DIVINE HEALING:THE HOLINESS-PENTECOSTALTRANSITION YEARS,

1890–1906

Theological Transposition in the Transatlantic World

JAMES ROBINSON

WITH A FOREWORD BY CANDY GUNTHER BROWN

DIVINE HEALING: THE HOLINESS-PENTECOSTAL TRANSITION YEARS, 1890–1906

Theological Transposition in the Transatlantic World

Copyright © 2013 James Robinson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-62032-408-0

eisbn 13:  978-1-62189-591-6

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Robinson, James.

Divine healing: the holiness-Pentecostal transition years, 1890–1906 : theological transposition in the transatlantic world / James Robinson ; with a foreword by Candy Gunther Brown.

xvi + 222 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 13: 978-1-62032-408-0

1. Healing—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Holiness movement. I. Brown, Candy Gunther. II. Title.

bt732.5 r63 2013

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For our grandchildren:

Jamie, Charlotte and Finn

Anna and Katie

Although Christian definitions of health will share dimensions of

other responsible human definitions, they will also include unique

dimensions that may surprise and offend the world.

Healing in Christ is ultimately cruciform.

—Frederick J. Gaiser, Healing in the Bible

Foreword

Pentecostal Christianity has expanded exponentially and globally during the past century. One of the principal explanations is the emphasis given to divine healing and the widespread perception that Pentecostal healing practices are effective. The appeal is greatest for the world’s poor, who suffer a disproportionate share of infirmities, yet have limited or no access to conventional medicine. Globalizing processes often exacerbate rather than alleviate health problems, for instance by spreading epidemic disease. Today, more than a quarter of the world’s two billion Christians self-identify as Pentecostal or Charismatic. Surveys single out divine healing as the most significant factor in distinguishing Pentecostals from other Christians. Most surveyed Pentecostals report having personally experienced or witnessed divine healing of an illness or injury. First-generation Christians, especially in the Latin American, Asian, and African contexts where Pentecostal growth is most rapid, often attribute their conversions primarily to divine healing.

Up until recently, the centrality of healing to Pentecostalism has been largely overlooked. Over the past thirty years, a growing cadre of scholars has discovered the prominence of healing in diverse Pentecostal communities around the world. But in many academic as well as lay circles Pentecostals are still more commonly associated with such practices as speaking in tongues and promises of financial prosperity in return for seed-faith giving. Healing is nevertheless pivotal to the story of Pentecostalism, and this has been the case since the nineteenth century when the theologically, socially, and geographically diffuse networks that would birth Pentecostalism began to take shape.

This book is best read as the second in a trilogy. The first installment treated the formative years of 1830–90, spanning from the Scottish Irvingite revivals of 1830–35 to the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness in London in 1885. The volume at hand zeroes in on the years immediately leading up to the watershed Azusa Street revivals in Los Angeles, California, 1890–1906. Yet to come is a volume taking the story forward from 1906–30, by which time the Pentecostal movement had become firmly established.

In the present volume, Robinson shows how the nineteenth-century Holiness movement, including its emphasis on divine healing, contributed to the rise of Pentecostalism. His focus is largely on the United States, and to a lesser extent Britain, though he acknowledges that the roots of Pentecostalism are more global than this. Indeed, this project can serve as an invitation to more work on the non-European origins of Pentecostalism, but for Robinson to have so broadened his purview at the current level of depth would have required several additional volumes.

Taken together, Robinson’s books represent a monumental achievement. Although other scholars have covered similar ground, Robinson’s treatment is unparalleled in depth. He draws productively on the burgeoning secondary literatures on Pentecostalism and healing and brings to light frequently overlooked, yet revealing primary sources. Even when relatively well-known individuals (such as John Alexander Dowie) appear in this narrative, most readers will find that there is much they had not known before; in some cases, the added detail may induce veteran readers to view characters in a more sympathetic light, while in other cases the reverse seem likely. An important achievement made possible by Robinson’s exhaustive treatment is that the narrative traces lines of influence—across individuals, geographic regions, and trans-local reading communities—with heightened precision. The result of Robinson’s painstaking research and patient narration is an authoritative treatise that will become required reading for students of Pentecostalism, healing movements, and the history of Christianity.

This is much more than a work of intellectual history. At its heart lie the experiences of individuals, families, and communities struggling to live, believe, overcome sicknesses and doubts, and make sense of their lives—and deaths. Robinson’s narrative illumines flesh-and-blood people from the past and invites modern readers to relate to fellow humans who experienced hope and relief, agonized over decisions, and felt the sting of disappointments and rejection by family, neighbors, friends, and co-religionists. The events Robinson narrates are fascinating in their own right, and they are important to the histories of Pentecostalism and healing for how they clarify the processes by which divine healing was pursued, debated, and often disparaged. The text also contributes to larger medical and social histories, as in a riveting excursus into neurasthenia, psychology, and the position of women in modernizing British and American societies. Such sections offer tantalizing glimpses of the roots of some of today’s most popular and contested medical and religious responses to sickness and health.

The careful reader will find not only common themes uniting the numerous individuals and communities whose stories are told, but also apprehend that healing proponents disagreed, sometimes sharply on many points of theology and practice. Not all of the effects of healing practices were intended, nor were they all positive. Although Robinson treats his subjects empathetically, he also reveals that many of the personalities who exerted an enormous influence within and beyond their local communities were anything but infallible.

It is notable that Robinson does not trace a story of absolute continuity or linear advance. Rather, the American and European divine healing movements were faltering on the eve of Azusa Street; at least, radical believers had lost much of their audience, even among fellow Christians. Of particular interest is Robinson’s poignant treatment of declining enthusiasm for healing practices in the face of failure, especially in cases where refused medical treatments could have relieved suffering or saved life. Today, most Pentecostals gladly accept modern medicine, and many non-Pentecostals pray for healing. Indeed, since the mid-twentieth century, divine healing practices, conventional biomedical treatments, and proliferating complementary and alternative medical approaches—a number of which are tethered to religions and spiritual traditions other than Christianity—have come into contact in increasingly complex ways in an era of growing pluralism. There are hints of this emerging milieu in Robinson’s account—for instance, in his treatments of Christian Science and Theosophy. But the simultaneous rise of sometimes competing and sometimes connected therapeutic approaches is a story that remains to be told.

Candy Gunther Brown

Indiana University

Preface

This book in its present form was never foreseen. When the topic of divine healing within Protestantism was conceived, the intention was to write a one volume study of its history for the period 1830–1930. The initial draft was considered too long for publication. The decision was taken to divide the work into two books. The first was published under the title Divine Healing: The Formative Years 1830–1890, and appeared in 2011. Work on second part added new material to the extent that the decision was made to divide it again into two parts. In effect, the completed task would be published as a trilogy. Book 2 is a study of the period 1890–1906, while Book 3 is planned to cover the years 1906–30.

The year 1890 maintains historical continuity with its published predecessor. How-ever, it carries a certain aptness in that the 1890s saw the formation of over twenty-three new Holiness denominations in America, most of them split from the mainstream Methodist Episcopal Church, earning their members the label “come-outers.” It was from their ranks that many of the earliest Pentecostals were drawn. The come-outers’ doctrine and practice of divine healing were largely transmitted to the new movement.

The significance of 1906 rests on the fact that it was the year of the Azusa Street revival, commonly regarded as the origin of classical Pentecostalism. From that starting point the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement has grown with great rapidity. Today it numbers around 8 percent of the world’s population, and about a quarter of the world’s Christian population, compared to just 6 percent thirty-five years ago.

