Reprinted from The Princeton Theological Review, xvi. 1918, pp. 321–373.
It appears to have been early observed that the mills of the gods grind very slowly: and hasty spirits have been only partially reconciled to that fact by the further observation that they do their work exceedingly well. Men are unable to understand why time should be consumed in divine works. Why should the almighty Maker of the heaven and earth take millions of years to create the world? Why should He bring the human race into being by a method which leaves it ever incomplete? Above all, in His recreation of a lost race, why should He proceed by process? Men are unwilling that either the world or they themselves should be saved by God’s secular methods. They demand immediate, tangible results. They ask, Where is the promise of His coming? They ask to be themselves made glorified saints in the twinkling of an eye. God’s ways are not their ways, and it is a great trial to them that God will not walk in their ways. They love the storm and the earthquake and the fire. They cannot see the divine in “a sound of gentle stillness,” and adjust themselves with difficulty to the lengthening perspective of God’s gracious working. For the world they look every day for the cataclysm in which alone they can recognize God’s salvation; and when it ever delays its coming they push it reluctantly forward but a little bit at a time. For themselves they cut the knot and boldly declare complete salvation to be within their reach at their option, or already grasped and enjoyed. It is true, observation scarcely justifies the assertion. But this difficulty is easily removed by adjusting the nature of complete salvation to fit their present attainments. These impatient souls tolerate more readily the idea of an imperfect perfection than the admission of lagging perfecting. They must at all costs have all that is coming to them at once.
It was John Wesley who infected the modern Protestant world with this notion of “entire instantaneous sanctification.” In saying this we are not bringing a railing accusation against him. There was no element of his teaching which afforded him himself greater satisfaction. There is no element of it which is more lauded by his followers, or upon their own possession of which they more felicitate themselves. “The current orthodoxy,” they say, “limited the salvation of Christ.” It had limited it “in the degree of its attainability as well as in the persons by whom it is attainable.”1 It was the achievement of Wesley to lift these limitations and to make it clear not only that the salvation of Christ is attainable by all but that it is completely attainable by all. “Knowing exactly what I say, and taking the full responsibility of it, I repeat,” John McClintock solemnly asseverates,2 in describing the result in the church which Wesley founded, “we are the only church in history, from the apostles’ time until now, that has put forward as its very elemental thought … the holiness of the human soul, heart, mind and will.” Nothing less than a new epoch in the history of the Church has thus, in the view of Wesley’s followers, been introduced. “Historically,” writes Olin A. Curtis,3 “Wesley had almost the same epochal relation to the doctrinal emphasis upon holiness that Luther had to the doctrinal emphasis upon justification by faith, or that Athanasius had to the doctrinal emphasis upon the Deity of our Lord.” We are merely recognizing, therefore, what is eagerly proclaimed by his followers, when we attribute to Wesley’s impulse the wide prevalence in our modern Protestantism of what has come to be known as “holiness teaching.” The fact is, however, in any event too plain to be overlooked. As wave after wave of the “holiness movement” has broken over us during the past century, each has brought, no doubt, something distinctive of itself. But a common fundamental character has informed them all, and this common fundamental character has been communicated to them by the Wesleyan doctrine. The essential elements of that doctrine repeat themselves in all these movements, and form their characteristic features. In all of them alike justification and sanctification are divided from one another as two separate gifts of God. In all of them alike sanctification is represented as obtained, just like justification, by an act of simple faith, but not by the same act of faith by which justification is obtained, but by a new and separate act of faith, exercised for this specific purpose. In all of them alike the sanctification which comes on this act of faith, comes immediately on believing, and all at once, and in all of them alike this sanctification, thus received, is complete sanctification. In all of them alike, however, it is added, that this complete sanctification does not bring freedom from all sin; but only, say, freedom from sinning; or only freedom from conscious sinning; or from the commission of “known sins.” And in all of them alike this sanctification is not a stable condition into which we enter once for all by faith, but a momentary attainment, which must be maintained moment by moment, and which may readily be lost and often is lost, but may also be repeatedly instantaneously recovered.