succumbed to my reasonings,” he says, “and soon the doctrine of the Second Coming, and what was called the ‘Eternal promise,’ were received on all sides with great enthusiasm.” But he did not like what he saw. There was “a seducing tendency to freedom of manners between the sexes,” and there was “a progressive excitement” manifesting itself. So he ran away—leaving without notice, on foot, “through snow and cold—below zero—to Putney, sixty miles distant.” Thus he escaped complicity, perhaps participation, in one of the wildest follies of the perfectionist orgies; and at the same time found a new scene for his work and a revised program for his labors. He did not at once, indeed, find the new way. A period of uncertainty intervened in which he spent himself endeavoring to repair the losses that had been suffered and to build up the broken fortunes of his party. He went from place to place on this errand. He was visited at Putney by old friends and fellow workers. Simon Lovett came on from Brimfield and joined him in his labors. Hard on his heels Charles H. Weld¹⁰³ came, fresh from Theophilus R. Gates (who, he said, was “pure gold”), with letters in his hands from a New York priestess, a Mrs. Carrington, full of censures of Noyes’s “carnality and worldly wisdom.” Noyes describes this woman as “a lady living somewhere in the State of New York, who had recently been converted to perfectionism by Weld’s labors, and was soaring in the highest regions of ecstacy and boasting.” He no longer had any sympathy with mere perfectionists—with Weld he finally broke, apparently violently, and certainly permanently. He was meditating other things to which perfectionism was only a stepping stone. To these other things, however, perfectionism was a stepping stone—an indispensable stepping stone—and he now gave himself, having the new vision before his eyes, with all diligence to building it up in a form suitable for what was to come.

“At this time,” he says, “I commenced in earnest the enterprise of repairing the disasters of Perfectionism, and establishing it on a permanent basis, not by preaching and stirring up excitement over a large field, as had been done at the beginning, nor by labouring to reorganize and discipline broken and corrupted regiments, as I had done at different places, but by devoting myself to the patient instruction of a few simple-minded, unpretending believers, chiefly belonging to my father’s family. I had now come to regard the quality of the proselytes of holiness as more important than their quantity; and the quality which I preferred was not that meteoric brightness which I had so often seen miserably extinguished, but sober and even timid honesty. This I found in the little circle of believers at Putney; and the Bible School which I commenced among them in the winter of 1836–7 proved to be to me and to the cause of holiness the beginning of better days.”

Although the work in which Noyes now engaged himself took the form of a “Bible School,” neither his purpose nor his interest could any longer be described as theological or even as religious. That purpose and interest belonged to a transcended phase of his development. His teaching in the “Bible School,” we are told, sought chiefly to confirm the pupils in “the new doctrines of Salvation from Sin and the Second Coming of Christ,” and to draw corollaries from them “resulting in the discovery of many other doctrines at variance with the dogmas of the divinity doctors and commentators.”¹⁰⁴ This is an euphemistic way of describing what was really being done. What was really being done was, by the constant inculcation, enforcement, elaboration, illustration, of Noyes’s fundamental doctrines of the emancipation of believers from all restrictions of law, and their imminent entrance into the “resurrection state” in which the selfishness of “exclusive marriage” should be done away, to supply his pupils with a religious basis for the practice of sexual promiscuity and to induce them to enter upon the practice of it without shock, when the time seemed to him to have come to introduce it. Meanwhile he tells us emphatically and with some iteration that, personally he “walked in all the ordinances of the law blameless”—“till 1846”; and that also his “face was set as a flint against laxity among the Saints”—again “till 1846.”¹⁰⁵ His whole preoccupation was, however, all this time with sex. “I got the germ of my present theory of Socialism,” he writes in 1867¹⁰⁶—meaning nothing other than his doctrine of promiscuity, which he speaks of as if it carried with it his entire socialistic theory—“very soon after I confessed Holiness, i.e. in May 1834. As that germ grew in my mind, I talked about it. It took definite form in a private letter in 1836. It got into print without my knowledge or consent in 1837. I moulded it, protected it, and matured it from year to year; holding it always, nevertheless, as a theory to be realized in the future, and warning all men against premature action upon it. I made ready for the realisation of it by clearing the field in which I worked of all libertinism, and by educating our Putney family in male continence¹⁰⁷ and criticism.¹⁰⁸ When all was ready, in 1846, I launched the theory into practice.”¹⁰⁹

Of course Noyes—for that was his custom—rationalized his preoccupation with sex. That was, he said, his necessary preoccupation after doctrine had been disposed of. “The first thing to be done,” he writes more than once,¹¹⁰ “in an attempt to redeem man and reorganize society is to bring about reconciliation with God; and the second thing is to bring about a true union of the sexes. In other words, religion is the first subject of interest, and sexual morality the second, in the great task of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. Bible communists are operating in this order. Their main work from 1834 to 1846 was to develop the religion of the New Covenant and establish union with God. Their second work, in which they are now especially engaged, is the laying the foundation of a new state of society by developing the true theory of sexual morality.” When this passage was written, however—say in 1848—Noyes and his followers were not engaged in “developing the true theory of sexual morality,” if by that is meant working it out theoretically. That had been the work of the preceding period. They were now putting that developed theory of sexual morality into practice—and only in this practical sense “developing” it. Nor must the general terms in which the statement is thrown be permitted to throw the reader off of the real line of thought which is being followed. It is of course perfectly true that the two great objects of human regard are religion and morality, and the two matters of first consideration in the establishment of a sound social order are our relations to God and to one another. Since man has been made male and female, it may very properly be said also that, after religion, the family is the foundation stone of society. Precisely what Noyes was engaged in doing, however, was destroying the family. The problem he had set himself was nothing less than the reconstitution of human society without the family. It was precisely because of this that, in “the laying of the foundation of a new state of society,” he required first of all to “develop” a new “theory of sexual morality,” a theory of sexual morality, that is to say, which dispensed with the family. The theory which he developed was nothing other than that of sexual promiscuity—prudently regulated, no doubt, in its practice in the interest of the community, but not only distinctly but even dogmatically insisted upon. The development of this theory and its inculcation to his followers were actually his “main work” for ten years before 1846. Its practical application was equally actually his main work for the remainder of his active life. His mind was preoccupied thus for a whole half of a century with the details of the sexual life. The religious preoccupation was past: “The Berean,” which was published in 1847, but is made up of articles reprinted from the periodicals published from 1834 on, is its monument. The economic experiment on which he ultimately embarked was dependent on the narrower matter of sex-relations in which he saw its foundation stone: for all communism is wrecked on the family, and he perceived with the utmost clearness that he must be rid of the family if he was to have communism. Accordingly he constantly speaks of his “social theory” when he means nothing more than his “sexual theory,” and his book called “Bible Communism,” published in 1848, was nothing more than an elaborate plea for the practice of sexual promiscuity under the name of “entire community,” that is to say community not only in goods but also in women.¹¹¹