The period 1890–1906 is brief, though much of significance took place within it. However, many of the important events and personal narratives of the main actors spill over the time-assigned limits. A review of the previous book noted that though its title might suggest a tight temporal framework (1830–90), it acted more as a focus than a straitjacket, and the historical flow is recognized on either side of these dates. This

applies even more so to this book. The guideline followed is that persons or events that contributed appreciably to the story of divine healing in the period 1890–1906 would be included where relevant.

Recent readers of the first book may wish to either miss or skim the Introduction. Other readers will tune into this book more easily, and read it with a fuller understanding when people and places met with in the earlier volume are referred to in this book. In the Preface of the first book I acknowledged those authors who have opened up this subject to scholarly analysis. Again, I wish pay tribute to them: Robert Bruce Mullin, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination; Heather D. Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician; James W. Opp, The Lord for the Body; Nancy Hardesty, Faith Cure: Jonathan Baer, Perfectly Empowered Bodies (PhD, Yale). To these can be added two more recent volumes by Candy Gunther Brown: Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, and Testing Prayer, and more recently Science and Healing. I extend my especial thanks to Professor Brown so willingly providing the Foreword.

I am deeply indebted to Michael Tregenna and Caroline Stevenson for proofreading the text at separate stages in its progress. Both offered their services willingly, and were assiduous in their approach to the task. I cannot thank them enough. Our son and daughter—in—law, David and Mary Robinson, kindly provided accommodation for me in London when I engaged in research at the British Library. The fact that their apartment was only a thirty minute walk from the Library was a great boon.

One person I sadly miss is Desmond W. Cartwright, who died recently. Desmond was an Elim pastor, as well as Archivist Emeritus, Donald Gee Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Research, UK. He was the first person I turned to for help in my doctorate, and the two books following. He was a mine of knowledge on Pentecostal history, which he was always prepared to share over many a lengthy phone conversation. Before his death he took time to read the draft of this book, and pass on his encouraging comments.

Abbreviations

AFC Apostolic Faith Church

AOG Assemblies of God

BDEB Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography

BMJ British Medical Journal

(C)CAC (Christian) Catholic Apostolic Church

CMA Christian and Missionary Alliance

DPCM Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements

IDHA International Divine Healing Association

LH Leaves of Healing

LRE Latter Rain Evangel

MCA Metropolitan Christian Association

MEC Methodist Episcopal Church

NCA National Camps Association

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

PMU Pentecostal Missionary Union

POF Pillar of Fire

RICDH A Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness

TH Thy Healer

TF Triumphs of Faith

WWW Work Word World

Introduction

SETTING THE SCENE

This book sets out to continue the theme of its predecessor Divine Healing: The Formative Years, 1825–1890 that studied the origin and growth of the divine healing movement within Protestantism in the nineteenth century. Its specific aim is to draw

attention to the fifteen or so years leading up to the beginning of the Pentecostal movement as defined here by its putative origin in Azusa Street, Los Angeles in 1906. Emphasis is placed on those people and events that could be termed proto-Pentecostal because in the transition from the nineteenth-century Holiness Movement to the Pentecostal movement the new movement was shaped profoundly by its Holiness parent, not least in its theology and practice of divine healing.

Pentecostalism and elements within the parent Holiness movement directly challenged much of the theology of suffering within the post-Reformation church. Up to the sixteenth century, the Catholic mind saw direct divine intervention as the staple fare of reality. The religious world was permeated by supernatural manifestations where miracles were mediated by saintly intercessors and their relics. Finucane commented that “from Rome to Lindisfarne the powers of holy bones were recognized by the simplest Christians, innocent of theology, and for a thousand years these beliefs, though sometimes challenged, would dominate much of the folk-Christianity of Europe.”[1] The Reformers rejected such traditional expectation of miracles. They took the view that the age of miracles had passed and they were no longer necessary because, as Calvin asserted, Protestants needed no new miracles because they had no new gospel. Cessationism, the belief that maintains the charismatic gifts found in the primitive church had ceased by the end of the apostolic age, all but precluded any return of miracles within early Protestantism.[2] Up to the latter third of the nineteenth century the prevailing view on suffering was that it was a burden that had to be faced with patient endurance, otherwise referred to as afflictive suffering.

As against the concept of afflictive suffering, there arose in the nineteenth century a number of Christian leaders who challenged such a view. A. B. Simpson advised, “If you should meet someone who has a broken arm, tell him not to try any experiments on God. If they can trust Him, without doubt He will heal anything.”[3] Many such radicals believed that the atonement was the cornerstone of the healing ministry by maintaining that healing for the body could be claimed on the same grounds as salvation for the soul. They laid great weight on their interpretation of a limited number of biblical passages.[4] Such ideas had taken root earlier within outposts of continental Pietism, expanded in the American Holiness/Higher Life movement and were boosted in the twentieth century by the Pentecostal/ Charismatic movement. Those who promoted this understanding are referred to in this book as “radical healers.” The earlier volume examined the story from 1825 to the 1880s. This study examines how the theology and practice of divine healing unfolded from the 1880s to 1906. The year 1906 is generally regarded as the beginning of the Pentecostal movement.

The message of the radicals was not readily received in other evangelical circles. At the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness held in London in June 1885, one of their number opined that “too many of our brethren utterly reject it . . . good men, high in the office of the church characterise it as a delusion, a work of Satan.”[5] What the “good men” were condemning was not any divine reluctance to heal for, as Warfield stated, “no one who is a Christian in any clear sense doubts that God hears and answers prayer for the healing of the sick.”[6] With this measure of agreement, the question arises as to what exactly did set the radicals apart from their critics. Three distinctive features can be identified and, though a broad consensus existed on the three strands within radical circles, unanimity was neither expected nor enforced on all three:

1. In the radical healing apologetic, redemption carried a wider connotation than that accepted in evangelical understanding. It held that since the defilement of sin extends to both the spirit and body, the redemptive work of Christ applied to both. A. B. Simpson was quite clear that “our healing becomes a great redemption right that we simply claim as our purchased inheritance through the blood of Christ.”[7]

2. As salvation is through faith, so is healing. The early nomenclature of “prayer cure,” “faith-cure” and “faith healing” came readily to the phenomenon, but was increasingly dropped in favour of “divine healing” to differentiate between the source and the recipient. “Man can only receive divine grace according to his faith,” wrote Andrew Murray, “and this applies as much to divine healing as to any other grace of God. . . .The part of faith is always to lay hold on just what appears impossible to human eyes.” For radicals, the only limits to the faith claim were the words and works of Christ, and the promises of Scripture.

3. The question of medical help was probably the most contentious of the three factors. It generated bitterness whenever it brought the charge of prolonging

unnecessary suffering or causing premature death by waiving medical help. Medical intervention was considered the sign of a deficient faith and brought less glory to God. Bosworth contended, “It honours God to believe Him even when every sense contradicts Him!”[8] Time would show that such a position would prove difficult to sustain.

RESUME: THE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1825–80

How such views came to be held in the period up to the 1880s was the aim of the earlier book. A brief survey of the leading figures and movements in the earlier period is provided here to show how this doctrinal singularity came to be embraced and advanced into the years of this study. The earliest feeder streams surfaced first in Britain and continental Europe shortly before its emergence in North America. Both streams contributed to the transatlantic confluence at the International Conference held in London in June 1885.

