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It is “our daily work” that she has particularly in mind. Her preoccupation is with Christianity as a This-world religion, that is to say, in contrast both with an Other-world and a Next-world religion;175 and this preoccupation supplies the major-premise of all her argumentation. “Did He [Christ] propose to Himself,” she exclaims,176 “only this partial deliverance,” which we have as yet experienced? “Was there a hidden reserve in each promise, that was meant to deprive it of its complete fulfilment?” Is a deliverance only partial, we ask, however, because it consumes time? Are promises deprived of their complete fulfilment because they are not fulfilled completely before the time of their complete fulfilment arrives? Mrs. Smith is only endeavoring to excite in the minds of her readers a feeling that they must have all that is promised them at once, or else the promise has failed. She wishes to betray them into an unwillingness to await the day of redemption and meanwhile to rejoice in the earnest of the inheritance that has been given to them. She wishes them to demand, like greedy children, all the feast prepared for them in the first course; and so she exhorts them to “settle down on this one thing, that Jesus came to save you, now, in this life, from the power and dominion of sin, and to make you more than conquerors through His power.” For proof, she can only say that “not a hint is given, anywhere, that this deliverance was to be only the limited and partial one with which Christians so continually try to be satisfied?” As if anybody supposes that! It is the good side of the Higher Life agitators that they manifest an active impatience with sinning. They revolt under and resent its bondage. It is a different matter to show impatience with God. And their reasoning too often runs on no other lines than these—if they are redeemed by the blood of Christ they have a right to all its fruits, and they wish them at once. They ask, “Is not Christ able to save to the uttermost?” and demand, “Why, then, does He not do it?” They are not willing to wait on God, and, unable to account for His method of saving by process, they chafe under the delay and require all their inheritance at once. This is the underlying attitude of the whole movement, and it is as manifest as anywhere else in the opening chapters of “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.” All the Biblical assurances of the completeness of Christ’s salvation are assembled, and then the demand made, Give me all of it—now. Mrs. Smith very properly explains that the whole work of our perfecting is done by God. Our part, she says, is only trusting it to Him that it may be done. Perhaps this is not precisely the same as trusting God to do it. We must not entrust it to God to be done, as we assign a job to a workman and require him to do it according to specifications. We must just trust God to do it—it, as all other things—in His own perfect way. The former attitude makes God our instrument to do our bidding. It is the attitude of the Higher Life movement.

There are two parts in “the work of sanctification,” Mrs. Smith teaches. There is man’s part; and there is God’s part. It is man’s part to place himself in God’s hands for sanctification; it is God’s part then to sanctify him. We say “then” to sanctify him, for God can do nothing towards sanctifying him until the man places himself in His hands for the purpose. “In the divine order,” says Mrs. Smith,177 “God’s working depends upon our co-operation. Of our Lord it was declared that at a certain place He could do there no mighty work because of their unbelief. It was not that He would not, but He could not. I believe we often think of God that He will not, when the real truth is that He cannot. Just as the potter, however skilful, cannot make a beautiful vessel out of a lump of clay that is never put into his hands, so neither can God make out of me a vessel unto His honor, unless I put myself into His hands. My part is the essential correlation [she means “correlative”] of God’s part in the matter of my salvation; and as God is sure to do His part all right, the vital thing for me is to find out what my part is, and then do it.” It is creditable to Mrs. Smith’s intelligence that she fully recognizes that, things being as she describes them, the vital thing in our salvation is our part in it, not God’s. The initiative—the decisive thing—lies in our hands: if we do our part God’s part follows of itself. “When a soul is really given up to God He never fails to take possession of it, and He then begins to work on that soul all the good pleasure of His will”—not before. “It is like making the junction between the machinery and the steam engine,” we are told.178 “The machinery is yielded up to the power of the engine, and the engine works it, and it goes easily and without effort because of the mighty power that is behind it.” “Thus,” we read, “the Christian life becomes an easy and natural life, when it is the outward development of the Divine life working within. When we give ourselves to Him He claims us, and this is where our safety lies—not in our giving, but in His taking. What we have to do is to put our will right over on His side, and then He will take possession of it, and work it for us, making us really willing to do His will.” We must first, by an act of will, give Him our will, and then—but only then—He works our will for us. “And if God thus gets possession of us,” we read next—“thus,” that is, by an act of our will giving Him our will—“and causes us to walk in His statutes and to keep His commandments and do them, we shall find it an easy and happy thing to live in conformity with His will.” “He works miracles in a man’s will,” we read in another place (p. 161)—“when it is put in his hands.”

The primary thing to observe here is, of course, the suspension of the whole process on the human will. We say “the whole process” because it emerges that not only is God helpless to work on and in us unless and until we truly place ourselves in His hands for the purpose, but He is equally helpless to keep us in His hands when once He has undertaken the work on and in us that has been committed to Him. We must not only surrender ourselves to Him, but we must also “abide” in Him. Mrs. Smith told the ladies at the Oxford Union Meeting—using the simile of the clay and the potter again—that “the part of the clay is simply to be put into the potter’s hands, and to abide there passively.”179 “Put yourselves then into God’s hands,” is the exhortation, “as clay in the hands of the potter, and trust Him. But do not take yourselves back. Having given yourselves to Him you must abide in Him—you must stay there. You must let Him mould and fashion you.” Very strange clay this, passive in the potter’s hands, to which the potter can do nothing unless it lets him! Mrs. Smith’s main purpose here is to preach her gospel of passivity in the potter’s hands: “The potter must do all the work.” “When we have put our case in the Lord’s hands our part is simply to ‘sit still,’ for He will not rest until He has finished the matter.” “And we must remember this—that if we carry a burden ourselves the Lord does not carry it.”180 What we need to note now, however, is, not the passivity itself, but the fact that it is voluntary—not merely in the sense that we put ourselves in the potter’s hands voluntarily, but that we maintain our passive attitude in His hands voluntarily. Thus, as we have said, everything is made to depend, not on the Potter’s will, but on our own. And it is anything but a passive will that Mrs. Smith has in mind; she emphasizes the energy of the volition by which we place ourselves in God’s hands in a very decisive fashion. Illustrating the right Christian method of meeting the troubles and trials of life from Ps. 55:6–8, she tells us that we must not only have the wings of a dove, but must use them if we wish to escape. “The power to surrender and trust,” she says,181 “exists in every human soul, and only needs to be brought into exercise.” It belongs to us to bring it into exercise. “With these two wings we can ‘flee’ to God at any moment; but, in order really to reach Him, we must actively use them. We must not merely want to use them, but we must do it definitely and actively. A passive surrender or a passive trust will not do.… We must do it definitely and practically, about each detail of daily life as it comes to us.” Though we are passive in God’s hands and do nothing to work out our own salvation—nothing, that is, directly—behind that passivity we are intensely active, instituting and maintaining it. We enter into the surrendered life by an act of our own will; it is a very definite and energetic act by which we abandon ourselves to God. On the emergence of each trial we again act; it is a very definite act by which we take it to God and leave it with Him. It is not a “passive” but an “active” surrender and trust, a very definite and decisive act. But this is all that we do—we must not endeavor to tunnel the mountains in our path, nor to make our way around them, we must just spread our wings and soar over them. The wings are the symbol of “surrender and trust”; they belong to us, and it belongs to us to use them.

Behind this teaching lies a very definite doctrine of the will. So important to her system does Mrs. Smith feel this doctrine to be, that she devotes a whole chapter to it, both in “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life” and in “Every-Day Religion,” her two most didactic volumes. In both chapters alike her chief purpose is to separate religion from the surface play of emotions. In order to do this, she makes religion an affair of the will alone, and asserts that the emotions have nothing to do with the will. You “yield” yourself to God, and that is the end of it. “You meant it then, you mean it now, you have really done it. Your emotions may clamor against the surrender, but your will must hold firm. It is your purpose God looks at, not your feelings about that purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need to attend to.”182 In writing-in a basis for such assertions she develops a clear psychological voluntativism. The will is affirmed to be “the governing power in man’s nature.” “If the will is set right,” we are told,183 “all the rest of the nature must come into harmony.” And by the will is meant here simple volition. “By the will,” she explains184 “I do not mean the wish of the man, or even his purpose, but the deliberate choice, the deciding power, the king, to which all that is in the man must yield obedience.” “It is,” she adds, “the man, in short, the ‘Ego’ that which we feel to be ourselves.” And then she expounds: “There is something within us, behind our emotions and behind our wishes, an independent self, that, after all, decides everything and controls everything.” Of course Mrs. Smith meets difficulties here. As she works out her problem the notion of the will she operates with vibrates between bare volition and the total subjectivity. She is found identifying it with what the Bible calls “the heart,” “the interior self, the controlling personality of our being.”185 She is found, despite the fact that the will is the king, to which all must yield obedience, speaking of a self behind the will, governing it. “I can control my will,” she says; and we are exhorted “to keep the will steadily abiding in its centre, God’s will.” “Your part then is,” she says,186 “simply to put your will, in this matter of believing, over on God’s side.” What this “you” is which controls the will, which itself controls everything, and which is indeed itself the “Ego,” she is helpless to explain. The will which is to control is the very will that is to be controlled. Mrs. Smith has no option here, of course; she must speak in this confusing way if she is to make—as she wishes to make—a bald volition possible to man and controlling in his destiny. I can choose to believe in that bald way, she affirms, when nothing seems true to me. She merely finds herself moving upward in that infinite regressus up which all the advocates of her notion of a determining will, itself undetermined, journey with no hope of a return. All that concerns us at the moment is to note that Mrs. Smith’s whole doctrine of the Higher Christian Life is founded on this doctrine of the will. Its starting point lies in the assumption that it is always in our power just to say “I will.” “The thing we are to do is to ‘choose,’ without any regard to the state of our emotions, what attitude our will shall take towards God.” “The whole question lies in the choice of our will.”187

