III. Upham’s Doctrinal Teaching

From examples such as those which we have adduced, it is sufficiently evident that in taking over the language of his Quietistic teachers, Upham took over with it only in part the doctrines of which that language was the appropriate expression. His own doctrinal system was different and it becomes desirable to ascertain in outline—or at least in its salient points—what the doctrinal system is to which he elects to give expression in this extraordinary fashion.

His primary engrossment was psychological; and it is natural that the conclusions at which he arrived in that field should underlie and be constantly attended to in the development of his religious philosophy. The one of these upon which he seems most to have prided himself was the threefold distribution of mental faculty into the intellect, the sensibilities, and the will. There appears to have been a sense in which he—or certainly his friends—looked upon this distribution as a discovery of his own. Alpheus S. Packard tells an affecting story¹²¹ of how in the early years of his work at Bowdoin, discouraged by his failure to coördinate the facts of mental action in an intelligible scheme, he was on the point of resigning his professorship and retiring beaten from his work, “when what we may term a discovery in mental science flashed upon his mind, which gave place, order and proportion to all his facts; the idea that there were in the unity of the soul three coöordinate forms of activity, the intellect, the sensibilities and the will.” Such a discovery at that date was, of course, only a rediscovery; and we can scarcely doubt that Upham was helped to it by at least obscure reminiscences of what he had read. He himself points out in his treatise on the Will¹²² that this threefold distribution was already to be found in Locke and Hume, in Lord Kames and Sir James Mackintosh. It was as old in continental psychology as Tefens and Mendelssohn, and had been given general currency there by Kant. Sir William Hamilton is ordinarily credited with having first clearly expounded and defined it in English, though we may understand this as meaning only that he performed much the same service for it among English-speaking writers as Kant did on the continent. Among his own New England predecessors Upham might have read it very clearly set forth as early as 1793 in Samuel West’s “Essays on Liberty and Necessity”; and he himself in 1834¹²³ points to Asa Burton’s “Essays on Some of the First Principles of Metaphysicks, Ethicks, and Theology,” which was published in 1824, the very year he went to Bowdoin—as expounding it. It was being taught, also, contemporaneously with himself, at New Haven by N. W. Taylor.¹²⁴ When he lays hold of it, however, he makes it very much his own, and founds on it his whole conception of mental action. “The general division of the Mind,” he says,¹²⁵ “is into the Intellect, the Sensibilities, and the Will. The External Intellect is first brought into action; followed, in greater or less proximity of time, by the development of the Internal. The subsequent process of the mental action, when carried through in the direction of the Pathematic”—that is, the natural as distinguished from the moral—“sensibilities, is from intellections to emotions, and from emotions to desires, and from desires to acts of the will. When carried through in the direction of the Moral sensibilities, it is from intellections to emotions, (not natural but moral emotions;) and then diverging into a different track and avoiding the appropriate domain of the Desires, passes from emotions to feelings of moral obligation, and from the Obligatory feelings, like the corresponding portion of the sensibilities, to the region of the Voluntary or Volitive nature.”

Thus everything culminates in willing; and Upham teaches¹²⁶ that “the will, in making up its determinations, takes immediate cognizance of only two classes of mental states, viz., Desires and Feelings of obligation.”¹²⁷ What he is seeking to enunciate here is, no doubt, primarily the general manner of the will’s action; but behind that there lies an intense conviction that the will is subject to law, and is no more capable of acting apart from the law to which it is subject than any other creature of God. He closes the long section of his “Treatise on the Will,”¹²⁸ devoted to validating this conviction, with these eloquent words: “Let us remember, that in this simple proposition”—that the will is in its action subject to law—“we find the golden link, which binds us to the throne of God. If my will is not subject to law, then God is not my master. And what is more, he is not only not so in fact, but it is impossible that he should be so. But on the other hand, if my will is not independent, in the sense of being beyond the reach of law, then the hand of the Almighty is upon me, and I cannot escape even if I would. The searching eye of the great Author of all things ever attends my path; and whether I love or hate, obey or rebel, I can never annul his authority, or evade his jurisdiction.”

There is, it is true, a certain faltering, scarcely in complete harmony with this eloquent assertion of the complete subjection of the will to law, in his enunciation of the general law of its action. He does not say that the will is determined by desires and feelings of obligation; he says that in its action it “takes cognizance” of them alone. What he means to say is that the will does not act except in the presence of or in view of motives: “the existence of motives in some form or other,” he roundly asserts,¹²⁹ “is the indispensable condition of any action of the voluntary power.” But he wishes to avoid asserting that the will is determined by the motive, in the presence or in view of which it acts: the motive is “nothing more than the preparatory condition, circumstance, or occasion; a sort of antecedent incident to that which takes place.”¹³⁰ The will stands among the motives which have released it for action, and sovereignly chooses which of them it will follow. This free choice among the motives, Upham now declares to be necessary if we are to regard man “as a free and accountable agent.” This seems to imply that if the motive really determined the volition man would not be “a free and accountable agent.” And that seems to imply that the power to act—and the habit of acting—contrary to the motive is essential to free and accountable agency. If this does not separate the action of the will from the control of the desire or moral feeling (with all the machinery of intellection, emotion, and so forth, back of it) and make its action lawless, we would like to know what it does do.

Reverting to the matter at a somewhat later point,¹³¹ Upham makes his doctrine plainer by repetition. The will never acts and cannot act in the absence of motives. “The will acts in view of motives and never acts independently of them.” The motives furnish “the condition or occasion”—“the indispensable occasion”—on which the “ability” of the will to put forth volitions “is exerted.” That is to say, the presence of the motives releases the will for action. But the motives, though they draw a circle around the will, do not determine—no one of them at least—how it will act. It acts “in view of motives”; yet “its acts are its own and are to be regarded and spoken of as its own.” It acts “in connection with motives,” and yet has “a true and substantive power in itself.” “In other words,” says Upham, coming at last really to the point, “although motives are placed round about it, and enclose it on every side, it,” that is, the will, “has the power of choosing, (or if other expressions be preferable,) of deciding, determining, or arbitrating among them. Although it is shut up within barriers, which God himself has instituted, it has a positive liberty and ability within those barriers. Although its operations are confined within a sphere of action, which is clearly and permanently marked out by its maker [God], yet within that sphere, (the proposition of the will’s subjection to law still holding good,) its acts emanate in itself.” The meaning of this is apparently that not only is the will released for action only by the presence of motives soliciting its action, but the range of its action is limited by their solicitations. It cannot act in the absence of motives and it equally cannot act otherwise than as it is solicited by one or another of them. But it has the power of selecting, among the motives presented to it, that one in accordance with which it prefers to act. Its “free action” is confined within the circle of its solicitation: but within that circle it is “free.” It must have a master, but it chooses its own master—from among the claimants for its service. It serves; but it gives willing service.

What now, we may ask, would happen if there were but one motive present at a given time to the will? Or what if a plurality of motives were present, but they acted in harmony with one another and drew all in the same direction? Obviously then we should have a determined will. The will released for action by the presence of motives and confined in its choice to the solicitations actually experienced, could choose only one way and would be a determined will. This is Upham’s own understanding of the matter and on it he founds a prescription of the proper method to become holy in life. It is to become holy in our desires, that the desires may pull in the same direction as conscience: and that, says he, will secure the holiness of the will. “The will acts,” he explains,¹³² “if it acts at all, in accordance either with natural and interested motives, on the one hand, or with moral motives on the other.” In a normal condition, in a man of sound mind, “the moral sense will always act right and act effectively, and will always furnish a powerful motive to the will, unless it,” that is the will, “is perplexed and weakened in its action … by the influence of unsanctified desires.” “If, therefore, the desires are sanctified, and the perplexing and disordering influence from that source is taken away, the feelings of desire and the sentiment of justice will combine their action in the same direction, and the action of the will cannot be otherwise than holy. To possess holy desires, therefore, in their various modifications, or, what is the same thing, to possess, as we sometimes express it, a holy heart, is necessarily to possess a holy will.” “Cannot be otherwise than holy”; “necessarily to possess a holy will.” Whenever then, either because there is only a single motive present to the will or because the motives present and active are in harmony with one another, the will is the subject of a unitary solicitation, we have a determined will—it cannot do otherwise than follow the only solicitation acting upon it. The condition here described is, however, it ought now to be said, always the real state of the case. The picture of the will standing in the midst of contending motives dragging it hither and yon, is an artificial and mechanical one. The conflict of appetences is carried on, not in the will, but before the will is reached. At the moment of volition there is but one motive active—the resultant of the whole. So long as the mind is divided, the will hangs suspended: it forms no volition. Upham discusses, formally, at least twice, the old question whether the will follows the strongest motive and he parries it with the old rejoinder, that there is no criterion of what is the strongest motive except the actual action of the will. The question which is the strongest motive, it is better to understand, is one of which the will has no cognizance: it settles itself in the conflict of appetences—and only the surviving motive, or better, the resultant motive, reaches the will. What determines the will is the total subjectivity at the moment of volition. That total subjectivity is a very complex thing, but its pressure on the will is unitary.

Upham does not, however, attain a solution of his difficulties. Vacillating between the claims of “law” and those of “freedom,” he is at his wit’s end. It is “freedom” that wins the victory with him. At the bottom of his heart he knows that man is determined in all his actions. Does he not tell us that “if the law of universal causation in particular be not true, there is no Deity”?¹³³ But on the top of his mind he is sure that man is the master of his own action—nay, that he controls God’s action, too. His philosophical faith assures him that God controls man; his practical belief is that God is at man’s disposal. Does he not tell us over and over again that God can do nothing for man’s moral and spiritual welfare without man’s consent? It is “undoubtedly a correct” opinion, he declares,¹³⁴ “that it is impossible for God to operate on a morally responsible being, for moral purposes, and with moral virtue resulting, without a real and voluntary consent.” “Man is a moral being,” he says again,¹³⁵ “endued with the power of free choice; and … the divine presence cannot exist in him, as a principle of life, except with his own consent.” “God cannot take up his abode in the heart,” he repeats with more elaboration,¹³⁶ “he cannot become the God and ruler of the heart, without the consent of the heart. This is all he wants, and where this consent (an act which has the peculiarity of sustaining moral responsibility without involving moral merit,) is not given, the poor rebellious one is left, left to himself, left of God.” The parenthesis thrown in here is a vain attempt to escape the imputation of teaching salvation by works. To withhold consent brings moral ruin, expressed here in terms of negative reprobation. Is it not wrong? And, it being wrong, to give consent, is that not a right act? And does not a right act “involve moral merit”? If God’s entrance into the soul depends as its condition on the soul’s consent, how can it be said that this consent—given on the soul’s own motion and in its own strength—is not a meritorious act? What is mainly to be observed here, however, is the strength of the assertion of the helplessness of God over against the rebellious sinner. He cannot save him, but must just leave him to perish.

This note is struck again in Upham’s latest book.¹³⁷ There it is asserted that although God’s love “is absolute and unchangeable,” “freedom also, as an attribute of moral beings, is absolute and unchangeable,” and cannot be violated. “God himself,” we read, “who in being the absolute truth, can never fail to respect the absolute truth, and¹³⁸ will never coerce a sinner into heaven; for that would only be placing him in a deeper Hell. This would be a violation of fixed and unchangeable truths and relations. It would be an impossibility.” Here is a flat assertion that it is impossible for God to determine human action without violating human freedom; and to give color to this absurd assertion, the more absurd assertion still is made that to save a sinner, without waiting for his “consent” to be saved, is coercion, and leaves him in his rebellious mind: that is to say, he is supposed to be saved without being saved.¹³⁹

There is a chapter in the “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life”¹⁴⁰ which deals in general with, if we may so express it, the locality of religious experience. In the course of it we may learn something more of Upham’s view of the interrelation of the human faculties. He begins, of course, with his threefold division of Intellect, Sensibility, and Will; and with his subdivision of the Sensibilities into Emotions and Desires—a subdivision so marked as to raise the question whether the Emotions and Desires—are not really conceived as major divisions. And he repeats here of course his view that normal mental action runs through these four states in the order in which they are enumerated. It begins with an act of intellect, which quickens emotions into activity, through which the desires are moved, and through them in turn the will. This is his constant representation. The point to be observed at present is that it is supposed that this normal course of action may interrupt itself at any point—so that the intellect may be brought into action without arousing any emotion, or emotion may be aroused without setting desire into action, or desire may burn strongly without moving the will. This notion results, of course, from a mechanical conception of mental action, the essential unity of which, as of the acting mind, is insufficiently apprehended. On the ground of this notion, however, we are told that if the intellect alone is moved by religious truth, there is no religion in that. No clearness of perception of religious realities, no amount of religious knowledge acquired and intellectually realized, is in any true sense religious—if it stops there. Even if the emotional nature responds to the new perception of religious realities, and is roused to the greatest conceivable heights of religious feeling, there is no religion, in the true sense, in that either—if it stops there. It is not until those modifications of the sensibilities which are called affections, and through them the will, are reached that anything which may properly be called religion is produced. “Any religion, or rather pretence of religion, which is not powerful enough to penetrate into this region of the mind, and to bring the affections and will into subjection to God, is in vain. It is an important fact, and as melancholy as it is true, that a person may be spiritually enlightened and have new views on the subject of religion, and that he may also have very raised and joyful emotions, and yet may be a slave to his natural desires.”¹⁴¹ Thus the mind is split into two halves—on the one side the intellect and emotions, on the other the affections and the will: and it is supposed that these two halves can stand contradictorily over against one another—the intellect and emotions be teeming with religious knowledge and thrilling with religious feeling, and at the same time the desires and will be lying cold and unmoved, dead in sin. This representation is the more remarkable that what Upham is employed in depicting is not merely the movements of the mind under nature but distinctively under grace. What is under discussion is the saving operations of the Holy Spirit. “We will suppose,” he says,¹⁴² “the case of a person who is the subject of a divine operation. Under the influence of this inward operation, he experiences, to a considerable extent, new views of his own situation, of his need of a Savior, and of the restoration of his soul to God in spiritual union. The operation which has been experienced, so far, is purely intellectual.… But in addition to this, we will suppose that an effect, and perhaps a very decided effect, has been experienced in the emotive part, which in its action is subsequent to that of the intellect.… The perception of new truth … gives him happiness; and the perception of its relation to his salvation gives him still more happiness.… His mouth is filled with praise. And others praise the Lord on his account.” Nevertheless, he has no religion, and is not the subject of any “religious experience.”

