William Edwin Boardman⁷ was born in Smithfield, New York, October 11, 1810, and grew up in the Susquehanna country into a rugged but very unstable manhood. After a number of business adventures he found himself in the early forties in the little mining town of Potosi in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin, seeking to mend his broken fortunes. His religious life had been of a piece with his business career. Converted in early manhood, he had passed through many violent changes before, under Methodist influences,⁸ he found in the rough surroundings of Potosi “rest of heart in Jesus for sanctification,” and became the head of the little “Plan of Union” church which had been gathered there largely under his influence.⁹ Within two years, however, he was compelled to leave Potosi by a violent anti-slavery controversy in which he had become embroiled, and entered Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati in the summer of 1843 as a student of divinity. The three years that he passed at Lane seem to have been devoted as much to the propagation of the Higher Life teachings as to his studies. After their close he was a year at Greenfield, Indiana, and then six months at New Haven in some loose connection with the Yale Divinity School. In 1852 he went to Detroit and his name appears this year for the first time in the Minutes of the General Assembly of the (New School) Presbyterian Church, as a “stated supply.” He found in Michigan what seems to have been congenial employment as a missionary of the American Sunday School Union, and was removed by that Society in 1855 to their central office in Philadelphia, to take charge of their “Students’ Mission Service”—transferring at the same time his Presbyterial membership to the (Old School) Presbytery of Philadelphia. Leaving the Sunday School Union after two or three years of service, he became for a short time “stated supply” at the manufacturing town on the Jersey side of the Delaware called Gloucester City, and then, in 1859, sailed for California for his wife’s health. In 1862 he returned from California and soon after entered the service of the United States Christian Commission, becoming its secretary and laboring efficiently in the organization of its work. After the Civil War he reverted for a while to business life, and then, in 1870, at last found his mission as a public agitator for the Higher Christian Life. At the same time he disappears also, in some unexplained way, from the roll of Presbyterian ministers, having held a place on that roll for nearly twenty years without ever having been settled as a pastor or continued longer than two or three years at a time in any one employment.¹⁰

Mr. Boardman’s eager and restless mind, little disciplined and very prone to extravagances, naturally had little taste for the humdrum work of the regular ministry, and the necessity of coöperation attending it. Having attained his threescore years without finding comfort or stability in the ordinary paths of ministerial labor, he appears to have thought it high time to throw off all the shackles of the conventional paths and to go his own untrammeled way. He stripped himself naked for the conflict. He broke all ecclesiastical ties and stood forth a perfectly free lance without responsibilities to anyone. He even freed himself from worldly entanglements, and resolved, like an invading army, to “live on the country.” A born agitator, equipped both by nature and by training for that work, we can imagine the zest with which he now cast himself with absolute abandonment into his congenial and wholly irresponsible task. The completeness of his separation of himself for it and the whole-heartedness of his devotion of himself to it are intimated to us by Mrs. Boardman in the language of her coterie. “At this time,” she writes,¹¹ “he felt he had a definite call to a definite work. As in his earlier life God had led him out into evangelistic work among the unconverted, so now He distinctly called him to evangelize among Christians, and proclaim the Gospel of full rest in our indwelling Saviour.” “It was evident now that the Lord was drawing my husband on to a full surrender of all his time to this direct service among His own people; and he became so very restful and happy in the separation from all secular work, that whatever doubts had heretofore crossed his mind, as to what the Lord wanted him to do, disappeared forever.”¹² “It was at this time in the same year, 1870, that the Lord called upon us to give up all our possessions, and enter upon a life of full trust in Him for all our temporal needs.”¹³ “Since that day in which all was committed to the Lord, there has never been an anxious thought as to how we should get on, or how meet any debt, for the Lord has supplied us even before asking, so that we have been free as the birds, going wherever the Father sends us, without a fear but that He would meet all expenses in His own way.”¹⁴ “It was now necessary to work independently of others, since it was the Lord who was to employ us.… No more committees or organizations, every step must now be directed by the Lord Himself.”¹⁵

We have overrun ourselves in the last two quotations. They remind us that soon after Mr. Boardman had given himself wholly to the work of public agitation in the interests of the Higher Life, he found it desirable to make a certain change in his methods. At first he made it his business to organize “Conventions for Holiness,” through which the propaganda he had taken in hand might be carried forward. An “Association for holding Union Holiness Conventions” was formed; Mr. Boardman was made its chairman; and as chairman it was his duty to be present at and to engineer all the meetings. Successful conventions were held under these auspices at Newark, Philadelphia, Washington, Wilmington and elsewhere. But difficulties arose. The responsibilities for and the labor of the conventions, all fell on Mr. Boardman’s shoulders: the financial returns from them were divided among the members of the Association and yielded to no one any large amount. Mr. Boardman thought that, the ball having now been started rolling, it might be permitted with advantage to roll on of itself. It might be left to others to organize conventions of which he should be invited to take charge. As Mrs. Boardman puts it:¹⁶ “Organization, as has been said, was one of my husband’s greatest—‘gifts’ shall I call it? And yet it was sometimes a hindrance, especially when the Lord was calling to a single-handed work.” The significance of the last clause should not be missed. The event proved the forecast just. “Many more invitations came than could be met.”¹⁷ Conventions were held everywhere; in the East, in the West:¹⁸ there seemed no limit to them. “It was a blessed liberty,” Mrs. Boardman exclaims,¹⁹ “to be free from all bondage to serve in connection with Committees or Associations”; and how delightful thus to experience how bountifully the Father, as their Provider, supplied every need!

There proved to be one limit, however—Mr. Boardman’s strength. He broke down from overwork in the spring of 1872.²⁰ But even that brought new opportunities and new triumphs. As one of its results Mr. Boardman found himself in the autumn of 1873 in London,²¹ where Mr. R. Pearsall Smith had been holding meetings during the spring for the propagation of the Higher Life and was now preparing to resume them. Mr. Boardman joined him, and during the next two years there was written into the history of religious conventions one of its most remarkable chapters.²² The great evangelistic campaign of Messrs. Moody and Sankey in England and Scotland was now in full swing, and the Higher Life movement was, as it were, embroidered upon it.²³ First there was that wonderful series of “Breakfasts” in which, week after week, Mr. Smith and Mr. Boardman met select parties of the ministers and Christian workers of the city to talk with them about the Higher Christian Life and Power for Service. These were followed by large popular meetings for the advancement of holiness, culminating in the meetings of the spring and summer of 1874, the climax of which was reached in the Conference at Broadlands in July and the great Oxford Union Meeting of the first week of September, 1874. Immense meetings of similar character were held throughout England during the next twelve months, and even the Continent was invaded by Mr. Smith with remarkable results. The climax was again reached in the great Brighton Convention of June, 1875—after which came Mr. Smith’s sad collapse. Meanwhile Mr. Boardman, after extensive tours through England and Scotland, had returned to America (early in June, 1875), but finding there no such opportunities for his propaganda as England offered him, he came back in December, 1875 to London, which he thereafter made his permanent home and the center of his activities. As late as 1880 when he had reached his three score years and ten he made an extended tour in Sweden preaching his favorite doctrine and—yes, healing the sick! For he had now taken up with this delusion, and indeed it seems to have become during the last few years of his life almost his chief concern. He apparently dates his conversion to it from a meeting with Dr. Cullis during his visit to America in the summer of 1875. It was not until the publication of his book, “The Lord that Healeth Thee,” in 1881, however, that he was fairly “launched as a teacher of divine healing.” The Faith-house called “Bethshan” was opened by Mrs. Baxter and Miss Murray in 1882 to accommodate the patients who resorted to him, and of it he was “both the father and the pastor.” But his career as a faith healer was short:²⁴ he himself died February 4, 1886.

Although he began late, Mr. Boardman became a somewhat voluminous writer.²⁵ It is by his first book, however, “The Higher Christian Life,” published in 1859, that he is best known, and through it that he has exercised his widest influence as a leader in the Higher Life movement. It is with it primarily therefore that we are concerned.²⁶ It is not a good book, and the critics dealt faithfully with it.²⁷ They pointed out the incorrectness of its historical illustrations, the vagueness and ambiguity of its doctrinal statements, the inconsequence of its argument, the formlessness of its structure, the inelegance of its literary style. Everything they alleged against it was true. Nevertheless, the book sold, and was read, and bore fruit. Theodor Jellinghaus says that more than a hundred thousand copies of it went into circulation in America and England; that it made its author the leading teacher of the more circumspect and practical doctrine of complete sanctification; and that it was by it that access was gained for this teaching into all evangelical denominations.²⁸ This is a conservative statement. Mrs. Boardman describes the sale of the book as rapid beyond all precedent in books of its class—“it was impossible for many weeks to supply the demand”; and reminds us that it was reprinted in many editions in England—an edition was issued by Nisbet, another by Strachan, and so forth—and that one British publisher alone sold sixty thousand copies of it before 1874.²⁹ It is a mere superstition to imagine that only good books sell well. Are Pastor Russell’s books good books? It is in literature as in music where ragtime makes a more popular appeal than Beethoven. This comparison may supply us with the proper characterization of Mr. Boardman’s book: it is a ragtime book. It is the book of a Sunday School missionary accustomed to address himself to the unsubtle intelligence of “the wild and woolly West.” Mrs. Boardman with pardonable wifely appreciation not wholly without reason describes it by saying that it “sets forth the truth in clear, simple, direct statements, illustrated by examples.” It uses a broad brush and lays on the color thickly. Much of its appeal lies in the very coarseness of its art. But that is not the whole truth. Its real power lies in its fundamentally Christian tone. It exalts Christ, and it exalts faith. And no book which exalts Christ and exalts faith will ever fail of an immediate response from Christian hearts.

Mr. Boardman’s zeal is, as he puts it, for a “full salvation” through “full trust.”³⁰ What he has it in his heart to do is to set forth Christ “as all in all for the sinner’s salvation,” and to assure “the sinner who receives him as such, and abides in him,” that he has in Him “full salvation.”³¹ The sinner who both “receives Him” and “abides in Him”: he who desires a full salvation must do both these things. He must not only enter by Christ but walk in Christ; Christ is not only the Door but the Way. And we contribute as little to our walking in the Way as we do to our entering by the Door. There are many who expect to enter by the Door, but to walk in the Way for themselves. They expect “to journey in the straight and narrow way by virtue of their own resolutions and watchings, with such help from God and man as they can secure from time to time.”³² It cannot be done. Jesus “is The Way and there is no other. There is no real progress heavenward but in Jesus.” Jesus is not a partial Saviour but a complete Saviour: we do not get a portion of our salvation in Him and supply the rest ourselves; In Him and in Him alone is complete salvation. “What we call experimental religion, is simply this: The sinner is first awakened to a realization of his guilt before God, and of his danger, it may be too. He really feels, that is, he experiences, his need of salvation, and becomes anxious and eager to do anything to secure it. Tries perhaps all sorts of expedients, except the one only and true, in vain. Then at last his eyes are opened to see that Jesus Christ is set forth to be his salvation, and that all he has to do is, just as he is, without one grain of purity or merit, in all his guilt and pollution, to trust in his Saviour, and now he sees and feels, that is, he experiences, that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life, the very Saviour he needs. In Jesus he triumphs and exults. In Jesus he revels and rejoices. Jesus is the one amongst ten thousand, the altogether lovely. The only one in heaven or on earth to be desired, filling all the orbit of his soul with faith, and hope and love. This in substance is the sum of all religious experience.”³³ In Jesus Christ, our complete Saviour, there is complete salvation to be had by faith alone.

Nothing, of course, could be truer to the Gospel than this insistence on the completeness of the salvation provided in Christ and received by faith alone; and it would perhaps not be easy to say it better. It is the very essence of the Christian proclamation. The mischief is that Mr. Boardman contends that this “full salvation” received by a “full trust” in Jesus our “full Saviour,” is not one indivisible salvation, but is separated into two distinct parts, received by two distinct acts of faith. This is the meaning of his dwelling so earnestly upon the necessity of not only entering by the Door but also walking in the Way. To his own consciousness, indeed, he is not dividing the two stages of salvation from one another but assimilating them to one another. He conceives it to be usual to think of them not only as separable in fact but as resting on different foundations; one on faith, the other on works. “We have one process for acceptance with God,” he says,³⁴ “that is faith; and another for progress in holiness, that is works. After having found acceptance in Jesus by faith, we think to go on to perfection by strugglings and resolves, by fastings and prayers, not knowing the better way of taking Christ for our sanctification, just as we have already taken him for our justification. We see and believe in Jesus as our Atonement on earth, and our Advocate and Mediator in heaven, but we fail to see and receive him as our ever-present Saviour from sin now here with us in the hourly scenes of the daily journey heavenward.” He is preoccupied with the vindication of faith as the sole instrument of salvation in all its stages alike. In making this vindication he is doing a good work, and for the sake of it we can bear with the play on words by which he gives a double reference to the Scriptural declaration: “The just shall live as well as be made alive, by faith,”³⁵ and can read with patience such a passage as this:³⁶ “Whether the question relates to justification or sanctification the answer is the same. The way of freedom from sin is the very same, as the way of freedom from condemnation. Faith in the purifying presence of Jesus brings the witness of the Spirit with our spirits that Jesus is our sanctification, that the power and dominion of sin is broken, that we are free, just as faith in the atoning merit of the blood and obedience of Christ for us, brings the witness of the Spirit that we are now no longer under condemnation for sin, but freely and fully justified in Jesus.”