The “surrender” and “trust” which “constitute our part” in “the work of sanctification,” and which are the precedent conditions of God undertaking His part, are, then, always in our power. Precisely what they are is not made quite so plain. They are sometimes elaborately treated, not as two names for one thing or two aspects of a single act, but two distinct acts;188 and we are told that we must have both “an entire surrender” and “an absolute trust.” Difficulty is experienced, however, in so defining them as to establish a plain distinction. In the effort to do so “surrender” is sometimes spoken of as if it meant merely “giving up” in the abstract—not giving up ourselves trustingly to God, but just accepting the course of life that comes to us. “Trust” then becomes the word for leaving ourselves in God’s keeping. At other times the attempt to separate the two things, at least, is abandoned. In the discussion in “Every-Day Religion,”189 Mrs. Smith tells us that she prefers the term “yield” to “consecrate,” to express what she means by “surrender.” “Consecration” is apt, she says, to express something too active, and indeed self-glorifying; it is an Old Testament word. We may consecrate our wealth to a given object; we yield ourselves to the care of a physician. “In the one case we confer a favour; in the other we receive a favour.” The idea sought to be conveyed is not that of sacrificing, but of abandoning. We yield ourselves to God as, when sick, we submit utterly to the nurse’s ministrations, or, when lost, we put ourselves wholly in the hands of the guide. “To yield to God means to belong to God, and to belong to God means to have all His infinite power and infinite love engaged on our side.” “Trusting,” now, she very naturally adds190 “can hardly be said to be distinct from yielding.… It is, in fact, the absolute correlation [she means “correlative”] to it.… Trusting, therefore, simply means that when we have yielded ourselves up unto the Lord, or, in other words, have made ourselves over to Him, we then have perfect confidence that He will manage us and everything concerning us exactly right, and we consequently leave the whole care and managing in His hands.” So far as a distinction is here made out, it would seem to be that “surrender” is thought of as the act by which we place ourselves in God’s hands, and “trust” as the succeeding state of confidence in His holy keeping of us. The point of importance, however, is not the discrimination of the words, but the establishment of the nature of the transaction which is expressed by them. This is made very clear. It is made very clear, for example, in this sort of a declaration: You have first to surrender your will into His hands—and by your will she means your liberty of choice—and He will take possession of it and work in you by His own mighty power “to will and to do of His good pleasure.”191 Having vindicated to us an ineradicable power of willing according to our own choice, Mrs. Smith now lays on us as our one duty in the use of this liberty of choice—to renounce it. The only use the religious man can put his will to is, by an energetic action of it, to work a complete exinanition of it.

Our part in sanctification—“surrender” and “trust”—having been duly done, God then does His part. His part is “to sanctify us.” The effect is, of course, instantaneous. As precisely what has happened is that we have ceased to work and God has taken over the work, what results is that hereafter we do nothing and God does all. This is a doctrine of Quietistic Perfectionism. Mrs. Smith’s Quietism is very explicit and very complete. No simile is too strong to express it. As we have had repeated occasion to note, a favorite illustration with her is derived from the clay and the potter. By our act of surrender we put the clay into the potter’s hands. He molds it then according to His will. She expresses what happens without figure by saying as repeatedly that God takes our wills and works them for us.192 He takes our wills, not our hearts or natures. The perfection that results, therefore, is a perfection of acts, not of heart or of nature. We put our wills into His hands, and He thenceforth works them for us. No, not exactly thenceforth, but as long as we leave them in His hands. It all depends on us, in the end, therefore; and that throws a fatal uncertainty over it all. At least, that is the way Mrs. Smith looks at it, from the point of view of her doctrine of arbitrary will. From our own point of view, as the heart remains unsanctified, we should have to say that it throws a fatal certainty of sinning over it all. “No safe teacher of this interior life,” says she,193 “ever says that it becomes impossible to sin; they only insist that sin ceases to be a necessity, and that a possibility of continual victory is opened before us.”

The next sentence is somewhat oddly phrased. “And there are very few, if any, who do not confess that, as to their own actual experience, they have at times been overcome by at least a momentary temptation.” Mrs. Smith scarcely means that it was a “momentary temptation” which overcame them: there seems no reason why a temptation which lasts but a moment should be thought to be particularly potent, and “momentary” does not appear to mean “sudden”—unexpected—and therefore unprepared for. She doubtless means that they are momentarily overcome by temptation. If so, she tells us that “few, if any,” make “the possibility of continual victory” which is “opened before us” an actuality. “At times”—which must mean a plurality of times—they are at least momentarily overcome by temptation. If this be true, then their perfection is not very perfect: it is broken in upon “at times” by sin. They may be rather better in their Christian lives than the general run of Christians, but when it comes to talking of perfection they are really no more perfect than others. This is given an even stronger significance by the next sentence. “Of course,” we read, “in speaking of sin here, I mean conscious, known sin.” She is not speaking of “sins of ignorance,” or of “what is called the inevitable sin of our nature.” These things she leaves to the theologians to discuss; she deals only in practical things—a rather cavalier way of speaking, one would think, of such tremendous realities. From this we learn, however, that the sins which she considers it possible to escape are only “conscious, known sins,” and also that the sins which “few, if any,” wholly escape falling into “at times”—fewer or more numerous times—are distinctively “conscious, known sins.” Despite her waving aside all discussion of “sins of ignorance,” she immediately enters into a discussion of them, the result of which seems to be that we can do very wrong things and not sin. Returning from this digression, she instructs us, not very consequently, that, as “the highway of holiness is not a place but a way,” we may step out of the path for a moment without obliterating the path, and we may step back into the path the next moment. It is not clear to us that a “path” has any superiority over a “place” in these matters, but, as the application is obscure, that may pass. The trouble does not seem to be with the path or the place—whichever “the highway of holiness” may be compared to—but with the bad habit of stepping out of it with the assurance that we can just as easily step back again. We have certainly lost sight of perfection in the course of the discussion, except, perhaps, as a bare possibility, a possibility of which “few, if any,” avail themselves. Nevertheless Mrs. Smith has no hesitation in asserting the possibility of continuous holiness, as if it were the experience of many and might easily be the experience of all. Of actually sinning she says,194 “There is no necessity for it whatever.”

Perhaps the most remarkable element in Mrs. Smith’s teaching in this matter, however, comes to light when195 she undertakes to expound the “causes of failure in this life of full salvation,” that is to say, to explain why those that are perfect fall at times into sin. “The causes do not lie,” she says, “in the strength of the temptation, nor in our own weakness, nor above all in any lack in the power or willingness of our Saviour to save us.” They lie simply in this: that we are cherishing in our heart something which is contrary to the will of God. That appears to amount, briefly, to this—that the perfect man sins because he is not perfect. She illustrates as follows: “Any conscious root of bitterness cherished toward another, any self-seeking, any harsh judgments, any slackness in obeying the voice of the Lord, any doubtful habits or surroundings,—these things or any of them, consciously indulged, will effectually cripple and paralyze our spiritual life.” Which, being interpreted, declares to us that if we are living in sins—conscious sins, too, note—“any conscious root of bitterness,” “consciously indulged”—why, we are liable to sin. And we are further told that we may be thus living in sin, though we seem to ourselves and to others to be triumphantly living the life of victory. What then becomes of consciousness as the norm of all?

It is not without its importance that we should note that Mrs. Smith is inclined sometimes to represent this liability to failure as an experience belonging particularly to the early stages of sanctification. She writes to her son,196 when he had just entered upon the “higher life” of complete consecration, that it cannot be expected to be wholly unbroken. “It often happens,” she says, “in the beginning of this life of faith, that there are temporary failures, and that the feet do sometimes stumble. But this need not discourage thee. Sanctification is not a thing once done, and done for ever; it is a life, a walk, and if we stumble we can get up again. It is a life of trust, moment by moment; and if for one moment we fail, that is no reason why we should not trust the next moment.” It even appears that in the process of growth hinted at here the sanctification may penetrate inward from the acts to the heart. This is, no doubt, formally denied in the most vigorous words. She writes to her son in the autumn of 1871,197 and prints it in 1873, on the very verge of the great London agitation: “But do not expect, dear boy, ever to find thy old nature any better or any nearer thy ideal; for thee never, never will. Thee thyself, that is, thy old nature, will always be utterly vile, and ignorant, and corrupt; but Jesus is thy life now. It is with thee, ‘No more I,’ but Christ who liveth in thee. And is not this glorious—to lose thy own life, and find Christ’s divine life put in its place?… Never look into thy own heart then for any sort of satisfaction or comfort. Thee will never find any goodness there,—no stocks of virtue laid up to draw upon. But thy goodness is all in Christ, and thee must draw it from Him moment by moment as thee needs it.” The very spirit of the Higher Christian Life speaks here; and it teaches us that the sanctification received by faith does not eradicate the sinful nature: we retain the old nature of sin, apparently completely unaffected. All our sanctification is “in Christ,” external to our self, and is drawn upon only for our daily need “moment by moment,” that is to say, for our conduct solely, since it does not affect our nature. Despite these strong words, however, Mrs. Smith teaches198 that the heart itself is purified by Christ’s indwelling. Following a lead from her son, she represents that we may not merely be delivered when we trust, but may be kept continually trusting; and more than that—that that traitor in the camp, inbred sin, may be ousted.