The Early British/European Contribution

A prefiguration of the later radical healing movement took place in the period 1830–35. This short phase, largely focussed on the Scottish Presbyterian divine, Edward Irving, is regarded as the high point of Irvingism proper.[9] The relevant event that formed the background to Irving’s charismaticism was an outbreak of prophesying, tongues (glossolalia), and healing during March 1830 in a parish on the shores of the Clyde estuary. Such an outburst fitted into Irving’s premillennialist belief that the Second Coming (Parousia) was imminent, and would be heralded by an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that would revitalize the church on lines comparable to that of the primitive church. A deputation from his church at Regent Square, London, was sent to Scotland to report on the situation there. Similar manifestations surfaced among members of the London church during April 1831 within home prayer groups. From November, freedom was given for the exercise of gifts during public worship. This aroused such fierce hostility among a section of the congregation that terminated in the formal expulsion of Irving and his supporters from the Regent Square church.

Within a few months, the dissidents found an alternative home as an independent congregation in Newman Street, London. The new setting presented an opportunity to pursue a pentecostal agenda. In his teaching on the restoration of the gifts and Spirit baptism, Irving made much of the authority and power of the church to minister healing to the sick. Prayers for the sick were conducted at weekly healing services. The idea that healing was available for all sickness and that “faith and prayer, and these only, should be employed as the means of deliverance” was one he both preached and practised. A true miracle, for him, was “part and parcel of Christ’s redemption.”[10]

Following this ground-breaking episode, the spotlight shifts to the Lutheran pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt (1805–80) who labored in Mottlingen, a village in south-west Germany. There, he was plunged into a case widely regarded as demonic possession that tested him almost to breaking point. The exorcism was followed by a revival in the surrounding district. The critical view taken by the regional Lutheran consistory to the exorcism forced his decision to establish a healing home at the spa resort of Bad Boll, near Stuttgart. It became the prototype of subsequent healing homes. Meanwhile, over the border in Switzerland more healing homes were established by Dorothea Trudel in the village of Mannedorf lying on the north shore of Lake Zurich. Though suffering a permanent curvature of the spine, she eventually established four separate homes in the village that attracted numerous visitors seeking healing and recuperation. Both centres provided the inspiration for similar residential ministries in Europe and America.

The coupling of perfectionist ideas and divine healing can be more clearly attributed to early Methodism in both Britain and America. John Wesley was cautious in his

attitude to contemporary wonders and any association with healing. Throughout his life he was, in Ronald Knox’s words, “determined not to be an enthusiast,” even though he was upbraided by Bishop Butler on that very score in his oft-quoted remark, “Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.” [11] As British Methodism succumbed to a drift to respectability, there was little sympathy for any expression of charismatic intensity. One consequence was that more than a half-dozen schismatic Wesleyan groups were formed between 1795 and 1815, with the Primitive Methodists forming the largest. It fell largely to some of these revivalist secessionist groups to espouse divine healing in Britain.

Over time, the Methodist separatists either dwindled into obscurity or lapsed into charismatic torpor. It is to groupings within Methodism in America that one must look for the most conspicuous intensification in the theology and practice of divine healing in the latter third of the nineteenth century. The Holiness movement, though rooted in Methodism, was of wider provenance and attracted some from within the Reformed tradition of whom the best known are Charles Finney, Asa Mahan, D. L. Moody, and William E. Boardman. In Britain the holiness message became identified with the Keswick Convention. Two wings of the Holiness movement could be distinguished by the end of the century—the Wesleyan Holiness and the Keswick/Higher Life. Both stressed the concept of “second blessing,” sometimes referred to as “baptism in the Spirit,” an experience of the Spirit subsequent to conversion. For Wesleyans it spelt “entire sanctification,” and for Keswick apologists it initiated a consecrated ability to counteract the power of sin.

The Wesleyan Holiness Tradition

Methodism saw its first American congregations established in the 1760s in New York and Virginia. By 1840 it had become the largest denomination in the USA, and by 1850 they formed one-third of the total church membership of the country. However, it was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that healing received prominence in bodies that broke away from the mainstream Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) as it edged into middle-class respectability. The “come-outer” schismatics identified themselves as part of the Wesleyan Holiness movement that aspired to revitalize the perfectionist

element in Wesley’s theology with its notion of perfect love that freed the believer from the disposition to deliberate sin.[12]

Divine healing was not entirely dismissed in early Methodism. Its most important pioneer was Ethan Otis Allen (1813–1903) who earned the sobriquet “Father of Divine Healing.” He was among the earliest in North America to reject medical intervention. He played a part in introducing other leading figures to the ministry of healing, of whom the husband and wife team of Edward and Sarah Mix became the best known. Sarah Mix (1832–84) was the first Afro-American healing evangelist in the USA, and the first known female to engage in the full-time ministry of healing.

The major schism to hit the MEC prior to the Civil War took place in 1860 with the founding of the Free Methodist Church of North America. Its leading figure was Benjamin Titus Roberts (1823–93) who was expelled from the MEC in 1858. The growing rift is encapsulated in a remark made by a MEC bishop who grumbled that “they encouraged a spirit of fanaticism, claiming the power of healing by the laying on of hands.”[13] With the formation of Free Methodism in 1860, Roberts was appointed its general superintendent and editor of Earnest Christian, a position he held for thirty-three years until his death. However, it was in the postbellum period that divine healing came to its apogee within the Wesleyan Holiness movement, a development that will be explored in chapter 1.

The Reformed Holiness Tradition

The perfectionist message was not confined to American Methodism. Between them, Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) and Asa Mahan (1799–1889), both of whom exercised their early ministry in Presbyterian churches, developed a strain of perfectionism, commonly referred to as “Oberlin Perfectionism.”[14] Another leading figure, William Edwin Boardman (1819–86) had a Presbyterian/Congregationalist background. He was author of The Higher Christian Life (1858), a book that became a major international success and helped ignite the Higher Life movement to which it gave its title. The work attracted international attention, especially in England, where Boardman exercised great influence during a visit in 1873–74. This was a prelude to his taking up permanent

residence in England for the last ten years of his life. During the first half of the 1880s he became the leader of the healing movement in Britain. Asa Mahan also spent his last years in England. All three men introduced the concept of Spirit baptism to Reformed believers.

Neither Mahan nor Boardman took easily to the doctrine of divine healing. Boardman, the more visible of the two, was the architect of the “International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness” in June 1885. In this venture he had the support of Elizabeth Baxter whose husband was the publisher of the Christian Herald, a weekly that raised the profile of divine healing throughout the British Isles. Elizabeth Baxter edited the magazine Thy Healer that printed numerous testimonies to healing she collated from countries throughout the English-speaking world. She also established Bethshan, a healing home in North London, where many found healing, notably Andrew Murray, a favorite speaker at the Keswick, and the Moody-convened Northfield Conventions in America.

With the quickening spread of the healing message in the 1870s, new influential leaders appeared on the scene. Two of them, Otto Stockmayer and Charles Cullis, had links with the healing home at Mannedorf. Around 1878, Stockmayer opened a healing home at Haupweil in his native Switzerland where he put into effect many of the methods he had seen employed at Mannedorf. His short book Sickness and the Gospel (1879) was the foremost text to present the theological underpinning for the radical healing position in the latter part of the 1870s into the early 1880s. It earned him the tag “the theologian of the doctrine of healing by faith.”[15] It was through his reading a biography of Dorothea Trudel that Charles Cullis, a Boston homeopath, was inspired to visit Mannedorf in the spring of 1873. Drawing inspiration from this contact, he launched a number of initiatives in the early 1880s that led to the establishment of a vast complex of buildings providing

succor to the sick and marginalized. Weekly prayer meetings for the sick were held from 1881 onwards. Soon after, a Faith Cure House, drawing its inspiration from Mannedorf, was opened. In the same year he held the first meeting specifically for healing at the Methodist convention campsite at Old Orchard Beach, Maine. In 1881 A. B. Simpson, then minister of 13th Street Presbyterian Church, New York, arrived at this campsite in a troubled frame of mind and body. It was a seminal moment for the embryonic healing movement, for Simpson was to become one of its most influential theologians.