Of course we have both justification and sanctification only in Jesus, and of course we have Jesus only by faith. But we cannot divide Jesus and have Him as our righteousness while not at the same time having Him as our sanctification. It is precisely this division of Jesus, however, which Mr. Boardman is insisting upon. That is his real meaning in the passage which we have just quoted. When we read it in its intended sense it is as pure a statement of the Wesleyan doctrine of the successive attainment of righteousness and holiness by separate acts of faith as Wesley himself could have penned. It is equally his real meaning in the double emphasis which he puts on the Scriptural declaration that the just shall live by faith. “The just shall be made alive first,” he expounds it,³⁷ “and afterwards learn to live by faith. The just shall be justified before God first, and afterwards learn the way to become just also in heart and life, by faith”—where the “first” and “afterwards” are the really significant words. This separation of justification and sanctification as two distinct “experiences” resting on two distinct acts of faith is in point of fact Mr. Boardman’s primary interest, and constitutes the foundation stone of his system. Grant him the reality of “the second conversion” by which we obtain sanctification, as distinct in principle from the first conversion by which we obtain justification, and he will not boggle over much else. Here lies the heart of his system of teaching and on the validation of this his whole effort is expended.³⁸

The necessity for this distinction of experiences he finds in the twofold need of the sinner and the consequent twofold provision made for his need. “And now,” he writes,³⁹ “to account for the two distinct experiences, each so marked and important, and so alike in character, we have only to consider two facts, viz. first, that the sinner’s necessities are two-fold and distinct, although both are included in the one word salvation. We express the two in the words of that favorite hymn, ‘Rock of Ages,’ when we sing,

‘Be of sin the double cure,
‘Save from wrath, and make me pure.’ ”

It will be observed that “Rock of Ages” is quoted here, not in its original form, but in that given it by T. Cotterill in 1815. Toplady himself wrote—

“Be of sin the double cure,
Cleanse me from its guilt and power.”

We do not know the precise end sought by Cotterill in the alteration which he introduced. It may have been merely greater exactness in the rhyme. It may have been also greater exactness in doctrinal statement. Whether he meant it or not, in any event his form does make the doctrinal statement more exact. Christ’s blood does something more for us than cleanse us from the guilt and power of sin: it cleanses us also from the corruption of sin. To sum up the “double cure” which it brings us as cleansing from the guilt and power of sin is therefore a fatally inadequate statement—though it is all that Mr. Boardman’s successors in the advocacy of the Higher Christian Life are able to attribute to it. Whether he himself understood more to be included in the cleansing wrought by Christ’s blood may require some further investigation. Suffice it to note here that he quotes the hymn in a form in which it says more; and that he speaks in this context in this more adequate language of the hymn. The “two great and equal wants of the sinner,” he declares⁴⁰ to be these: “he must be just in the eye of the law, justified before God. And he must also be holy in heart and life”—in heart as well as in life, observe—“or he cannot be saved.” All that it is necessary to make ourselves sure of at the moment, however, is that Mr. Boardman explicitly represents the two things which he here describes as “being reckoned righteous before God, and being made righteous in heart and life,” as things which are “distinct and different in their nature,” and therefore separable in their experience.

It is only fair to recognize at the same time that Mr. Boardman is willing to be as reasonable in the matter as it is possible to be while yet preserving the essence of his contention. He is willing to admit, for example, that the two “experiences”—justification and sanctification—need not be always temporally separated. A man may be justified and sanctified at the same time. He is even willing to admit that these two experiences need not be consciously separated—“by a gulph of vain strugglings.”⁴¹ “Any particular kind of experience is nowhere in the Bible made a pre-requisite of salvation. He who really and truly believes in the Lord Jesus, will be saved whether he has any experience at all to relate or not.”⁴² “Let Jesus be received as the all in all, and that is enough! Whoever can say, ‘Jesus is mine and I am his,’ that ‘he is complete and I am complete in him,’ and say the truth, has the experience whether he has an experience to relate, or not.”⁴³ But he is firm in asserting that we must actually have these two “experiences,” both of them, if we are to be saved, and that they are essentially distinct. Though they may possibly coalesce in time, and though we may have nothing to relate concerning them, yet they are distinct, necessary experiences both of which we must have. There may therefore be—there ordinarily is—an interval between them, long or short.⁴⁴ The second experience may be as cataclysmic as the first—it often is even more so. In any event it must be had. “It is necessary for all to come to the point of” distinctly “trusting in the Lord for purity of heart to be prepared for heaven.” “There is no other way under heaven to be purified but by faith in the Lord. And none but the pure in heart shall see God in peace.”⁴⁵ So little is Mr. Boardman inclined to sink “the second experience” in the first, that his tendency is to exalt it above it. He speaks of it as “the second and deeper work of grace.”⁴⁶ He declares plainly⁴⁷ that “the second is the higher stage, and more difficult too. It is really harder to overcome sin in the heart, than to break away from the world at first. And it is harder to come to the point of trusting in Jesus to subdue one’s own heart entirely to himself, than to venture upon him for the forgiveness of sin. We are slower to perceive that the work of saving us from sin—of expelling sin from us—is Christ’s, than to see that he has already suffered the penalty of sin and purchased our pardon.”

That the second experience like the first is of faith alone we have already seen to belong to the very essence of its conception. It is usually emphasized in antagonism to the notion, supposed to be prevalent, that we are justified by faith but are to be sanctified by works. No, it is asserted with emphasis, we are sanctified also by faith. There were two classes in Peter’s audience at Pentecost, we are told in a typical passage⁴⁸—not only unconverted men, but men who had long enjoyed the forgiveness of their sins. But Peter had not different messages for them. “Peter did not say to the one, Believe in the Lord Jesus and ye shall be converted, and to the other, Watch, pray, struggle, read, fast, work, and you shall be sanctified. But to one and all he said, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and ye shall receive the Holy Ghost.” Perhaps there is a tincture of the Quietism so prominent in the later teaching of this trend of thought traceable here; and an illustration employed a little further on increases the suspicion that there may be. “Suppose,” we read,⁴⁹ “when Daniel was cast into the lion’s den, instead of trusting in his God, that He would deliver him—suppose then that in his impotence, bound hand and foot, he had made fight with the lions, and sought deliverance by his own struggles with those terrible beasts of prey, how long before he would have been torn limb from limb and devoured by the hungry monsters of the den?” The suspicion remains, however, a mere suspicion: the obvious intent is less to discredit effort than to exalt faith, as the alone instrument of salvation. Mr. Boardman obviously means to conceive this faith on which he hangs everything in its utter simplicity. It is a formula with him, no doubt that, We must both give all and take all, and that is obviously the “surrender” and “faith” of later authors.⁵⁰ But Mr. Boardman perceives better than they that these are but two aspects of one act. “True and saving faith,” he says,⁵¹ “is two-fold. It gives all and takes all.” If both these elements of it are not present, the act of faith is not complete, and, in a word, no real faith has been exercised. “If it fails to give all up to Christ, no matter how bold and clamorous it may be in claiming the promises, it is dead and powerless.… On the other hand if it fail of taking Christ for all, all its givings will be in vain and worse than in vain, ending only in sore and terrible disappointment at last.” “He who gives all and takes all has all. He who gives but does not take, or takes but does not give, has nothing but disappointment and sorrow.”

It results inevitably from Mr. Boardman’s separation of justification and sanctification as two experiences, each the result of a special act of faith and normally occurring at different times, that he has two kinds of Christians on his hands. Naturally he is a little embarrassed when he attempts to relate these two kinds of Christians to one another and to the ultimate issues of life. One of his reviewers—Dr. John A. Todd⁵²—wishing to push him to the wall, demands how true faith can be ascribed to a man, “when all the while, as our author says of Luther,⁵³ he ‘accepts Christ as a propitiation, but rejects him as a sanctification.’ ” “On this principle,” he cries out, “a man may be justified, and, we suppose, go to heaven—for ‘whom he justified, them he also glorified’ (Rom. 8:30)—while rejecting Christ in one of his most important offices as a Saviour. A more gross and revolting error could not well be conceived.” Dr. Todd is right of course: the situation created by separating justifying and sanctifying faith and describing them as unrelated operations, is an impossible one. The Scriptures, not merely in Rom. 8:30, but everywhere—very explicitly in Rom. 6—join justification and sanctification indissolubly together as but two stages of the one salvation secured by the one faith in the one Christ. But Mr. Boardman has not laid himself open to the whole extremity of Dr. Todd’s assault. He does teach that a man may accept Christ for justification and live through long years rejecting Him—or at least not receiving Him—for sanctification: as if a justified man, received into the divine favor and granted the Spirit of Adoption, could possibly fail to receive his Redeemer from sin for sanctification also—if that depended on a separate and special act of faith and was not rather, as it is, an inevitable result of the justification itself. But he does not teach that a man may go to heaven without having received Christ for his sanctification; that is to say, without being sanctified—for there is, as he too allows, no sanctification out of Christ. The way he attempts to meet the situation is this: “How does it fare,” he asks,⁵⁴ “with all those professors of religion who live on to the end of their days without the experimental knowledge of the way of sanctification by faith?” And the answer he gives is this: “Badly, of course, if they are mere professors, and not truly converted.… For they have not been justified, and therefore they cannot be either sanctified or glorified, but will be banished from the presence of God and the glory of his power forever.… But, if really converted, then the way of sanctification by faith in Jesus will be made plain in the evening of their earthly course.” That is to say, no man who has had only “the first conversion” can be saved: but there is no man who has only “the first conversion.” If he has “the first conversion,” he certainly will sooner or later have “the second.” God the Lord will take care of that. There are not then, after all, in Mr. Boardman’s scheme two kinds of saved men, merely justified and both justified and sanctified men. There are only two stages in salvation, which may come together or may be—even widely—separated in time; but which invariably are both experienced in the saved. This is, it will be perceived, a doctrine of “Perseverence.” All those who are “really converted,” says Mr. Boardman, are ultimately saved: God will see that they are also sanctified. But he can see no vinculum between the two, except the bare will of God: God will not permit one who has received Jesus Christ for justification to fail to receive Him also for sanctification. This is undoubtedly something—and might lead one to say, What God has joined together let not man put asunder. But it falls gravely short of the teaching of Scripture which connects sanctification with justification as its necessary issue and through it the necessary issue of the indivisible faith that lays hold on the indivisible salvation of the indivisible Christ. From even it, however, Mr. Boardman’s successors in the teaching of the Higher Christian Life have fallen away.

The most difficult matter in connection with Mr. Boardman’s doctrine of sanctification is to make perfectly sure precisely what he supposes we receive in this “second conversion” which it is his main purpose to establish. He says with great fervor that we receive in it by faith just Christ—and Christ, says he, is enough. “Exactly what is attained in this experience?” he asks.⁵⁵ And he answers, “Christ. Christ in all His fulness. Christ as all in all. Christ objectively and subjectively received and trusted in. That is all. And that is enough.” But Christ, we must remember, is not received in this experience for the first time. He had already been received in the “first conversion,” between which and this “second conversion” the analogy is most complete.⁵⁶ When He was received in the “first conversion” apparently that was not enough. In the “first conversion” Christ was received only for justification; only in the “second conversion” is He received for sanctification. Precisely what we get in Christ in this second conversion is, then, sanctification. It is not meant that the holiness of Christ is imputed to us in this transaction, so that we are in Christ looked upon as holy, though we are unholy in ourselves. Nor is it meant that the holiness of Christ is transfused into us in it, so that we are instantaneously made actually holy by our reception of Him for sanctification. Nor is it merely meant, as Dr. Jacob J. Abbott, who wrestles with the problem manfully in a review of the book in the Bibliotheca Sacra and Biblical Repository,⁵⁷ suggests, that we receive in it in Christ “a proper equivalent for a completed sanctification.” Dr. Abbott, however, in his explanation of what he means by this comes very near to the truth—in one aspect of it. “We have made the ‘transfer’ to Christ,” he expounds; “we may, therefore, in the full confidence that he will carry on the work to its completion, dismiss trouble about our present imperfect state. We may act and feel and rejoice and triumph just as if the work was already consummated. We have ‘conquered an abiding peace, and gained the full salvation.’ ” Mr. Boardman certainly means to say that in receiving Christ by faith for sanctification, we receive a power which assures our sanctification. The actual realization in all its details of the holiness thus assured us he represents as a process; and he does not seem, at least clearly, to deny that it is realized by us in its details by means of effort. But he asserts that it is unfailingly realized, and he teaches that the strength by which it is realized is not our own but Christ’s. We are relieved from all anxieties, all care, all responsibility, about our sanctification: it is in Christ’s hands, and because it is in Christ’s hands, we are at peace. And being thus relieved from all anxiety about it, we may properly be said to have it, to have it not merely in prospect, but, in principle, in present possession—though in a possession that progressively realizes itself in fact.