“In order to know a complete and continuous victory,” she says, “this inward enemy must be cast out, and the heart must be cleansed from all unrighteousness. Then, the very centre of the being having been taken possession of by Christ, and all His enemies destroyed by His presence, He reigns there supreme. And the soul finds itself ‘kept by the power of God,’ through an unwavering faith, which nothing jostles or dims.” On this teaching a doctrine of perfection, not of act but of nature, and with it a doctrine of perseverance, might be based. Mrs. Smith justifies herself in it by adding that “this wonderful truth is taught in many ways, and under many different figures, in the New Testament. Being ‘dead to sin,” knowing ‘the body of sin to be destroyed,’ ‘purifying our hearts by faith,’ being ‘cleansed from all unrighteousness’; all these, and many other expressions, set forth this truth, that Christ, who was manifested to destroy the works of the devil, is able and willing to destroy his very worst work,—even that which he wrought in us when he implanted sin in our nature. And that when Christ enters there, sin must retire.” Surely it is sufficiently clearly taught here that the old nature is not left untouched by the salvation of Christ. Indeed, it is even taught that Christ expels sin from our very nature, and that can mean nothing less than that we no longer have even indwelling sin, and that, in turn, can mean nothing less than the Wesleyan “entire sanctification,” “Christian Perfection.” “But,” adds Mrs. Smith, seeking to guard herself, “but let it be understood that it is only the presence of Christ that keeps out the sin. There is no inherent purity in the heart itself. But as with light and darkness, so with Christ and sin; they cannot exist together, there is no possibility of fellowship between them. Let a room, however, presume on its light, and shut out the rays of the sun, and darkness at once fills it. So let the soul presume on its purity, and cease to let Christ abide in it, and that moment sin reigns there again supreme. The indwelling presence of Christ makes the heart pure, and keeps it pure. The indwelling presence of Christ drives out His enemies, and keeps them out. The indwelling presence of Christ destroys (or ‘renders inert’) the body of sin, and keeps it so; but the moment the soul lets go of Christ, or turns its eyes away from Him, that moment its old evil all returns.”

It is evident that Mrs. Smith is here at her wit’s end. She is trying to teach at once that our old nature is expelled by Christ and that it is not expelled; that Christ keeps us permanently, and that His keeping is only moment by moment; that our abiding in our grace rests on Christ alone, and that it depends absolutely on ourselves. It is an impossible task. She says that implanted sin is itself cast out; that Christ entering the heart expels sin from it; that there cannot be the least remnant of sin left where Christ dwells. The indwelling Christ not only makes the heart pure but keeps it pure; not only drives out His enemies but keeps them out. He destroys—but here she falters, and suggests that we may say only “renders inert”—the body of sin and keeps it destroyed. But she cannot leave it at that, although she has said it so strongly and with such variety of expression that she must leave it at that. She talks of there being no inherent purity in the heart itself—as if a heart that is pure can be pure any other way than “inherently.” What she means is that it owes its purity to Christ, who dwells in it. But that makes no difference—if Christ dwells in it, and by dwelling in it “makes the heart pure and keeps it pure.” Underneath all this lies the assumption that we can put Christ out of our hearts again: “The moment the soul lets go of Christ, or turns its eyes away from Him, that moment its old evil all returns.” The mind reels as it tries to imagine how this can be—if, for example, Christ not only “drives out His enemies,” but “keeps them out.” The cart is surely put before the horse. Surely we cannot “let go of Christ,” “turn our eyes away from Him,” unless the old evil has already returned. A pure heart—and we are told that Christ has made the heart pure and keeps it pure—cannot do these things. And this old evil, all of which returns, where has it been all the intervening time? If it had only been “made inert,” it might perhaps be revived; but that is not what the Apostle says, nor what Mrs. Smith says—both he and she say it has been “destroyed”—and she adds that Christ keeps it destroyed. Surely it cannot come back. We cannot both be kept by Christ and not kept by Him; we cannot be made pure and kept pure and not be pure. Mrs. Smith is laboring with the fundamental contradiction of her school; she wishes to teach a supernatural salvation on the basis of a fundamental naturalism. She cannot do it.

Ordinarily when Mrs. Smith speaks of progress in sanctification her preoccupation is merely to reconcile the immediate attainment of sanctification by faith and the possibility nevertheless of growth in holiness. On our part, she teaches, sanctification is secured by an act, the entrusting of ourselves to God; from the moment that we entrust ourselves to God we are holy—God sees to that. But on God’s part, sanctification is produced in us by a process; God leads us up to ever higher planes in our holiness. “Sanctification,” she says,199 “is both a step of faith and a process of works. It is a step of surrender and trust on our part, and it is a process of development on God’s part. By a step of faith we get into Christ; by a process we are made to ‘grow up into Him in all things.’ By a step of faith we put ourselves into the hands of the Divine Potter; by a gradual process He makes us into a vessel unto His own honor, meet for His use, and prepared to every good work.” So far as the mere words go, the truth of the matter is stated here. But Mrs. Smith’s meaning is not apprehended until we understand that she conceives man to be purely passive as the clay in the hands of the potter in the whole process, and that she conceives the growth which he experiences not to be towards perfection but in perfection. She speaks, indeed,200 of God carrying us “through a process of transformation, longer or shorter as our peculiar case may require, making actual and experimental the results for which we have trusted.” And if this were given true validity it might serve largely to correct the faults adverted to. After all is said, it certainly is God who sanctifies us: we are the clay in His hands, and He molds us as seems to Him good. And the process of transformation wrought out in our sanctification does only actualize in us what from the beginning we have trusted Christ for; it is a “working out” of our salvation. But to say this would not satisfy Mrs. Smith. She asserts that “purity of heart” is complete from the very first moment of our believing,201 and that all our subsequent growth is in, not into, purity of heart. We are “truly pleasing to God” in every stage of our growth, though “it may require years of training and discipline to mature us into a vessel that shall be in all respects to His honor, and fitted to every good work.”202 “The lump of clay, from the moment it comes under the transforming hand of the potter, is, during each day and each hour of the process, just what the potter wants it to be at that hour or on that day, and therefore pleases him; but it is very far from being matured into the vessel he intends in the future to make it. The little babe may be all that a babe could be, or ought to be, and may therefore perfectly please its mother; and yet it is very far from being what that mother would wish it to be when the years of maturity shall come. The apple in June is a perfect apple for June; it is the best apple that June can produce; but it is very different from the apple in October, which is a perfected apple. God’s works are perfect in every stage of their growth. Man’s works are never perfect until they are in every respect complete.”203

It could not be more strongly declared that the whole process of “sanctification,” so far as it is a process, is the growth merely into greater maturity of a person already from the beginning free from sin. It is a process not towards purity, but in purity towards maturity. In point of fact, however, this process is, on one side of it, a process of progressive freeing from sin. The human “apple in June” is not merely an immature apple, it is a rotten apple. It does not merely need “to grow” in order to become the “perfected” apple of October, it has got to be remade before it becomes the perfect apple for June and is in a state to “grow” at all. Mrs. Smith cannot explain away the recreative process of sanctification by confusing the ideas of imperfection and immaturity; this “imperfection” is not a merely negative but a most positive quality. She says, very smartly,204 that the Scriptures do not teach that we are to grow into grace but in grace. But to be “in grace” does not mean in Scripture that we are already free from sin, nor—it is time now to add—does the exhortation to “increase in grace” (2 Pet. 3:18) mean that we have no part in making the increase. It is, nevertheless, specifically to an attitude of passivity with respect to our growth that Mrs. Smith exhorts us. “Let me entreat of you, then,” she says,205 “to give up all your efforts after growing, and simply to let yourselves grow.” That is her fundamental prescription for the Christian life, “a growth without effort.”206 The lilies, she says, planted in good soil, do not strive to grow: their growing “is not a thing of effort, but is the result of an inward life-principle of growth.” “All the stretching and pulling in the world could not make a dead oak grow; but a live oak grows without stretching.” What we are to do, then, is merely “to get within” us “the growing life.” More at large:207 “We are to be infinitely passive, and yet infinitely active also; passive as regards self and its workings, active as regards attention and response to God.” Which is explained to mean that “we must lay down all the activity of the creature, as such, and must let only the activities of God work in us, and through us, and by us.” The fundamental meaning is that our only work is to get into Christ: He does the rest.

Of course Mrs. Smith finds herself in difficulties with the Scriptures here, and perhaps she could not have lighted upon a passage that would give her more difficulty in squaring her Quietism with the Scriptures than 2 Pet. 3:18, with which she particularly concerns herself. Precisely what Peter does in this passage is to require Christians to engage actively in advancing in their life of faith. It is not enough for him that we plant ourselves in the garden of the Lord—and let God give the increase. Precisely what he says we are to do is “to exert ourselves” (verse 14, cf. 1–10, 15), and to exert ourselves precisely that we may be found on the great day of judgment “unsullied and faultless” in His sight. To that extent we are engaged in our own sanctification, and to that end we are (among other things) “to take care”—to take care that we are not carried away by errors, and so fall from “our own” steadfastness (“our own,” notice); on the contrary, we are to “make increase” in grace, and the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, this “making increase” being put in contrast with the “taking care” not to fall, as the other half of our duty. There is no Quietism here; and Peter says he is teaching just what Paul teaches. In contrast to both Peter and Paul Mrs. Smith says we are neither to exert ourselves nor to make increase in grace. We are in grace already and all our growth is to be within the grace we are in, and it is to be accomplished without any effort on our part.

This, then, is the teaching of the Higher Life agitation which filled with its propaganda the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It is not a very profound teaching, and its tendency was downwards. It was more shallow in the hands of its later than in those of its earlier advocates. Perfectionism is impossible in the presence of a deep sense or a profound conception of sin. This movement proclaimed, it is true, only an attenuated perfectionism—a perfectionism merely of conduct. But this involved a correspondingly attenuated view of sin. The guilt of sin, the corruption of sin, were not denied, but attention was distracted from them and fixed on the practice of sin. This is a fatally externalizing movement of thought, and brings with it a ruinous under-estimate of the baneful power of sin. This effect was reënforced by an extreme limitation of the notion of sinning. Nothing was recognized as sinning but deliberate sinning. Ignorance or inadvertence was made the mother of holiness, and holiness was thus brought to so low a level that the meanest in Christian attainments might easily lay claim to its possession. Corresponding to this defective outlook on sin and holiness was an equally defective attitude towards God and His relation to men. None of the high attributes of God were denied, but the practical effect of the teaching was to encourage men to look upon Him as a force existing for them and wholly at their command. This degrading conception of God was not given, it is true, so crass an expression as it has received in some later developments of the same type of thought. Mrs. Smith even includes in her chief book208 a chapter bearing the title “Is God in Everything?” in which she is fairly compelled to teach, in the mere interest of the life of faith, the fundamental fact of the universal government of God. Nevertheless, the open teaching of the whole movement is to the effect that God acts—and can act—in the matter of sanctification, as in the whole matter of salvation, only as man, by his prior action, releases Him for action. This is not a wholesome attitude to take towards God. It tends to looking upon Him as the instrument which we use to secure our ends, and that is a magical rather than a religious attitude. In the end it inhibits religion which includes in its essence a sense of complete dependence on God.