Simpson and A. J. Gordon were among the most talented leaders to come to the fore in their advocacy of divine healing in the 1880s. Like many who espoused the healing message, Simpson came to it as a sufferer who experienced complete recovery of health, in his case during his initial visit to Orchard Beach. Shortly afterwards, he resigned from the Presbyterian Church, and established an independent church that burgeoned into an array of ministries, diverse enough to vie with those of Cullis in Boston. One such was the healing home Berachah (“House of Blessing”), opened in May 1884 in New York. The four leitmotivs that encapsulated his lifelong Fourfold ministry were Christ as Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King. In 1887 he founded two fellowships that would eventually become the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA), an ecumenical and evangelical fellowship committed to the principles and ethos of the fourfold gospel. Ten years later the CMA was one of the leading global missionary organizations supporting over 300 missionaries, widening the global range of the healing message. His book The Gospel of Healing (1885) remains one of the classical texts of the doctrine.

Another book of similar authority was The Ministry of Healing by A. J. Gordon, published in 1883. Gordon, minister of Clarendon Street Baptist Church, Boston, was representative of the power of the written word to spread the healing message. His fellow Bostonian, Charles Cullis, was a prolific publisher. His publishing enterprise, the Willard Tract Repository, through its annual reports, books and tracts, reached a worldwide

audience conveying the message of holiness and, post-1873, healing. It was through the reprint of works by or about Blumhardt, Trudel and Stockmayer that the work of these continental pioneers became better known. So great was the interest in the Repository’s catalogue that a branch was opened in London in 1881, following a visit of Cullis to the capital.[16] Most of Simpson’s writing was for the periodicals that he edited. His monthly, The Word, Work, and World, from 1888 renamed The Christian Alliance, usually carried lengthy testimonies of healing. In England, Elizabeth Baxter through the Christian Herald and Thy Healer fed the spread of news emanating from the 110 centres of distinct work in holiness and healing throughout Britain.[17]

SYNOPSIS: THE YEARS 1890–1906

The first chapter concentrates on the progress of the Holiness message in America in the aftermath of the Civil War. The division and distraction occasioned by the war weakened the hold of organized religion. In an effort to revive the holiness message within Methodism, some ministers within the MEC convened a nine-day national Holiness camp meeting in Vineland, New Jersey in 1867. This led in time to the formation of the National Holiness Association (NCA). Through it, an elaborate structure of loosely

affiliated interdenominational local, state and regional Holiness groupings gave national coverage to the movement. Some associations began to act like quasi-churches in which the seeds of “come-outism” and “crush-outism” were sown.[18] Though at first the leaders of the MEC viewed the movement as a welcome reinvigoration of piety, they were forced to have second thoughts as creeping theological sophistication and rising middle class refinement predisposed them against favoring any show of old-time religion. The MEC felt the brunt of the schisms especially in the 1890s. A sizeable number of the new groups practised divine healing; others, while hesitant to proscribe it, remained cool, and a few were hostile to the whole idea. The greater part of the chapter is taken up with a study of these three differing attitudes to healing and their relationship to the nascent Pentecostal movement. The three studies that comprise this section are of Frank Sandford and the Shiloh movement, Daniel Warner and the Church of God (Anderson), and Alma White and the Pillar of Fire movement.

Chapter 2 switches attention to proponents of divine healing from a Reformed Holiness background, viz. John Alexander Dowie, A. T Pierson, and R. A. Torrey, with Dowie the most prominent of the three. Chapter 3 is given over to Dowie’s legacy. Born in Scotland and raised in Australia, Dowie migrated to the USA in 1888. In the same year he founded the International Divine Healing Association. His magazine Leaves of Healing was estimated to have reached a circulation of 40,000 by 1901. By then, he moved his community to the western shore of Lake Michigan where a pristine site was developed for Zion City. It was run on theocratic lines by Dowie who was noted for his anti-medical fulminations and lavish claims to healing. His controversial career ended in ignominy but his legacy was far-reaching. Many healing evangelists could trace the inspiration for their ministry back to Zion. Chapter 3 considers the influence of Zion on John G. Lake in his work in South Africa, on Gerrit Polman in the Netherlands, and on Arthur Booth-Clibborn, Harry Cantel, and Smith Wigglesworth with their base in Britain. By contrast, Pierson and Torrey were not associated with the Pentecostal movement, and their teaching on healing was more guarded.

Chapter 4 examines the ministry of two women who played a major part in spreading the healing message. Both Maria Woodworth-Etter and Carrie Judd Montgomery made the transition from the Holiness to the Pentecostal movement. In breaking the

gender barrier, they opened the way for other women, notably Aimee Semple McPherson. Woodworth began preaching when she was in her mid-thirties. For the next forty years she engaged largely in an itinerant evangelistic and healing ministry across America. Bodily manifestations featured greatly in her meetings. They included speaking in tongues, prophecies, visionary experiences, and congregants “slain in the Spirit.” She

became known as the “Trance Evangelist” because she was given to fall into a trance state in the middle of her sermon. She can be regarded the first itinerant evangelist to elevate the healing message to one of mass appeal.

Carrie Montgomery, raised and confirmed in the Episcopal Church, had to drop out of teacher training because of a serious injury caused by a fall. In 1880, she was healed through the healing ministry of Mrs Edward Mix. Two years later her book The Prayer of Faith was published. It was a considerable achievement for a twenty-two year old. The book brought her to the attention of some of the leading figures in the healing movement, notably Simpson, Cullis, Boardman, and Elizabeth Baxter. In 1881 she began the publication of Triumphs of Faith, a monthly magazine that she was to edit for the next sixty-five years. Contributors were welcomed from all denominations which helped to spread its influence worldwide. Reserved by nature, she gained confidence enough to speak at conferences sponsored by Simpson, and at the International Conference at London in 1885. Subsequent to her Spirit baptism in 1908, she became a charter member of the General Council of the Assemblies of God but, with her insistence on love and unity, she still maintained close links with Simpson’s CMA.

Chapter 5 examines the Holiness to Pentecostal transition in Britain. The chapter

begins by looking at some of the contemporary metaphysical alternatives that were

popular among sections of British society. Theosophy and Spiritualism were two that presented a direct challenge to the core tenets entertained by the radical healers. The Holiness message in Britain was largely defined by the Keswick Convention. A number of speakers who addressed the Keswick Convention both favored and practised divine healing. Donald Gee acknowledged that those who identified with the Pentecostal

movement in its earliest years were Christians of mature spiritual experience who “had tasted a previous experience of the Spirit’s grace and power in connection with the Holiness and Keswick Movements.”[19]

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of Bethshan, the healing home in north London, and its links with nascent British Pentecostalism. As mentioned above, Bethshan was the hub of the healing movement in Britain, and the administrative center for the International Conference on Divine Healing held in the Agricultural Hall, London 1885. Bethshan had indirect links with both Keswick and the nascent Pentecostal movement. Max Reich and Elizabeth Sisson were two of the prominent names to appear in The Eleventh Hour, published from Bethshan, and Confidence, the premier Pentecostal periodical, edited by A. A. Boddy, the Anglican vicar of All Saints, Sunderland.[20] Though divine healing in the pages of The Eleventh Hour became dampened, and Pentecostal

theology increasingly resisted, Bethshan played a significant part in the nascent Pentecostal movement in Britain and Ireland.