The faults of this representation are of two kinds—psychological and religious. The human soul is a unit and cannot be divided thus into water-tight compartments. As the emotions cannot be aroused except through a prior movement of the intellect, so every movement of the intellect must be felt in the emotional nature—and through it, in those affections which Upham calls desires and in the will. New views of truth, if genuine, cannot fail to be felt to the extreme verge of human action. Above all it is inconceivable that the intellect can be illuminated by the Holy Spirit and the feelings, appropriate to the new view of truth imparted, aroused, with no effect at all upon “the affections and the will.” The fundamental fault of Upham’s representation lies, however, in his complete failure to recognize any creative operation of the Holy Spirit on the heart. He is endeavoring to account for the difference between the growth of the seed which falls on the rocky ground and of that which falls on the good ground—without recognizing any difference in the soil. The reason why some who hear the word go on to fruit-bearing, and others do not, he says, is that the natural process of growth is arrested in midcourse in the one case and not in the other. The reason why it does it, is—that it does it. The truth of course is that whenever true religion starts in the intellect it does not end until it reaches the will. We may say, if we choose, that whenever the Spirit enlightens the intellect and arouses the emotions, He will quicken the affections and move the will. That is true and may be enough to say; but it is not all nor even the most fundamental thing that is true. We must add that whenever true religion begins in the intellect it is because the Spirit of God has moved creatively over the soul and prepared it in all its departments of activity to respond to His Word. The account of the difference of “temporary faith” and “saving faith” is that in the one case there has never been any true religion at all, and in the other there has—because in the one case the soul has not been prepared by the Holy Spirit for the acceptance of the seed and in the other it has.

Let us observe meanwhile that the effect (it is really the cause) of Upham’s representation, is to throw all religion into the affections and will; ultimately into what we would call the voluntary activities of the soul. This too is a result of his theological attitude, which in this matter has affected his psychological construction. He is operating here with one of the basic contentions of the “New Divinity,” and what is meant ultimately is that he thinks in terms of the will as the sole source of all ethical and religious character. This involves, of course, the denial of native depravity, and forms thus one of the points of sympathy between him and his Romanist mentors, with their doctrine of pura naturalia. It is upon this element of his teaching that his pupil, young Henry Boynton Smith, very naturally concentrates his criticism in the estimate of his psychological system which he wrote, at Upham’s request, for The Literary and Theological Review of December, 1837.¹⁴³ Upham goes wrong, he points out, on the question of the morality of instincts, appetites, propensities, defending the view “that it is the will which gives them a moral character; that we are accountable for them only as far as they are voluntary; that in their native, instinctive action, they are innocent.” In opposition Smith rightly declares that “the affections are a fount of moral character, separate altogether from deliberate volition,” and appeals in support to the older New England tradition. In point of fact, so far is the will from giving character to the impulses, emotions, affections, it is they which give character to the will. An interesting inquiry might be started whether in Upham’s view the deliverances of conscience in the sense of the moral sense, the organ of moral judgments, which appear in his system as motives to the action of the will, not products of it, have any moral character. The time may come in the development of the Christian life at any rate, he teaches,¹⁴⁴ when conscience passes into the background, because no longer needed: we are good without its aid. “The soul which is given to God without reserve,” he teaches, has passed beyond the need, of course, of the reproofs of conscience. It is “clothed with innocence,” and there is therefore now no condemnation for it. Madame Guyon accordingly spoke of having “lost her conscience.” She had not done that: she had only transcended the need of the admonitions and reproofs of conscience, and now called out only its approving judgments. It is to be recognized, however, that it is not merely the reproofs of conscience, but its compulsory or constraining action, that holy people are said to pass beyond the need of. They do all that is right without any instigation from it, under the guidance of holy love. “It would be a work of supererogation to drive a soul which goes without driving.” “Conscience itself becomes the companion and playmate of love, and hides itself in its bosom. Shielded by innocence, we come to God without fear”—which seems to say that our dependence is in our own, not Christ’s righteousness. This appears to be as near as may be a doctrine of the abolition of conscience in the “perfect” state: and as conscience is the organ of our morality, the abolition of morality. We get beyond the categories of right and wrong. True, it is allowed that conscience persists, in order to applaud. It no longer directs—not even love: it waits on love’s acts to approve them. In Upham’s imaginative picture of what men are when they are perfect, he says they are emancipated (among other things) from conscience. Why just that? Why not say they are emancipated to the perfect fulfillment of all the indications of a perfectly instructed conscience?

Love, it is clear, is the highest category of Upham’s thought. It is in his usage a synonym of God. He deals much more sanely with the phrase, “God is love,” than most teachers of his type.¹⁴⁵ But he seemingly fancies that he is speaking intelligibly when he says that love is “the life of God,” “that elementary, self-moving and self-instigating principle in God which constitutes” His life:¹⁴⁶ that it “makes or constitutes God”; and is “the essential and eternal life of the divine existence, and in fact constitutes that existence.”¹⁴⁷ In point of fact no clear meaning can be attached to such words: these are things which love, which is a quality of being or a mode of action of a being, cannot be. What is true, Upham himself tells us¹⁴⁸ when he defines the phrase “God is love by essence,” as meaning that “love is forever and unchangeably essential to his existence as God.” God would not be what we call God without it. It is inevitable, however, from his general point of view that he should exalt love above all those other essential attributes, without which equally God would not be what we call God; and should make it the sole principle of the divine action. It was the principle, for example, of creation. We are told that love was the motive and the production of happiness the purpose of God in creation¹⁴⁹—from which we perceive that Upham adopts that hedonistic theory of ethics prevalent in the New England of his day,¹⁵⁰ according to which happiness is the summum bonum and general benevolence, or the love of being in general, the principle of all virtue. Man is not only like other creatures the product of God’s love, but, having been created in the image of God, like God a “love being”¹⁵¹—though this certainly cannot mean, on man’s part, that love is the very substance out of which he is constituted. The image of God in man, we are told, does not consist in external form, for God has no form. Nor does it consist in intellect—“for the intellect of God embraces all things, while man can know only a part”—surely a suicidal remark, since it can scarcely be meant that man’s love equals God’s. Nevertheless, it is boldly said at once that God’s image in man does consist “in that which constitutes, more than anything else”—this qualifying phrase seems to allow something else than love to be of the divine nature—“the element, the life, of the divine nature, namely, holy love.” As specifically a “love-being,” man as he came from his Maker’s hands, loved instinctively, immediately and universally. Love “flowed out” from him “in all directions, like a living stream” and suffused all his environment. It almost seems as if it were conceived as a necessary mode of action, like a natural force. “Spontaneous in its action,” we are told, “acting because it had a principle of movement in itself, it did not wait for the slow deductions of reason.” Did not reason, then, act spontaneously—and indeed also “instinctively, immediately and universally”—in the protoplasts as truly as love? We suppose in any case that the action of love did wait, even in the protoplasts, for the apprehension of an object, and for the perception of it as an appropriate object for this affection. We should be loath to conceive of love, even in them, as radiating from man as a center like light, say, from the sun, and playing indifferently on everything that came within its reach. Even in the protoplasts love, we presume, should be conceived as the action of an intelligent and moral being.

This exaggeration apart, however, there is a great deal that is just in Upham’s description of man, on the side of his affectional nature, as he came from his Maker’s hand. We agree that man came from his Maker’s hand “a love being,” spontaneously loving every sentient thing brought to his apprehension. Of course, loving God most of all—Upham says, because the amount of existence or being in God is greater than in any other being. “The law of love’s movement, all other things being equal, is the amount of being, or existence in the object beloved.”¹⁵² We draw back from this quantitative mode of conceiving the matter, which is part of the mechanical representation by which love is supposed to act like a natural force—say “directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the distance.” “Other things” are not equal: they never are. God is loved most of all because He is the most worthy of all beings to be loved. Directed to Him, the love of benevolence, which in Upham’s scheme is the sum of all virtues, seems to pass into the love of complacency. We desire for Him nothing that He has not or is not: we would have Him be nothing but what He is: desire turned to Him becomes pure delight. And Upham describes the love of the protoplasts for the creature also much in terms of complacency, as if the creature in the world’s prime scarcely stood in need of anything for the supply of which the love of benevolence could be called out. Man, he tells us,¹⁵³ “saw all things in the possession of life and beauty, and he rejoiced in all things, because all things had God in them. He loved the tree and the flower, which reflected the divine wisdom and goodness. But far more did he delight in the happiness of everything which had a sentient existence.… He loved them; and he gave them their names.… His simple and pure heart flowed out” to them. It is a beautiful picture. And it is Upham’s picture not only of the paradise that has been lost but of the paradise that shall be regained when once more “pure love” becomes the principle of our existence.

The sin-cursed desert lies between. As we traverse its burning sands one of our chief consolations is the providence of God. For in His providence we meet with God. “God himself,” says Upham finely,¹⁵⁴ “is hidden in the bosom of every event.” “So that we can truly say,” he adds, “that no event in his providence happens, without bringing God with it, and without laying his hand upon us.” It is here only—in His providences—besides the heart, that God is to be found. Neither in clouds nor in sunsets, neither in our seasons of retirement nor in our devotion, can He be found: only in these two “places”—the heart and His providence.¹⁵⁵ Upham is accordingly accustomed to insist on the presence of God in all happenings—except sin. He tells us, for instance,¹⁵⁶ that “every thing which occurs, with the exception of sin, takes place, and yet without infringing on moral liberty, in the divinely appointed order and arrangement of things; and is an expression, within its own appropriate limits, of the divine will.” The conclusion he draws is that therefore “in its relations to ourselves personally and individually,” whatever occurs “is precisely that condition of things which is best suited to try and to benefit our own state.” Thus God is essentially present to us in every occurrence. “Faith identifies every thing with God’s superintendence, and makes every thing, so far as it is capable of being so, an expression of his will, with the exception already mentioned, viz., of sin. And even in regard to this, faith proclaims the important doctrine that sin has, and ever shall have, its limits; and that Satan, and those who follow him, can go no further than they are permitted to go.” There are curious—we had almost said amusing—reserves inserted here and there in this statement, as in others like it:¹⁵⁷ reserves which, if pressed, might go far toward eviscerating it. Sin is to be excepted from the control of God’s providence, though limited by it: moral liberty is not to be infringed by it; there are limits to the expression of the divine will in it. Despite this display of timidity in giving expression to the whole truth, the statement shows clearly as its main matter, that Upham believed in the universal providence of God and had the courage to say so. Calvin says it better; but it is good to have it said at all, and that directly in the interests of holy living.

From this doctrine of universal providence it is very easy to draw the conclusion that submission to providence is not only a duty, but a privilege and a joy. If providence is the expressed will of God and we are His children, what other can we do than rejoice in it? All that God does is glorious: let us but observe and applaud. Upham, however, confuses the duties of submission to providence and of ordering our lives by providence, and while not neglecting to insist on the one, insists equally and very distressingly on the other. “Harmony with Providence,” says he,¹⁵⁸ “is union with God.” “The man who lives in conformity with Providence necessarily lives in conformity with God.” How, we ask in perplexity, can a man do anything else than live in conformity with providence? In this particular statement Upham may be only expressing himself ill and may intend only to dissuade us from that temper which, in dissatisfaction with our lot in life, or with the events which befall us, complains of God’s providential arrangements. It would be wise in that case, if, instead of saying that the natural man is out of harmony with God’s providence, while to the truly holy man God’s providences are dear, because he conforms to the law of providence—we should say simply that the circumstances of life come from our Father’s hands and should be received as such. But it is not always possible to escape from the confusing implication of Upham’s prescriptions thus. “If the law of Providence were strictly fulfilled,” he remarks in one place,¹⁵⁹ “it is obvious that order would at once exist throughout the world.” How can the law of providence—which is not the preceptive but the decretive will of God—fail to be strictly fulfilled? Upham, however, proves to have a special use of the phrase. “It should be remembered,” he says,¹⁶⁰ “that Providence is one thing; the law of Providence is another.” “Providence is God’s arrangement of things and events in the world, including his constant supervision. The law of Providence, in distinction from Providence in itself considered, is the rule of action, which is contained in, and which is developed from, this providential arrangement.” He is actually recommending us to derive our rule of life from an observation of God’s providential government of the world! As if we could sweep our eye over the whole course of things from the beginning to the end! It is the universal course of things which constitutes the matter to be observed, and our rule of life is to be in conformity to this universal course of things. How this differs from the Stoic maxim of living according to nature, it is difficult to see: “some call it evolution, others call it God.” If, on the other hand, we limit the providence to which we attend to a few outstanding happenings which appear to us divine interpositions, the law of life which we derive from them runs great risk of betraying us into fanaticism. We may and must commit ourselves to the divine providence: it is a joy to be in our Father’s hands. We cannot deduce from observed providences a law of life: if for no other reason than that the observation is fatally defective. It is the written Word and it alone—the preceptive, not the decretive will of God—in which our divinely given rule of life is to be found: that and that law of nature, written on the heart, conscience. When we say, in our current speech, that we order our lives by the indications of providence, we mean something very different from that ordering them by a rule of life deduced from the observed providential order which Upham vainly commends. We mean that we adjust our lives to emerging events, and seek to do our obvious and nearest duty in every situation which successively confronts us. Stated in secular language that is to say that we order our lives in accordance with circumstances; from the religious point of view, the circumstances are recognized as ordered by God and hence we say we are led by providence. But the rule of life in these circumstances is not derived from an induction from them—and therefore not from providence—but from the law of God, written whether in His revealed Word or on the fleshly tablets of our hearts.