With these defects in its outlook on God and sin, the movement naturally fostered a thin religious life. The deep things are not for it. Throes of repentance, ecstasies of aspiration, alike, are rendered unnecessary and unbecoming. Christian living is reduced to the level of common respectability. The law of God having been pushed out of sight His grace becomes obscured with it. The summum bonum becomes ease in Zion, and God, as He is no longer greatly feared, neither is any longer greatly loved. Nor is He trusted. Our dependence is put in our own trust, not in God, and as arrant a work-salvation results as was ever taught. The works depended upon are concentrated into the specific work of trust; but all is hung on this specific work. This is a gravely unethical proceeding. Pelagius, when he hung salvation on works, at least demanded perfect righteousness as its ground. In this teaching perfect righteousness is dispensed with, and the trust in favor of which it is dispensed with disappears with it. The type of piety engendered by the preaching of a conditional salvation is naturally in polar opposition to that engendered by the preaching of a free salvation. The correlate to a free salvation is trust; the correlate to a conditional salvation is performance. Trust and performance are contradictions. A “Do” religion and a “Trust” religion are irreconcilable. To demand trust as a condition defeats, therefore, its own object and renders the trust demanded impossible. If we are to depend on our own trust it ceases to be trust. We cannot look to ourselves for the decisive act in our salvation and at the same time be looking to God for all. Trust transformed into a work loses its quality; turned back on itself, it is obliterated.

Nevertheless, despite its leanness, the movement has persisted in its influence down to our own times. In Britain, on the European Continent, in America, its echoes are still heard. Mrs. Smith herself, at the opening of the new century no doubt, looked back on it as in some sense a thing of the past209; but that was only relatively the case. We do not so quickly escape from low levels of thought and feeling. It is sadly true in spiritual as in earthly things that the poor are always with us. It is matter of congratulation that the two great movements which arose, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the violent “Higher Life” agitation of the seventies—“The Keswick Movement” in Britain, and the “Heiligungsbewegung” in Germany—while very greatly extending the influence of its essential teaching, have, although in different degrees, mitigated some of its most objectionable features. If, however, we have a right-wing, we have also a left-wing, of Keswick teaching; and if there has been a Theodor Jellinghaus in Germany, there has also been a “Pastor” Paul. Outside the main currents of these two great movements, individual preachers of the Higher Life also are, of course, continually appearing. Among these, Albert B. Simpson attracts perhaps primary attention, not less for the extravagance of his thories than for the wideness of the influence he has exerted through his long career.210 In the closing years of the last century the unwholesome figure of “the Tamil Evangelist,” V. D. David, drew temporary notice to itself and then passed under a cloud.211 On the other hand, James H. McConkey’s little book, entitled “The Threefold Secret of the Holy Spirit” (1897), pleases by the sobriety of its spirit, although certainly, in the main, running true to type.212 By the side of Mr. McConkey we may perhaps be permitted to place such teachers as Matthew H. Houston, who have not escaped direct influence from Keswick.213 From Wesley to Keswick may superficially seem a somewhat far cry. There is, no doubt, room between these limits for many distinguishable varieties of teaching. They are all bound together, however, by common fundamental conceptions of very dubious character, and it is too much to hope that we have seen the last of any one of them. Recent events only emphasize the fact that it is not merely the fittest among them which promise to survive.214

Footnotes

  1. “History of Christian Doctrine,” 1886, ii. p. 376. ↩

  2. J. T. Crane, “Holiness the Birthright of All God’s Children” (1874), ed. 2, 1875, pp. 14–15. ↩

  3. J. S. Inskip, “Methodism Explained and Defended,” 1851, pp. 59 ff.: “There is, however, one doctrine, in a great measure peculiar to Methodism. It is that, in which we teach the possibility of man attaining a state of grace in the present life, in which he will be made free from sin.… We contend this state may be attained now—at the present moment.… In this, as well as in our justification, ‘we are saved by grace, through faith.’ … Reader, thou mayest now believe, and now be saved from all thy sins.” The London Quarterly Review for October, 1875, xlv. p. 192: “The testimony to the completeness of the Spirit’s work of grace in the human soul, as an application of the atonement, has been and still is the leading peculiarity of Methodist teaching.” ↩

  4. See an illuminating page by Lyman H. Atwater in The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review, July, 1877, pp. 410, 411. ↩

  5. See the account given by Mrs. Boardman in her “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman” (1886), American edition, 1887, chapter iii. ↩

  6. Mrs. Boardman, “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” preface, p. vii. ↩

  7. See “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” by Mrs. Boardman, with a Preface by the Rev. Mark Guy Pearse, London, 1886; New York, 1887. There is a short appreciative sketch in Th. Jellinghaus, “Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum,” ed. 4, 1898, pp. 718–720. ↩

  8. This states the fundamental fact. It is not intended that influences from other quarters did not coöperate to the effect; Mrs. Boardman in the “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman” indicates a number of such influences—among others intimate intercourse with an elderly woman who was one of a coterie of persons who had been excluded from Dr. E. N. Kirk’s church at Albany on the ground of their perfectionism. In “The Higher Christian Life,” Mr. Boardman shows adequate acquaintance with all the current forms of perfectionism. Jellinghaus, p. 718, very properly says moreover: “Neither he nor his wife could understand sanctification in the Wesleyan fashion as Christian Perfection and the eradication of the old nature, and had seen people fall through misunderstanding of this doctrine into an awful fanaticism.” ↩

  9. He received his ordination at this time from the Presbytery of the United Congregational and Presbyterian Churches, meeting at a neighboring town (“Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman.” p. 65). ↩

  10. In the “Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A.,” his name appears on the roll of the (N.S.) Presbytery of Detroit of 1852, 1853, and 1854 as Agent and S.S.; of 1855 as Agent; and of 1856 as in transitu. It appears on the roll of the (O.S.) Presbytery of Philadelphia of 1856 as W. C.; of 1857–1858 as S.S. at Gloucester City, N. J.; and of 1859 as W. C. It appears in the Index to the “Minutes” (O.S.) of 1860, 1861, 1862, with the note “not reported,” and in the “Minutes” of 1863 and 1864 as a member of the Presbytery of Stockton in transitu. In 1865 his name appears on the roll of the Presbytery of Philadelphia as Secretary of the Christian Commission. From 1866 to 1870 he is a W. C. of the Presbytery of Philadelphia. In 1871 he appears in the Index as residing in New York, without reference to a Presbytery. He then disappears from the “Minutes.” From Nevin’s “History of the Presbytery of Philadelphia,” p. 41 (of Roll) we learn that Mr. Boardman was received by the Presbytery of Philadelphia from the Presbytery of Detroit, April 2, 1856; dismissed to the Presbytery of California, January 4, 1860; received from the Presbytery of Stockton October, 1864; transferred to the Presbytery of New York, June, 1870. He does not appear in the “Minutes” as a member of the Presbytery of New York, but in S. D. Alexander’s “History of the Presbytery of New York,” p. 159, his bare name, without data, occurs in the list of ministers belonging to the Presbytery of New York before the Reunion. This seems to imply that he presented the letter from Philadelphia, and was enrolled, but withdrew his letter in less than a twelvemonth. But other conjectures are possible. ↩

  11. “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” p. 136. ↩

  12. Ibid. ↩

  13. P. 142. ↩

  14. P. 145. ↩

  15. Pp. 145–146. ↩

  16. P. 140. ↩

  17. P. 146. ↩

  18. Pp. 141, 146 ff. ↩

  19. P. 150. ↩

  20. Pp. 151 f. ↩

  21. P. 155. ↩

  22. An account of them written by Dr. Cullis is printed in the “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” pp. 156 ff. ↩

  23. Messrs. Moody and Sankey landed at Liverpool June 17, 1873, and spent two years in the campaign. ↩

  24. Like Augustine who afterwards recognized occurrences he had witnessed at Milan as miracles—though they had not impressed themselves upon him as such at the time—Mr. Boardman now recognized as miracles occurrences in his earlier life which he had not recognized as such at the time (cf. “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” pp. 63, 133). In Sweden, in 1880, he quite freely worked cures (pp. 199, 209, 213, 218, 219). He depended on the Lord entirely for his own health: “Whenever threatened with a bilious attack he looked directly to the Lord, and was delivered” (p. 240). A quite disagreeable story is told, pp. 227 ff., of his persuading a dwarf not to insist on the Lord giving him a normal figure, because of the advertising value of his deformity. ↩

  25. We find the following books credited to him: “The Higher Christian Life,” 1858; “He that Overcometh, or A Conquering Gospel,” 1869; “Gladness in Jesus,” 1870; “Faith Work; or, the Labours of Dr. Cullis in Boston,” 1874; “In the Power of the Spirit, or Christian Experience in the Light of the Bible,” 1875; “The Lord that Healeth Thee,” 1881; “Rest for You” (a booklet). He also wrote much in periodicals. ↩

  26. It was written when he was forty-eight years old while he was acting as “stated supply” at Gloucester City. ↩

  27. See especially the article by Jacob J. Abbot in the Bibliotheca Sacra and Biblical Repository for July, 1860, pp. 508–535, and the article by John A. Todd in The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review for October, 1860, pp. 608–640. ↩

  28. “Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum,” ed. 4, 1898, p. 719. ↩