Mr. Boardman certainly means this, we say: but just as certainly this is not all that he means. He teaches very distinctly that the sanctification which we receive in Christ does not come all at once, but in process. Although he is concerned to show that the analogy between the first and the second conversions is complete, he yet is constrained to allow⁵⁸ that there is one matter in which “the pardon of sins” which we get in the one and “the purging of sins” which we get in the other differ with a difference that is radical. This is that “pardon is instantaneously entire, but cleansing from sin is a process of indefinite length.” It is secured instantaneously by the single act of faith, just as pardon is, but the difference is that, in the first conversion, “the work of Christ is already done the instant the soul believes, while in the second, the work of Christ remains yet to be done in the future after the soul believes.” “In the one,” he continues, “the atonement has been made, and the moment it is accepted, the pardon is complete; in the other, although the righteousness of Christ is perfect in which the soul is to be clothed, yet the work of unfolding the heart to itself in its wants, and the unfolding of Christ to the heart from glory to glory, in his sympathizing love, and purifying presence and power, as the soul shall be prepared to go onward and upward from faith to faith, is a work of time and progress.” Or, as he states it in another place,⁵⁹ by the act of faith in accepting Christ for sanctification “the soul is now placed in the hands of Christ, as the clay in the hands of the potter; and by faith, Christ is received by the soul as the potter to mold it at his own sovereign will, into a vessel for the Master’s own use and for the King’s own table.” Thus a new starting point has been gained. A new and higher level has been attained, upon which the soul hereafter moves. But—and the warning is made express and very emphatic—a starting point is “not the goal reached, or the mark of the prize won.” There can be no doubt, then, that Mr. Boardman teaches that the sanctification which we make sure, absolutely sure, of in our “second conversion” is progressive and that we attain the goal only at the end of a long process. Nevertheless there is no reader of Mr. Boardman’s book who will not feel that, when this has been said, all is not yet said. In one way or another, Mr. Boardman also certainly teaches that when we accept Christ for sanctification, we not only make our sanctification certain but obtain it at once.

The puzzle into which Mr. Boardman’s readers are thrown at this point is relieved by an incidental remark which he lets drop in a letter, written in his old age to Miss Baxter, the founder of Bethshan. “I have known Him as my Saviour from my own conscious sins,” he writes,⁶⁰ “as long as you have known your right hand from your left.” That is to say, from the beginning of his career as a teacher of the Higher Christian Life, he has looked upon Christ as delivering His people from “all conscious sins.” This is the precise key which is needed for what otherwise was in danger of appearing a sheer contradiction. What Mr. Boardman teaches, we now see clearly, is that the moment we accept Christ for sanctification we receive in Him freedom from all conscious sinning and at the same time absolute assurance in Him that He will progressively cleanse our “heart and life” in His own good time and way from all sin. There is here in other words, a double “experience,” the experience of an immediate deliverance from all conscious sinning and the experience of progressive deliverance of the heart and life from all sin whatsoever. How Christ proceeds in thus cleansing us gradually from all sin we have seen in descriptions already quoted: it is all summed up in the phrases⁶¹ that He progressively unfolds “the heart to itself in its wants,” and Himself “to the heart from glory to glory,” leading the soul thus steadily upwards from faith to faith. That this was settled doctrine to Mr. Boardman we perceive from its reëmergence in precise form in his addresses at the great Oxford Union Meeting in 1874.⁶² “In every one of us,” he is there reported as saying, “there is a whole unknown world. Sin cannot be abandoned by us until it is known. The instant we know it, we lay it on Christ, and the blood cleanseth it. We learn much of it when we are wholly given over to Christ, but now we can learn only progressively.… Be content to accept this, that there is a world within, which unfolds as we walk in the light. We see day by day what we could not see before. But every discovered need is at once met in the Lord Jesus, our mercy-seat. Condemnation for known transgression is not the necessity of our existence. In Him is available victory over every temptation—not partial, but complete. If you have faith in Christ, Christ acts in you.…” What is declared here is not that Christ is our future Sanctifier, but our present Sanctifier, our present Sanctifier in every successive present. At every moment we are in Him free from all conscious sin; but we are led by His sanctifying grace every successive moment to be conscious of more sin that we may be in Him freed from that too—until we are at last freed from all sin. This is a very ingenious combination of a constant sense of freedom from sin in Christ with a constantly increasing deliverance from sin by Christ. It enables Mr. Boardman to declare that we have from the moment of accepting Christ for sanctification “full salvation” in Him and yet to represent the salvation we have in Him as wrought out in a process which is not complete until life itself ends.⁶³ Christ is at once a perfect present Saviour and a perfect prospective Saviour. “Christ,” he is able to say, therefore, with emphasis,⁶⁴ “is no more freely offered in the faith of his atonement, than in the assurance of his personal presence and sanctifying power! He has not given himself to us in half of his offices freely, then to withhold himself from us in the other half. If we are content to take him as a half-way Saviour—a deliverer from condemnation, merely, but refuse to look to him as a present Saviour from sin, it is our own fault. He is a full Saviour. And to all who trust him he gives full salvation. To all and to each.”

From the point of view thus attained we are able to answer the question also how far Mr. Boardman’s teaching is “Perfectionism.” He is himself anxious to dissociate it from “Perfectionism,” and writes a whole chapter for that purpose.⁶⁵ Nevertheless no other name can justly be given to it. In his view every Christian who rejoices “in full salvation through full trust in Jesus,” experiences Him as a “present Saviour” from sin. All such (having passed out of the seventh chapter of Romans into the eighth) “have learned that there is deliverance now here in this life through faith in Jesus.… They have learned experimentally, they know, that Jesus Christ our Lord, through faith in his name, does actually deliver the trusting soul from the cruel bondage of its chains under sin, now in this present time.”⁶⁶ They do not look to death “as their deliverer … as if death was the sanctifier or the sanctification of the children of God”; they have an adequate sanctifier in the present Jesus. “The great difference between the two classes”—those that have taken Jesus for sanctification, and those who have taken Him only for justification—is that while the one has not, the other has “found Jesus, as a present Saviour from the present power of sin,”⁶⁷ and may therefore give “thanks to God for triumphant deliverance already wrought, through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” “The very gist of the experience” expounded, we are told with the emphasis of italics,⁶⁸ is that those who possess it have “an assured knowledge of the presence and power of Jesus to deliver us from the dominion as well as the penalty of sin, and keep us by the power of God, through faith unto salvation.” So the crowning thing which constitutes this fulness of faith “is the apprehension, not so much of the certainty of final salvation, as the joyful confidence of the presence of Jesus, as a present Saviour from sin, and a present captain of salvation, to direct us and sustain us in every conflict with Satan.” Of course it is the indwelling Christ that is here celebrated. The source of all the Christian’s confidence is that he knows “that Jesus is with us, and that He will keep us by His own power, and wash us in His own blood, and lead us by His own hand, and uphold us from falling, or lift us when fallen” (pp. 279–280). It is not in our state that we trust nor in our attainments, but in Christ alone. “The command is not—Now you have got into a high and holy state, so walk in that; But even as ye received christ jesus, so walk in him.”⁶⁹ But—in Christ Jesus we have attained to a state, in which, abiding in Him, we abide. And the state which we attain in Him is a state of freedom in Him from conscious sin and ever increasing freedom in Him from all sin as we are made by Him—in whose hands we are as the clay in the hands of the potter—progressively conscious of more and more of the sins of which we are ignorant, only that we may be progressively delivered from them also. If this is the state of the Christian it is a state of freedom from conscious sin and that at an ever higher and higher level of actual holiness. This is very expressly a doctrine of perfectionism. It is not taught that the Christian is absolutely perfect—but what perfectionism teaches that? It is not taught that the Christian never sins. But the Christian’s sinning is made merely auxiliary and contributory to his holiness—the instrument which Christ his Sanctifier uses to elevate him continually to a higher and higher level in his perfection. In the most literal sense the Christian’s sins become stepping-stones to higher things.

It ought to be added, however, that in his latest years Mr. Boardman appears to have exchanged this most ingenious form of perfectionism by which a constant, conscious perfection is maintained in the course of a steady actual growth towards real perfection, for the exaggerated mysticism which has become a characteristic doctrine of the later advocates of the Higher Christian Life.⁷⁰ We find him at least, say about 1880, writing to this effect in a letter to Miss Baxter, the founder of the Faith-Cure Home, Bethshan. “He is the life, the All of life,” he now writes,⁷¹ “for body as well as soul, complete. In Him dwelleth all fulness; we are filled full in Him.… Fulness, absolute fulness of life dwells in Him alone; and in us, only as He dwells in us by faith.… As long as we take healing from Him bit by bit, bits will yet be lacking. As long as we take strength from Him bit by bit, bits of infirmities will remain.… He is the great Expulsor of ‘the world, the flesh (self) and the Devil,’ and that by His own continual presence in us, in His own fulness, the Fulness of God. And so He is the Expulsor of sin, sickness, weakness, and all that can oppress, whether in spirit, soul, or body.” On this teaching, when we have Christ, Him Himself and not merely things from Him, we have at once all: there is no more room for growth—for Christ is past all growth and we are “uplifted” by the Spirit into Christ and He is unfolded “in all His fulness, the Fulness of God in us.” We can no longer be sick or weak or sinful in any, even the least degree, for these things are incompatible with the fulness of life we receive in Christ. This extreme doctrine of the mystical indwelling may be thought to be already prepared for by a distinction which Mr. Boardman had made a few years earlier, between the dwelling of the Spirit with us and in us. “Our Saviour makes this distinction,” he writes (p. 90) in his book, “In the Power of the Spirit,”⁷² “in connection with the promise of the Spirit as an indwelling one, ‘who is with you and shall be in you.’ The Spirit is with us to convince of sin before we are converted and to regenerate us in the new birth; and He is with us afterwards to work in us everything that is of God. But this is an entirely different thing from His coming to possess us fully for God as His temple; to purify us to God as His peculiar possession, purchased by the blood of the Son of God; fill us with all the fulness of God; attend us by the might of God; and preserve us blameless unto the coming of Christ.” But it belongs distinctively to Mr. Boardman’s later years and supplants in them the clever theory by which he reconciled, perhaps with a greater measure of success than any other theorizer of his school, the contradictory requirements that the Christian must receive in Christ immediate sanctification, and that the Christian’s sanctification must be a progressive attainment.

Of course it is easy to say that the sanctification received at once in Christ is not a real sanctification; it is only sanctification to the consciousness of the Christian himself. This might be expressed by saying that what the Christian receives at once when he receives Christ for sanctification is not sanctification but peace. Here is the root of the phraseology which speaks of this experience as obtaining “rest in Christ.” But this only uncovers to us the ingrained eudaemonism of the whole Higher Christian Life movement. It is preoccupied with the pursuit of happiness and tends in many ways to subordinate everything else to it. It is no accident that the title of Hannah Whitall Smith’s chief book is “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.” And it is no accident that Isaac M. See’s book bears the title, “The Rest of Faith.”⁷³ Men grow weary of serving the Lord; they do not wish to fight to win the prize; they prefer to be carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease.