Great as is the perversion of the precious truth that God meets us in His providence, which is made by Upham’s proposed erection of the observed order of providence into our rule of life, there is an even greater perversion which was also taught him by his Quietistic mentors. Under color of the high motive of—not submitting to providence merely—but gladly embracing it, because the hand of God is in everything and all that occurs is therefore right, Madame Guyon, and Upham following her, inculcate a very unwholesome indifference with respect to life and all that occurs in the process of living, as if it were wrong to seek to better anything. Madame Guyon, for example, boasts that her soul is entirely independent of every thing which is not God.¹⁶¹ It would be content, she says, if it were alone in the world, since it does not find its happiness in any earthly attachments. Every desire has been mortified and no wishes survive. This is merely inhuman. God has made us social beings; he does not desire us to be indifferent to our fellows. We do not require to break all earthly attachments that we may be attached to Him. There is revealed in this attitude of indifference attachments not so much to God as to ourselves. It is the self-centered attitude by way of eminence. Of this aspect of it also a word should be spoken in this connection. Because God is in all that occurs, each thing that exists may be taken in turn as a center from which we may look out upon the all-embracing providence of God, and in relation to which we may contemplate all that occurs. It is not in itself wrong, therefore, that each individual soul should look upon all that occurs to it, and to all that circle of existence which closely surrounds it, as part of God’s providential dealing with itself, and should utilize it from that point of sight. Nevertheless, some very curious—some very undesirable—results are apt to grow out of this entirely right and useful habit, when it is onesidedly indulged. It may, often does, end in erecting our individual self into something very like the focus of the universe and conceiving of everything and everybody in the circumference of the circle thrown out from ourselves, as a center, as existing for us alone. A death of someone in our circle, for example, comes to be viewed only in its relation to our own person, and is thought of as if it were brought about by the Divine Governor of the world solely for its effect upon us. We read, for instance, in Upham’s “The Life of Madame Guyon,”¹⁶² of the deaths of her father and daughter, and from all that appears from the expressions of feeling quoted from Madame Guyon, or from Upham’s comments, they seem to have been looked upon by her and to be recommended to our consideration by him, so prevailingly from the point of view of her own disciplining, as to suggest that they were brought about by God for no other purpose than to benefit her. “He who gives himself to God,” writes Upham, “to experience under his hand the transformations of sanctifying grace, must be willing to give up all objects, however dear they may be, which he does not hold in strict subordination to the claims of divine love, and which he does not love in and for God alone. The sanctification of the heart, in the strict and full sense of the term, is inconsistent with a divided and wandering affection. A misplaced love, whether it be wrong in its degree or its object, is as really, though apparently not as odiously, sinful, as a misplaced hatred.” Madame Guyon’s freedom of soul, it seems, was liable to be contracted and shackled by domestic affections, which were but partially sanctified. So God took from her, her father and her daughter that she might learn to love only Him and in Him. It would seem to be quite dangerous to live within the reach of the as yet only partially sanctified affections of a saint. In such a position we are liable to be “removed” at any time, for the benefit of his growing holiness. Contact with him appears almost as perilous as contact with a live wire. Madame Guyon’s comments on the death of her daughter are: “What shall I say,—she died by the hands of Him, who was pleased to strip me of all.” There is no reason for refusing to see this relation of the child’s death, or for refusing to profit by the sense that it is a Father’s hand here too that is dealing with us, fitting us for the Sanctuary above. Only—it is distinctly unpleasant to see the mother apparently thinking in this strain alone, or predominantly. Everything is looked at from the point of view of its relation to a morbid preoccupation with self. And this is the characteristic mental attitude of the mystic—a truly morbid preoccupation with his own subjective states and experiences. He looks within to find God, he says: it is with difficulty, apparently, that he finds anything there but himself.

In the opening pages of “A Treatise on Divine Union,”¹⁶³ Upham gives a brief summary of his dogmatic system. It proves to be, as expressed there, pure Semi-Pelagianism. Man is “unable to help himself,” but is “able nevertheless to utter the cry of his helplessness and anguish,” and thus to obtain the help of God. Cassian could not have expressed his doctrine better: men need grace, but not prevenient grace. They cannot restore themselves, says Upham, repeating Cassian’s doctrine, but they can turn to God for the needed aid. It lies in our own choice whether we will live with God or not: though it is not in our power to live with God. We must go to God of our own free-will; and then, “God, acting upon the basis of man’s free consent, becomes the life of the soul.”¹⁶⁴ We must open “our hearts to the free and full entrance of his grace,” and then, “he will become the true operator in the soul, and will give origin to all spiritual good.”¹⁶⁵ “It is then,” he says precisely to the point, “that God works in the soul.” Man must “exercise voluntary acquiescence in and acceptance of the divine operation”; but it is this divine operation which works salvation. Not indeed even this apart from man’s activities: man does not become quiescent after his first act of “consent”: let us call it coöperation rather: he ceases only from “independent action.” Now “God becomes the Giver, and man the happy recipient.” “We coöperate … with God in the work of … redemption,” he explains more fully in another place,¹⁶⁶ “when we submit to this divine operation without reluctance”; or¹⁶⁷ man “unites with God in his own restoration, when he lets the great Master of the mind work upon him.” “Lets.” This of course subordinates God to man in the work of salvation; and as murder will out, so this comes out plainly in a statement like this:¹⁶⁸ “God acts in the holy man in connection with, and perhaps we should say, in subordination to, his own choice.”

Thus Upham suspends the whole process of salvation in its inception and in all its stages alike, on our voluntary action. He is very much afraid of an “enforced” salvation, “against men’s consent.” “Grace, and compulsion in the administration of it,” he declares,¹⁶⁹ “are ideas which negative each other.” Grace “implies a suitable subject for its reception,” and it is “impossible, in the nature of things, to bestow” it not only “upon a being, that has no intelligence to realize its value,” but also upon one who has “no power of reception or rejection”¹⁷⁰—a proposition which is not obvious, unless “grace” be arbitrarily defined as just “divine influence.” In the statement we have just quoted from him, it is apparently more than this. In others, however, he reduces it to this. In one passage, for instance, dealing with it under this designation,¹⁷¹ he very naturally declares that neither “the application of material force,” nor of “anything … analogous to material force” is implied in it. That “would obviously be inconsistent with the nature of mind.” “So far as we can perceive,” he now adds positively, “such divine influence is, and can be, only the application of that mental force which is lodged in motives.” “God influences by setting motives before us.” Then he quite superfluously remarks: “God, in operating upon man by means of motives, never violates his freedom.” Upham places himself here, we perceive, squarely on the platform of the “New Divinity,” the maxim of which (as enunciated by Lyman Beecher, for instance) was crisply expressed in the words: “God governs men by motives, not by force.” In doing so, he brings the whole body of his mystical teachings and especially the more Quietistic ones among them, under some obscuration. It is more immediately important, however, here to note that he equally embarrasses the doctrine of salvation which we have just seen him teaching. He is no longer a Semi-Pelagian. He has become a Pelagian. If God only persuades, something more than “consent” on man’s part seems to be requisite to the working of effects.

Other language which he employs in the same relation incurs the same condemnation. There is the term “renunciation” for instance. Both justification and sanctification, he tells us, involve, on our part, complete “renunciation.” We must “be willing to be saved, both from the guilt of the past and from present sin, by God’s grace” alone. Is God’s grace conceived here as merely suasive? What is being emphasized is, it is true, that we must be willing. God respects our freedom and unless by our own free act we put ourselves in His hands, He will not save us. We must decide—but is it not implied that it is He that does the work? We remember, however, the importance which Upham attaches to our “consent” being conceived not as mere consenting, but as involving actual activities coöperative with God’s saving operation. Even this, however, becomes an inadequate form of statement, when all the actual work proves to be done by us. On one occasion,¹⁷² when defining the nature of this wonderful “consent” by which we make ourselves to differ, after telling us broadly that it is not a cessation of action, or the absence of action, but “a real or positive act on the part of the creature,” he adds more specifically, that it is “an act of harmonious concurrence and coöperation with the divine act.” Does it require nothing more than concurrence with an act of persuasion—or even cooperation with an act of persuasion—to recover a lost soul? Where the divine efficiency is reduced to persuasion, and the human to coöperation with this persuasion, there seems to be no power left to work salvation. We no longer have the alternatives, grace and free-will to choose between: each is in turn eliminated. We cannot trust in grace; it is mere persuasion. We cannot trust to free-will; it merely gives consent.

Of course it is the will that gets the victory. Even in his Semi-Pelagian mood, as we have just noted—where God’s grace is conceived as the operating cause of salvation—the soul is represented as capable of performing and as actually performing an act of harmonious concurrence and coöperation with the divine act, even before God takes charge of the soul. What need has such a soul of salvation? If it can perform one such act, it can perform another. Or many others. Or an unbroken series of others. And are we not told that “salvation is nothing else, and can be nothing else, than harmony with God”? An unbroken series of acts of harmonious concurrence with God’s acts is already salvation. What need of salvation has a soul already capable of performing and actually performing these acts? A soul must save itself—bring itself into harmony with God—in order that it may be saved by God, be brought into harmony with God! For, we are told, what characterizes a saved soul is the constant repetition of this “consentient and concurrent act,” by which it freely enters into salvation.

We make ourselves a new heart immediately and at once by a volition, says Finney, and this volition is just as easy to make as any other volition—say the volition to raise our arm. No, says Upham, we make ourselves a new heart by our faith: it is faith that makes a new heart. And he seems to mean this of the direct action of faith. Of the two, Upham certainly has the advantage. “The faith of the heart, therefore,” he says,¹⁷³ “is that faith, which makes a new heart; in other words, which inspires new affections; such affections, as are conformable to God’s law and will.” A body of new affections may, no doubt, be spoken of collectively as a new heart. And, no doubt, a strong faith (which is itself an affection) dropped into the seething caldron of this heart, may cause a new crystallization of the affections and so tend to make us a “new heart.” What kind of a heart this “new heart” will be can scarcely be predicted so long as we operate with the abstract notion of “faith.” In itself, without consideration of its object (no doubt such an abstraction has no existence) “faith” cannot make a “new heart.” There is no faith which is not faith in something; and it is the nature of this something which gives its character to any faith which really exists; and to the “new heart” which results from its entrance into it. After all, then, it is not faith but the object on which faith rests which gives us our “new heart.” Faith in God; faith in some great and good man; faith in ourselves; faith in a bad cause: the new hearts which faith can make differ among themselves toto cœlo. Upham, of course, has, at the back of his mind, the idea of faith in God, when he says that faith gives us a new heart. Faith in what God? Faith in the tribal God of the savage? Faith in the distant God of the Deist? Or faith in the God who in Christ is reconciling the world unto Himself? The new heart that we get will depend on the God on whom our faith rests. Two things further need be said. The former is this: it is not faith only which will give us a new heart. Any alteration in any affection will no doubt produce a readjustment of our affections and so give us to that extent a “new heart.” Faith has no monoply in this power to make a “new heart.” The other is this: where shall we get this faith that is to make us a new heart? No doubt, if we will be satisfied with a very little change in our heart—and a very little change will make so far a “new heart”—we may manage to produce the requisite faith ourselves. But if we want a really new heart? Undoubtedly a change from unbelief to real, hearty faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, will profoundly transform—say, rather transfigure—the whole affectional life. But where shall we get this real and hearty faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Certainly it cannot be the spontaneous product of a heart at enmity with God, filled with the mingled dread and hatred of God of the conscious criminal in the presence of his just Judge. Can such a heart trust itself, trust itself wholly and without reserve, trust itself with full confidence that we shall receive from Him nothing but good, to God? Clearly, we shall need the “new heart” before we can conceive the faith that is to make us this new heart. Faith, this faith, cannot come into existence except as the product of the new heart: the heart it enters is already the new heart. We may say that it is the first issue of the new heart and that it is through it that the reconstruction and realignment and rearrangement of the other affections are accomplished. It may be the gathering point about which they all assemble; and in this sense it may be precisely faith which makes us a new heart. But in any case, the new heart itself—faith does not make it but presupposes it.