  29. “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” pp. 104–105. ↩

  30. “The Higher Christian Life,” p. 45. ↩

  31. P. 47. ↩

  32. P. 326. ↩

  33. P. 50. ↩

  34. P. 52. ↩

  35. P. 183. ↩

  36. P. 94. ↩

  37. P. 191; cf. pp. 31, 183, 256. ↩

  38. It is interesting to observe that Theodor Jellinghaus, who has a great admiration for Mr. Boardman, cannot go the whole way with him with regard to his “second conversion.” “In England and America and lately also in Germany,” he writes (“Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum,” ed. 4, 1898, p. 71), “some have maintained that a converted man does not become a complete Christian, and does not become a thoroughly blessed and powerful instrument of God’s kingdom, until he receives suddenly and consciously a second baptism with the Holy Spirit. In this there is only this much truth—that a large number of men of God have experienced after their conversion, suddenly, a new deep baptism with the Holy Spirit; many of them at a time when there was suddenly brought to their remembrance and experience the cleansing power of Christ’s blood and the greatness of Christ’s love. But the New Testament nowhere requires for all believers a second, sudden baptism with the Holy Spirit. In most cases the deeper filling with the Holy Spirit comes gradually in sufferings, humiliations and wonderful answers to prayer, and deliverances by the deeper experience of the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection.—He who teaches that every Christian must experience through a second baptism with the Holy Spirit the eradication of his sinful nature and the attainment of sinlessness, is an anti-Scriptural fanatic and errorist (Schwärmer und Irrgeist) …” In his book, “In the Power of the Spirit, or Christian Experience in the Light of the Bible,” 1875, Mr. Boardman identifies “the Baptism of the Spirit” with “the second conversion”: “The name given it in the New Testament,” he writes (p. 5), “is: ‘The Baptism of the Holy Ghost.’ ” Compare below, note 73. The same general position is taken by Asa Mahan, “The Baptism of the Holy Ghost,” 1870: see especially pp. iii–iv, 15–16. Jellinghaus, it will be noted, employs the phrase (in accordance with Matthew 3:11) of the saving operations of the Spirit of Christ in general. ↩

  39. P. 51. ↩

  40. P. 52. ↩

  41. P. 53. ↩

  42. P. 205. ↩

  43. P. 53. ↩

  44. Pp. 199, 200. ↩

  45. P. 206. ↩

  46. P. 139. ↩

  47. P. 140. Speaking elsewhere in terms of his own experience, he writes: “Forgiveness did not satisfy me; I wanted the dominion of sin destroyed. Purification, not less than pardon, I saw to be required. I became thoroughly awakened to my own wretched bondage to sin.” “The wrath of God against sin, as declared in the first of Romans, had been heavy upon me ten years before; but now the bondage of sin, as illustrated in the seventh of Romans, was heavier still, and I experienced the full bitterness of soul which sings out in the cry, ‘Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me?’ But after the Lord led me into the rest of heart for sanctification, how sweet it was!” ↩

  48. P. 113. ↩

  49. P. 126. ↩

  50. He uses the expression (p. 178): “They could tell him what to do—could tell him to consecrate himself, and to believe.” Again (p. 135): “Another thing was needed as much as consecration to do the will of God, viz.: faith in Jesus, for the power of Him who worketh in us, to work in Him both to will and to do of his own good pleasure.” ↩

  51. Pp. 124, 125. ↩

  52. The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, October, 1860, xxxii. p. 625. ↩

  53. P. 30. ↩

  54. Pp. 210, 211. ↩

  55. P. 58. ↩

  56. Pp. 116 ff. ↩

  57. July, 1860, xvii. pp. 533–534. ↩

  58. P. 116. ↩

  59. P. 59. ↩

  60. “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” p. 231. ↩

  61. Pp. 116 f. ↩

  62. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” pp. 120, 121. ↩

  63. Mrs. Boardman, “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” p. 174, teaches very expressly the same doctrine. “It is only as the Holy Spirit reveals self that the soul can see it. There is ever a vast territory within to be possessed by our Lord, and He alone sees all the lurking places of this hidden self, and He alone can show us.… ‘If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we (Christ and we) have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.’ When we are walking, going on in the light, He reveals to us that from which we need to be cleansed; and we learn that whatever knowledge we may have gained, and however deep may be our communion with God to-day, it will not suffice for to-morrow; all we have learned is only retained by the exercise of trust or faith in the Lord moment by moment.” According to this the Higher Christian Life is a walk in Christ. We never commit known sin. But we continually learn that what we do is sin. And learning this, we cease from it. Thus there is a progressive cleansing from sin. ↩

  64. P. 76. ↩

  65. Part I, chapter v. pp. 64 ff. Mrs. Boardman, “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” pp. 52, 58, 135, 170, also vigorously repudiates “Perfectionism” from the same point of view as her husband. On p. 58 she tells us that the experience of receiving Christ as Saviour from his sins was to Mr. Boardman “not the end of sanctification, but the beginning of a life of full, abiding union with Jesus.” “It was a new and better starting-point for full and real progress in all time to come, all the springs of which were in Christ, not in himself.” He was thus bound to Christ “for all future progress” and was assured that “there would be no end of growth.” On p. 170 she defends herself and her husband from the charge that they could not use the clause in the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses.” They did not doubt that Christians remained sinners always and always needed forgiveness. “Conscious sins” are a different matter. ↩

  66. Pp. 266, 267. ↩

  67. P. 269. ↩

  68. P. 289. ↩

  69. P. 322. ↩

  70. See, for example, the article on “The Victorious Life” in The Princeton Theological Review, July, 1918, xvi. pp. 356 ff. or pp. 561 ff. of this volume. ↩

  71. “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” pp. 231–233. ↩

  72. Published in 1875. This distinction is made in connection with an unhappy effort to turn the phrase, the Baptism of the Holy Ghost, into a technical term designating “the second conversion.” “Conversion, therefore,” he writes (p. 89), “and the baptism of the Spirit are separate and distinct experiences.” “There is one, only one Baptism of the Holy Ghost, though there may be many and very great and precious renewals or refreshings by the Spirit afterwards” (p. 32). “The baptism. The baptism, I say; not a baptism, but the gift of the Holy Ghost as an abiding, guiding, teaching, girding, strengthening one” (p. 102). See above note 39. ↩

  73. Isaac M. See, “The Rest of Faith,” 1871. “Yes,” says he in the preface, “let the book be called by that name. For that is the blessed condition of the ‘little ones’ of the Lord Jesus.”—The fundamental teaching of the book runs on the familiar lines of the Higher Christian Life School. Mr. See calls what he advocates “Scriptural holiness” (p. 62). The following brief extracts will give the outlines of his doctrine. “Can I be holy? Yes, beloved, surely you can. Otherwise the glorious God of our salvation would not have commanded you to be holy” (p. 28, cf. p. 43). “I can be holy … God designed it.… He is able and willing” (p. 75). “It must be conceded by those who have tried every way to become holy and have failed that the work of our sanctification is only the Lord’s. Our part in the gracious plan is—‘only believe’ ” (p. 43). “But observe, that though the Lord Jesus is so ‘able to save unto the uttermost,’ yet He will not do our part of the work.… Do your part … and He will do His part” (p. 48). “He, with our full consent (He will not do it without), brings every power into harmony with His own life” (p. 44). “Most positive are we, that if they will let Jesus work, they shall know the joy of a perfect cure” (p. 51). “Let all go for Jesus. This is consecration—a complete, final yielding up of all we have to God, to be succeeded by a continual remembrance that we possess nothing henceforth in our own name” (p. 17). “He died to save us from all leaven of sin, that it might be rooted out and cast away, and that our lives might shine with His holiness. Any other view deprives the church of the full benefit of His death” (pp. 32–33). “We are just as helpless to be holy as the man with the withered arm was to stretch it out. All our works can never make us holy.… It is done by the all-powerful Jesus, who reigns in the hearts of His people, and who delivers them from all things ‘according to their faith.’ … This simple faith is in momentary exercise. It does not believe that holiness which it receives from Christ is infallibility, for this has never been promised; but it does believe, that, as it momentarily looks unto Jesus, it gets the work of the Holy Spirit done within, it keeps the cleansing which it enjoyed at first, and that it is enabled to please God” (p. 85). The perfectionists’ “distinguishing feature … is, that Jesus is so formed in them as to make it impossible for them to fall into sin. It would appear that they believe in infallibility. We have no such doctrine” (p. 54). “We confess our perfection cannot be Adamic, being conformable to our present imperfect capacities.… We also confess that our present graces are not angelic” (p. 55). “We are not sinners in the sense of active trangression of the law” (p. 89). “Jesus can and does keep those who intently look to Him from sinning, from breaking out into actual, known, and therefore wilful, acts of sinning” (p. 105). “I am utterly unable to see how sin can have any dominion or power, or active presence, if Jesus … dwell within. His presence is sin’s expulsion” (p. 58). “I need not, therefore, be anxious about the amount of sin which is left, when by His reigning grace, yea, by His sure presence, I am not conscious of a single desire outside of His will, nor of a departure from Him in my ways” (pp. 58–59). “Jesus has done two things for us. These two things are the purchase of His precious blood; they are inseparable … imputation and impartation. The latter expresses His own indwelling.… If we try to cleanse ourselves we shall be unfit for His dwelling, but if we believe He will cleanse us, and if we give up the work to Him He will see it well done” (pp. 95–97). Here is perfectionism of conduct, confined to deliverance from conscious transgression of known law, produced by the indwelling of Christ. Its generic sameness with the perfectionism taught by the other adherents of the Higher Life school is clear and the specific difference small. ↩

  74. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 74. ↩

  75. P. 80. ↩

  76. Some idea of their number and character may be formed from the volume published in 1872 with the title: “Pioneer Experiences; or the Gift of Power Received by Faith. Illustrated and Confirmed by the Testimony of Eighty Living Witnesses of Various Denominations.” By the author of “The Way of Holiness.” Introduction by the Rev. Bishop Janes. ↩

  77. There appear to be no objective, critical biographies of either Mr. or Mrs. Smith accessible. There is a little sketch of Mr. Smith in German: Möller, “R. P. Smith, ein Lebensbild”; and there is a short notice of him in Schiele und Zscharnack, “Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” v. p. 727. There is also a discussion of the “Religious Experience of R. Pearsall Smith” in The (London) Christian Observer, lxxv. 1875, pp. 830 ff., 926 ff.; lxxvi. 1876, pp. 60 ff. See also Th. Jellinghaus, “Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum” (1880), ed. 4, 1898, pp. 431, 720. Mrs. Smith gives data for the earlier period of their religious life in “The Record of a Happy Life: Being Memorials of Franklin Whitall Smith,” 1873; and a valuable sketch of her own development in “My Spiritual Autobiography or How I Discovered the Unselfishness of God,” 1903. Her later years are depicted by her granddaughter, Ray Strachey, in “A Quaker Grandmother,” 1914. ↩