It will have been, no doubt, noticed that in his presentation of his notion of the Higher Christian Life Mr. Boardman has left a place for the divine initiative. The sanctification of the Christian is, in his view, in such a sense in Christ, that it is really Christ—or the Holy Spirit—who sanctifies him, according to His own plan and by means of His own working. This leaves a place for a doctrine of assurance—in which indeed, as we have seen, Mr. Boardman’s doctrine of sanctification very largely consists; and for a necessarily correlated doctrine of perseverance. In these respects Mr. Boardman’s mode of presenting the idea of the Higher Christian Life has an immense advantage over that which has been more common later. It seems really to suspend upon God the sanctification of the Christian, instead of, as has been common later, suspending the sanctifying work of God on the Christian. Whether Mr. Boardman was prepared, however, to go the whole way here, and to recognize without reserve, with Paul, that in all ways and in all respects it is “of God that we are in Christ Jesus,” may admit of some doubt. In his later years at least he had fallen away from, if he had ever heartily embraced, that pure confession. We find him at the Oxford Union Meeting in 1874,⁷⁴ saying: “ ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ Each one has to open. A very little latch will keep a door fast,—a rusty lock will keep it very fast. You must undo the fastenings. It is not His way to force the door.” This sounds like the familiar teaching of the Pelagianizers: Christ is dependent in His action on our pleasure, and works—can work—only when we release Him for working. Theodore Monod on the next page, puts the general notion at its height. “Believing, we shall have life through the Lord Jesus. How much life? Precisely as much as we trust Him for. Christ is to each one what each one expects Him to be: if nothing be expected, He is nothing; if little, little; if much, much; if everything, everything.” If this be true, then it is not Christ who regulates our activities, and so secures our sanctification; but we who regulate His activities, and so secure our own sanctification. Christ is merely the instrument at our disposal by means of which we may sanctify ourselves—and we may use Him at our will, little or much, inefficiently or efficiently, according to our choice. Mr. Murray Shipley declares this in open language.⁷⁵ There is “limitless power” in Christ for us, he tells us; and then he exhorts us: “The power is yours—use it!” He even compares it to electricity and magnetism—forces lying at our disposal, for us to use as we list. This conception is the precise antipodes of that to which Mr. Boardman more happily gives expression, when he tells us that the Christ whom we receive within us by faith sanctifies us by bringing us progressively to the knowledge of the sins which we ignorantly commit and delivering us from them one after another as they emerge in our consciousness. It is a matter of regret that it supplanted both in his own later teaching and in the teaching of his successors that better doctrine.

His successors naturally were numerous, and varied very much in the details of their teaching.⁷⁶ It was, however, in Mr. and Mrs. Robert Pearsall Smith that the movement which he had inaugurated found its most capable propagators and it was through them that it attained its widest extension and its most lasting influence.⁷⁷ Both Mr. and Mrs. Smith were born and bred Quakers. They did not receive, however, their doctrine of the Higher Christian Life from their Quaker inheritance. Mr. Smith indeed shows little or no Quaker influence in his teaching. He was through most of his active life a member of the Presbyterian Church, though, when he appeared as the leader of the Higher Life movement in London in 1873, he had renounced all ecclesiastical connection and presented himself as an unattached teacher, who would fain serve all denominations alike. Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, remained essentially a Quaker throughout life, or, as it would be more accurate to say, grew steadily more and more Quaker. There is scarcely a distinctively Quaker conception which does not find expression at some time or other in her writings.⁷⁸ In her later years, even the fundamental mystical doctrine of the “divine seed”⁷⁹ is quite clearly enunciated and the characteristic Higher Life teaching developed out of it. “There is … in every man,” she expounds,⁸⁰ “a seed of the divine life, a Christ-germ as it were. The old Quakers called it ‘the witness for God in the soul,’ ‘that which corresponds to the divine inspeaking.’ ” This same seed, she explains, while in everyone, is not quickened in all. But “whenever we feel inward stirrings and longings after holiness,” “the divine seed within us is being quickened.” “This is the begetting of God.” That is precisely Robert Barclay over again.⁸¹ But now Mrs. Smith goes on: “Then comes in our responsibility. We cannot create life, but we can let life live. We can ‘lay hold’ of it by an entire surrender to Christ, who is our life. We can accept Him as our life, and can refuse to let any other life live in us.” “This, then, is how the spiritual life is to grow; that is, by surrender and faith. We must ‘boycott’ the old self-life, and must deal only with the spiritual life. But we must not make another mistake, and think that although we cannot beget life by our self-efforts, we are to make it grow ourselves. We are as powerless in the matter of our growth as in the matter of our begetting. Life grows of itself. It is a mighty dynamic force that only asks a chance to grow. The lily grows by the power of its inward life principle, and according to the laws of a lily’s life. No amount of its own stretching or straining, nor any pulling up by others, would help its growth. It is all folly, and worse than folly, for Christians to make such mighty efforts to grow. If they would only let the Christ life within them grow, unhindered by their interference, they need have no fear of the result.”

According to this, every man is born with a Christ-germ in him. It needs only quickening. There is to be no new creation, therefore, but only a rousing into activity of something already existing. The Holy Spirit quickens this Christ-germ. Then we come into play. Whether this new-born life is to live depends on us. We had no power to quicken the Christ-germ into activity. But it has no such power of life in it as to force itself on us. We have to decide whether it shall live or not. Only if we welcome it will it live. Our welcoming of it is described, however, very lamely, and is made purely negative. It consists of a duplex act, surrender and faith. That is all we have to do, but our doing it is, somehow, the essential condition of the living of the new-born life quickened in us. We must not do anything or try to do anything positive, looking to the cherishing of this new-born life. Hands off!—that is the only thing we are to do. Perceiving it to be quickened—“feeling inward strivings and longings”—we must just stand aside and let it grow. That is the condition of its growing. This purely negative act is oddly described as “ ‘lay[ing] hold’ of it, by an entire surrender to Christ.” No wonder the words “lay hold” are put between quotation marks. “Surrendering” seems more like letting go than taking hold. And indeed letting go is what we are being told to do. It is miscalled “accepting” therefore. The attitude is one of complete passivity. We have nothing to do with the begetting of this new life and we have nothing to do with its growth. “Life grows of itself.” We feel the life stirring in us. We know ourselves to be alive in Christ because of it. And then, finger on lip, we softly step aside, and—let it grow. The condition of its growth is that we should thus step aside. That is Mrs. Smith’s exposition of the Christian life. No, it does not sound like Paul’s, “Work out your own salvation.” Nor like Christ’s, “Strive—agonize—to enter in by the narrow door.” It is just quietistic mysticism. There is some talk, no doubt, of our feeding our spiritual life on Christ, and that not merely by contemplation but by following Him—imitatio Christi. But that is a false note here, and we soon are brought back to the declaration that our fruit-bearing is not to be by effort, “but by spontaneous growth.” We are not to trouble ourselves about it, any more than the fig-tree troubles itself about its fruit. Effort to bear fruit is like tying apples on a tree: they are not the fruit of the tree unless they are spontaneously produced.

Mrs. Smith became perfectly well aware, then, that her teaching was in its essence genuinely Quaker teaching: and she delighted to present it in its organic relation with Quaker teaching. But she did not get it from the Quakers. She got it from the Methodists. Having got it from the Methodists, however, she recognized it as Quaker teaching also and rejoiced in that fact.⁸² “My dear father,” she tells us,⁸³ “who was a genuine Quaker, as well as a most delightful one, owned to it. At the earliest opportunity I told him of our new discovery, and said, ‘And now, father, is not this the secret of thy life and the source of thy strength? Is not this the way thou hast always lived?’ I shall never forget his reply. ‘Why, of course it is, daughter,’ he said, with a joyous ring of triumph in his voice.…” But “I must confess,” adds Mrs. Smith,⁸⁴ “that, although we found … that the Friends did actually teach it, yet it was among the Methodists we received the clearest light.” Having got it from the Methodists moreover, she got it in that distinctively Methodist form which separates justification and sanctification as two distinct experiences, and this is the form in which she teaches it throughout the whole course of the Higher Life Movement, though she reverted from it later to the Quaker form. “The Methodists were very definite about it,” she writes⁸⁵ in her old age. “They taught definitely that there were two experiences in the Christian life, the first being justification, and the second sanctification, and they urged Christians not to be satisfied with justification (i.e., forgiveness) merely, but also to seek sanctification or the ‘second blessing,’ as they called it, as well. I should not myself express the truth in this fashion now, but at that time I must acknowledge it was most helpful.” In point of fact, this distinction between justification and sanctification was the hinge on which her whole Higher Life teaching turned, as we shall have occasion to note later.

Robert Pearsall Smith was born in Philadelphia, February 1, 1827, and died in England, at the age of 72, April 17, 1899. His wife, Hannah Whitall Smith, was some five years his junior (she was born in Philadelphia in 1832) and outlived him a dozen years, passing away in a serene old age at her English home in her eightieth year. Both had been born into Christian homes and had lived from their earliest years under exceptionally winning Christian influences. But it was not until the summer of 1858 that they found their “all-sufficient Saviour,” by a happy coincidence both on the same day.⁸⁶ The language in which Mrs. Smith speaks of their experience of conversion is enthusiastic. In it they came “to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ” as their “all-sufficient Saviour”: in it they “by faith in Him were ‘born again’ into the family of God.” We gather from certain “old papers” which she quotes in her biographical sketch of her son Frank, that they entered by it into a very happy Christian life.⁸⁷

As the years passed, however, they became dissatisfied with their Christian attainments. They wanted, not a future deliverance only, but a present deliverance. For this they strove, but with only indifferent success. Looking back on these years Mr. Smith came to speak of them as “long and toilsome” years of “legality.” Mrs. Smith fell into a most unhappy condition of questioning the justice of God, for which she found relief only by adopting a doctrine of universal salvation. “I began to feel,” she says,⁸⁸ “that the salvation in which I had been rejoicing was, after all, a very limited and very selfish salvation, and, as such, unworthy of the Creator who has declared so emphatically that his ‘tender mercies are over all His works,’ and above all unworthy of the Lord Jesus Christ, who came into the world for the sole and single purpose of saving the world. I could not believe that His life and death for us could be meant to fall so far short of remedying the evil that He came on purpose to remedy, and I felt it must be impossible that there could be any short-coming in the salvation He had provided.” She was already arguing from the “completeness” of Christ’s salvation to effects she imagined must therefore be included in it.

Soon she carried the argument one step farther. From her immediately subsequent point of view, she explains:⁸⁹ “We had … learned thoroughly the blessed truth of justification by faith, and rejoiced in it with great joy. But here we had stopped. The equally blessed twin truth of sanctification by faith had not yet been revealed to us.” This new revelation came to them in the later sixties—we may apparently date it in its culmination somewhere about 1867. How it came Mrs. Smith describes in its broad outlines in “The Record of a Happy Life,” published in 1873.⁹⁰ “In the fall of the year 1866, there came as Tutor to Frank, a young Baptist theological student. He had not been long in our house, before we discovered that he had a secret of continual victory and abiding rest of which we were ignorant. After watching him for many months, continually impressed with the wonderful purity and devotedness of his life, we began to ask him about it. And he told us that his simple secret was faith. He trusted, and Jesus delivered. He laid the care of his life, moment by moment, on the Lord, and the Lord took it, and made his life moment by moment what He would have it be. It was a wonderful revelation. At the same time, some of the workmen in our factory, having also come into the experience of this life of faith, began to come to our house to talk about it; and we all attended … a little evening meeting, held for the consideration and promotion of this truth.” The result was at last, that “… (we) were brought out into a clear knowledge of the truth of sanctification by faith, and realized in the wondrous peace, and victory, and liberty of this new life, that we had known before only half the gospel.”