In a remarkable chapter in his posthumous volume, “Absolute Religion,”¹⁷⁴ Upham gives us in brief his whole philosophy of human existence, under the categories of creation and regeneration—the first and second births. God, we are told, “is the beginning or source of things,” and therefore “the first or natural birth of man is and must be from the Infinite to the finite.” That is man’s descent into individuality; an individuality in which, by necessity of nature he is “self-centered,” and in which also, as we learn later, he becomes “by a moral necessity” sinful, “moral evil” being “necessarily incidental to the facts which are involved in the constitution of man’s nature.”¹⁷⁵ The second birth, now, “is a birth back from the finite to the Infinite.” This is man’s ascent back to his source; but, we are told, without loss of his personality. “In the first birth God may be said to make or constitute the finite, giving it the freedom and independence of a personal existence; and yet without spiritually incarnating Himself in it as an indwelling principle of that life.… In the second birth, the finite in the exercise of its moral freedom, which is an essential element in its personality, has accepted God in the central intimacy of its nature as its living and governing principle.” Thus we learn that God brings about the first birth, man the second. The reason why it must be man who produces the second birth is “the inviolability” of man’s freedom, which makes God’s “spiritually incarnating Himself in it” impossible, “without a consenting action on the part of the creature.” When, however, in its own freedom the creature accepts God in the central intimacy of its nature, “the human or ‘earthy,’ as the Scriptures call it, without ceasing to be human or earthy, but by renouncing its own centre as the source of life, and taking God as its centre, does by its own choice and in a true and high sense become divine.” From the beginning God intended this issue: that was the plan. But it could not be reached otherwise than through this development—a development which began on the thrusting of man by God down into the finite—involving sin—and the rising of man up by his own free-will into the infinite, into unity “with the universal or divine personal life.” Sin, which is not mentioned at all in the primary exposition of man’s fundamental history, appears in this construction only as the incidental and inevitable result of man’s finiteness, to be left behind, of course, when he attained the infinite, eliminated as incidentally as it arose. In essence, salvation is then our deliverance not from sin, but from the finite, not the attainment of holiness, but the achievement of the divine.

In dealing with the topic of justification and sanctification Upham has in the first instance two objects in view. He wishes to make it clear that sanctification is the end to which justification is the means. This is in order that he may preserve the general contention of the perfectionists that deliverance from the power of sin is more important than deliverance from its guilt.¹⁷⁶ But he wishes equally to make it clear that sanctification is not an inevitable result of justification; as he phrases it in one passage,¹⁷⁷ that “the work of sanctification” is not “absolutely and necessarily involved in that of justification.” This is in order that he may preserve the specific contention of the perfectionists that sanctification is obtained by a separate and independent act of faith. Justification exists only for sanctification, but it only prepares the way for it, and does not itself involve it. It cannot be said, however, that Upham succeeds in preserving formal consistency in his many discussions of their relations. That these relations are not merely those of antecedence and subsequence he distinctly declares;¹⁷⁸ he represents sanctification as “starting on the basis¹⁷⁹ of justification” though apparently not in the full force of this language;¹⁸⁰ and he even speaks of sanctification being the evidence of justification.¹⁸¹ There is something more than even this apparently implied in a statement like the following, which links justification and sanctification so intimately together as hardly to escape making them imply one another.¹⁸² “It is important to remember that there are two offers involved in that great work, which Christ came to accomplish;—the one is, forgiveness for the past, and the other is, a new life in God for the future. A new life in God, which implies entire reconciliation with God as its basis, could not be offered to man, until the penalty of the old transgression was remitted. And, on the other hand, the remission of the penalty of the past would be wholly unavailing, without the permanent restoration of a divine and living principle in man’s spiritual part.” We should be scarcely justified in insisting on the reiterated reference of forgiveness here to “past” sins and the valuelessness of their forgiveness apart from permanent spiritual restoration, as intended to assert that no remedy exists for sins committed after justification, or that no sins are committed after justification. One or the other of these assertions is, it is true, required to introduce perfect consistency into the statement, but all that seems to be intended is to declare that justification and sanctification are so interrelated that one implies the other. They have at any rate two things of great importance in common, which bind them together at least as the two indispensable saving operations. They are both supernatural operations: in both we ultimately receive everything from God. And in both, we receive everything through the same channel, viz. “by faith.”¹⁸³

We do not receive everything in both, however, “by faith” in precisely the same way, although in both instances faith may fairly be called the procuring cause. Justification is summed up in pardon or forgiveness, and from that point of view an attempt is made to show that there can be no effective pardon except by faith.¹⁸⁴ No doubt an offended person may pardon an offender with no reference to any state of mind the latter may be in or may enter into: pardon is free. But such an act of pardoning would have no effect upon the offender. He would not feel pardoned; and the act of pardon would not “result in mutual reconciliation, in the reciprocation of benevolent feelings, and in true happiness.” The implication is that in such circumstances pardon would do no good; it would leave the offender just where he was before with unaltered feelings towards the pardoner. The removal of objective penalties is left wholly out of the question: and the entire transaction is conceived as subjective. Upham now argues that on the assumption that a pardon “which is spiritually available, one which is desirable and valuable in the spiritual or religious sense,” “results in entire reconciliation between the parties”—in the manner explained—therefore no pardon is conceivable among moral beings “without confidence or faith existing on the part of such subject towards the author.” Justifying faith in this view is not faith in the atoning Saviour, but general confidence in the benevolent God; and justification takes place in foro conscientiæ and not in foro cœli. As a rationale of justification therefore this exposition wholly misses the mark. It amounts to saying that justification is by faith because pardon can work its beneficent effects in the pardoned one’s heart only if received in confident trust, a trust which will believe without question that the pardon is real and that it is worth while. But justification concerns not the reception of pardon on the part of the offender but the granting of pardon on the part of the offended. When we say we are justified by faith, we do not mean that it is through faith that we are enabled to enjoy the sense of pardon, though that is true also. We mean that it is through faith that we enter the state of pardoned ones. It is through entrusting ourselves to Christ, that by virtue of His atoning work, we are received as pardoned sinners. However true it is, that it is only by trusting in the pardoning God that we can enjoy the sense of pardon, that is not the function of faith in justification; is only a secondary effect of it. It is better to be saved than to feel saved: and we must not confound salvation with the sense of salvation.

The precise explanation of exactly how faith operates to sanctify us apparently presents some difficulty to those who are yet agreed that the doctrine of sanctification by faith is not second either in importance or certainty to the parallel doctrine of justification by faith. Sometimes sanctification is spoken of as so directly by faith as to appear to imply that the state of mind which we call faith is itself sanctification, that is to say to identify faith and holiness. At other times what is meant seems to be merely that sanctification is an effect wrought by God, to whom we entrust it believingly. The latter is perhaps the prevailing manner in which Upham speaks of it; and when he does so his primary assertion is doubtless that sanctification is in some sense a supernatural effect. This, however, is not always made as clear as it might be. He can speak of the “sanctification of the heart, resting upon faith as its basis in distinction from mere works,”¹⁸⁵ after a fashion which unhappily suggests that he is thinking of faith as a virtue and is merely giving it the precedence as an inward virtue—the inward virtue by way of eminence—to external acts of virtue, especially “ceremonial observances and austerities.” In that case he would mean merely that this state of mind is a holy state of mind and those who possess it are holy. There is at least one passage, however,¹⁸⁶ in which he explains somewhat formally how faith purifies the heart of “irregular and unholy desires”; and we probably will not go wrong if we take this explanation as expressing his matured mind on the subject. Faith, he here says, purifies the heart in two ways, directly and indirectly. Directly, it lays hold of the promises of God, and so rests on God to cleanse us. Indirectly, it gives birth to love to God and this inhibits all love to the creature. Here is a comprehensive explanation, recognizing both a supernatural and a natural operation. It is not clear, however, at first sight, how these two are harmonized in the single effect. If it be “faith formed by love”—it is a Romanist conception which seems to be floating before his mind—which sanctifies us, that appears to carry with it the conception that our sanctification consists in a faith-produced love, which is only another name for holiness. In this case we do not readily see how our sanctification can be brought about by God in the fulfillment of His promises, except by just the fostering of faith in us by Him—and this is done by Him in Upham’s view, as we have seen, not supernaturally, but naturally, viz. solely by presenting to us motives to believe. There do not lack passages in which it seems that it is precisely this which Upham means to say. Thus, for example, he tells us,¹⁸⁷ that God saves us from sin by “operating by the Holy Spirit in the production of faith in the heart.” What he means apparently is that God does not directly eradicate sin from the heart through the creative operation of His spirit, but attains the result by producing faith in the heart—of course by the presentation of motives to believe, which is the only mode of the divine operation which Upham admits in the premises. In that case it seems meaningless to talk of two modes of action by which faith purifies the heart—a direct one in which it rests on the promises of God and an indirect one in which it produces the love which is holiness. The so-called direct method is swallowed up into the so-called indirect method: God purifies the heart only through the faith which works by love. The rationalism of the “New Divinity” neutralizes the mystical tendencies to supernaturalism, and we have left only that we are sanctified by faith because faith passes into love and love is holiness. God may graciously support and aid us in the process, but we sanctify ourselves, and look to Him only to urge on our own good work.

Faith, then, passes into love.¹⁸⁸ And love constitutes holiness. “perfect love,” says Upham,¹⁸⁹ “is to be regarded, on the principles of the gospel, as essentially the same thing, or rather as precisely the same thing, with sanctification or holiness.” To love, then, is to be holy; and perfect love is only another name for perfect holiness. In assuming this attitude there is danger, of course, of conceiving of love as a substitute for holiness; and of supposing that if a man has love he has all the holiness he needs. And the double peril lurks in this path, of sentimentalizing the conception of the Christian life, on the one hand—fostering a tendency to conceive it in terms of emotion rather than of morality—and of directly relaxing the demands of righteousness, on the other. Upham does not wish to relax the demands of righteousness. “Immutable right,”¹⁹⁰ says he, “has a claim and a power which entitle it to regulate every thing else. Even love itself, an element so essential to all moral goodness that it gives a character and name to God himself, ceases to be love the moment it ceases to be in conformity with justice. Love that is not just is not holy; and love that is not holy is selfishness under the name of love. Every affection, therefore, however amiable and honorable it may be when it is in a right position, is wrong, and is at variance with inward holiness of life, which is not in conformity with the rule of right.” Nevertheless, it can scarcely be denied that Upham in his actual treatment of the subject does not succeed in avoiding somewhat depreciating the sense of right as a principle of action in the interests of love—contrasting the religion of obligation with the religion of love, with a view to showing the superiority of the latter in the conduct of life.¹⁹¹ It is a subject with respect to which some careful discrimination is necessary to its prudent treatment. The propositions which Upham defends are such as these: that in the order of nature love is the first in time—the heart naturally acts before the conscience; that it is love which determines the actions of the holy man—in fact not so much from as with conscience; that the more holy a man is the less he feels the compulsive power of conscience—and he may even feel that he has “lost his conscience.” No doubt each of these propositions is true—with its proper qualification. But in their sum, they do not avail to subordinate duty to love. Love itself, indeed, is a duty; and in loving, we fulfil our obligation. When Augustine says, “Love and do what you please,” it is with the maxim in his mind that love is the fulfillment of the law, in the sense that love is in order to duty, and instrument to the meeting of obligation. It is a fundamental mistake to set love and duty in opposition to one another, as if they were alternative principles of conduct. We cannot try a cause between the religion of love and the religion of duty as litigants—as if we were trying the cause between spontaneous and legalistic religion. Love should be dutiful and duty should be loving. What God has joined together, why should we seek to separate? If we could think of a love which is undutiful—that could not be thought of as an expression of religion; any more than a dutifulness without affection. What we are really doing is discussing the affectional and the ethical elements in religion and seeking to raise the question whether we prefer emotion or conscientiousness in religion. The only possible answer is—both.

Upham remarks that “the holy man does not act from mere will, against the desires of his sensitive or affectional nature, on the ground, and for the reason, that his conscience requires him to do so; but, on the contrary, acts under the impulse of holy and loving affections, affections which are the regenerated gift of God, and which sweetly carry the will with it.”¹⁹² True enough: and we remark in passing, that this is also true psychology, truer psychology than Upham always gives us. But this is only to say that in the holy man, his affections are on the side of his conscience. That is what his holiness—in part—consists in. His enlightened conscience and purified affections move together to the one holy end. But how if the affections are not purified—not so fully purified as perfectly to harmonize in their impulses with the requirements of conscience? That is the condition of all on earth: though Upham, as a perfectionist, may have reserves in allowing it. Surely then, the conscience and imperfectly purified affections will not “sweetly” move together to one end. There is a conflict—and, in the interests of holiness, which ought to govern? Surely conscience ought to govern. Upham has not shown that the affections ought to rule, against conscience, when there is a conflict; but only that it is a higher stage of holiness where there is no conflict, but the affections coincide with conscience. No doubt the law is then written on the heart; but it is the law that is written on the heart. And when it is the law that is written on the heart, why, then the impulses of the heart accord with the law. That is the felix libertas boni. As nothing but the good pleases us now, why—we can do as we please. Conscience has not been dethroned but enthroned. If we no longer feel “the compulsive power of conscience,” that can only be because we so spontaneously obey conscience that we do not feel it as imperative as compulsion. The categorical imperative has not died within us: it has so prevailed as that it embodies itself in the systole and diastole of all our most intimate action. It is not merely that conscience now approves and so does not whimper against our actions. It is that it flows out “sweetly” into and through the open channels of the sanctified affections into the unreluctant will. Conscience is not superseded by love. Love has become an organ of conscience. Were it not so, it would not be holy love, and if it were not holy love neither would it be (Upham himself being witness), so far, religious love. There is no religion of love, then, which is not also, and first of all, a religion of obligation.