The conclusion examines developments in the doctrine at the turn of the century, with especial attention to the MEC because Wesley’s perfectionist doctrine was sustained by the Holiness movement that developed within it. As perfectionism waned under

liberalizing pressures, so did the radical interpretation of divine healing. The come-outer schismatics fought to revivify both the doctrines of entire sanctification and the radical version of divine healing. It was from this source that many of the earliest Pentecostal assemblies in America were formed. The implications, beneficent or dubious, of this

transition for the ministry of healing up to the present are enlarged.

1. Kydd, Healing, 121.

2. In the The Westminster Confession of Faith, the author describes how many of the divines of the

period accepted that “prophecy” continued in their time, and that some of them thought it possible that God could disclose his will through dreams, visions and angelic communication.

3. Simpson, The Lord for the Body, 131.

4. Simpson, “The Ministry of Healing, chapter 2.

5. Boardman, RICDH [Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness], 92.

6. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles, 160. Warfield (1851–1921), noted Calvinist scholar, was Professor of Didactic and Polemical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.

7. Simpson, The Gospel of Healing, 300. Simpson stated that the literal translation of the verses Isa 53:4–5, quoted in Matt 8:17, is “Surely he has borne away our sicknesses and carried away our pains.” He considered these verses “the strongest possible statement of complete redemption from pain and sickness,” (291)—an interpretation dismissed outside radical healing circles.

8. Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 110.

9. The term “Irvingite/ism” is rejected by the Catholic Apostolic Church [CAC], the founding of which had Irving as its formative figure. Its first council of twelve apostles met in 1835, the year subsequent to Irving’s death. Tierney points out that “it is more the embarrassment of association, than anger at inaccuracy that causes the term “Irvingite” to be shunned” (Tierney, “The Catholic Apostolic Church,” 290).

10. Ibid., 466.

11 Knox, Enthusiasm, 452.

12. For a classification of the differing views taken on sanctification within the wider Methodist family see Peters, Christian Perfection, 175–76.

13. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 195.

14. Both men became colleagues on their appointment to the struggling Oberlin College, Ohio. In simple terms, Wesleyans stressed perfection of the heart expressed in perfect love, while Oberlin perfectionism understood holiness primarily as a voluntary conformity of the human will to the divine will.

15. Gordon, The Ministry of Healing, 223.

16. Daniels, Dr Cullis, 198.

17. RICDH, 155.

18. Rulings issued from the MEC headquarters and local animosities over perfectionism “pressurized (“crushed”) some Wesleyan Holiness folk into forming their own churches.

19. Gee, Wind and Flame, 45.

20. Thy Healer ran from 1884 to 1896 and was succeeded by Jungle Need and Home Help up to 1902, when those laborers who worked in the last (eleventh) hour of the day were paid the same as those who worked for twelve hours. Elizabeth Baxter retained her position as editor-in-charge of the titles successive to Thy Healer.

1

The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition in America

The first major schism to shake the mainstream Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) during the antebellum period took place with the founding of the Free Methodist Church of North America (FMC). The departure in 1860 of the schismatic body was not, on the face of it, a major statistical blow to the MEC because fifty years later the FMC numbered just under 38,000 members. However, it was a portent of troubles to come.[21] As the century progressed, the MEC increasingly adopted middle-class ways and values while the Wesleyan Holiness counter-movement appeared on the scene to become “one of the most powerful and yet most neglected of nineteenth-century religious movements.”[22] Many of the Holiness adherents expressed their disenchantment with what they saw as the increasing deadness of the MEC. They objected to the wilted fervor of the mainstream body, its formal worship and procedures. There was a dislike of the increasing grandeur of its urban churches and the voguish dress code of its rising middle-class membership.

In 1867, the first camp meeting, organized by the newly-founded “National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness,” took place at Vineland, New Jersey. It is estimated that a crowd around 10,000 attended the Sunday afternoon service to hear MEC Bishop Matthew Simpson preach.[23] The “National Association,” as the organization came to be known, began to expand beyond camp meetings by holding tent meetings in strategic cities throughout the country. The organization then changed its name to the “National Association for the Promotion of Holiness.” Its greatest strength lay in the Midwest, South and Southwest of the country.

In the early years the movement, as it began to organise in national, regional, state and local associations, met with the support of some key MEC bishops and clergy while other denominational leaders were perturbed by the potential for disaffection, justifiably so as events were to prove. As early as 1869, the editor of the official Methodist periodical, Northern Christian Advocate, voiced his alarm at the quasi-ecclesiastical nature of the National Camp Meeting Association. He asserted that at the second and third National Association gatherings, though largely attended by Methodists, the MEC had nothing officially to do with it, yet the public held the MEC responsible for the organization.

By March, 1884, the National Association held at least fifty-four summer camps. Ministers and lay members returning home spread the doctrine of Christian perfection through holiness prayer bands and holiness periodicals and schools. Their enthusiasm for the message of a second blessing increasingly met with bitter opposition from all levels of the mainstream church. None more so than Bishop Thomas Bowman, who, in speaking to young Methodist ministers at the 1883 New England Annual Conference, referred to the subject of holiness as a “darkness that repels our people. . . . There are some of our people who are constantly talking and entirely too much on the question of entire sanctification.” A similar attack appeared in the New York Christian Advocate, the largest and most influential Methodist publication in America. It accused many of the Holiness Associations of being “a standing menace to the spirit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and religious anarchists.”[24] There was considerable support for the more Reformed view on sanctification expressed by MEC theologians denying that sanctification accomplished anything not previously effected in regeneration. In a sermon preached on the subject, the minister objected to the usage that rendered sanctification a second work. He asked, “Who says so? . . . No reader of the Bible of ordinary intelligence says so.”[25]

By the 1890s, the Methodist hierarchy sought to regulate a situation that was retreating from its control. The effect of this was to bolster the “come-outist” cause as increasing numbers of Holiness adherents became convinced that the preservation of Wesleyan perfectionism lay outside the MEC and other mainstream denominations. It was an option captured in a hymn that called believers to “Leave the names and creeds of Babylon/ Take the Holy Bible way” and carried the refrain

Come out from among them

Oh, do not partake of her sins;

Come out from among them

For her judgement already begins.[26]

The last National Association convention with a recognized tie to the MEC was held in 1901. Though the number who withdrew from the MEC was sizeable, the majority who accepted the holiness message chose to remain in the church. The come-outer cause curtailed public interest by its susceptibility to schism. Instead of forming one grand, unified front, it split repeatedly. In the period 1893–1900 twenty-three Holiness denominations were founded, a statistic that led Synan to comment, “never before in the history of the nation had so many churches been founded in so short a time.”[27] It is estimated that around 100,000 left the MEC out of four million Methodists in America in the 1890s. Within mainstream Methodism between one third and one half remained committed to the holiness doctrine of sanctification as a second work of grace. Even so, the schismatics proved to be the seedbed for much of the flowering of Pentecostalism. Their promotion of second-work sanctification entailed a renewed promise of “miracles of direct divine intervention and guidance in human affairs.”[28] Their radicalism fashioned “a world of power and wonder in which the miraculous was routine, the routine miraculous.”[29]