Details are added in later accounts. The Smiths were now living at Millville, New Jersey, whither they had removed in the autumn of 1864 to take charge of the glass-factories there, belonging to the firm of Whitall, Tatum & Co. A little Methodist dressmaker in the village became Mrs. Smith’s Priscilla;⁹¹ Mr. Smith found his Aquila among the Methodist workmen in his factory:⁹² these took them unto them and expounded unto them the way of God more carefully. The Methodist Holiness Meetings became their resort: Inskip, McDonald, Methodist Holiness revivalists, became to them household names⁹³—and they soon found themselves enthusiastic adherents of the Wesleyan doctrine of sanctification by faith. There were points no doubt at which they held back. Even in the glow of her new discovery Mrs. Smith, while crying out with fervor, “And this is the Methodist ‘blessing of holiness,’ ” feels bound to add,⁹⁴ “Couched by them it is true in terms that I cannot altogether endorse, and held amid what seems to me a mixture of error, but still really and livingly experienced and enjoyed by them.” Despite these minor reserves she was not backward in acknowledging that she owed her new Blessing to the Methodists, and what she now began to teach was in essence what they taught. Mr. Smith was won to the new doctrine with more difficulty; it was Mrs. Smith herself who put the finishing touches to his conversion. “At first my husband felt somewhat frightened. He continually fell back on the argument that the ‘old man’ must always bring us into bondage. ‘Impossible or not,’ I said, ‘it is certainly in the Bible, and I would like to know what thee thinks of Romans 6:6. What can this mean but that the power of sin is really to be conquered, so that we no longer need to serve sin! ‘Startled, he exclaimed, ‘There is no such passage in the Bible.’ ‘Oh! yes there is,’ I replied, and turning to my Bible I showed it to him. With this verse, of course, he had been familiar, but it now appeared as if he had never seen it before. It brought conviction, however, and from that time he did not rest until he had discovered the truth for himself.”⁹⁵ Hermann Benser is quite right therefore when he emphasizes that it was under Methodist influences that Mr. Smith attained his new point of view;⁹⁶ and Theodor Jellinghaus⁹⁷ is entirely accurate when he pronounces him a spiritual pupil of Inskip, Upham and Boardman, but equally right when he adds: “In his doctrine and mode of presenting it he agrees, however, most closely with Boardman.”⁹⁸

With his characteristic enthusiasm Mr. Smith gave himself, at once on acquiring his new views, to their zealous propagation. His chief book, “Holiness through Faith,” after having appeared first in instalments in a periodical, was published in 1870. In the summer of 1871 he experienced at a Methodist Camp Meeting, in immediate response to prayer, what he understood to be “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” equipping him for fuller service. His description of that experience is very striking.⁹⁹ His whole being was inexpressibly filled with God, so that he was less conscious of what his senses presented to his apprehension than of what was revealed to him within and no creature was so real to his soul as the Creator Himself: losing nothing of his sense-perception, everything was yet glorified by the divine revelation. Mrs. Smith gives us a temperate account of the occurrence. “The truth came to me,” she says,¹⁰⁰ “with intellectual conviction and delight; my husband, being more of an emotional nature, received the Blessing in true Methodist fashion, and came home full of Divine glow. He said he had retired to the woods to continue the prayer by himself. The whole world seemed transformed to him. This ecstasy lasted for weeks, and was the beginning of a wonderful career of power and blessing.” It was in the power of this endowment that he appeared in London in the spring of 1873 as a world-evangelist.¹⁰¹ We have already spoken of the remarkable meetings begun in London in the spring of 1873, which ran up to the great Oxford Union Meeting of August 29 to September 7, 1874. Mr. Boardman participated in them, but they were Mr. Smith’s meetings; and by the time that the Broadlands Conference of July 17–23 and very especially the Oxford Union Meeting was reached, Mr. Boardman had fallen well into the background.¹⁰² The Oxford Meeting was called by Mr. Smith, was presided over by him, was governed in all its details by him with calculated adjustment to the effect desired, and was, in a word, but an instrument of his propaganda. The effect of the meeting was nothing less than amazing; and from it the propaganda was widened out with great energy and skill to cover all Britain, and then carried over to the Continent. Mr. Smith himself, on the invitation of highly-placed theologians, bore it to Berlin where, on the request of the Court-preacher Baur, the Emperor placed the old Garrison Church at his disposal. From Berlin he went to Basel, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, down the Rhine to Bonn, and thence to Barmen, everywhere arousing the greatest enthusiasm and leaving permanent results—although he could address his audiences only through an interpreter, and could only shout to them as his battle cry a single sentence in their own language, the refrain of a hymn composed for the meetings by Pfarrer Gebhardt of Zurich—Jesus errettet mich jetzt, “Jesus saves me now.”¹⁰³ Meanwhile preparations were making in England for the holding of another great international convention which should surpass even the Oxford Meeting. It was held at Brighton from May 29 to June 7, 1875, when the climax was reached. Mr. Smith again presided and again was the chief speaker. The enthusiasm already at a high pitch was raised still higher. Plans were laid for continuing the campaign vigorously throughout England—when suddenly it was announced that all of Mr. Smith’s engagements were cancelled and he had returned to America. That was his dramatic definitive disappearance from public life.

What had happened to occasion this sudden withdrawal at its very culminating point from a work enthusiastically prosecuted was not fully made known to the public. Mr. Smith had had a fall from his horse in 1861 which had been followed by congestion of the brain and long-continued distressing nervous symptoms;¹⁰⁴ and it was understood that it was to seek relief from some of the sequelæ of this accident that he had come to Europe in 1873.¹⁰⁵ It was said that a return of this disorder now rendered a complete rest imperative. But the public knew very well that this was not all that was to be said. The air was full of rumors of the most disquieting kind; Theodor Jellinghaus characterizes them as “a stream of the most rancorous and malignant calumnies,” to which no one who has any respect for the ninth commandment should listen.¹⁰⁶ The rumors were not, however, without foundation in fact. And Mr. Smith’s friends were compelled before the end of the year to issue an explanation. This explanation was signed by S. A. Blackwood, Evan H. Hopkins, Marcus Martin, Donald Matheson, R. C. Morgan, Lord Radstock, J. B. Smithers, and Henry Varley, and ran as follows: “Rumors of an exceedingly painful character with regard to a prominent teacher, which had for some time been in private circulation, having now had currency given to them in your and other papers, we consider it right, in the interests of truth, and in justice to the person in question, to make the following statement:—Some weeks after the Brighton Convention, it came to our knowledge that the individual referred to had, on some occasions in personal conversation, inculcated doctrines which were most unscriptural and dangerous. We also found there had been conduct which, although we were convinced that it was free from evil intention, was yet such as to render action necessary on our part. We therefore requested him to abstain at once from all public work, and when the circumstances were represented to him in their true light, he entirely acquiesced in the propriety of this course, and recognized with deep sorrow the unscriptural and dangerous character of the teaching and conduct in question. In addition to the above, a return of the distressing attacks of the brain, from which he had previously suffered, rendered the immediate cessation from work an absolute necessity.” This statement, it will be observed, makes it clear that Mr. Smith’s withdrawal from the public agitation in the interests of the Higher Christian Life which was being vigorously carried on under his leadership, was not at his own instance or primarily on account of illness: his illness is brought in very pointedly as subsidiary and apparently as a subsequently arising justification of his retirement. His withdrawal was compelled by the intervention of his fellow-workers in the agitation, and that distinctly on the double ground of erroneous teaching and faulty conduct. Precisely what the nature of his “unscriptural and dangerous” teaching was, and exactly what the conduct was¹⁰⁷ which compelled intervention, the statement does not tell us, and a certain obscurity hangs about the matter accordingly until to-day.¹⁰⁸ It seems, however, to have been no secret at the time that Mr. Smith’s dereliction was just that he had “lapsed into antinomianism,”¹⁰⁹ and one of the journals of the day tells us more explicitly,¹¹⁰ that “the special error against which the gentlemen above named protested was the positive and unqualified assertion, that those who are ‘in Christ’ are no longer subject to the law of God, as the rule of their conduct; that they are lifted to a higher sphere of life, and walk in a freedom unknown to those who are strangers to the exalted experience of the new and better life.”

This was the end of Mr. Smith’s public career. He had yet a quarter of a century to live, a quarter of a century of suffering and seclusion after that short decade of exciting agitation and popular applause. A short, pathetic note from his wife to Mr. J. B. Figgis, one of his companions in that agitation, written in the midst of this quarter of a century (March 29, 1883) may contain the essential story of the whole of it: and it seems to us that it may bring us some aid—the aid of significant silences—to an understanding of what had happened following the Brighton Conference in 1875. “Mr. Smith’s health,” writes Mrs. Smith,¹¹¹ “is very poor, and he is obliged to live a very quiet and domestic life. He thinks he cannot live long, but, of course, this is something we know nothing about. Some physicians say that he has a very serious heart trouble. I believe myself that the springs of his life were sapped in 1874, and that existence can never be anything but weariness and suffering to him again in this world.”

In our absorption in Mr. Smith’s remarkable career we must not forget the woman by his side. We have seen her finding Christ as her “all-sufficient Saviour” on the same day with him;¹¹² and afterwards, when she had discovered that she had not, after all, found Christ as her “all-sufficient Saviour” but only as her halfway Saviour, leading him with her into the devious pathway of “the second blessing” of “holiness by faith.” The immediately subsequent years of eager propagation of this new-found gospel were as much hers as his. At the great Oxford and Brighton meetings she played almost as great a part as he did. Every day she gave a Bible reading, ostensibly to the ladies, really to the gathering crowds.¹¹³ “But there were other portions of the day,” writes Mr. J. B. Figgis, of the Oxford Meeting,¹¹⁴ “at which some special speaker had the whole attention of the audience. This was especially the case at 3 o’clock each afternoon, when Mrs. Pearsall Smith gave a Bible Reading. Anything more impressive or delightful … than this series of addresses we never remember hearing.” Of the Brighton Convention he writes:¹¹⁵ “Such was the enthusiasm that each afternoon people crowded together to listen to Bible-readings by Mrs. Pearsall Smith, with interest so keen that the Great Dome could not hold the numbers that came; and after the earliest days the readings had to be repeated an hour later in the Corn Exchange.” She shared also, in a measure, her husband’s retirement after 1875, but not with such complete, as not with such enforced, silence. Mr. Smith’s literary as well as oral propaganda now came to an end.¹¹⁶ Mrs. Smith, on the other hand, although from this time on she appeared only occasionally on public platforms, merely shifted her constant activity into more literary channels. Her calmness of disposition and greater facility of literary expression would have given her, in any event, a much larger hearing in this department of labor than her husband could ever have aspired to. Her book, “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” first published in 1875, has sold in innumerable editions, and Mr. Figgis feels able to say of it¹¹⁷ that “with a wider circulation than any other book on holiness,” it has had “greater effect in leading pilgrims to this River than any other writing of any other man or woman of the time, with the possible exception of some of Miss Havergal’s.” Of her writings in general he declares¹¹⁸ that they have done “more than any publications ever written to extend the knowledge of the truth of sanctification.” Through them¹¹⁹ Mrs. Smith very easily becomes one of the most conspicuous figures and one of the most influential factors in the Higher Life movement.

The hinge on which the whole system of Mr. and Mrs. Pearsall Smith’s Higher Life teaching turns is the separation of sanctification from justification as a distinct attainment in Christ.¹²⁰ Sanctification is not thought of by them as involved in justification, and necessarily issuing from it in the unfolding of the salvation received through faith in the “all-sufficient Saviour.” It is thought of, on the contrary, as a wholly new acquisition, sought and obtained by an entirely fresh act of faith. The fundamental fact of their religious experience was that they were dissatisfied with the results of their acceptance of Christ as their “all-sufficient Saviour, bearing” their “sins in His own body on the tree.”¹²¹ They felt the imperative need of a fuller salvation than that exercise of faith had as yet brought them, and they were unwilling to await God’s slow methods of developing this fuller salvation through the conflicts of life. They supposed themselves to have obtained it at once by supplementing their first faith, through which they had received only justification, by an additional faith,¹²² through which they received sanctification. And this they proclaimed to be really God’s appointed way for the sanctification of His children. Their whole gospel consists essentially, therefore, in the proclamation of what they speak of as “sanctification by faith,” by which they mean immediate sanctification by a special exercise of faith directed to that particular end. They imagine that thus they escape the necessity of awaiting the completion of salvation only in some future experience. Though it comes in two separate stages, it does not come in their view by process. Each of these stages is an immediate attainment following at once on the exercise of a faith particularly for its attainment. We are freed from the guilt of sin by one act of faith, and we are freed from the power of sin by another act of faith. It is the immediacy of the effect which is the point of chief insistence: the suspension of it on faith alone is only a means to that end. Hence the watchwords, “A present salvation”—“Jesus saves me now!” and “Sanctification by faith alone”—“Not by works or by effort, but by faith.”¹²³

This is what Mrs. Smith means when she describes the gospel which they proclaimed as “the glad tidings of a sufficiency to be found in the Lord Jesus, not only for our future salvation, but for our utmost present needs as well.”¹²⁴ The present need which she has in mind is “real and present victory” over sin. And this is what Theodor Jellinghaus means when he explains¹²⁵ that the essential teaching of the Oxford Union Meeting was that “Jesus’ blood, death and resurrection has delivered and delivers us not only from the guilt of sin, but also from all the power of sin, according to the Scriptures; that our sanctification comes not in parts through our efforts and self-mortifications according to the law, but through surrendering trust in Christ’s redemptive power and leading.” The words are capable of a good sense, as also are the words of his crisper statement: “Jesus is for every believing Christian a present deliverer, who lets none sit and sigh in the bonds of sin.” But this good sense is not the sense intended. The sense intended is that those who have been justified by faith may attain sanctification also with equal immediacy by an equally simple exercise of faith. This is, of course, perfectionism. The exact variety of perfectionism that it is may be the object of further enquiry, but it is already declared in this general statement that what is taught is some form of perfectionism. The immediate attainment of sanctification and perfectionism are convertible terms.