Having identified “sanctification, evangelical holiness, and evangelical or Christian perfection” with “perfect love,” Upham undertakes to tell us what “perfect love” is.¹⁹³ It is, he says, first of all “pure love,” that is, it is free from all selfishness. It is, however, on the other hand, “relative to the capacity of the subject of it”; the perfection of a man is not that of an angel. It includes, of course, like all love, the two elements of pleasure or complacency in its object and a desire to do it good—or, since we are speaking of love to God, a desire to promote His glory, and that “in such a degree, that we are not conscious of having any desire or will at variance with the will of God.” As, however, “the nature of the human mind is such, that we never can have an entire and cordial acquiescence in the will of God in all things, without an antecedent approval of and complacency in his character and administration,” we need only attend to the second mark of perfect love, “a will entirely accordant with and lost in the will of God.” Thus Upham gets around to his definition of perfection:¹⁹⁴ “An entire coincidence of our own wills with the divine will; in other words, the rejection of the natural principle of life, which may be described as love terminating in self and constituting self-will; and the adoption of the heavenly principle of life, which is love terminating and fulfilled in the will of God.” This view of the nature of perfect love, he says, is very important “practically, as well as theologically.” There is certainly every appearance here that love is confounded with one of its effects.

In another place¹⁹⁵ “pure or holy love” is defined by Upham as the love which is “precisely conformed to its object.” That is to say, it is the reaction of the subject loving to the object loved, when that reaction is precisely accordant with the loveliness of the object. “If,” says he, “all objects were correctly understood by us in their character and in their claims upon us, and if our affections were free from all selfish bias, our love would necessarily be appropriate to the object, and therefore holy”—from which we learn incidentally that a necessary reaction of the affections may have moral character, a thing we would not have expected from Upham. What is directly said, however, is only that if our perceptions of the loveliness of the object are perfect, and our reaction to this perception is unaffected by any disturbing causes—we should love that object as it ought to be loved. From this point of view, it would seem, we can have a pure love of God only when our apprehension of Him, in His character and His claims on us, is perfect—when we know Him perfectly as He is in all the loveliness of His infinite loveliness—and when our souls, reacting to this perfect apprehension of Him, are perfectly free from every detracting and disturbing bias—in a word, are themselves perfect. This would appear to render what is called pure love to God impossible to creatures like us. Upham, if we understand him, seeks to meet this difficulty by affirming that pure love tends to purify the judgment. “The object is much more likely to present itself before the mind distinctly, and precisely as it is, in the state of pure love, than it is to present itself before the mind with entire precision, when its affections are perverted and selfish.” Quite so. But this posits pure love as the condition of the apprehension which is to serve as its cause. What we get from it is then only the assertion that in order to exercise pure love, we must first be pure of heart. The question then presses very severely, How are we to become perfectly pure of heart? Upham’s suggestion here¹⁹⁶ seems to be that we must not be too exigent in our demands on ourselves. God will have regard to our weaknesses. “All that he requires at such times is, that we should love the object just so far as it is presented to us.… And such love, however it may be perplexed in its operation by existing in connection with involuntary errors of judgment, he readily and fully accepts.” The general conclusion then is, “that, if we avail ourselves of all suitable aids in obtaining a knowledge of objects, and if by loving without selfishness we love them purely, we shall love them rightly or holily, and of course love them acceptably.” This can mean nothing else than that, after all, then, pure love can exist without a perfect apprehension of its object, and without a perfect soul to react to it. Pure love need not be perfectly pure, then, to be pure love. “Perfect love,” we read,¹⁹⁷ “as it is understood by such writers”—that is, “writers on evangelical holiness”—“to exist in truly holy persons in the present life, is a love which is free from selfishness, and which is conformed to its object, so far as a knowledge of its object is within our reach in our present fallen state.” We are now flatly on the plane of the Oberlin “sliding scale,” and arrive therefore in the end at nothing more than that perfection of heart—a mitigated perfection—is the condition of holy activities—a mitigated holiness. “Certain it is,” he says at another place,¹⁹⁸ “that those who are perfected in love, whatever may be their infirmities and errors, and however important and proper it may be for them to make constant application to the blood of the atonement, both for the forgiveness of the infirmities of the present, and of the infirmities and transgressions of the past, are spoken of and are treated, in the New Testament, as accepted, sanctified, or holy persons.” The term “transgressions” seems to be carefully avoided when the present failings of the saints are mentioned.

We are now in the midst of Upham’s doctrine of perfection. We have already seen that the perfection which he teaches is a “mitigated” perfection: it may be—it is—marred by infirmities and errors; and it requires to be forgiven. And we infer from that, that it is not yet all that shall be: there is something beyond. In the second chapter of his “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,”¹⁹⁹ he describes in some detail what he understands that holiness to be which constitutes its substance, and which he declares to be “the first and indispensable prerequisite” of the state of “the Interior or Hidden Life,” here represented as “walking in close and uninterrupted communion with God,” and elsewhere as “union with God.” He begins by declaring it an obtainable state, a state actually to be enjoyed in this life. It is then defined in passing as consisting in a life free from “voluntary transgression.” To this is soon added the information that it is sometimes called “evangelical or gospel holiness” in order “to distinguish it from Adamic perfection”; and a little later still, that the name of “Christian perfection” is given to it, thus identifying it with the Wesleyan doctrine of perfection. And then we are given quite an elaborate exposition of what it does not involve. It does not “necessarily imply a perfection of the physical system”; nor yet a “perfection of the intellect”; nor is it in every respect the same as “the holiness or sanctification of a future life”—it is subject to temptations, and it may be lost. Nor does it imply that we no longer need an atonement. We still require an atonement for “all mere physical infirmities, which originate in our fallen condition, but which necessarily prevent our doing for God what we should otherwise do.” And also for “all unavoidable errors and imperfections of judgment, which in their ultimate causes result from sin.” These things, he says, are “very different in their nature from deliberate and voluntary transgressions,” which is true enough: and then he adds that nevertheless their stains can be washed away in the blood of Christ—they are sins, though only “involuntary sins.” It would perhaps be more just, however, he adds, not to call them sins at all, but “imperfections or trespasses”—though they cannot be remitted without application to the blood of Christ. No doubt it is with these things in mind, he says, that some good people say that they are morally certain to sin all the time. If so, he has no quarrel with them: he means by perfection only freedom from “sins of a deliberate and voluntary nature.” That is the negative side of it. Positively, “Christian perfection,” or “that holiness which, as fallen and as physically and intellectually imperfect creatures, we are imperatively required and expected to exercise … at the present moment, and during every succeeding moment of our lives”—consists just in love.²⁰⁰ He “who loves God with his whole heart, and his neighbor as himself, although his state may in some incidental respects be different from that of Adam, and especially from that of the angels in heaven, and although he may be the subject of involuntary imperfections and infirmities, which, in consequence of his relation to Adam, require confession and atonement, is nevertheless, in the gospel sense of the terms, a holy or sanctified person.”²⁰¹ And this holiness is a “condition” of moral communion with God which is called the Hidden Life here and elsewhere Union with God.

Attention cannot fail to be attracted in this exposition to the stress which is put on voluntary sinning, with the involved light estimate of involuntary faults. This reflects, no doubt, the tendency of thought prevalent in the “New Divinity,” but it is also the common tendency of perfectionists everywhere, who by it seek to adjust their doctrine of perfection to the only too manifest facts of life. It leads us only to observe therefore, that with Upham also, as with the rest, perfection is not conceived as perfection. Physical infirmities, intellectual errors, involuntary sins remain—all somehow connected with our fallen condition and therefore needing the atoning blood of Christ to wash away their stains. Perfect men are even guilty of “relatively wrong acts and feelings”²⁰²—whatever that may mean: can we understand it of anythything but “little sins”? And they may even commit not merely sins which “result from infirmity and are involuntary,” but sins “which are seen by the omniscient eye of God, but which may not be obvious to ourselves”;²⁰³” “sins of ignorance,” then, let us say. They need therefore “every moment” “the application of Christ’s blood,” and ought to confess sin, “during the whole course of the present life”;²⁰⁴ and to pray in the words of the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses.” And no man “is able, either on philosophical or Scripture principles, to assert absolutely and unconditionally, that he has been free from sin, at least for any great length of time”²⁰⁵ It is not wrong, then, to speak with some caution about our sinlessness, “merely as if” we “hoped, or had reason to hope,” that we have “experienced this great blessing,” and have been “kept free from voluntary and known sin.”²⁰⁶ If it is a question of “absolute perfection”—why, that “exists only in another world.” “We are permitted to indulge the humble hope, that there may be, and that there are instances of holiness of heart on earth.” But, “notwithstanding their exemption from intentional sin,” “truly holy persons” do not exhibit “an obvious perfection of judgment, of expression, and of manner.”²⁰⁷ We gather that they may be rather trying people to live with; people whom, of course, we love, but may find it sometimes rather difficult to like.

The question of growth in holiness is often a perplexing one to perfectionists, and they solve it variously. Many are content to say that we do not grow into but in holiness; but that seems rather an avoidance than a solution of the question—to grow in holiness, surely, is to grow progressively into a holiness not before this last increment of growth enjoyed. Upham²⁰⁸ calls in a distinction between nature and degree. We already have holiness according to its nature, but can grow in degree of holiness. The phraseology does not seem happy; but the meaning is reasonably clear. He adduces also the doctrine of total depravity as an illustration e contrario: we are totally depraved, but we are not as bad as we might be, or as we will be, if we continue in our bad course. The distinction here is that of extension and intensity. The totus homo is depraved—his depravity extends to every department of his being: there is no faculty or disposition, or appetite or propensity, or affection, into which depravity does not penetrate. But the depravity which penetrates to every department of the man’s being is not necessarily the deepest possible depravity: it may increase indefinitely in intensity. A drop of ink falling into a glass of water may stain its whole volume—it is totally stained; but if you empty the whole ink well into it, it is not more totally, but very much more deeply stained. The difficulty is that the perfectionists, Upham included, do not teach that we are merely extensively perfect, but insist that we are intensively perfect also—or perfect as we can be. Upham says here, for example,²⁰⁹ that we are perfect “in our perceptions, our feelings, and our purposes”—extensively therefore—“to the full extent of our capability”—intensively, therefore, too. And it would seem that we must say this, if we are to employ such a notion as “perfect.” For perfect is a superlative notion and admits no growth beyond it. There seems to be but one door of escape and Upham takes it. To grow in perfection the perfect one must grow in capability. Our perfection depends on our knowledge, he says, and may grow as our knowledge grows. “Evangelical holiness,” he explains, is “nothing more nor less than perfect love.” And “love is based in part upon knowledge, and is necessarily based upon it.” We can love no object we do not know; and our love for a lovable object must grow with our knowledge of it. As our knowledge grows, our capability for loving grows and that means our capability for perfection.²¹⁰ Of course we may raise the question whether this argument proves that perfection expands with growing knowledge, or that there can be no such thing as perfection until knowledge is perfect. And beneath that lurk two further questions. Does holiness really depend on knowledge? Do we really “know” God? The importance of the last question lies in the circumstance that Upham does not always appear to be sure that we can really “know” God: but sometimes speaks almost like an earlier Mansel playing on the strings of “faith” as the organ of the incomprehensible and of “symbolical knowledge” which only serves the purposes of knowledge.²¹¹

Whatever may be the difficulties to a perfectionist of the idea of a developing holiness, however, Upham frankly teaches that idea, and gives it very rich expression. It is embodied, for example, in the following eloquent description of the process of salvation.²¹² “In the day of his true restoration, therefore, God once more really dwells in man. We do not say, however, that he actually enters and takes full possession at once. Just as soon as man gives his exiled Father permission to enter as a whole God and a God forever he enters effectually; but ordinarily he enters by degrees, and in accordance with the usual laws and operations of the human mind. He does not break the vessel of man’s spirit, nor mar its proportions, nor deface anything which is truly essential to it; but gradually enters into all parts of it, readjusts it, removes the stains which sin has made upon it, and fills it with divine light. Man’s business in this great work is a very simple one. It is to cease all resistance, and to invite the Divine Master of the mind to enter it in his own time and way. And even this last is hardly necessary. God does not wait even to be invited to come, except so far as an invitation is implied in the removal of the obstacles which had previously kept him out. Man’s ceasing from all resistance, and his willingness to receive God as the all in all, and for all coming time, may be regarded as essentially the completion of the work in respect to himself; but the work of God, who is continually developing from the soul new powers and new beauties, can be completed only with the completion of eternity.” The most important thing to note here is that Upham casts his eye forward through all the eternities to view the ever-increasing perfection of God’s servants. He is able to do this, it is true, only by the help of some adjustments. The work of perfecting them is “essentially” completed here and now. But there is something beyond. Inadequate as this provision for undying aspiration is, it is much that its existence is recognized. There is a sense in which the perfectionist doctrine is the child of aspiration. The trouble is that it permits this aspiration to be too easily satisfied and so clips its wings. Henrich Heppe points out²¹³ that Madame Guyon’s perfectionism was in essence a revolt from that ecclesiastical perfectionism of official Roman teaching, which is embodied in the doctrine of the consilia evangelica. She longed for a higher perfection than that—and for a perfection not confined to an ecclesiastical order, but open to every child of God. What she was really thinking of, says Heppe, “was the perfection of the souls in heaven, who have now achieved complete union with God.” Only—and this is the tragedy of it—she transferred this heavenly perfection to earth and identified it with the attainments of mere viators. Thus she abolished aspiration and corrupted the very notion of perfection in order that it might accord with the observed attainment of the saints on earth. We purchase the proud title of “perfect” here too dearly when we barter for it the hope of heaven. One of the gravest evils of the perfectionist teaching is that it tempts us to be satisfied with earthly attainments and to forget the heavenly glory. It is an old remark that the more saint-like a man is, the less saint-like he feels: the less evil there is to see in him, the more evil the evil that remains is seen to be. “The nearer we approach” to God—this is the way R. A. Vaughan puts it²¹⁴—“the more profoundly must we be conscious of our distance. As, in a still water, we may see reflected … the bird that soars towards the zenith—the image deepest as the ascent is highest—so it is with our approximation to the Infinite Holiness.… It appears to us that perfection is prescribed as a goal ever to be approached, but ever practically inaccessible. Whatever degree of sanctification any one may have attained, it must always be possible to conceive of a state yet more advanced,—it must always be a duty diligently to labour towards it.”