  78. She herself says in her old age (“My Spiritual Autobiography,” 1903, pp. 55 f.): “Nearly every view of divine things that I have since discovered, and every reform I have since advocated, had, I now realize, their germs in the views of the Society; and over and over again, when some new discovery or conviction has dawned upon me, I caught myself saying, ‘Why, that was what the early Friends meant, although I never understood it before.’ ” ↩

  79. Robert Barclay’s term (cf. Charles Hodge, “Systematic Theology,” i. p. 94; Hastings’ “Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics,” vi. p. 143 a), as also William Law’s (cf. W. R. Inge, “Christian Mysticism,” 1899, p. 282). Eckhart called it “spark” (cf. Inge, p. 155; R. A. Vaughan, “Hours with the Mystics,” i. p. 190). For the history of the term, see Inge, “Christian Mysticism,” Index, “Synteresis.” ↩

  80. “Every-Day Religion,” 1893, pp. 160 ff. ↩

  81. Charles Hodge, as cited, thus summarizes Barclay’s teaching: “This seed comes from Christ, and is communicated to every man. In some it lies as a seed upon a rock, which never shows any sign of life. But when the soul receives a visitation of the Spirit, if his influence be not resisted, that seed is vivified, and develops into holiness of heart and life; by which the soul is purified and justified. We are not justified by our works. Everything is due to Christ. He is both ‘the giver and the gift.’ Nevertheless our justification consists in this subjective change.” To make the parallel complete, Mrs. Smith teaches the same subjective conception of justification (p. 193). Christ is our Righteousness, she says, and then she adds: “That is, the life of Christ in our souls is a righteous life.” She had learned in 1858 the doctrine of Justification by Faith under Plymouth Brethren influences and held it for a time very clearly; but she came afterwards back to the Quaker doctrine (“My Spiritual Autobiography,” pp. 235 ff.) and spoke of her earlier period as a past phase of belief—“in our very evangelical days” (p. 278). ↩

  82. “My Spiritual Autobiography,” 1903, chapter xxix. pp. 275 ff.: “But now at last I had got the clue, and the true inner meaning of Quakerism dawned upon me more and more fully day by day. It was the ‘way of holiness’ in which they were seeking to walk. They preached a deliverance from sin, a victory over the cares and worries of life, a peace that passes all understanding, a continual being made ‘more than conquerors’ through Christ. They were in short ‘Higher Life’ people, and at last I understood them; and now the old preaching, which once had been so confusing, became marrow and fatness to my soul. The preaching had not changed, but I had changed. I had discovered the missing link, and had reached that stage in my soul’s experience to which such preaching ministered” (pp. 280–281). ↩

  83. “The Unselfishness of God,” as cited by J. B. Figgis, “Keswick from Within,” 1914, p. 13. The passage occurs (with some expansion of details) on pp. 278–279 of “My Spiritual Autobiography or How I Discovered the Unselfishness of God,” 1903, which is advertised as “a new edition of ‘The Unselfishness of God.’ ” We infer that Mr. Figgis’ quotations are taken from the first edition of the book, or else that he has skilfully condensed the text. ↩

  84. “My Spiritual Autobiography,” p. 283. ↩

  85. Ibid., p. 283. Theodore Sippell summarizes the Quaker doctrine as follows: “Let us open Robert Barclay’s famous Apology of Quakerism. In the eighth chapter, ‘Concerning Perfection’ we read: ‘In whom this pure and holy birth is fully brought forth the body of sin and death comes to be crucified and removed, and their hearts united and subjected to the truth; so as not to obey any suggestions or temptations of the evil one, but to be free from actual sinning and transgressing of the law of God, and in that respect perfect: yet doth this perfection still admit of a growth; and there remaineth always in some part a possibility of sinning, where the mind doth not most diligently and watchfully attend unto the Lord.’ This power to live free from sin is ascribed by Barclay only to the regenerate man, in whom Christ lives and rules, who not only reveals and punishes sin but also gives power to cease from it. This perfection is, to be sure, no divine perfection, in the sense that we are as pure, holy and perfect as God Himself, but only a perfection which corresponds to the human measure. The doctrine that the saints can never in this life be free from sinning agrees, according to Barclay, neither with the wisdom and almightiness of God nor with His righteousness. It is in the highest degree an accusation of Christ, takes away the power of His offering and makes His coming and His service in the main matter ineffective. It is irrational and meaningless. Christ commands: ‘Ye shall be holy;’ it must therefore be possible. We have the promise, ‘Sin shall not rule over you.’ Paul does not argue in Rom. 6. ‘Ye can be free from sin,’ but ‘You must be free from it, because you are under grace, not under law.’ This perfection or freedom from sin is obtained and made possible when the Gospel and the inner law of the Spirit are received and recognized. According to the witness of Scripture, many have received this freedom from sin—some before the law, and some under the law, and many more still under the gospel. This perfection can be lost again, through lack of watchfulness.… Barclay does not wish to throw into doubt that a still higher condition is attainable by man in this life, in which the right has become so a second nature to him that he in this condition cannot at all sin again. All doubt of this possibility is excluded for him by the Scriptural declaration, 1 John 3:9. ‘Whosoever is born of God doeth no sin, for his seed abideth in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.’ But Barclay modestly recognizes that he has not himself attained this degree of perfection. If now we bear in mind that regeneration, that is, the destruction of the sinful nature and the restoration of the original nature (as Adam possesed it before the fall), is accomplished according to the conception of the Quakers by a sudden instreaming of divine power and grace—then the kinship of the Quaker and the Methodist doctrines of perfection seems extraordinarily close. A difference between them must of course not be overlooked. According to the Quaker conception we receive the perfection immediately on our entrance into a state of grace; according to Wesleyans in a later stadium, namely in the ‘second change.’ But we should not lay too great weight on this difference in the question of their wider kinship” (Die Christliche Welt, xxviii. 1914, coll. 149–150). ↩

  86. This is what Mrs. Smith says explicitly in “The Record of a Happy Life,” p. 16. They “had long been seeking the truth,” she says, and “were both brought on the same day, during the summer of 1858, to a knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ as our all-sufficient Saviour, bearing our sins in His own body on the tree; and by faith in Him were ‘born again’ into the family of God.” In a much later book, “The Unselfishness of God,” 1902 (American edition under the title of “My Spiritual Autobiography,” 1903, pp. 172 ff.), a somewhat different account is given. Mr. Smith seems to be confusing this and his “second conversion” when in an address at the Oxford Union Meeting in 1874 (“Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 168) he says: “I had been a ‘religious man’ for ten long and toilsome years, when one day, in the railway carriage, I for the first time saw in the Scripture what the blood of Christ had done for me. Reaching my journey’s end I found that my wife, in the same way from the Scripture, had, a few hours before, also found eternal life in believing.” It appears to have been about 1867 that he found “the second blessing.” ↩

  87. See also “My Spiritual Autobiography,” pp. 192 ff. ↩

  88. “My Spiritual Autobiography,” p. 200. ↩

  89. “The Record of a Happy Life,” 1873, p. 37. ↩

  90. Pp. 37 f.; cf. chapter xxvi. of “My Spiritual Autobiography.” ↩

  91. “My Spiritual Autobiography,” p. 240. ↩

  92. “Holiness Through Faith,” pp. 83 f., 64 ff. ↩

  93. “The Record of a Happy Life,” pp. 139, 141; cf. p. 186. ↩

  94. “My Spiritual Autobiography,” p. 245. ↩

  95. “The Unselfishness of God,” quoted by Figgis, “Keswick from Within,” p. 12; in a more expanded form, “My Spiritual Autobiography,” p. 263. Mr. Smith’s own account, pp. 264 ff. ↩

  96. Das moderne Gemeinschaftschristentum,” 1910, p. 4. ↩

  97. “Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum,” ed. 4, 1898, p. 720. ↩

  98. Johannes Jüngst (“Amerikanischer Methodismus in Deutschland und Robert Pearsall Smith,” 1875) in his sketch of Smith’s doctrine is concerned to show that the teaching of Smith and that of the Methodists are closely related. This he does very well. The fact is, however, not in dispute. The writer of the able article “The Brighton Convention and its Opponents” in The London Quarterly Review, xlv. October, 1875, pp. 84–128, while criticising quite freely, from the Wesleyan point of view, details in Smith’s teaching, does not think of denying that the cause of the one is in essence the cause of the other: “We are … concerned to defend the general doctrine they teach” (p. 103). ↩

  99. He tells about it in his book, “ ‘Walk in the Light.’ ” Compare Mrs. Smith’s “My Spiritual Autobiography,” 1903, p. 288. ↩

  100. “The Unselfishness of God,” quoted by Figgis, “Keswick from Within,” p. 14; in fuller form, “My Spiritual Autobiography,” pp. 288 f. ↩

  101. The phrase is Fr. Winkler’s, “Robert Pearsall Smith und der Perfectionismus,” second thousand, 1915, p. 17: “1873 beginnt seine Tätigkeit als Weltmissionar.” ↩

  102. Cf. Mrs. Boardman’s “Life and Labours of the Rev. W. E. Boardman,” 1886, p. 250, where J. E. Page, editor of The King’s Highway, speaking of the Oxford Meeting, remarks of Mr. Boardman: “He was not very prominent in the meetings … but he did much valuable work in dealing with individuals.” ↩

  103. We are following the condensed narrative here of F. Winkler, “Robert Pearsall Smith und der Perfectionismus,” 1915, pp. 17 f.; cf. also the vivid brief narrative of Hermann Benser, “Das moderne Gemeinschaftschristentum,” pp. 3 f. and especially the full contemporary account of Johannes Jüngst, “Amerikanischer Methodismus in Deutschland, und Robert Pearsall Smith,” 1875, pp. 48 ff. ↩