Divine Healing within the Wesleyan Holiness Tradition

Historians of the Wesleyan Holiness movement have, in general, paid scant attention to the extensive healing ministries found within it in the decades around the turn of the century. Their reluctance to acknowledge the link was in some cases an attempt to avoid contamination by association with early Pentecostalism into which a sizeable number of Holiness people morphed.[30] By contrast, greater prominence has been given to the Higher Life healers in the Reformed tradition such as A. B. Simpson and A. J. Gordon, while Wesleyan Holiness healing has been treated as a side issue. One reason for the side-lining of its contribution lay in the fact that leading Higher Life healing advocates, like Simpson and Gordon, operated in urban settings in the 1880s when the healing message was attracting widespread press coverage. Their writings carried a particular appeal to the lettered middle class at a time when Christian Science and New Thought were upping the temperature of public disputation. By contrast, come-outerism’s rapid spread took place largely in rural communities and small urban centers from the mid-1890s in the Midwest and South. By contrast, the Higher Life movement was stronger in the urban/industrial North-East. Many of the Wesleyan Holiness people were loath to accommodate themselves to the culture of the growing urban middle class. For them, the lifestyle of the well-heeled smacked more of “friendship with the world and enmity with God” (Jas 4:5). While the middle class might dress to kill, one Holiness group embroiled itself in wrangling over the wearing of ties. The so-called “Necktie Controversy” exercised the Church of God Reformation Movement for years. The leader of the anti-necktie faction maintained in 1903 that “any article of dress put on merely for adornment can only be the fruit of pride in the heart.” As the Movement moved into the cities in the 1900s some members protested that their dress code strictures were a barrier to the evangelization of the business class. The controversy led to a split in the denomination in 1913.[31] The puritanical temper of the late Victorian age “was nowhere observed more strictly than in Holiness circles.”[32]

The come-outers agenda carried a strong restorationist impulse to reconstitute the dynamic of the primitive church. Charles Ewing Brown (1883–1971), a second generation leader of the Church of God (Anderson), affirmed the role of the Spirit in church polity: “It is my belief that the apostolic church was spiritually organised by the Holy Ghost [in that] the Scriptures teach the government of the church by the Holy Spirit through the bestowal of gifts.”[33] There was a distinct gearing up of pentecostal ways of acting and thinking within some newly radicalized groups. The term “pentecostal” came to be used virtually as a synonym for “entire sanctification.”[34] The periodical Guide to Holiness added to its title and Pentecostal Life as a response to the mood of the time when the concept was becoming pervasive.

Innovatory doctrines relating to Spirit baptism were voiced. R. C Horner (1854–1921), a Holiness evangelist, founded a radical movement in the early 1890s that was to spawn at least three Holiness denominations in his native Canada. His meetings were noted for excessive enthusiasm marked by “prostration,” “ecstasy,” and “immediate laughter” that, together with his insubordinate and judgemental manner, led to his expulsion from the Methodist church. In his book Pentecost (1891) he pointed out that the idea of second blessing, as generally understood in the Wesleyan Holiness movement, missed out on a “baptism in the Holy Spirit.” Spirit baptism, he taught, was in reality a “third work” of grace subsequent to salvation and sanctification, the purpose of which was to empower the believer for service. It was a theological distinction that came to play a crucial and contentious part in the development of Pentecostalism in America, though less so elsewhere. The tenor of the times adds weight to Dayton’s opinion that “the whole network of popular ‘higher Christian life’ institutions and movements constituted at the turn of the century a sort of pre-Pentecostal tinderbox awaiting the spark that would set it off.”[35]

The distancing of the “come-outer” groups from mainstream Methodism was matched by division within its own fraternity. The divisive issues revolved round matters of doctrine, church government and worship, as well as divine healing. Mainstream Methodism with its decline in membership was either unwilling or unable to measure up to the forcefulness of spirited Holiness revivalists, many of whom practised divine healing. The itinerant Holiness evangelist challenged both the professionalism of the cleric and the doctor. To liberally-minded Methodists, faith healing was an embarrassment that, if pursued, would drag the denomination back to the gullibility of the past. Methodism like other mainstream churches had a closer affinity to the Emmanuel Movement that was dedicated to promoting cooperation between medical professionals and clergy.[36] Again, not all Holiness groups were sympathetic to divine healing. Isaiah Reid, president of the Iowa Holiness Association, was one of the most articulate critics of both premillennialism and divine healing. His stance ran counter to the trend in the spreading Wesleyan Holiness movement within which both doctrines found general acceptance. Those bodies that broke with MEC oversight were released to develop healing ministries. This spared them from liberal distaste and hindrance as typified by an article in the Methodist Review that called divine healing “a tantalising mirage whose fading only mocks suffering,

patience and faith.”[37]

What gave the Wesleyan Holiness movement its identity was a gestalt of convictions that sprang from Pietist and Wesleyan roots. The distinctive doctrinal locus lay in the area of Christian perfection and more narrowly on the question of a “second blessing,” though complete agreement on their meaning, significance and character eluded the movement. There developed a decided shift towards premillennialism within the more radical wing of the movement as it followed the swelling swing towards that position which captured much of the fundamentalist fringe of American evangelicalism by the end of the century. More centrist bodies, such as the National Holiness Association with its closer attachment to the MEC, strongly opposed this trend. Moderates like Daniel Steele maintained that premillennialism was alien to the optimism inherent in classical Wesleyan postmillennialism.

For the radicals, however, dispensational premillennialism was, nothing short of “a call to God’s people to put on the wedding garment.”[38] The apocalyptic end envisaged by premillennialists carried the promise of an outpouring of the Spirit unequalled since apostolic days. Divine healing as a potent sign of the Spirit’s activity in the eschatological denouement became coupled with the Parousia. Like premillennialism, healing was a topic of some moment throughout the movement but lacked a consensus to guarantee general acceptance as to its legitimacy and practice. The National Holiness Association banned the subject of healing being discussed at meetings convened under its auspices. Asbury Lowrey, founder and editor of Divine Life (1878–96) and Methodist defender of holiness teaching, was concerned that undue emphasis on divine healing would “divert attention from holiness to novelties and elevate the cure of the body above the healing of the soul.”[39]

Not all found Lowrey’s caution acceptable. A leading Holiness advocate and evangelist, W. B. Godbey (1833–1920), wrote that his healing took place when “there was no light on divine healing at that time [around 1868], I myself having received but a glimmer when the Lord sanctified me [1860] and I was alone in the experience.”[40] It was at the insistence of his wife that prayer was offered for him, overriding her disinclination to accept her husband’s brand of intense spirituality. Godbey surmised early in their marriage that “I could surely lead my dear wife out of the wilderness into Canaan without hesitation. But I found her Anglican heredity, stirring up John Bull.” However, when he was gravely ill from pleurisy and beyond current medical help, his wife took command of the sick room, compelling the company to gather around his bed and join in prayer with her to God “that He may touch his body and raise him up to preach the Gospel as in bygone days.” After two hours of prayer over him, Godbey showed signs of a rapid recovery. Of the reaction of his doctor, he wrote: “He reached me in a single leap, apparently like a squirrel: snatching up my body, examining my pulse and responding, ‘The congestion is broken, pulsation restored, regular and healthy, and you are a well man.’ He then fell prostrate on the floor and cried aloud, ‘Do not get off your knees, as you have prayed the Great Physician down from heaven who has healed my patient after I gave him up to die! Therefore hold Him back till He saves my soul!’”[41] Such was the uptake of the healing message that Godbey could rejoice with some conviction that since “the rise of the Holiness movement, divine healing has become so common as to be no longer a matter of controversy. With candid Bible readers I have witnessed it ever and anon the last twenty-five years. It is rapidly coming to the recognition and appreciation of the church.”[42] So convinced was he of the future of the healing message within the Holiness movement that he could assert, “the recognition of the Omnipotent healer will become as common as in New Testament times.”[43]

Isaiah Reid’s unwillingness to advocate divine healing exemplifies the considerable variation in the acceptance of the healing template within Holiness circles. A few groups, at the more unrestrained end of the spectrum, proved a source of consternation to the movement as a whole, as the serpent handlers of Appalachia have ever been since the 1910s. Most of such extreme groups have more or less dwindled. A sizeable number of others incorporated divine healing in their statements of faith and practised it systematically, though not always with similar intensity. Not all of them sided with the Pentecostal experience that stemmed from Azusa Street, though nearly all groups formed post-1894 did. At the other end of the spectrum, some groups remained cool on the subject without necessarily proscribing it. They tended to be hostile to the Pentecostal movement. An example of each type will be examined here in the following order: (a) the Shiloh movement, a militant community that ultimately collapsed, but played a part in fostering a Pentecostalism; (b) the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) that was strongly supportive of divine healing in its early years, but has remained outside Pentecostalism; (c) the Pillar of Fire Church that was ambivalent about healing, and fiercely non-Pentecostal. These bodies are associated respectively with Frank Sandford, Daniel S. Warner, and Alma White.