It will scarcely have passed without notice that in all the discussion of perfection and of the remnants of sinning which continue even in the perfect to vex them, Upham says nothing of the “corruption of man’s heart.” He draws the distinction between “deliberate and voluntary transgressions” on the one hand which he represents as inconsistent with perfection, and inadvertent, unintentional and other forms of sinning, thought of as “relatively” light, on the other, which he represents as still liable to show themselves in the perfect. His thought of sin is all in terms of sinning; and no account at all is taken of the underlying sinfulness of nature. This also is no doubt due to his basal “New Divinity” consciousness, which finds very insufficient correction in his chosen Quietistic mentors—although they do not manifest so complete a neglect of the inner springs of evil as he does. Samuel Harris, in a very able review of Upham’s “Life of Madame Guyon,”²¹⁵ takes occasion to remark on the futility of a doctrine of perfection of mere act. Madame Guyon, he says, teaches a real perfection, because she supposes that we may cease from sin as well as from sinning. Here is a perfection in which we not only do not determine to do wrong, but have no desire or tendency to do so. Nothing less than this is in any real sense perfection. A perfection of act is unimportant and without significance, if “through the remains of corrupt nature or the effects of sinful habit”—the conceptions of the old and the “New Divinity,” respectively—“evil thoughts and evil desires are rushing into the soul, even though the strong hand of the will instantly seize and throttle them.” That “the strong hand of the will”—itself under the control of these very propensities (the operari follows the esse)—can perform any such feat, is not shown and cannot be shown. The case is therefore worse than Harris supposes; and the real fact is that evil in the heart not only may, but must, show itself in all our acts. The conclusion he draws, however, is sound: “We are never perfect till the effects of corrupt nature and of sinful habit are eradicated, till self-denial ceases in the extinction of all tendency to selfishness and not the mere restraining of it, till we are restored to a state of spontaneous, delightful, universal coincidence with God’s will.…” No man is perfect “till he not only refuses to gratify corrupt tendencies and desires, but till they actually cease to exist.” And so he adds, the Bible teaches. The greatest error of perfectionism, he now goes on to say, is in neglecting this fact and “teaching that to be perfection which is not—it is the element of antinomianism perpetually appearing—the lowering of the standard of moral obligation, not merely to the capacity, but to the present habits and attainments of men.” “We regard perfectionism as dangerous, not because it requires too much, but because it requires too little.”

Upham may be supposed to escape the incidence of these remarks by the slenderness of the recognition he gives to the activity, not to say the very existence, of what Madame Guyon speaks of as “that secret power within us which continually draws us to evil.” But the neglect or denial of the corruption of the heart does not abolish it; and in its presence it is futile to talk of perfection of life. In any event, however, he does not teach even a perfection of life; but endeavors to give that appearance to the life, which he presents as perfect, by minimizing the importance and evil of the transgressions of the absolute rule of life which he cannot deny that it exhibits. He then falls squarely under Harris’ condemnation of “lowering the standard of moral obligation, not merely to the capacity, but to the present habits and attainments of men.” Ray Palmer in a review of Upham’s “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” published a few years earlier,²¹⁶ emphasizes the same point on which Harris principally lays his stress. There can be no perfection, he urges, which does not go through and through. “No being can be considered perfect, of whom it is true, either that his moral action is in any respect defective, or his moral nature in any respect deranged.” But his own primary stress is thrown on the matter which, in Harris’ discussion, holds the second place—on the confusion wrought by defining perfection as something less than perfection. When Upham complains that it is “the popular doctrine, that no man ever has been sanctified, or ever will be sanctified till the moment of death,” he says, and speaks of “the common doctrine of the impossibility of present sanctification,” it is not so certain that he is not paltering in a double sense. If we are to define “sanctification” as Upham defines it—as a state which admits of the continued commission “of a large class of sins”—it can hardly be doubted that all Christians devoutly believe that they not only ought to be but in many cases are sanctified now. What Upham calls “perfection” most Christians look upon as only the ordinary attainments of the Christian life—a stage in the advance towards perfection no doubt, but far short of perfection. These remarks are valid and important in their general sense, but it is not impossible to push them beyond their validity, and Palmer can hardly be exonerated from doing this. It is not quite true that the common doctrine looks upon perfection, as defined by Upham, as attainable and generally attained by sincere Christians, in this life. For although Upham admits into perfection as defined by him, “a large class of sins,” yet, formally at least, he excludes from it all voluntary transgression. We may doubt whether he does this really; we may discern among the sins which he admits, some from which voluntariness is abstracted with some difficulty, not to say arbitrariness. Meanwhile all voluntary transgression is formally excluded; and so long as our hearts are corrupt we shall never escape all voluntary transgression. Not only shall we never be perfect through and through until we are perfect in heart as well as in life; but we shall never be perfect in life—not even in the highest movements of our living—until our hearts are perfect. We must not look upon sinning atomistically, as if we could sin in this act and not sin in that: sin is a quality which, entrenched in the heart, affects all of our actions without exception. It is more true, then, to say that all our voluntary, as well as instinctive acts, are sinful, than that all voluntary acts may be holy, leaving only the instinctive ones to sin. A defective psychology underlies the notion that the range of our activities may be divided between indwelling sin and intruding holiness; some of them being altogether holy and others altogether sinful. This could be true only on the false doctrine of the “will” that it does what it pleases, independently of the “nature” that lies behind it, and can therefore vi et armis act holily despite the constant infection of the evil of a sinful nature. Only on some such notion can we talk of the voluntary acts being holy in the presence of an unsanctified heart.

On its positive side, however, Palmer’s criticisms are perfectly just. Nothing can be more important than that the conception of perfection be maintained at its height. If there is an eternal and immutable distinction between right and wrong, he argues, then “goodness must be everywhere and in all beings essentially the same. The fundamental principles of right moral action, must be the same to God and to his creatures; and there must be one rule of duty—one standard by which to test character—to angels and to men.… True perfection is one and the same thing in all beings.” The habit of conceiving of perfection as admitting of many imperfections—moral imperfections, glossed as infirmities, errors and inadvertences—not only lowers the standard of perfection and with it the height of our aspirations, but corrupts our hearts, dulls our discrimination of right and wrong, and betrays us into satisfaction with attainments which are very far from satisfactory. There is no more corrupting practice than the habit of calling right wrong and wrong right. That is the essence of antinomianism, if we choose to speak in the language of the schools. To give it its least offensive description, it is acquiescence in sin. And this is the real arraignment of all perfectionist theories, Upham’s among the rest. They lull men to sleep with a sense of attainments not really made; cut the nerve of effort in the midst of the race; and tempt men to accept imperfection as perfection—which is no less than to say evil is good.

The books in which Upham developed and commended these opinions had a wide circulation, running through many editions, through the middle half of the nineteenth century. They were republished in England through the instrumentality of G. Pennell, Esq., a Wesleyan local preacher of large means at Liverpool,²¹⁷ and have enjoyed there a larger popularity and exerted a more lasting influence than even in America. They are apparently no longer, however, on the market—except the most elaborate of them all and the one with the most general appeal, the “Life of Madame Guyon,” a new edition of which, with an Introduction by W. R. Inge, was published so lately as 1905. Upham’s retired life and aversion to public speaking confined his influence to the single channel of his published works. It can be traced in the perfectionist parties which succeeded him, but it is not dominant in any of them; he formed no sect and built up no party of his own. It is among the adherents of the Keswick movement that his name remains in most honor, and that his works continue to be most sought and read. J. B. Figgis, writing the history of that movement, represents him with Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, Molinos and Madame Guyon as one of the channels through which the “pure stream from the River of the Water of Life” has come down to us.²¹⁸ But even at Keswick it is not his which is the decisive influence. Loved by all who knew him; admired by all who came into contact with him, whether in person or in his printed works; he lived his quiet life out in a somewhat remote academic center, and has left behind him little more than the sweet savor of an honored name. Perhaps in his case we can reverse Mark Antony’s maxim and say that the good he did lives after him and the evil has been largely interred with his bones.

Footnotes

1. “George Fox: An Autobiography,” edited with an Introduction and Notes by Rufus M. Jones, M.A., Litt.D., 1919, pp. 120 f. In a note on p. 85, the editor points out the persistency with which Fox asserted the fact of perfection. The basis of the assertion is made clearer by some remarks in the Introduction (p. 30): “As soon as he realized that … to be a man means to have a ‘seed of God’ within, he saw that there were no limits to the possibilities of a human life. It becomes possible to live entirely in the power of the Spirit and to have one’s life made a free and victorious spiritual life.” ↩

2. The Eighth Proposition, “Concerning Perfection.” We have prefixed some phrases from the two preceding Propositions in order to provide a context. We are quoting from Barclay’s “An Apology for the True Christian Divinity: being an Explanation and Vindication of the Principles and Doctrines of the People called Quakers,” Philadelphia, 1789, pp. 7–9. This Apology first appeared in Latin, Amsterdam, 1676, and then in English (Aberdeen?), 1678. For the doctrine, see also Barclay’s “A Catechism and Confession … which containeth a true and faithful Account of the Principles and Doctrines, which are most surely believed by the Churches of Christ in Great Britain and Ireland, who are reproachfully called by the Name of Quakers …” ed. 5, London, 1716, pp. 42 ff. for the Catechism and pp. 129 f. for the Confession. The article in the Confession and the answers in the Catechism are mere centos of Scripture passages: but Barclay manages to argue the matter quite fully in the questions of the Catechism. ↩

3. “An Apology for the True Christian Divinity,” as cited, pp. 241–262. ↩

4. The Princeton Theological Review, xvi. 1918, pp. 612 ff. or pp. 501 ff. of this volume. ↩

5. Ibid., xvii. 1919, pp. 61 ff. or pp. 534 ff. of this volume. ↩

6. William Law’s “Humble, Earnest, and Affectionate Address to the Clergy” makes the pathetic appeal of not merely being his last book, but of having been completed only in the last few days before his death. In these last few pages (pp. 190 ff.), he argues the question of perfection. Christ came to save us from all sin; He saves us from all sin. Absolute freedom from sin is, therefore, not only our duty but our privilege. “He that is left under a Necessity of Sinning, as long as he lives, can no more be said to be cleansed from all Unrighteousness, than a man who must be a Cripple to his dying Day, can be said to be cured of all his lameness. What weaker Conclusion can well be made, than to infer, that because Christ was the only Man, that was born and lived free from Sin, therefore no Man on Earth can be raised to a Freedom from Sinning; no better than concluding, that because the Old Man is every one’s Birth from Adam, therefore there can be no such Thing as a New Man, created unto Righteousness, through Christ Jesus, living and being all in all in him; no better Sense or Logic than to say, that because our Redeemer could not find us any Thing else but Sinners, therefore he must of all Necessity leave us to be Sinners” (pp. 197 f.). “To suppose a Man born again from above, yet under a necessity of continuing to Sin, is as absurd as to suppose, that the true Christian is only to have so much of the Nature of Christ born in him, as is consistent with as real a Power of Satan still dwelling in him” (p. 194). “That which cannot help you to all Goodness, cannot help you to any Goodness; nor can that take away any Sin, but that which can take away all sin” (p. 192). ↩

7. “The Berean,” 1847, pp. 271 ff. ↩

8. For example, in his “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life” (1843), ed. 8, 1859, p. 120. Quotations from this book are throughout from the eighth edition. ↩

9. Compare J. H. Overton, “William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic,” 1881, pp. 161–170: “Law himself … very rarely mentions any of this group of mystics. There is, indeed, frequent allusion to Madame Guyon in the earlier interviews between Law and Byrom; but the subject was obviously introduced by Byrom, who was attracted to her by her resemblance to his favourite, Madame Bourignon. Law’s remarks on both ladies are by no means complimentary. To that most lovable of men and fascinating of writers, Archbishop Fénelon, Law hardly ever refers” (p. 161). “He expressly mentions both ‘the great Fénelon and the illuminated Guion’ as mystic writers whom he had read, and yet we may gather, from his distinct words in one case and from his silence in the other, that neither of them was a real favourite of his” (p. 164). “They were, neither of them, robust enough for Law’s taste” (p. 165). “Though Fénelon was not exactly effeminate, there was a certain softness about him … not at all the sort of charm to fascinate William Law” (p. 166). “As to Madame Guyon, the very fact that she held many of Law’s sentiments would naturally make him all the more intolerant of her other views which were likely to bring those sentiments into disrepute” (pp. 166 f.). “As for that other mystic lady, Madame Bourignon, … Law constantly expressed strong antipathy to her in his conversations with Byrom” (p. 169). ↩