  104. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” pp. 134 ff. ↩

  105. This is the ordinary account; but Mrs. Smith does not say this. In her “My Spiritual Autobiography,” 1903, p. 221, she writes: “In 1873 my husband had come over to England to hold some meetings in the interests of the Higher Life, or, what I prefer to call it, the Life of Faith. I soon followed him.…” This may be, however, only a comprehensive way of describing what actually took place. ↩

  106. “Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum,” ed. 4, p. 434. He says he has fully discussed the matter in the first edition of his book, 1880, and has there shown that Mr. Smith’s whole fault lay in teaching privately to some of his pupils “an extravagant esoteric doctrine of particular betrothal (besonderen Verlobung) with Jesus.” We have not seen the first edition of Jellinghaus’ book, and do not know the grounds on which he bases this opinion. ↩

  107. We are assured by Mr. Smith’s friends that this “indiscretion” in conduct “did not amount to immorality in word or act” (The Presbyterian, February 19, 1876, p. 9). The closing words in the following account of Mr. Smith, given by P. Kahlenbeck in Herzog-Hauck, “Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche,” ed. 3, v. p. 665, seem unjustifiably harsh: “About the same time with the news of the results [of Moody’s preaching in Great Britain] there came another revivalist from across the ocean to Germany, Pearsall Smith, who addressed himself, however, more to those who were already believers, seeking to lead them to complete consecration to the Lord, and thus to sinlessness. He, however, after many had attached themselves to him, became in his personal life a disgrace to his doctrine.” ↩

  108. Fr. Winkler (“Robert Pearsall Smith und der Perfectionismus,” ed. 2, 1915, pp. 18, 19) in closing his brief sketch of Smith’s life mentions that the air was full of ugly rumors at the time when Smith broke off his work in England, but adds that the accessible sources of information do not render it possible to form a certain judgment of the truth of the matter. “Here,” says he, “there is a task for investigation, and in general a satisfactory life of R. P. Smith, from the point of view of critical science, is still lacking.” ↩

  109. The phrase is Professor Thomas Smith’s (The British and Foreign Evangelical Review, April, 1876, p. 251). Compare the words of Dr. Lyman H. Atwater (The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review, July, 1877, p. 419) who, warning his readers against the antinomian tendencies intrinsic in the Higher Life teaching, remarks: “Nor do we think it wrong or uncharitable in this connection to refer to the career of Mr. Pearsall Smith, who has been so conspicuous in Higher Life leadership.” ↩

  110. The Presbyterian (Philadelphia) of January 22, 1876, p. 8, where also the statement quoted above may be found. The matter is reverted to in the issue of February 19, 1876. ↩

  111. “Keswick from Within,” by the Rev. J. B. Figgis, 1914, p. 59. ↩

  112. Here is Mrs. Smith’s own account of the crisis (“My Spiritual Autobiography,” pp. 179): “One day, however, a ‘Plymouth Brother’ friend, hearing me tell my story, exclaimed ‘Thank God, Mrs. Smith, that you have at last become a Christian.’ So little did I understand him, that I promptly replied, ‘Oh no, I am not a Christian at all. I have only found out a wonderful piece of good news that I never knew before.’ ‘But,’ he persisted, ‘that very discovery makes you a Christian, for the Bible says that whoever believes this good news has passed from death unto life, and is born of God. You have just said that you believe in it and rejoice in it, so of course you have passed from death unto life and are born of God.’ I thought for a moment, and I saw the logic of what he said. There was no escaping it. And with a sort of gasp I said, ‘Why, so I must be. Of course I believe this good news, and therefore of course I must be born of God. Well, I am glad.’ From that moment the matter was settled.” ↩

  113. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 65: “At 4.30 Mrs. Pearsall Smith held a Bible Reading in the same room—a meeting for ladies. Gentlemen who chose to attend were not excluded, and many were present at this and the subsequent hours devoted to her Scripture lessons.” ↩

  114. As cited, pp. 23–24. ↩

  115. As cited, p. 37. ↩

  116. Mr. Smith’s books include “Holiness Through Faith,” 1870; “ ‘Walk in the Light,’ ” 1873; “Through Death to Life: the Lesson of the Sixth of Romans, with Illustrated Narratives”; “Bondage and Liberty; or, is Romans 7 to be the Continued Experience of the Christian?” and a series of booklets: “The Secret of Victory”; “Liberty in Serving Christ”; “Out of Darkness, into the Kingdom”; “A Clean Heart”; “Doers of the Word”; “Life’s Great Sorrow, and its Remedy”; “Chosen to be Holy”; “ ‘Thy Maker is Thy Husband’ ”; “The Way of Righteousness.” He was also the editor of the periodical: The Christian’s Pathway of Power. ↩

  117. P. 10. ↩

  118. P. 59. ↩

  119. Hannah Whitall Smith’s books include: “Holiness as Set forth in the Scriptures”; “The Record of a Happy Life: Memorials of Franklin Whitall Smith,” 1873; “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” 1875; “The Veil Uplifted; or, the Bible its own Interpreter,” 1886; “Every-Day Religion,” 1893; “Soul Rest; or, the Joy of Obedience,” 1893; “Child-Culture; or, the Science of Motherhood,” 1894; “Christ Enough,” 1895; “Old Testament Types and Teachings,” 1899; “The Unselfishness of God,” 1902; “Living in the Sunshine,” 1906; “Difficulties of Life”; “God is Love”; “The Open Secret.” There are besides a long series of booklets belonging to her earlier activity, such as: “The Way to be Holy”; “Abiding in Christ”; “The Christian’s Cry”; “The Christian’s Shout”; “A Word to the Wavering Ones”; “Jesus our Saviour from Sin”; “What Faith is and How to Exercise it.” For a considerable period she contributed almost every month a paper to The Christian’s Pathway of Power. ↩

  120. Johannes Jüngst (“Amerikanischer Methodismus in Deutschland und Robert Pearsall Smith,” 1875, pp. 62–66) has some admirable remarks upon this fundamental error of tearing apart two organically related things. “A justification which can endure for years without ripening true fruits of sanctification has been no justification at all in the evangelical sense. Can I talk of a fire which has been burning for years, but only to-day gives out warmth? According to both the Scriptures and the doctrine of the Church, justification and sanctification are two never to be separated twin sisters. He who is really justified and brought by Christ into the relation of a son to his God has received at the same time the impulse to sanctification, the impetus to an eternal advance. We must certainly bear in mind that the work of redemption in the Christian is a unitary whole.” ↩

  121. “The Record of a Happy Life,” p. 16. ↩

  122. “The Record of a Happy Life,” p. 37. ↩

  123. Johannes Jüngst, as cited, p. 66, quotes a German periodical of the time, which remarks that this haste to secure “full salvation” is a sign of the times: “Get rich quick, get saved quick!” ↩

  124. “The Record of a Happy Life,” p. 37. ↩

  125. “Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum,” ed. 4, 1898, p. 431. ↩

  126. The air in London in the summer and autumn of 1875 was fairly palpitant with the Higher Christian Life. Mrs. Julia McNair Wright “reported” the meetings for The Presbyterian (Philadelphia), perhaps a little too sympathetically and yet with an eye open to excesses. Here is a vignette or two (September 11, 1875, p. 2). She tells of “an errant American preacher” who “preëmpted the platform,” and “was long and loud” in his claims to “complete sanctification,” and “was more than righteously angry with all who denied such a claim.” She tells also of “an elderly sister” “who claimed that even the roots of sin were dead in her heart.” “We studied this sister’s case carefully,” says Mrs. Wright, “and came to the conclusion that her assertion was based, not on a fact of sanctification, but on an obtuseness of perception.… She thought herself completely holy merely because her conscience did not remonstrate where other people’s consciences would have lifted an outcry.” ↩

  127. For these elements of Dr. Mahan’s teaching, see his “Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection,” 1844, pp. 91, 92, 189, 190. ↩

  128. “Holiness Through Faith,” p. 76. ↩

  129. “Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection,” pp. 92–93. ↩

  130. Pp. 189, 190. ↩

  131. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” pp. 49–52. ↩

  132. “Holiness Through Faith,” p. 41. ↩

  133. P. 49. ↩

  134. P. 49. ↩

  135. “Das völlige, gegenwärtige Heil durch Christum,” ed. 4, 1898, p. 717. ↩

  136. Ibid., p. 721. ↩

  137. P. 722. ↩

  138. As cited, p. 435. ↩

  139. “Holiness Through Faith,” p. 11. ↩

  140. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 186. ↩

  141. Ibid., p. 222. ↩

  142. Ibid., p. 150. ↩

  143. Ibid., p. 150. ↩

  144. P. 150. ↩

  145. P. 150. ↩

  146. P. 151. ↩

  147. “The Rest of Faith,” 1871, pp. 14 f.: “We have heard that a certain divine once said that the Church is an hospital where the inmates are all sick. When they get well they are taken to heaven. The person speaking may have believed it, but we believe the sentiment is of the devil.… If so… then, too, the churches that are scattered here and there through the land are only infirmaries where people come to be treated by the Great Physician, who proceeds to cure the people by a slow process, in the meantime leaving them to the oversight of these sick ministering nurses,” that is, their pastors. ↩

  148. “Holiness Through Faith,” p. 92: the italics are ours. ↩

  149. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 78. ↩

  150. Ibid., p. 60. ↩

  151. Ibid., pp. 60–62: the italics are ours. ↩

  152. “Holiness Through Faith,” p. 59: the italics are ours. ↩

  153. P. 60: the italics are ours. ↩

  154. Compare the reductio ad absurdum of these teachings of Mr. Smith’s given by Thomas Smith, The British and Foreign Evangelical Review, April, 1876. pp. 271–272. ↩