THREE HOLINESS ASSOCIATIONS WITH

DISPARATE LINKS TO PENTECOSTALISM

Frank Sandford and the Shiloh Movement

The story of Frank Weston Sandford (1862–1948) carries within it the not unfamiliar ring of a charismatic religious leader who leads his followers to the brink of disaster. There was nothing in his background to suggest such a denouement. He was a graduate of Bates College, Lewiston, and later Maine and Cobb Divinity School, the Free Will Baptist graduate school that was then part of Bates College. In 1887 he left the School to become pastor of a Free Baptist church. While there, he was drawn to the holiness message through reading Hannah Whitall Smith’s The Christian Secret of a Happy Life (1875), a devotional classic that condensed Holiness theology for readers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The same year he attended his first summer school led by D. L. Moody. The event coincided with the second annual meeting of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions. The Movement, with its watchword “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” appealed to Sandford and the following year he signed its pledge with an aspiration to serve overseas. He and a former fellow student at Bates took the opportunity to travel around the world on behalf of their denomination. The trip convinced him that current missionary practice was so inadequate that only a select, purified band of people, likened to the OT “remnant,” was sufficient for the task. Heavily swayed by premillennialism, he saw the need for a ministry of signs and wonders as a requisite step to the fulfilment of God’s plan for the ages.

Such ideas seized him during his second pastorate at Grand Falls, New Hampshire. In his first summer there, he attended the Old Orchard camp ground convention and was impressed sufficiently to accept holiness teaching. It was at this camp he met A. B. Simpson and first made contact with his future wife. Helen Kinney was the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street broker and a graduate of the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) Training College that prepared her for missionary service in Japan. They were married in 1892 at the Kinney estate on the banks of the Hudson River, Simpson officiating, but not before the entire wedding party had spent the morning in prayer. The following year the couple broke their denominational tie and cast themselves in “total abandonment to the providences of God.”[44] For Sandford, a new day was dawning and he later recollected the years 1893–99 as the time of his “journey back to apostolic life and power.” It began with the establishment of a small Bible school in a borrowed house near Durham in southern Maine. His first students were carefully selected young men and women barely out of their teens, some of whom were to become key members of a new movement. With funds “prayed in,” the school expanded quickly to become a large complex of buildings on a sandy hill. The first building constructed was a chapel, named “Shiloh.” Though the movement labelled itself grandiosely at successive times the “Holy Ghost and Us Bible School,”[45] the “World’s Evangelization Crusade,” the “Church of the Living God,” and “The Kingdom,” it kept the name “Shiloh.”[46]

Frank Sandford

Within its first decade, the number of students at the School reached hundreds, including whole families, sharing all things in common and submissive to its increasingly authoritarian regime. Sandford made most major decisions, claiming to act on divine revelations or “whispers,” as he called them. Projects advanced ahead of the funding, yet financial deadlines were almost invariably met. The record of the whole enterprise in its early years reads like a catalogue of crises from which it was dramatically extricated. The attitude to money was on the face of it carefree and yet it subtly affected everything. A policy of dependence on God for every necessity was dictated. No one worked for wages and little was sold. Sources of income included the handing over of personal and family savings, monies raised at conventions and the somewhat unpredictable returns from the adjoining farm. Often there was insufficient to eat, yet overseas stations were opened in Jerusalem and England, and boats were purchased to carry the gospel to the coastal communities along the Maine shoreline, and eventually to the wider world. Within ten years of opening over 600 people were in residence. They constructed a seven-storey tabernacle, an orphanage, a large brick hospital, a community church and a dormitory block sizeable enough to house 500 students.

The Holy Ghost and Us Bible School opened in October 1894. It was established with the single-minded determination to make known the Bible and nurture obedience to it. In essence, the operation became an enclosed community with global pretensions, dominated in its biblical understanding by the interpretative skew of its autocratic leader. It was in these early days that the whole ethos of the Shiloh movement was fashioned with a commitment to “personal Spirit-endowed revelation, the sense of being separated for God’s ultimate purposes, and obedience at any price.”[47] In the winter of 1895, there was the initial launch of a monthly periodical carrying the unwieldy title, Tongues of Fire from the World’s Evangelization Crusade on Apostolic Principles. Early issues carried articles on Jennie Glassey, a young missionary to Africa who was mentored by Sandford and loosely affiliated to Shiloh. Glassey was reported to have received “the remarkable ability to command certain native dialects,” a feat that came to be identified with the xenolalia of Acts 2.[48] When Charles Parham, one of the founding figures of Pentecostalism, visited Shiloh in 1900, he witnessed for the first time speaking in tongues, albeit in the form of short glossolalic phrasing.

Healing was the most positively embraced of the charismata. Before making contact with Simpson, Sandford had found himself at odds with the theology and practice of divine healing. Even the healing of his sister from chronic back pain at the Old Orchard camp the year before his own visit to the site failed to convince him. It was through listening to Simpson that he was persuaded to “preach that part of the Bible.”[49] The earliest editions of Tongues of Fire carried accounts of healing. One edition surpassed itself in the scale and variety of cures that had been recently witnessed: “Pneumonia, cancer,

galloping consumption, diphtheria, asthma, bad humor (referring to body fluids), catarrh, rheumatism, sick headache, sprained wrist, blindness, measles, la grippe, severe contusion, dropsy, heart trouble, chronic fever, typhoid, broken eardrum, dislocated shoulder, twisted neck, scrofula bunches, mental derangement, broken bones (set and mended) and utter exhaustion.”[50] Some healings stood out sufficiently to be published in the local press. One report from a local citizen who had no particular warmth for Sandfordism acknowledged the recovery of sight of a three-year old girl. The medical specialists at Bowdoin College had diagnosed the child as suffering permanent blindness. On the day she was prayed for she awoke from her slumber suddenly with sight restored. The incident was witnessed by a number of the local community.

Sandford took radical healing teaching to its limit. Shiloh stood for the “Word of God in its entirety and that without adulteration,” which led a Harvard graduate member of the community, Nathan Harriman, to urge that they waste no more time in searching for a “systematic theology” but rather to “absorb the Word through their spiritual pores.”[51] To Sandford, if James 5:14 stated that the sick should call for the elders while preachers of the day advise calling the physician, then the latter were denying God’s Word. Sickness was declared an onslaught of Satan that God might permit as a disciplinary measure but, for those who lived in trustful obedience, healing became the powerful assertion of the divine victory over Satan. To renege on such gospel promises was to be “untrue to the compassion of Christ for a suffering humanity.” A local newspaper got the message when it mischievously ventured, “The Ghosts hold that to cure the afflicted it is necessary to get at his satanic majesty in the solar plexis.” Prayer was the weapon of choice in the struggle, expressed in a noisily prolonged and combative mode. One unsympathetic observer visited Shiloh on a day when the community prayed six hours without intermission for the sick. As he sat on the front steps, he became increasingly nervous as the meeting inside rapidly increased in fervor and intensity until there seemed to be “a hundred people talking at once.”[52] The eerie screams of a woman participant were enough to make him double check his getaway plans.