10. See A. G. Upham, “History of the Upham Family,” 1845. ↩

11. A number of the pamphlets published in this controversy are brought together in vol. 430 of the “Sprague Collection,” preserved in the Library of Princeton Theological Seminary. ↩

12. W. B. Sprague, “Lectures on Revivals of Religion,” ed. 2, 1833, p. 325. ↩

13. In a short account of his religious experience printed in Phoebe Palmer’s “The Riches of Grace,” 1854, pp. 20 ff. ↩

14. One of his pupils describing his personal carriage, says that “he was meek enough to inherit the whole earth”:—“A tall man of bent figure, face turned toward mother-earth, but heart lifted toward the stars, Professor Upham impressed the undergraduates of his time with the idea that the Kingdom of God is not taken by violence” (F. L. Dingley, in The Lewiston [Maine] Journal, February 27, 1915). ↩

15. George Bush, the eccentric Hebraist, William Chamberlain, subsequently Professor of the Classics at Dartmouth, Cyrus P. Grosvenor, afterwards President of New York Central College, were classmates at Dartmouth. ↩

16. The translation was made from the Latin one volume compend, compared with and enlarged from the German original, and furnished with additions in the form of notes. It is a very scholarly piece of work and was long in demand as a textbook in the theological seminaries. ↩

17. “A Treatise on Divine Union” (1851), ed. 6, pp. 342 f. The citations from this book are throughout from the sixth edition. ↩

18. It seems probable that the teacher who is here described was John Adams, born at Canterbury, Connecticut, September 18, 1772, graduated at Yale in 1795, and given the degree of LL.D. by Yale in 1854; died at Jacksonville, Illinois, April 24, 1863. His life was passed in teaching, except that in his later years he served as Sunday School Missionary in Illinois. He was principal of Phillips Academy, Andover, from 1810 to 1833, including Upham’s time. There is a brief notice of him in Appletons’ “Cyclopædia of American Biography.” Horace E. Scudder gives an account of Phillips Academy, Andover, in Harper’s Magazine for 1877, lv. pp. 562 ff., but the portrait is drawn from the times of “Uncle Sam” Taylor. ↩

19. His father had removed from Deerfield to Rochester in his childhood (see A. S. Packard, “Address on the Life and Character of Thomas C. Upham, D.D.,” 1873, p. 6). ↩

20. “Ratio Disciplinae, or the Constitution of the Congregational Churches,” 1829; new ed., 1844. ↩

21. “The Manual of Peace, Embracing I. Evils and Remedies of War, II. Suggestions on the Law of Nations, III. Consideration of a Congress of Nations,” 1836: the third part reprinted 1840, 1842. A. S. Packard, as cited, pp. 10 f., gives the following, not perfectly clear, account of this work. “Having embraced at an early period the doctrines of Peace announced and advocated with great zeal and ability by Capt. William Ladd of this vicinity, he wrote several articles for the public press under the signature of ‘Perier,’ the name of the eminent French banker and statesman.… These essays were embodied in one of the four Prize Essays on a Congress of Nations, in a volume under that title in 1840.… Previously, in 1836, was published his Manual of Peace, which has been stereotyped, and both these works are among the advertised volumes of the Peace Society.” Upham characteristically pushed his conclusions as to peace to the furthest extreme. He would not allow that war could be condoned in any case whatever. “We say, in any case whatever,” he writes, (“The Manual of Peace,” p. 81) “because we do not propose to make any distinction between offensive and defensive war.… The true doctrine is, that human life, both in its individual and corporate state, as one and as many, is inviolable; that it cannot be taken away for any purpose whatever, except by explicit divine permission; and that war, in every shape, and for every purpose, is wrong, absolutely wrong, wholly wrong.” Packard (p. 19) nevertheless tells us, with what exact meaning we do not know, that “he labored earnestly, as we have noticed, in the cause of peace, and yet when the cloud of civil war hung over our land, his heart was stirred within him for the salvation and integrity of his bleeding country.” ↩

22. Cf. Packard, as cited, p. 8: “Prof. Upham at first gave lectures to his classes, and in 1827 embodied them in a work, which he called a compilation on Mental Philosophy, which in 1831 he expanded into a more original and systematic work in two volumes.” ↩

23. He ceased, however, to preach. Packard, as cited, pp. 13 f., says: “Prof. Upham came, as we have seen, from a pastorate to his professorship. But although he had exercised the public ministry of the Word, his nervous temperament, as he alleged, did not allow frequent preaching.… He … soon felt constrained to avoid public speaking.… At an early period of his life among us his voice ceased to be heard even in the social meetings.” One of his pupils (ibid., p. 17) writes of him: “His excessive nervous timidity to my mind accounted for traits of character that awakened unfavorable comment. He trembled at, and shrank from, public speech. He hesitated at a bold assertion, however true. He loved the most retired, not to say secret, ways of investigation for either practical or philosophical purposes, more because his nerves were weak, than because his convictions were feeble or his moral courage faint.” ↩

24. Packard, as cited, p. 16, refers to “the unaffected, deep and earnest interest he always manifested in the moral and religious well-being of his fellow-men,” and illustrates this remark by adding: “He was instant in season and out of season, in visiting the students at their rooms, was the first to discern indications of awakening interest in religious concerns; was abundant in personal efforts in such seasons; was sagacious in detecting the in-working of the Divine Spirit, or the presence of the spirit of evil.…” He cites instances of Upham’s work of this sort. ↩

25. “Henry Boynton Smith. His Life and Work,” edited by his wife, 1881, pp. 14, 15. ↩

26. We are drawing, in the following account, on Upham’s own narrative printed in Phoebe Palmer’s collection of “experiences” bearing the title: “The Riches of Grace: or the Blessing of Perfect Love as Experienced, Enjoyed and Recorded by Sixty-Two Living Witnesses,” 1854 (copyrighted 1852), pp. 20 ff. Compare her: “Pioneer Experiences; or the Gift of Power Received by Faith. Illustrated and Confirmed by the Testimony of Eighty Living Witnesses of Various Denominations.” Introduction by Rev. Bishop Janes, 1867. ↩

27. “The Riches of Grace,” 1854, p. 20. ↩

28. “The Riches of Grace,” 1854, pp. 435 ff. ↩

29. P. 444. ↩

30. Richard Wheatley, “The Life and Letters of Mrs. Phoebe Palmer,” 1876, pp. 239 f. ↩

31. This seems to be not quite accurate. Upham’s book on “The Will” was first published in 1834 at Portland; and although it was ultimately transferred to the Harpers, along with the rest of the series on Mental Science, it does not seem to have been issued by them as early as 1840. His work, “Outlines of Imperfect and Disordered Mental Action,” designed to form the fourth part of his comprehensive treatment of mental faculty, on the other hand, was published by the Harpers in 1840; and it was doubtless in connection with this publication that he was in New York. He appears to have arranged at the same time, or not long afterward, for the taking over of the whole series by the Harpers. The Harpers, it will be remembered, were a Methodist house and fit the description which Upham gives of those he had business with. ↩

32. Phoebe Worrall was born in New York, December 18, 1807. She gave herself to her Saviour in childhood and adorned the doctrine she professed through a long life of abounding activity. It was on the 26th of July, 1837, that she “entered into the rest of faith, the Canaan of perfect love” (Wheatley, p. 36). That day she always spoke of as “The day of days.” The famous Tuesday meetings date, however, from the combination of the ladies’ prayer-meetings of the Allen Street M. E. Church and the Mulberry Street M. E. Church in 1835. The combined meeting was held at first in Dr. Palmer’s (Phoebe Worrall had become Mrs. Palmer) back office, but, outgrowing this room, was taken upstairs to the parlor. It continued to be exclusively a ladies’ meeting until Upham’s attendance was the occasion of its transformation into a union meeting (Wheatley, p. 238). Phoebe Palmer, it will be seen, had herself entered into holiness only a little over two years before she conducted Upham into it. She was for many years the editor of The Guide to Holiness. She died November 2, 1874, and her life was written by Richard Wheatley, 1876. ↩

33. For these items see Wheatley, as cited, p. 241. We should not forget how much it meant to Upham to speak publicly (see above, note 24). ↩

34. Letter to the Uphams of April 30, 1851, in Wheatley, as cited, pp. 518 f. ↩

35. Wheatley, as cited, p. 426. ↩

36. “Out of Darkness into Light,” 1875, pp. 199 f. ↩

37. Upham had died shortly before—in 1872. ↩

38. Cf. above, note 15. ↩

39. “The Life of Faith,” 1845, p. 294. ↩

40. “The Life of Faith,” 1845, p. 91. ↩

41. Ibid., pp. 263–264. ↩

42. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” pp. 245, 251. ↩

43. The “New Dispensation” Perfectionists swarmed, in Western and Central New York and adjacent parts of New England, in the later twenties and early thirties of the last century. For their teaching see The Bibliotheca Sacra, lxxviii. January, 1921, pp. 70 f., or this volume, pp. 247 f., note 55. ↩

44. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” pp. 285 f. ↩

45. The Bibliotheca Sacra, lxxviii. January, 1921, pp. 52 f., or this volume, pp. 244 f. The classical book on “Spiritual Wives,” is W. Hepworth Dixon, “Spiritual Wives,” 1868. ↩

46. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” pp. 295, 299. ↩

47. George Bush became a Swedenborgian in 1845, and was, at the moment (1851) when Upham was writing these words, editing the Swedenborgian journal, The New Church Repository and Monthly Review (1848–1855). “Memoirs and Reminiscences of George Bush,” edited by W. M. Fernald, was published in 1860. There is a brief notice of him in “The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge,” ii. p. 318. ↩

48. “Life and Religious Opinions and Experience of Madame de la Mothe Guyon,” 1849, ii. pp. 52 ff. In the passage quoted from Madame Guyon, she is represented as speaking directly of martyrs for the truth. There are three different grounds of their martyrdom, she is represented as saying, corresponding to three several fundamental truths which required, one after the other, to be proclaimed and witnessed, thus constituting three successive dispensations. There was first the Old Testament dispensation, in which the existence of the one true God was proclaimed and won its martyrs. Then, in “the primitive times of the Christian Church,” that Jesus Christ was crucified for sinners was proclaimed and won its martyrs. “At the present time” there are those who are “martyrs of the Holy Ghost”—who “suffer for proclaiming the great truth, that the reign of the Holy Ghost in the souls of men has come.” Thus the entrance of Quietism into the world is set in the same sequence with the entrance of the old and new dispensations. ↩

49. “The Church History of Eusebius,” p. 229, in “Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,” Second Series, i. 1890. ↩

50. Upham, “Life of Madame Guyon,” ii. p. 271. ↩

51. “Studies in Mystical Religion,” 1909, pp. 122 f. ↩

52. Jones, as cited, p. 172. ↩

53. Jones, as cited, p. 175. ↩

54. Jones, as cited, pp. 187 f. ↩

55. “Absolute Religion. A View of the Absolute Religion, based on Philosophical Principles and the Doctrines of the Bible,” 1873, pp. 45–67, especially pp. 64 f. ↩

56. “The doctrine, that the Divine Nature is dual in its personalities, and that this duality implies and includes the fact of a divine maternity, is adopted and advocated by the sect known as Bible Communists. The leading doctrines of this people are found in a work entitled ‘The Berean’; a work which is characterized by acuteness of thought and reasoning, and by no small share of biblical learning” (“Absolute Religion,” p. 64). Then he proceeds to quote from “The Berean” passages in support of his contention. It is not credible that Upham was unaware of the character of the sectaries to which he was appealing. Cf. The Bibliotheca Sacra, lxxviii. October, 1921, pp. 343–375, or this volume, pp. 308–333. ↩

57. A writer in The Methodist Quarterly Review for April, 1846, p. 260, remarks, apparently with no misgivings with respect to the non-Wesleyan element in its teaching: “There is no work in our language, not excepting our own writers, in which the doctrine of entire sanctification is more fully stated and applied than in the ‘Interior Life.’ ” ↩

58. In the “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” 1843, he quotes not only from Tauler and Behmen, À Kempis and Law, but from St. Theresa, Francis de Sales, Molinos, La Combe, Madame Guyon, Fénelon, Antoinette Bourignon, and Père Lombaz. Yet this was a “popular” book, meant for the reading of “the general.” ↩

59. In 1869 he gathered the three parts of his “Mental Philosophy” into one comprehensive work in two volumes. But this resume of old material constitutes no exception to what is said in the text. ↩

60. “American Cottage Life,” ed. 2, 1850, ed. 3, 1852. ↩

61. “Letters Written from Europe, Egypt and Palestine,” 1855. ↩

62. The language is his own in describing, in the preface to the latter (p. v.), the leading purpose of the first two of these books—“Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life” and “The Life of Faith.” It may be applied to all. ↩

63. “Mysterium Magnum” in “Works,” edition of Schiebler, Leipzig, 1843, v. chapter xxvii. p. 177. ↩

64. “Life of Madame Guyon,” i. 1849, p. 398. ↩

65. Ibid., ii. 1849, p. 127. ↩

66. “Geschichte der quietistischen Mystik in der katholischen Kirche,” 1875, p. 488. ↩