The whole whirlwind campaign conducted by Mr. Smith from 1873 to 1875 was simply a concerted “drive” of American Perfectionism on the European stronghold.¹²⁶ It is interesting to observe the forces converging to the assault at the Oxford Union Meeting. The presence on the platform there of Dr. Asa Mahan, the chief figure among the Oberlin Perfectionists, by the side of Mr. Boardman and Mr. Smith, reveals the significance of that meeting to the leaders of all types of the perfectionist movement and their united effort to secure through it their common ends. Whatever differences may have existed among them in details of teaching, they were conscious of unity among themselves and between them and their Wesleyan colleagues, in the main object in view. In point of fact, Dr. Mahan was in complete harmony with Mr. Smith in the essence of the matter. For him, too, sanctification—and he at least felt no hesitation in saying that he meant “perfect sanctification”—was at any moment obtainable by the Christian by a simple act of faith. For him, too, this sanctification was the work of the indwelling Christ alone. And for him, too, all effort on our part in the working of it out was excluded.¹²⁷

Even on one point on which we might expect to find Dr. Mahan more decided than Mr. Smith there is no real difference between them, although Dr. Mahan gives to his exposition of it a somewhat greater fulness. We mean the reference to the sinner’s own will of the really decisive action in every stage of his salvation, so that it may properly be said that his salvation continuously hangs purely on himself. Nothing could exceed the decisiveness of Mr. Smith’s statements. The apostle Peter, referring to the case of Cornelius and his companions, speaks (Acts 15:9) of God “purifying their hearts by faith.” He is not speaking here of sanctification, it is true; but Mr. Smith takes him as if he were. The point to observe is that the passage, so understood, raises no barrier to Mr. Smith’s affirming sharply, “We purify ourselves.” God purifies us, says Peter; we purify ourselves, says Mr. Smith. We purify ourselves, but only by faith; and because we purify ourselves by faith, that means that we purify ourselves by using God to purify us; we by faith secure the purifying of our hearts by God. That is Mr. Smith’s meaning when he says¹²⁸—to quote the sentence fully now—“We purify ourselves, not by effort, but by faith; not by works, but by the precious blood of Christ.” He does not dream of questioning that it is we that purify ourselves: it is only a question of how we do it. He goes further, and declares that even the maintenance of our purified condition depends wholly on ourselves. “This clean and humble condition, however,” he continues, “is ours only while the blood is applied by faith, for the very moment faith ceases to apply it, corruption ensues, and the same old bitter waters flow out.”

It is not possible for Dr. Mahan, then, to be more decided than Mr. Smith is, in referring our sanctification wholly to ourselves as its procuring cause, at the very same moment that he is referring it to God as its effecting cause. But Dr. Mahan explains more fully how the matter is arranged.¹²⁹ The sinner, according to him, has power to “avail himself of proffered grace,” to “abide in Christ.” And, having this power, it is his part to exercise it; and when he exercises it he is properly said to sanctify himself—though, of course, it is the grace of which he avails himself, the Christ in whom he abides, that immediately works the sanctification. “The sinner,” he says, “is able to make himself a ‘new heart and a new spirit,’ because he can instantly avail himself of proffered grace. He does literally ‘make to himself a new heart and a new spirit,’ when he yields himself up to the influence of that grace. The power to cleanse from sin lies in the blood and grace of Christ; and hence, when the sinner ‘purifies himself by obeying the truth through the spirit,’ the glory of his salvation belongs, not to him, but to Christ.” It is our business to “yield ourselves up to the influence of grace,” which is identified with abiding in Christ. “We can ‘abide in Christ,’ and thus bring forth the fruit required of us.” But it is the grace to which we yield ourselves, the Christ in whom we abide, that is the immediate worker of the actual effect. “Herein also lies the ability of the creature to obey the commands of God, addressed to us as redeemed sinners.” We cannot obey them directly by our own act, but we can obey them, indirectly, by using Christ as an instrument through which we may perform what is required of us. “ ‘He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing.’ ‘As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me.’ These declarations are literally and unqualifiedly true. We can ‘abide in Christ,’ and thus bring forth the fruit required of us. If by unbelief we separate ourselves from Christ, we of necessity descend, under the weight of our own guilt and depravity, down the sides of the pit, into the eternal sepulchre.” It is not Christ in the last analysis that sanctifies us: He is merely the instrument through which we perform this work. Facit per alium facit per se: we are our own sanctifiers. Nevertheless, Christ is the sole instrument through which we can sanctify ourselves, and therefore faith, or “abiding in Christ,” is the sole thing we have to do in the matter. And here comes in the Quietism of this teaching. “There is one circumstance connected with my recent experience,” says Dr. Mahan,¹³⁰ “to which I desire to turn the special attention of the reader. I would here say, that I have forever given up all idea of resisting temptation, subduing any lust, appetite, or propensity, or of acceptably performing any service for Christ, by the mere force of my own resolutions. If my propensities, which lead to sin, are crucified, I know that it must be done by an indwelling Christ. If I overcome the world, this is to be the victory, ‘even our faith.’ If the great enemy is to be overcome, it is to be done ‘by the blood of the Lamb.’ ” We sanctify ourselves; but we do it only by faith. Beyond faith there is nothing for us to do. The Christ, released for the sanctifying work by faith, does the rest; and we must leave it to Him wholly. In all these matters Mr. Smith’s teaching simply repeats Dr. Mahan’s.

The primary zeal of these writers is naturally to establish the completeness of the sanctification which we receive immediately on faith. This amounts in their hands, as it amounted in the hands of the Wesleyans, to an attempt to substitute a doctrine of Perfectionism for the doctrine of Perseverance, and to discover the completeness of salvation in what we find in our possession, rather than in “what we shall be,” which an apostle tells us is not yet made manifest. A very good example of how Scripture is dealt with in this interest is supplied by the address which Dr. Mahan delivered at the first morning hour of the first full day of the Oxford Union Meeting.¹³¹ He seizes here upon the declaration of Heb. 7:25, that Christ is able to save to the uttermost them that come unto God by Him. The idea of the “uttermost” of this passage includes that of “glorification.” As A. B. Davidson puts it (“The Epistle to the Hebrews,” p. 142): “The offering of Christ enables men to draw near unto God; those that thus draw near He is able to save completely, to bring them through all hindrances to that honour and glory designed for them, which He Himself has reached as the Captain of their salvation.” But for this Dr. Mahan has no consideration. He emphasizes merely the strong assertion of the completeness of Christ’s salvation contained in the word, and then demands, dramatically: “Why is that power in Christ revealed, if we are not to avail ourselves of it? Why are we told what He is able to do, if we suppose that He is not ready to do it, or that we are not authorized to expect it?” “Expand your hearts,” he exhorts us; “expect to receive, and receive all that He is able to do.” “It is a great sin,” he declares, “to ‘limit the Holy One of Israel.’ ‘Save to the uttermost!’ Dare to cease to limit His power, and take Christ at His word!” The response, of course, rises to the lips of every simple believer—that the power of Christ to save to the uttermost is the foundation of all our hope, and that everyone who believes in Him commits himself to Him for this and nothing less; we do, all of us, expect to receive and do receive it all, without limitation and without diminution, and in this expectation, sure and steadfast, lies all our comfort and all our joy. But the revelation of it would not need to be made to us—we would not need to be told of it—if it were a present experience, not a matter of hope. Nor would the revelation made in this great declaration be true, if the measure of salvation we have already received were all that we could look to Him for, if a complete salvation both of soul and body were not the portion of His saints. And certainly it would not be true if even the measure of salvation we have already received from Him were unstable or liable to be lost to-morrow, its maintenance depending not on Him but on us. The whole force of the declaration hangs precisely upon our being as yet viatores, not consummatores; exactly what it does is to give us assurance of the consummation. The state of that Christian is sad indeed who must believe that what he already is is the uttermost which Christ is able to do for him, and that henceforth he must depend on himself.

On the afternoon of the very same day, Mr. Smith, in the very same spirit, exhorted his hearers not to put an arbitrary limitation on the power of God by postponing the completion of their salvation to the end of their “pilgrimage,” and so virtually attributing to death the sanctifying work which they ought to find rather in Christ. “Shall not Christ do more for you than death?” he demands, and then he develops a reductio ad absurdum. We expect a dying grace by which we shall be really made perfect. How long before death is the reception of such a grace possible? “An hour? A day? Peradventure a week? Possibly two or three weeks, if you are very ill? One good man granted this position until the period of six weeks was reached, but then said that more than six weeks of such living”—that is, of course, living in entire consecration and full trust, with its accompanying “victory”—“was utterly impossible!” “Are your views as to the limitations of dying grace,” he inquires, “only less absurd because less definite?” The absurdity lies, however, only in the assumption of this “dying grace”—Mr. Smith describes it as “a state of complete trust to be arrived at, but not until death.” The Scriptures know of no such thing; they demand complete trust from all alike, as the very first step of the conscious Christian life. It finds its real source in the Arminian notion that our salvation depends on our momentary state of mind and will at that particular moment. Whether we are ultimately saved or not will depend, then, on whether death catches us in a state of grace or fallen from grace. Our eternal future, thus, hangs quite absolutely on the state of mind we happen (happen is the right word here) to be in at the moment of death: nothing behind this momentary state of mind can come into direct consideration. This absurd over-estimate of the importance of the moment of dying is the direct consequence of the rejection of the Bible doctrine of Perseverance and the substitution for it of a doctrine of Perfection as the meaning of Christ being our Saviour to the uttermost. The real meaning of this great declaration is just that to trust in Jesus is to trust in One who is able and willing and sure to save to the uttermost—to the uttermost limit of the progress of salvation. Death in this conception of the saving Christ loses the factitious significance which has been given to it. Our momentary state of mind at the moment of death is of no more importance than our momentary state of mind at any other instant. We do not rest on our state of mind, but on Christ, and all that is important is that we are “in Christ Jesus.” He is able to save to the uttermost, and faithful is He that calls us, who also will do it. He does it in His own way, of course; and that way is by process—whom He calls He justifies, and whom He justifies He glorifies. He does it; and therefore we know that our glorification is as safe in His hands as is any other step of our salvation. To be progressively saved is, of course, to postpone the completion of our salvation to the end of the process. Expecting the end of the process only at the time appointed for it is no limitation upon the power of the Saviour; and looking upon death as the close of the process is a very different thing from looking upon death as a Saviour.

It will not require to be pointed out that the whole tendency of such arguments as we have just quoted is to establish the immediate attainment by faith of all that can be subsumed under the term “salvation.” Whatever Christ came to give is ours to-day—not in developing, but in developed form—for the taking. “You must agree with us,” says Mr. Smith,¹³² “that whatever the Holy Spirit makes us to yearn for, Christ came to give.” Once the chief need of our soul was pardon of our sins; we trusted Christ for it and got it. Now, says he, substitute for pardon, “purity of heart,” “holiness,” being “filled with the Spirit,” wholehearted “love to God and your neighbor,” or “righteousness.” Trust Christ for them and you shall have them all, in their completeness, here and now. Here is a doctrine of salvation, not by faith, but by faiths. Not content with dividing salvation into two halves, each of which is to be obtained by its own special act of faith, Mr. Smith pulverizes it into numerous distinct particles, each of which is to be sought and acquired by its own separate act of faith. The principle he lays down is that we are to trust in Christ for whatever our soul feels the need of, in each several instance, separately, and thus pile faith on faith. In this way we make our way through the Christian life by repeated acts of believing. Not only so, but it is to us in each several instance precisely according to our faith. “Full faith gives the full deliverance; partial faith the partial victory. So much faith, so much deliverance, no more, no less!”¹³³ It is our faith, then, which regulates our grace; and that means that it is we and not God who save. “The stream can ascend no higher than the passage that conveys its waters from the fountain. Faith is the channel. While the fountain is infinite in depth and in height, its flow is regulated by the channel opened for it.” Mr. Smith himself draws the inference with reference to sanctification, and that with the emphasis of italics. “If we would live up to the gospel standard of holiness, we must believe up to the gospel standard of faith.”¹³⁴ This is a dismal outlook for those of “little faith,” and indeed is as complete a doctrine of work-salvation as Pelagius’ own. We advert to it, however, only by the way, as illustrative of Mr. Smith’s general conception of “the way of life.” Despite the confidence with which it is presented, it is held in subordination to the dichotomizing of salvation into justification and sanctification—each the product of its own act of faith. It may serve, however, to make clear to us that Mr. Smith supposes sanctification to be attainable in its fulness by mere faith—provided, of course, the faith is full faith. He that yearns for perfect sanctification can have it on perfect faith. “Full faith gives the full deliverance.”

