Reprinted from The Princeton Theological Review, xvi. pp. 572–622 and xvii. pp. 37–86.
The circle of ideas summed up in the general term “Perfectionism,” was first given standing in the Protestant churches through the teaching of John Wesley. The doctrine of “Christian Perfection” in which these ideas were formulated by him, very naturally therefore took from the beginning and has continued always to hold among the Wesleyans “the place of an acknowledged doctrine.” Henry C. Sheldon tells us, 1 no doubt, that it has claimed “very different degrees of practical interest and advocacy from different representatives” of Wesleyanism. He even tells us that “in the present, while it is advocated by not a few after the manner of John Wesley, many in effect set it forth as rather a possible ideal to be progressively approached, than as the goal lying immediately before every well-instructed Christian, the prize of a present faith and consecration.”
A somewhat earlier writer goes even further and gives us to understand that Wesleyans have never been very forward in laying claim to their “Christian Perfection” as practically exemplified in their own lives, however faithfully they may have clung to it as a distinctive and highly valued doctrine of their confession. “Hardly one in twenty of our ministers,” he remarks,2 “professes it, either publicly or privately, so far as I can learn. We preach it occasionally; but among our people its confessors are still fewer, in proportion to numbers, than in the ministry. Even among our bishops, from 1784 to the present day, confessors are as hard to find as in any other class of our people. The very princes of our Israel have been silent in regard to their own experience of it. The apostolic Wesley never professed it. In the sixty-fourth year of his age, and the forty-second of his ministry, he published, in one of the leading journals of London, a letter containing these words: ‘I have told all the world I am not perfect; I have not attained the character I draw.’ Bishop Asbury, who, if possible, exceeded Wesley in the toils and sufferings of his faithful ministry, did not profess it. The saintly Hedding, approaching the grave by lingering disease, always calm, and often joyous in view of death, was importuned to profess it, and declined. Myriads of men and women among us, whose lives were bright with holy light, saints of whom the world was not worthy, never professed it.” However chary, nevertheless, men may have been in pointing to their own lives as illustrating the doctrine, the doctrine of “Christian Perfection” has always been the glory of Methodism; and for a hundred years or so it constituted also one of its most exclusive peculiarities.3
As the middle of the nineteenth century was drawing on, however, a kindred doctrine began to show itself, in a relatively independent development, among the American Congregationalists, in sequence to the increasing dissolution of the hereditary Calvinism of the American Congregational churches and the shifting of opinion here and there among them to a Pelagianizing basis.4 Very potent influences were in operation in America during these years, moreover, tending to break down the barriers which divided the denominations from one another, and to give to doctrines hitherto distinctive of one or another of them more general currency. The conditions of life, especially in the rapidly settling frontier regions of what is now called the Middle West, made it a struggle to preserve in them any form of Christianity whatever, and opened the way for the wide extension of all kinds of extravagances. In the welter of sharply contrasting notions struggling for a footing in this intellectual and social confusion, a certain advantage was enjoyed by extreme pretensions. Only those who took strong ground could hope for a hearing. And the constant interchange between the frontier and the country at large spread the contagion rapidly throughout the land. Among the other extravagances thus given great vogue was naturally a tendency to proclaim perfection a Christian duty and an attainable ideal, which none who would take the place of a Christian in this wicked world could afford to forego.
The growing influence of perfectionist ideas in the religious community at large was both marked and advanced by the publication in 1859 of W. E. Boardman’s book called “The Higher Christian Life.” Mr. Boardman had acquired his notions under Methodist influences in a frontier settlement,5 and in this book he gave them wings and thus inaugurated a movement which has affected the whole Protestant world. We do not see but that Mark Guy Pearse’s description of the book is perfectly just. It was, he says,6 “perhaps the first popular treatise on this subject that won its way amongst all denominations; and its vast circulation, both in America and England, not only melted the prejudices of hosts against this subject, but made it possible for other writers to follow in the paths which he had opened, and led multitudes of timid souls out of the misty dawn into the clear shining of the sun.” The movement thus begun reached its culmination in the labors of Mr. and Mrs. Pearsall Smith, out of which grew in the early years of the fourth quarter of the century the great Keswick Movement by which their formative ideas have been spread throughout the English-speaking world and continue still to be vigorously propagated. It is to W. E. Boardman and Mr. and Mrs. Smith accordingly that we must go if we wish to know what the Higher Life movement really is, and what it really means for Christian life and doctrine.