67. “Life of Madame Guyon,” ii. p. 128. ↩

68. Ibid., i. p. 398. ↩

69. Ibid., i. p. 238. ↩

70. Ibid., i. pp. 140 f. ↩

71. “Life of Madame Guyon,” ii. pp. 127 f. ↩

72. We are drawing from Ernest Seillière, “Madame Guyon et Fénelon, Prècurseurs de Rousseau,” 1918, pp. 143 f. ↩

73. Rufus M. Jones, “Studies in Mystical Religion,” 1909, p. 230. ↩

74. “Alle miteinander in eime Blicke und in eime Punte”—“Everything merges into a single flash and into a single point.” ↩

75. As cited, p. 222. ↩

76. As cited, pp. 270 f. ↩

77. A good brief account of this Romanist doctrine (with references) may be found in H. Bavinck, “Gereformeerde Dogmatiek,” ed. 2, i. pp. 369–378; see also the same author’s “De Algemeene Genade,” 1894, pp. 18–24. ↩

78. May 25, 1688, quoted by C. E. Scharling, “Michael de Molinos,” German translation, 1855, pp. 115–116. ↩

79. Leibnitz adds an anecdote which is not exactly ad rem, but may serve to show the way in which the matter was looked at: “I am told,” says he, “that there was this kind of a Quietist in Hesse—a Reformed minister—who lewdly kissed a devout woman while she was praying: and when she resisted, blamed her for not being sufficiently abstracted and insensible to outward things.” There were many stories of this kind in circulation, showing that in the general apprehension of the time, the quietude of the Quietist was complete insensibility. Compare above, the story of Swester Katrei, who was “dead all through.” ↩

80. Rufus M. Jones, “Studies in Mystical Religion,” 1909, p. 209, drawing from Preger, “Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter, iii. p. 133. ↩

81. The Harvard Theological Review, x. 1917, p. 49. ↩

82. Viscount St. Cyres, “Francois de Fenelon,” 1901, p. 229. ↩

83. As cited, p. 67. ↩

84. “Works,” edition published by Leroux, 1851, 1852, v. p. 566; quoted by Viscount St. Cyres, as cited, p. 61. ↩

85. Cf. H. Bavinck, “De Algemeene Genade,” pp. 18–19: “In one word, it is conceivable that a man, confined wholly within the limits of nature, shall perfectly conform to his idea.… Most men, of course, are very far from attaining a sinless, earthly, natural life; … But so far as the abstract idea goes, it does not seem impossible.” Again, pp. 21–22: “The natural man of 1 Cor. 2:14, is according to Rome, not the sinful man, but the man without the donum superadditum.… This is the explanation of the milder judgment which Rome confers on the heathen. And from it also flows, for the Christian, the doctrine of fides implicita, the concessions made in morals, the compilations of casuistry.” ↩

86. As cited, p. 3. ↩

87. As cited, p. 2. ↩

88. Jones, as cited, p. 49. ↩

89. As cited, pp. 36 ff. ↩

90. “A Treatise on Divine Union, ed. 6, p. 325. ↩

91. “Life of Madame Catharine Adorna,” 1845, p. 245. ↩

92. P. 247. ↩

93. P. 248. ↩

94. P. 249. ↩

95. P. 250. A little before (p. 241) Upham had told us: “Nothing but sin can ever prevent him from entering into the most intimate union with the human mind. Let the heart be right, and he dwells there as a matter of necessity. A holy heart, whether it be in man or in angels, cannot be otherwise than a part of himself.” It is Upham’s consistent representation that holiness is the condition, not the effect, of union with God—its “first and indispensable prerequisite” (“Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” ed. 8, p. 17). J. W. Yeomans (The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, xviii. 1846, pp. 285 f.), comments on this: “We are … instructed that this ‘hidden life,’ this ‘greatly advanced state of religious feeling’ results in a sacred and intimate union with the Infinite Mind. We are accustomed to reverse this order.… That successive stages of advancement in holiness should be attended with an enlivened consciousness of intimacy with God, is both conceivable and undeniable.… It is the conscious sympathy of like with like. It is a recognition of oneness; in which is involved the whole idea of the most intimate union conceivable between different persons. But we do not receive from the Scriptures the notion of any sacred and intimate union with the Infinite Mind which belongs rather to one true believer than to another. Every true Christian must be as intimately united to Christ as any other; and any difference among different Christians, respecting the consciousness of that union, and the manifestation of its fruits, cannot amount to a different kind of life, but only to a different degree, or conception, or manifestation of the same life.” ↩

96. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” pp. 364–366. ↩

97. The conception of the holy man as an inspired man belongs to the common property of perfectionists. It is found also among the Quietists. Madame Guyon, Upham tells us (“Life of Madame Guyon,” i. p. 377), was so near to claiming inspiration for her Commentaries that she records something like the miracle which attended the Septuagint translators as occurring in her case. Parts of her comments on Judges were mislaid and she rewrote them. When the first copy turned up again, it was found almost exactly like the second. She regarded this as evidence of divine superintendence over her writing. ↩

98. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” ed. 8, pp. 370 ff. ↩

99. P. 374. ↩

100. 1873, pp. 263 ff. ↩

101. “Geschichte der quietistischen Mystik in der katholischen Kirche,” 1875, pp. 469 f. ↩

102. “Lettres Spirituelles,” ii. p. 187, quoted by Heppe, as cited. ↩

103. P. 250. ↩

104. “Life of Madame Guyon,” ii. p. 157. ↩

105. P. 237, quoting from the 27th of the “Maxims of the Saints.” ↩

106. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” ed. 6, pp. 238 ff. ↩

107. Pp. 356 ff. ↩

108. Madame Guyon’s statement, as given by Upham (“Life of Madame Guyon,” i. p. 393) is a little more arresting in form, but the same in substance. “When he finds us in this position,”—the position of self-annihilation, “nothingness”—“he finds us, not to despise and reject us, but to come into the heart which is now made empty and clean for his reception, and to set up his kingdom there forever.” ↩

109. P. 361. ↩

110. Ed. 8, pp. 258 ff. ↩

111. P. 265. ↩

112. Ed. 8, pp. 213 ff. ↩

113. P. 221. ↩

114. Pp. 222 f. ↩

115. P. 199. ↩

116. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” ed. 8, pp. 314 ff. ↩

117. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” ed. 6, p. 157. ↩

118. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” ed. 8, p. 362. ↩

119. Pp. 365 ff. ↩

120. Pp. 394 f. ↩

121. “Address on the Life and Character of Thomas C. Upham, D.D.,” 1873, pp. 8 f. ↩

122. “A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will,” 1834, pp. 28 ff. Compare H. B. Smith, The Literary and Theological Review, December, 1837, p. 630. ↩

123. “A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will,” pp. 29 f. ↩

124. For West, Burton and Taylor, see F. H. Foster, “A Genetic History of the New England Theology,” 1907, pp. 232, 243, 247. ↩

125. “Elements of Mental Philosophy” (1831), ed. 2, 1837, ii. p. 117. Cf. “A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will,” 1834, p. 24. ↩

126. Ibid., § 263; more at large, ibid., §§ 28–30. ↩

127. The distinction between these two classes of mental states is stated as follows (“A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will,” p. 61): “Desires are founded on those emotions, which involve what is pleasurable or painful, while Obligatory feelings are exclusively based on emotions of a different kind, viz. those of approval and disapproval.” These two classes, it is added, often “stand before the will in direct and fierce opposition to each other.” ↩

128. Pp. 109–201. ↩

129. P. 214. ↩

130. P. 215. ↩

131. Pp. 250 ff. ↩

132. Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” p. 211. ↩

133. “A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will,” p. 132. ↩

134. “Life of Madame Catharine Adorna,” 1845, p. 32. ↩

135. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” 1851, p. 355. ↩

136. “Life of Madame Catharine Adorna,” p. 196. ↩

137. “Absolute Religion,” p. 266. ↩

138. We suppose this “and” should be omitted, that the sentence may become correct. ↩

139. Enoch Pond, in a perfunctory notice of Upham’s “Treatise on the Will,” in The Literary and Theological Review for March, 1835, pp. 148–168, strangely says that the views of Upham are substantially the same as those of Edwards. The Methodists saw more truly and claimed him for their own. A writer in The Methodist Quarterly Review for April, 1846, p. 249—who quotes Wilbur Fiske among others as of the same mind with him—declares that the “Treatise on the Will” “is certainly more satisfactory to the Arminian school than any of its predecessors,” and adds that “it modifies quite away the Cyclopean mound of difficulty reared by Edwards.” Compare in the same sense F. H. Foster, “A Genetic History of the New England Theology,” p. 252. ↩

140. Pp. 138 ff. ↩

141. P. 141. ↩

142. P. 140. ↩

143. Pp. 650 ff. ↩

144. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” pp. 389 ff. ↩

145. Ibid., pp. 99–104. ↩

146. Ibid., p. 246. ↩

147. “Absolute Religion,” p. 82. ↩

148. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” p. 99. ↩

149. “Life of Madame Catharine Adorna,” p. 112. ↩

150. Cf. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” p. iv.: “The view which is taken of the nature of pure or holy love, namely, that in its basis it is the love of existence … does not essentially differ, I believe, from that which is presented by President Edwards, in his Treatise on the Nature of Virtue.” ↩

151. Ibid., pp. 109–110. ↩

152. P. 112. ↩

153. P. 110. ↩

154. “The Life of Faith,” 1845, p. 260; cf. p. 223. ↩

155. “The Life of Madame Guyon,” i. p. 123. ↩

156. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 182–184. ↩

157. As, for example, in “The Life of Faith,” pp. 440 ff. God is present in all things that occur. He is not the originator of them all, at least not in the absolute sense of the term. But He is “in some sense present to all things which take place”; “exercises over all events a degree of control and direction”; “every thing, which takes place, exists either by his control or by his permission”; “whatever is, has God in it; not always in the same sense; but always in some sense.” There is some fumbling; but this general statement is aimed at the mark. And the inferences are right: all events are ordered in wisdom and goodness: God is glorified in everything that takes place. ↩

158. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” p. 228. ↩

159. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” p. 234. ↩

160. P. 193. ↩

161. “The Life of Madame Guyon,” i. p. 66. “The great principle of practical sanctification,” says Madame Guyon (ii. p. 79), “is this;—to desire nothing but what we now have, sin only excepted.… When we thus have God, by accepting him in all his manifestations and doings, we necessarily have every thing.” This is the very essence of Quietism. ↩

162. i. pp. 136–137; cf. i. p. 144. ↩

163. 1851, pp. 26 ff. ↩

164. P. 29. ↩

165. Pp. 28–29. ↩

166. P. 271. ↩

167. P. 270. ↩

168. P. 272. ↩

169. “Life of Madame Catharine Adorna,” p. 205. ↩

170. P. 205. ↩

171. “Absolute Religion,” 1873, p. 230. ↩

172. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 73–74. ↩

173. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 55–56. ↩

174. Pp. 95 ff. ↩

175. Pp. 105, 116. ↩

176. So e.g. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 164–165. ↩

177. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” p. 173. ↩

178. Ibid., p. 171. ↩

179. The italics are ours. ↩

180. P. 170. ↩

181. Pp. 171–172. ↩

182. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” pp. 265–266. In the “Life of Madame Guyon,” ii. p. 8, Upham expounds Madame Guyon and Father La Combe as teaching “that sanctification is the … true end of justification; and that the merciful intentions of the Infinite Mind are not satisfied … by merely redeeming us from hell, without making us holy.” “They proclaimed,” he continues, “the doctrine of sanctification, therefore, as the true complement and result of that of justification.” This is said in a manner to involve his agreement with the doctrine expressed. ↩

183. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” p. 169. ↩

184. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 65 ff. ↩

185. “Life of Madame Guyon,” ii. p. 10; cf. ii. p. 8, and i. p. 370. ↩

186. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 162 ff. ↩

187. “The Life of Faith,” p. 165. ↩

188. Ibid., p. 53; “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” pp. 85 f. ↩

189. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” p. 125. ↩

190. Ibid., p. 210. ↩

191. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” pp. 130 ff. ↩

192. Pp. 131–132. ↩

193. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” pp. 145 ff. ↩

194. P. 148; cf. “Life of Madame Guyon,” ii. p. 338. ↩

195. “Life of Madame Catharine Adorna,” pp. 123 ff. ↩

196. Pp. 126–127. ↩

197. P. 135, he says this “perfection” is essentially the same thing as “pure love.” ↩

198. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” p. 125. ↩

199. Pp. 17–24. ↩

200. P. 23. ↩

201. P. 23. ↩

202. Pp. 274 ff.; cf. p. 72. ↩

203. P. 277. ↩

204. P. 275. ↩

205. P. 277. ↩

206. P. 278. ↩

207. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 188–189. ↩

208. “Principles of the Interior or Hidden Life,” pp. 267 ff. ↩

209. P. 269. ↩

210. Pp. 270, 273. ↩

211. “The Life of Faith,” pp. 150–151; cf. “Absolute Religion,” pp. 80–81. ↩

212. “A Treatise on Divine Union,” pp. 266–267. ↩

213. “Geschichte der quietistischen Mystik in der katholischen Kirche,” p. 483. ↩

214. “Hours with the Mystics,” ii. p. 233; cf. p. 240. ↩

215. The New Englander, April, 1848, pp. 165 ff; see pp. 171–175. ↩

216. The New Englander, July, 1845; pp. 373 ff; see pp. 380 ff. ↩

217. Richard Wheatley, “The Life and Letters of Mrs. Phoebe Palmer,” 1876, p. 379. ↩

218. J. B. Figgis, “Keswick From Within,” 1914, p. 9; cf. W. H. Griffith Thomas in C. F. Harford’s “The Keswick Convention,” 1907, p. 224. ↩