Precisely how Mr. Smith conceived his full sanctification, however, it requires some further discrimination to make clear. Theodor Jellinghaus wishes us not to confound it with the “perilous” Wesleyan doctrine of a complete deliverance from sin.¹³⁵ He is right in insisting on this. Mr. Smith, like Mr. Boardman before him, teaches only that we are saved from all sinning; Wesley, that we are saved from all sin. The way Jellinghaus expresses the distinction between the two parties is this:¹³⁶ “Whereas Wesley teaches a sudden destruction (einmaliges Ertöten) of sin, so that every sinful motion that shows itself afterwards is a proof of the loss of this stage of Christian perfection, they” (that is, Messrs. Boardman and Smith) “teach that the Christian who hungers after deeper sanctification enters, through complete surrender and trust in the power of the blood of Christ to cleanse and preserve from all sin, into such a condition of the soul that he can continuously conquer. If he, nevertheless, stumbles again, he is to confess and repent and be cleansed again, and then enter boldly at once again into the same condition.” They accordingly read 1 John 1:7, with an emphasis on the present tense: “If we walk in the light, the blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin,” and interpret it as meaning that our cleansing from sin is a continuous act. Wesley, on the contrary, read the text erroneously with a past tense: “The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed us from all sin,” and referred 1:8 to false teachers who denied that they were by nature sinful, needing redemption and purification by Christ. Jellinghaus goes on to say¹³⁷ that accordingly there was very little of the specifically Wesleyan doctrine heard at the Oxford Union Meeting. What was heard daily was declarations like these: “I feel my inward corruption more than ever”; “we remain in ourselves sinful and liable to sin”; “sinless perfection is pure nonsense—we do not dream of such a thing”; “no one can say I can be holy if I will”; “our strength in faith lies in the knowledge of our own sinfulness and inability to conquer”; “you cannot be cleansed to-day from all unconscious faults, but only from the faults and sins which God has as yet revealed to you”; “we are cleansed only according to our knowledge or our light, therefore as we advance we discover sins in us hitherto unknown, which must be destroyed”; “the sanctified Christian is not holy in his own nature, but only through a life of faith in Christ, which makes and preserves us holy”; “it is not sin that is dead, but we are dead to sin.” All this amounts only to saying that the precise teaching of Messrs. Boardman and Smith is that when we receive Christ for sanctification what we receive is a sanctifying power, able to make and keep us holy in all our acts. In his earlier and better period Mr. Boardman read the last clause, rather: “pledged to make and keep us holy in all our acts.” Mr. Smith reads it rather: “able to make and keep us holy in all our acts—if we constantly rest in perfect trust upon Him for it.” Thus he throws us back on our own activity to maintain (through Christ) our sanctification. The state itself into which we come by our trust is a state of sanctification, of holiness, of perfection; but a state of perfection of acts, not of heart, and so a state of perfection which has its seat not in us but in Christ. We are perfect as long as we abide in Christ. As Theodor Jellinghaus puts it:¹³⁸ “It is a fundamental idea of the holiness-movement that sanctification and undisturbable peace of heart may be found and maintained by believingly obedient rest on the sanctifying will and gracious leading of God in Christ Jesus.”

On its negative side this teaching denies that the sinful nature is eradicated. Mr. Smith’s language is not always exact in this matter. He speaks repeatedly of “the purification of the heart by faith”—partly, no doubt, because of his erroneous interpretation of Acts 15:9 of sanctification. He even sometimes speaks very confusingly of our having received “a new nature” when we believed, though, when he does so, he is careful to explain that the reception of this “new nature” has not extruded the old nature. “Being born of God,” he says,¹³⁹ “we received, in addition to the old nature (the flesh) a new nature, an actual existence begotten of God, of ‘incorruptible seed.’ ” He even speaks in one passage, indeed,¹⁴⁰ most inconsistently, as if we had been changed in our very being by our union with Christ. “Shall the larger part of my being be held by Satan? Nay, henceforth it shall gravitate, not toward sin, but toward God.… No longer ‘prone to wander,’ though liable to it every moment, the current of our being sets toward God and not toward sin.” All such language must be set down to the credit of traditional modes of expression intruding into Mr. Smith’s speech. It does not express his own point of view. This he declares most explicitly. “Remember,” says he,¹⁴¹ “that you are now no better in and of yourself—only you have learned that you may dare to trust Christ for more than you ever conceived of before.” He does not teach, he says,¹⁴² “perfection in the flesh,” but rather its exact antithesis. Nay, not only does there not dwell in the flesh any good thing, but “there never will be any good thing in it, or coming out of it.” The Articles of the Church of England speak truly when they say, “This infection of nature doth remain, yea, in them that are regenerate.” We are always to pray, “Forgive us our debts”—“for, even where we are not immediately conscious of displeasing God, there is so much in the debilitated condition of our moral nature, and in our lives, at an immense moral distance from the perfect holiness of God.” The passage from which we are quoting¹⁴³ bears on its face an apologetical character. Mr. Smith is obviously defending himself from criticisms which had been made of his doctrine. His defense consists in the very emphatic denial that the “infection of nature” is eradicated or that we are ever freed wholly from sin.

He does teach, however, on the positive side, as he gives us at once to understand,¹⁴⁴ that we are freed from sinning. Even here, however, a qualification is introduced. He does not teach that we are freed from all sinning, but only from all conscious sinning. He is willing to admit that there is a standard of holiness above the holiness to which he contends that we may attain. Our own perceptions of what is right and what is wrong do not constitute a final standard: “Christ is our only standard.” “Trespass against the known will of God” is therefore only “one, but not the only, definition of sin.” Under a higher definition of sin we could not claim to be free from sin; but under this lower definition of sin—which is one though not the only definition of sin—we are, on believing, made free from sin. We are not, then, “to ‘continue in sin,’ in the sense of known evil.”¹⁴⁵ “Christ came to save us from this.” This does not mean that Christ came to save us from this only. Christ meets “in the atonement, not only all conscious guilt, but also all unperceived evil in our moral condition or ways.” He saves us from all our guilt. But, besides saving us from our guilt, he saves us also from all conscious sinning. “Christ came to heal us, not to leave His Church one general hospital of sick souls”¹⁴⁶—a simile borrowed possibly from Isaac M. See¹⁴⁷ and running in its implications somewhat beyond Mr. Smith’s meaning. For Mr. Smith does not deny that the Church contains only sick souls. He only affirms that Christ, on being appealed to for that purpose, takes away all the sickness of which these souls are conscious. The Church may, and should, then, contain none who are consciously sick; and the simile is intended to affirm strongly that this is Christ’s purpose for His Church—that all its members should be free from all known sin. Christ “will give” us “not pardon only, but deliverance from the power and act of sin.”

Mr. Smith thus very distinctly teaches a perfectionism. But the perfectionism which he teaches is equally distinctly a subjective, not an objective, perfectionism. It might be described as living up to the light that is in us. “It is noticeable,” he says¹⁴⁸ “how constantly the Scripture speaks to our consciousness, rather than in absolute terms, carefully avoiding all metaphysical distinctions, and suiting its expressions to the realized need of the believing hearer.” Accordingly we must define both sin and holiness relatively to our consciousness. Sin is “the consciousness of transgression of God’s will”; holiness, “loving God with the whole heart, unconscious of any active, inward evil.” What is asked of us, he explains, is not perfect faultlessness, but “a conscience void of offence”; not “absolute perfection,” but living “up to the measure of today’s consciousness.” “The apostles,” says he,¹⁴⁹ “neither claim an absolute holiness, nor open the door for a defiled conscience.” He speaks on this subject from 2 Chron. 29:16, which tells us that the priests brought out of the temple all the uncleanness that they found in it. He emphasizes the words “all that they found.” “It was ‘all that they found,’ that they carried forth,” he says.¹⁵⁰ “We shall never know in this life the absolute purity of the Lord Jesus. We are, and ever shall be, at an immense moral distance from ‘the Holy One,’ but we cry to God for light to see the evil within us progressively as we are able to bear it; and we must accept strength from Him to ‘carry forth’ all that in our dim vision we can see of ‘filthiness out of the holy place.’ ” “There never was but One,” he says again,¹⁵¹ “who, from the cradle to the grave, was in every thought, affection, and action, a complete burnt-offering. Everything in us is short of the perfect holiness of Christ. Yet we may, up to the very furthest measure of our consciousness, present ourselves living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God. In each moment, as to the attitude of our souls we may, so far as we see and know, be wholly the Lord’s, yet, with each day’s increasing intelligence, being more and yet more completely the Lord’s.” “ ‘The blood cleanseth’—is ever cleansing sin from the conscience, as it is progressively revealed”; which is not exactly what 1 John 1:7 says.

We perceive that in this conception of the nature of holiness, as living up to the light that is in us, a doctrine of progressive sanctification is developed, which is in harmony with perfectionism. The light that is in us may increase, and as it increases we rise to ever higher planes of living, but not to greater perfection. We can be perfect at each stage, while no stage is final: “there is no finality short of the Throne of God.” My ignorance of God’s will at each stage will permit me to act contrary to His objective will and yet maintain “the Rest of Faith,” “entire consecration.” “I breathe to-day,” we are told,¹⁵² “the atmosphere of the love of God, every past sin forgiven, and, through the blood of cleansing, without a present sense of transgression,—not a cloud to separate me from God; but I may not be able to walk to-morrow with a clear conscience in all the paths I tread to-day.” “It follows from this,” we are told again,¹⁵³ “that persons who have great light in the teaching of Scripture may be walking outwardly in advance of the sanctified but ignorant Christian, while yet the one is sinning and under a sense of condemnation, and the other, more ignorant but more trusting, walks with a conscience void of offence.” A recently converted heathen, accordingly, living in a half-light, may commit many heathenish horrors and yet be none the less perfect. The standard being a subjective, not an objective one, our knowledge, not God’s law, Christian perfection does not mean the fulfilling of all that God requires of a Christian, but only of all that a Christian’s conscience, in its changing degrees of knowledge, requires from time to time of himself. The subjectiveness of the thought is intense, and one is tempted to apply the proverb, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”¹⁵⁴

Meanwhile Mr. Smith, on the basis of this theory of “adjusted holiness”—a phrase of W. B. Pope’s—is able to declare the Christian at every stage of his development perfect; and having done that, he permits the idea of perfection to run away with him. Because the Christian is “perfect” at every stage of his development, Mr. Smith forgets that this perfection is, according to his own teaching, an imperfect perfection, perfect only to the Christian’s consciousness; and that only the ultimate goal to which he is tending is objective perfection. He thinks now of an ever objectively perfect Christian advancing to a higher kind of perfection: the Christian is growing all the time, but he is growing not towards perfection—that he possesses all the time—but towards maturity. “Remember,” he counsels us,¹⁵⁵ “that soul-health is very different from maturity. The sour apples in April are perfect. In October they are mature or ‘perfected.’ At the best we are but ripening, and yet I do not shrink from Scripture terms. The Bible speaks of many perfect men—‘as many as be perfect’—but adds, ‘Not as though I were already perfected.’ Little children are ‘perfect’ in all their immaturity. Do not confound an unobtainable, absolute, or divine holiness with an attainable victory over known sin. When Paul asserted, ‘I know nothing against myself’—not as the ground of his justification, but of his conscience void of offence; and when John said, ‘We keep His commandments and do those things that are pleasing in His sight’; they neither claimed absolute holiness nor opened a door for a defiled conscience.” He is thinking here of the Christian’s growth as if it were a normal growth like the ripening of an apple, at every stage perfect for that stage. It seems to have escaped his mind that a Christian’s growth is a progressive cleansing from imperfections and has not “maturity” but “cleansing” as its goal. No doubt, says Johannes Jüngst,¹⁵⁶ properly, the growth which Mr. Smith’s simile pictures to us would be the normal development of the divine life in a sinless soul; but it is not such a development that we poor sinners must pass through, and Mr. Smith also allows that we are in this world poor sinners: which is much the same thing that Lyman H. Atwater means when he declares¹⁵⁷ that Mr. Smith and his companions describe in such passages not such a growth as takes place on earth, but that which takes place in heaven.