  155. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 323. ↩

  156. As cited, p. 58. ↩

  157. The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review, July, 1877, p. 415. ↩

  158. “Holiness Through Faith,” p. 59. ↩

  159. Cf. Lyman H. Atwater, as cited, p. 408: “The late Bishop Janes, in his introduction to the book entitled Pioneer Experiences, says that, ‘while entire sanctification makes us perfect Christians, it does not make us perfect men.’ ” The distinction between religious and moral perfection is curiously illustrated by a phrase of Mrs. Smith’s (“My Spiritual Autobiography,” p. 213): “I saw that God was good, not religiously good only, but really and actually good in the truest sense of that word.” The notion that a being can be “religiously good” without being “really and actually good” is not a wholesome one. ↩

  160. “Holiness Through Faith,” pp. 105 ff. ↩

  161. P. 108. ↩

  162. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 136. ↩

  163. P. 152. ↩

  164. Mr. Smith’s assertions on this side reach their climax in the declaration he is reported to have made at the Brighton Conference: “I know no example of a relapse from the higher life” (Herzog-Hauck, “Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche,” ed. 3, xxiii. p. 530, lines 29, 30). ↩

  165. P. 321. ↩

  166. P. 274. ↩

  167. Pp. 155, 156. ↩

  168. Here is a hard saying of the Rev. D. B. Hankin’s (“Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” pp. 83 f.): “I trusted the Lord as never before, and found Him faithful to His promises in keeping me from falling; when I have stumbled, as I do even now sometimes, the failure is mine not Christ’s.” He means that it is only when his trust fails that Christ’s keeping fails. But he also means that when his trust fails Christ’s keeping fails. He means, that is, that Christ’s keeping depends on his own trusting. Christ has promised to keep him from falling; and Christ will be faithful to that promise—that is, will keep him from falling. Nevertheless he falls whenever he wishes to, and Christ does not keep him from doing so. ↩

  169. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 134. ↩

  170. As cited, p. 96. ↩

  171. “My Spiritual Autobiography,” pp. 222 f. ↩

  172. P. 37. ↩

  173. “Every-Day Religion,” 1893, p. 170. ↩

  174. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” pp. 66–68. ↩

  175. This also was no doubt a result of her Quaker training. Speaking of her girlhood, she writes (“My Spiritual Autobiography,” p. 143): “The Quakers rarely touched on the future life in any way, either as regarded heaven or hell. Their one concern was as to the life of God in the soul of man now and here, and they believed that where this was realized and lived, the future could be safely left in the Divine care.” Preoccupation with the present was therefore natural to her. ↩

  176. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” pp. 17 f. ↩

  177. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” p. 36. ↩

  178. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 291. ↩

  179. Ibid., pp. 295–296. ↩

  180. “Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874,” p. 299. ↩

  181. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” pp. 243–244. ↩

  182. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” pp. 66 f. ↩

  183. P. 80. ↩

  184. P. 80. ↩

  185. “Every-Day Religion,” pp. 69, 72. ↩

  186. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” p. 82. ↩

  187. “Every-Day Religion,” p. 79. ↩

  188. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” pp. 246 ff. ↩

  189. Pp. 36 ff. ↩

  190. P. 40. ↩

  191. One of the most remarkable things in this passage (p. 72) is the use of Phil. 2:13 in it. Henry A. Boardman, in his excellent examination of the teaching in “The ‘Higher Life’ Doctrine of Sanctification,” 1877, pp. 143 ff., animadverts on the violence done to this text by Mr. Smith in such passages as these: “Is not the promise worthy of confidence, that God will work in us to will and to do of His good pleasure, and if He does this, shall we not have to cease working ourselves?”—“God worketh in you to will and to do; therefore cease working.” The Apostle says God worketh in you, therefore work. Mr. Smith says, God worketh in you, therefore cease working. Mrs. Smith, in some of her allusions at least, has learned to avoid this gross wresting of the text, though at the cost of a great inconsistency. “When we have surrendered the working of our wills to God,” she says in “Every-Day Religion,” 1893, p. 76, “and are letting Him ‘work in us to will and to do of His good pleasure,’ we are then called upon to ‘set our faces like a flint’ to carry out His will, and must respond with an emphatic ‘I will’ to every ‘Thou shalt’ of His.” The inconsistency of this with her Quietism is glaring. And the wresting of Paul in suspending God’s working on our working instead of vice versa remains unaffected. Compare also pp. 72 and 80. ↩

  192. For example, “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” p. 190: “God’s way of working … is to get possession of the inside of a man, to take the control and management of his will, and to work it for him.” ↩

  193. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” p. 128. ↩

  194. P. 142; cf. p. 242. ↩

  195. Pp. 138 f. ↩

  196. “The Record of a Happy Life,” 1873, p. 88. ↩

  197. Ibid., p. 119. ↩

  198. “The Record of a Happy Life,” 1873, pp. 148 f. ↩

  199. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” p. 30. ↩

  200. P. 30. ↩

  201. P. 34. ↩

  202. P. 35. ↩

  203. P. 34. ↩

  204. P. 173. ↩

  205. P. 180. ↩

  206. Pp. 183–184. ↩

  207. P. 179. ↩

  208. “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,” Part II, chapter xiii. ↩

  209. See J. B. Figgis, “Keswick from Within,” 1914, p. vii. ↩

  210. Among his relevant writings are: “The Christ Life”; “Walking in the Spirit”; “Life More Abundantly”; “Himself,” an address delivered at Bethshan, London, 1885; “Tracts for the Times, Deeper Life Series.” Compare The Princeton Theological Review for July, 1918, pp. 358 ff., or pp. 597 ff. of this volume, and “The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge,” x. p. 430. ↩

  211. The titles of some of his tracts are: “Scriptural Heart Cleansing”; “Practical and Scriptural Holiness”; “Have You Perfect Peace?”; “Are You a Pentecostal Christian?”; “Solution of Many Difficulties”; “How to Know the Voice of Christ”; “Is this Your Photograph?”; “Have You the Holy Ghost? “They were published by “The Church Press,” Chicago. ↩

  212. James H. McConkey, “The Three-fold Secret of the Holy Spirit,” ed. 2, 1897, 128 pages. Mr. McConkey writes on the general presupposition of the Arminian scheme of salvation. He looks upon Repentance and Faith, conceived as two separate acts, as the proper conditions of salvation. He even speaks of our “yielding” to the Spirit “for Regeneration,” and in general as if our “yielding” were always the precedent condition of the Spirit’s working. He teaches that there are two distinct and separate stages of salvation. On Repentance and Faith we enter into life, are united with Christ, and “receive the indwelling Spirit.” Then on “yielding,” or, more technically “surrendering,” our life to God we “receive the fulness of the Spirit.” Usually there is an actual interval between the two; logically such an interval is presupposed and the appeal of the Scriptures for the second is grounded on the asumption that the first has taken place; but actually the two steps may take place chronologically together, or with so short an interval between that it is unnoted. In the order of thought “conversion must of necessity precede consecration.” But the interval should not be prolonged. “The flesh still abides in the believer,” though he “need not walk in it.” “Jesus Christ does not so much impart life as He inbrings life”; and so “the believer has no spiritual life in himself, apart from Christ Jesus.” The old man is not to be amended but put off—as if the old man is not put off precisely by being amended.—Of course, the new spiritual life which is imparted is not “independent of Christ,” or “apart from Christ.” It will not do to represent the believer, however, as left dead: he is made alive in Christ—and it is he that is made alive. It is not only that he has Christ in him and Christ is living, but it is he himself that is living, for Christ has made him alive; yes, he has life in himself (John 6:53). It is not true that “the believer is portrayed as a man in himself spiritually dead, indwelt through the Spirit by Jesus Christ, who is his spiritual life” (p. 98). He is portrayed as a man who is spiritually alive, in whom Jesus Christ the source of all his life, dwells by His Spirit. The man himself is saved, and his new holiness is his holiness. It is a grave error to suppose that the living Christ can dwell within us without imparting life to us. He quickens whom He will; and he whom He quickens, lives.—It is pleasant to observe that, in spite of his fundamental Arminianism, Mr. McConkey believes in “Perseverance.” ↩

  213. M. H. Houston, “Dr. Strickler on Perfectionism,” 1904, p. 6: “I am nothing; Christ is all: his life is brought to me by the Holy Spirit, and to be filled with the Spirit is to have the fullness of Christ. The Christ life is obedience to all the commands of God, and the fullness of Christ is full, entire obedience to these commands. This is what is meant by the phrase, entire, or complete, sanctification.” ↩

  214. An admirable detailed criticism of the “Higher Life” teaching will be found in Henry A. Boardman, “The ‘Higher Life’ Doctrine of Sanctification, Tried by the Word of God,” 1877. It is also faithfully, though briefly, dealt with by John Charles Ryle, in the Introduction to his “Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots,” 1877; ed. 2, 1879; often reissued. Professor Thomas Smith in an article on “Means and Measure of Holiness,” in The British and Foreign Evangelical Review for April, 1876, pp. 251 ff., gives an excellent discussion of it; and Lyman H. Atwater, in an article on “The Higher Life and Christian Perfection,” in The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review for July, 1877, pp. 389 ff., takes occasion from it to review the whole subject of Christian Perfection most helpfully. There is an able article in The London Quarterly Review for October, 1875, xlv. pp. 85 ff., on “The Brighton Convention and Its Opponents” from the Wesleyan point of view, defending the “Higher Life” teachers against their critics. From the heading of this article the titles of a number of the criticisms of the movement published in 1875 may be obtained. Valuable discussions are found also in Johannes Jüngst, “Amerikanischer Methodismus in Deutschland und Robert Pearsall Smith,” 1875; Reiff-Hesse, “Die Oxforder Bewegung und ihre Bedeutung für unsere Zeit”; G. Warneck, “Briefe über die Versammlung in Brighton,” 1876; Paul Fleisch, “Zur geschichte der Heiligungsbewegung,” 1910; H. Benser, “Das moderne Gemeinschaftschristentum,” 1910; Fr. Winkler, “Robert Pearsall Smith und der Perfectionismus,” second thousand, 1915. Compare also Herman Bavinck, “Gereformeerde Dogmatiek,” J. H. Kok, Kampen, 1911, iv. pp. 262 ff., and the literature there given. ↩

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