But Mr. Smith has another expedient by which the perfection of the imperfect Christian can be vindicated. When expounding his doctrine of merely subjective perfection, at one point,¹⁵⁸ he drops this remark: “This might be termed a Christian, not a Divine, nor an angelic nor yet an Adamic ‘perfection.’ ” That is to say, Christian perfection differs from all other kinds of perfection precisely in this, that it is not real perfection. That is a pity, if true, and provokes the jibe that one may then be a perfect Christian, it seems, without being a perfect man.¹⁵⁹ We are face to face here, in other words, with that Antinomian tendency which is the nemesis that follows on the heels of all forms of perfectionism. In order to vindicate the perfection of the Christian the perfection of his perfection is sacrificed. The cant phrase is that he is under no other law than that “of this dispensation,” as if the law of holiness were a mere body of positive enactments which might vary from time to time and is not grounded in the nature of things, to say nothing now of the Nature of God Himself. Mr. Smith runs through the whole wretched story.¹⁶⁰ “We are not called to the standard of a different dispensation from that in which our lives are to be lived. We are not called to walk by the rule of angels, … nor yet even by the rule of the yet unfallen Adam. Neither is our standard that which will be ours in glorified bodies.… The obedience to which Christ is wooing us is not the legal obedience, a stainless perfection of knowledge and act impossible to these clouded faculties.… We are called to a hearty and supreme love of God, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. ‘Love is the fulfilling of the law.’ ‘A new commandment I give unto you.’ ” “It would seem, then, that love is God’s law and standard in this dispensation, and that whatever is not contrary to love does not now bring condemnation upon our conscience.” “We cannot claim any perfection beyond this, that up to the furthest line of to-day’s consciousness, we have the witness that we do love God and our brethren, and keep a conscience (or knowledge) void of offence.” The only alleviation of this calamitous teaching is that the way is left open for growth; and it is gravely questionable whether this can consistently be done. “Each day of full obedience,” we read,¹⁶¹ “is a day of advancing knowledge. Yesterday’s standard of walk will not answer for to-day. The past twilight did not discover some defiling bone in my tent, and it did not then bring an evil conscience; but, in the clearer light of to-day, the same contact would bring condemnation. The essential thing is not perfect light or perfect knowledge, but perfect obedience to the light and knowledge already bestowed.”

In developing now this doctrine of the Christian’s growth Mr. Smith sometimes speaks, as has already no doubt been noted, as if such a growth were not only normal for the Christian but sure to be experienced by him. The steps and stages of it seem to be represented as steps and stages through which Christ leads His children in conforming them more and more closely to His image. It nevertheless admits of some question how far Mr. Smith means to leave the impression that when once we have surrendered ourselves to Christ by faith we are in His hands and will not merely be “sanctified” by Him at once subjectively to our own consciences, but also gradually step by step “sanctified” by Him objectively, according to the standard of God’s holiness. Cross-currents of doctrine affecting this matter are flowing through his mind. He wishes to throw on Christ, to whom our lives are committed in faith, the whole responsibility for their direction. He wishes to keep in the hands of the believer the whole responsibility for his experiences. The solution of the paradox which he ordinarily suggests is that we have the responsibility for being in Christ, and Christ has the responsibility for the lives of those in Him. He has difficulty, however, in working this suggestion out consistently in detail.

With respect to himself, at least, he is very emphatic that his commitment of himself to Christ was once for all. “I am of course,” he says,¹⁶² “with increasing intelligence always more completely given to God, yet as regards the deliberate, full surrender, I did it but once. Thenceforward I looked on it as a thing irrevocably done, just as we look on our marriage for life. We do not say the ‘I will’; ‘I give thee my troth,’ of the marriage ceremony year after year, however more holy and complete may become the union of heart.” The conception which informs this statement is not that of a moment by moment surrender, but of a surrender done once for all, and valid thenceforward for ever. And this conception is repeatedly thrown forward. It is very sharply asserted, with the emphasis on the divine side of the transaction—the side of “Preservation “as distinguished from “Perseverance”—in a passage like the following:¹⁶³ “As you definitely turned your back to the world, and accepted pardon through Christ, so now, with equal definiteness, give yourself to be the Lord’s, wholly the Lord’s, and for ever the Lord’s; to accept His will, to let Him live your lives for you.… We dare to believe that He will go on to ‘perfect that which concerneth us.’ We no longer faithlessly say, ‘I shall some day fall by the hand of the enemy’; but, rather, ‘I will yet praise Him more and more.’ We are beginning to feel the power of that word, ‘elect unto obedience’; and have given ourselves to a life of instantaneous, implicit, uniform obedience to God. We do not expect to be doing and doing this again and again, but always to recognize that we have done it. Liable in each moment to fail, we expect in the hourly miracle of grace, to be ‘kept by the power of God.’ ” If the sense of security expressed here seems not quite as pure as the point of view occupied requires, and we still hear of a constant “liability” to fail, we are glad to learn from other passages that this liability is understood to be in process of progressive elimination, and that it is not thought of as “liability” to more than what is commonly called “backsliding.”¹⁶⁴ “The old nature,” we read,¹⁶⁵ “is liable in each moment once more to assume its sway, and yet it may in each moment be kept in the place of death and beneath our feet. Faith’s power over it becomes more uniform every day. There will be conflict all along, but victory, not defeat.” And again:¹⁶⁶ “Should failure come, let us never delay for one instant a full confession and restoration. Sometimes in this life of full faith, there may come a momentary parenthesis of failure. We must expect these, but if we stumble we will not lie there an instant. The way back is open. ‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’ He who thus claims instantaneous restoration, finds failure to fade out of the life and communion to become more and more unbroken.”

Perhaps Mr. Smith’s fundamental meaning here nowhere finds clearer statement than in the closing pages of “Holiness Through Faith.” He is there speaking of our “abandoning “ourselves to Christ. “I like that word ‘abandon,’ ” he says.¹⁶⁷ “It expresses the soul’s attitude towards Christ.… It places the soul in Christ’s hands, and makes Him alone responsible, if we may so speak, for all results. Our responsibility ends with the abiding: for then He Himself works in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure. A life of abiding is a life in which we sin not (1 John 3:6); we bear much fruit (John 15:5); we ask what we will, and it shall be done unto us (John 15:7); and then when He shall appear, we shall have confidence before Him at his coming.” The antinomy is glaring and cannot be covered up. If, when we “abandon” ourselves to Christ, we place ourselves in His Hands, so that He becomes responsible for all results, does He not become responsible for our continued “abiding,” too? But Mr. Smith intends to remove precisely that out of His responsibility and to reserve precisely that to us as the condition of Christ’s keeping us. This amounts in the end, of course, to saying that He will keep us, if we will only keep ourselves: He will keep us in the way if we will only keep ourselves in the Way. Mr. Smith is, to put it in one word, teaching Quietism, not Evangelicalism. It is our will, after all, not Christ’s will, that governs our lives. Christ can keep us only if we let Him keep us. We must first “abandon” ourselves to Him before He can take the responsibility for our lives. He can maintain His control of our lives only if we “abide” in Him. And at any moment we can—are “liable” to—snatch their control out of His hands.¹⁶⁸

It is perhaps worth noting, in passing, that Mr. Smith is not unaware that the determining place which he gives to the will in religion requires of him a special doctrine of the will. He even ventures upon a psychological grounding of this doctrine. “President Edwards’ teaching of the affections governing the will,” he says,¹⁶⁹ “I believe to be untrue. The will governs the affections. I believe in the yet older saying, that ‘True religion resides in the will alone.’ ” His immediate purpose here is to protect his hearers from imagining that religion consists in “frames and feelings.” “Many are feeling deeply,” he says, “but I desire to take you away from your emotions.” But in order to take them away from their emotions he propounds a purely voluntative theory of religion. This was held to his credit when he went to Germany. Johannes Jüngst¹⁷⁰ recalls that it was noted there that “he does not aim to call out a movement of the emotions and feelings, but the will is awakened almost in a Kantian fashion. Religion lies for him chiefly in the will. He thanks God that it does not lie for him in the feelings.” The allusion in this closing sentence is to a pathetic story which Mr. Smith tells at this place, of how, when lying ill in South America, after the fall from his horse which has already been mentioned, in the deepest nervous depression and in the midst of powerful assaults of Satan, he “was thankful then that religion was in” his “will.” “To all his [Satan’s] attacks I said, ‘I will believe: live or die, in agony or in joy, I will believe!’ I seemed as one with his back to a rock and beset by devils.… I know whereof I affirm; I speak that I know, when I say God’s salvation is beyond the region of our emotions.” Of course there is defective analysis here and consequent self-deception. Because the “emotions” he has in mind were not the determinants of his will on this occasion, he fancies that the will is not determined by any emotions. He is not aware that in the sentence from Fénelon on which he supports himself, the term “will” includes the affections. He does not even stop to consider that when he makes religion to consist in “faith,” or “trust” as he calls it here—with “no sensible religious emotion for almost months, I did trust God, not only for final salvation, but for a conscience void of offence”—he is placing its essence in an affection. He is only intent on suspending all religion on undetermined acts of the will. He conceives of himself as able at any time to act in either part by a sheer arbitrary choice, and, whatever Fénelon meant, Mr. Smith means to hang all religion on such arbitrary choices. He “abandons” himself to Christ, he “abides in” Christ—or he falls away from Christ by sin—all by arbitrary acts of will. It is on these arbitrary acts of will that all the divine operations in salvation depend.

For “substance of doctrine” the teaching of Mrs. Smith does not differ greatly from that of her husband. There is an occasional slight difference in modes of statement. There is also perhaps some difference in emphasis. The mystical aspects of the doctrine—especially its Quietistic elements—are more dwelt upon in Mrs. Smith’s teaching. Their Quaker inheritance in general colors her presentation of their common teaching as it does not his, and this is increasingly so as the years go on. It is quite evident that Mrs. Smith found a growing pleasure in presenting her doctrine in a Quaker mold. She held also very strongly a doctrine of universal salvation, and declared that she would not be muzzled in the expression of it, although, in point of fact, it is not obtruded in her “holiness” teaching.¹⁷¹ Mrs. Smith’s career as a religious writer, moreover, extended over more than thirty years. It is not strange that she does not preserve entire consistency with herself through all these years in the details of her teaching, or perhaps the same zeal in the propagation of this or another of her peculiar conceptions. There is evidence that she not only gave up wholly in later years the separation of sanctification from justification, which was the very heart of her teaching at the height of her propaganda, but very much mitigated the assertion of perfection. Nevertheless, what she teaches on “holiness” during the Higher Life movement is what Mr. Smith teaches, and, in general, she teaches it just as he teaches it, often in precisely the same terms.

In the opening pages of her chief book, “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” she defines “the Higher Christian Life,” to the propagation of which they had both given themselves with single-hearted devotion. “Its chief characteristics,” she says,¹⁷² “are an entire surrender to the Lord, and a perfect trust in Him, resulting in victory over sin, and inward rest of soul.” The adjunction of “rest of soul” to “victory over sin” in the description of the thing sought—she says, rather, the thing obtained—is perhaps characteristic of her personal attitude. It is perhaps also characteristic of her personal attitude that the sentence is given a somewhat mechanical turn. She wishes victory over sin and inward rest of soul, and she knows how to get them. The recipe to be followed is, “entire surrender to the Lord and a perfect trust in Him.” The result will follow. In a later book,¹⁷³ at least, we find her discoursing of “inevitable law” in these high spiritual matters, and announcing with reference to them the perhaps disputable proposition, that “the man who discovers the law of anything possesses a power in regard to that thing as limitless as the law itself.” Mrs. Smith, now, knows the law of life: it consists in surrender and trust. We are in a position, accordingly, to control this life. These slight shades of suggestion apart, however, the sentence, in its isolation, is unexceptionable. All Christians understand that victory over sin and inward rest of soul come—and come only—by entire surrender to the Lord and perfect trust in Him. The sentence must be put in its setting in Mrs. Smith’s system to bring out its meaning to her. That setting is supplied in part in the little autobiographical sketch which she gave the ladies in her first Bible Reading at the Oxford Union Conference.¹⁷⁴ “I saw,” she said, “that sanctification was by faith as well as justification. That the same Saviour who delivers from the guilt of sin, delivers also from its power. And that the very righteousness which the law demanded, but failed to procure, was made possible and easy by grace.… It had been an unspeakable blessing to me to be delivered from the guilt of my sin, but it was infinitely more glorious to be delivered from its power. For to me the consequences of sin were not so dreadful as the fact of the sin itself.” By the “fact of sin,” however, she means merely the fact of sinning: it is from the power of sin, not from the corruption of sin, that she so yearns to be delivered. Accordingly she goes on to express herself thus: “The same grace that saved us must keep us. The same Saviour who bore our guilt for us must do our daily work for us also.”