Sandford had witnessed with his own eyes enough to convince himself and his followers of the reality of supernatural evil. His very first experience of witnessing

deliverance in this realm took place in August 1891. While visiting Old Orchard campground, he met an old friend, Carrie Kendall, who told him that she had been beleaguered for months by religious doubts. Hesitant about how to handle the situation, he asked her if she wished him to pray for her. Quite unsure of himself in this untried scenario, he placed his hands on her head and ordered in a loud voice, “Everything contrary to Jesus of Nazareth to leave this body!” In Nelson’s account the room was filled at once “with confusion,” as what seemed to him to be a “clump of demons” swirled about and vanished. It was over in a second, and Carrie stood up, exclaiming, “‘Why, all those doubts have gone!’ Frank was astonished and shaken. Without thought or plan, he had obeyed the prophecy of Jesus in Mark 16:17, ‘In my name shall they cast out demons.’”[53] Though the laying on of hands was not unfamiliar to Sandford, having seen it employed at Alliance meetings, he had not hitherto witnessed any incident that dealt directly with what he took to be demons. It was a seminal moment. For him, Satan was an oppressive reality, the progenitor of evil and the subversive cause of sin and misery in the world. It impelled him to leave the sunny uplands of evangelical propriety for the battlefield of supernatural engagement. The casting-out of demons was thus ensured a place high on the agenda of Shiloh.

At first glance, it would appear inexplicable that the idea of building a hospital in the grounds of the Shiloh complex was even floated. Sandford seemed to have ambivalent feelings about the project and, for a while, he deliberately put off completing it, unsure if he could bear the responsibility involved in the venture, as well as having to face the inevitable derision of cynical neighbors. As to be expected, it was no conventional hospital, both in its inception and running. With a vacant shell of a building already on the site, $8,000 was still required for fitting out a hospital, a financial exaction of daunting proportion with $65 barely in the kitty. The motivation came from a prophetic directive to “Complete it!” Galvanized to a ferment of activity, a team of sixty tradesmen completed the task in a month. Meanwhile, donations poured in daily and by the end there was just enough to cover the cost.

Shiloh

The three-storied building was opened in 1899 and named Bethesda (“House of Mercy”), with all its rooms and wards appointed to the pitch of luxury. Helen Sandford maintained it was to be a place where the oppressed might “get away from the unbelief which surrounds them and have an atmosphere in which to wait for God’s deliverance.”[54] Sandford declared that the hospital stood for “perfection through the power of the Holy Ghost” which entailed “the utter annihilation of sin,” and “health throughout every organ of the body.”[55] Doctors were called upon but were restricted to diagnosis and consultation and were banned from prescribing any form of medication. Personal care was free though Sandford forewarned sufferers that Bethesda would not be “a resort for cranks” who would find it “the hottest place” they had ever lighted on. As for cripples, they must “either get healed or go home.”[56] He imposed a regime that was stricter than any similar institution. Residents had to “obey the rules and tactics of the Great War Book [Bible] or get out, and cease to be a stumbling block to those who are resolved to follow and obey.”[57] Such institutions almost invariably reflect the stamp of their founder.

The miracle with the greatest claim to distinction was the ostensible raising from the dead of Olive Mills. Mills was a forty-five year old mature student at Shiloh. Small and frail, she was blessed by an out-going temperament that won her the affection of her fellow students. Sandford respected her spiritual discernment and spoke of her as a prophetess. She had been a teacher for the New England Evangelistic Association that trained workers to labor in tough urban areas. In 1899, when she fell ill she recognized the onset of cerebro-spinal meningitis similar to what she had survived in the past. With her condition worsening, Sandford decided to postpone a planned visit to England. One evening he was roused from sleep to be informed that Olive was dead. Immediately, with two other leaders, he made his way to her room. There they saw her lifeless form that showed neither breath nor pulse, and eyes that were expressionless and fixed. Sandford knelt at her bed and prayed fervently for her life. No response was detectable until he clutched her head in desperation and shouted, “Olive Mills! Come back! In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, come back!” One of his companions, Ralph Gleason, called out, “The blood! The blood of Christ!” and straightway collapsed to the floor. Whereupon, Sandford yelled for the demon to depart.[58] While Gleason was picking himself up, Olive Mills opened her eyes and within a few hours was mobile and dressed. Set in a wider historical context, the Mills affair demonstrated Sandford’s proto-Pentecostalism in its talismanic use of the name “Jesus” and “the blood.” As Wacker has pointed out, for Pentecostals the name Jesus “could shield believers from evil and physical danger like a verbal iron curtain” and the blood “possessed restorative powers beyond its role in the scheme of salvation.”[59] Holiness/Pentecostal people saw the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus as much a present agency as a historical datum.

The Mills incident, in its timing and reverberations, came to play a significant part in the story of Shiloh. Its shine was soon tarnished. The day after the event the New York Times carried a front-page story. It thundered: “Holy Ghost Camp Outrage: Weak Woman Says She Was Beaten by Sanford’s [sic] Men.” The article conjectured that Sandford and Willard Gleason, brother of Ralph, would be arrested in a matter of days on charges brought by Mrs. Sarah Appleby, the wife of a Methodist clergyman. The couple claimed that Sarah had been “brutally attacked” and thrown out of the “Temple of Truth,” and the trunk containing all her clothes thrown from a third-story window. Further indignities were alleged that included disdain for her kneeling in prayer at a chair instead of lying with face to floor. They alleged that Gleason had struck her back with his Bible while shouting “Get out of here, you devil.”[60] The matter brought to national attention the whole authoritarian ethos that marked Shiloh. Though nothing came of the incident, it was the harbinger of events that transpired to undermine the reputation of Shiloh.

Not that anything suggestive of failure at the time was uppermost in the mind of Sandford. Rather, the restoration of Mills was taken to confirm on him “the seal of apostleship.” Such a mighty deed was interpreted as placing him on the same level as the first apostles in their ministry of signs and wonders. The ambiguities involved in this kind of power soon caused problems. From September 1900, a formal hierarchy of authority was instituted in descending order from God the Father down to the smallest children. Sandford’s enthusiasm for the plan was barely restrained as he argued for a hierarchical structure of subordination: “I saw that as the woman took her place, obedient at every point and turn to her husband, and as the woman and man took their places obedient to the men of God, and as the men of God took their places, obedient to my Lord, that my Lord took the whole company of us and stepped in behind His Father, obedient at any point.” As set out, the structure had a logic that could mask, but not obviate, his personal aggrandizement. What it entailed in practice was that disobedience at each level was to be dealt with by the level above it.

Enforcement was swift. The following month the entire community was arraigned on its perceived spiritual failings and each member was subjected to close personal scrutiny of their behavior and spiritual life. While almost all students were reinstated, few escaped some emotional bruising. A few, on the other hand, saw it as a turning point in their Christian experience. The daughter of a father who attended the Bible School at Shiloh wrote of the impact of “the Purge” on him: “He was feeling pretty blue one Saturday and I heard him say to Mother that he doubted he would be able to pass the test when it came his turn for criticism as to his spiritual state. It was well enough for the enthusiastic and pliable youngsters at the school, but he was too sedate and set in his ways to participate actively in the battles against Satan and his cohorts which were the growing practice there, or to join the shouting sessions of praise at the moment of victory.”[61] While almost all students were reinstated, few escaped emotional turmoil.

Two years later, during what became known as “the black winter,” a smallpox epidemic hit the community. Early in the quarantine period, Sandford called for a fast, praying for a special empowerment to heal the stricken and to put stay to the spread of the malady. With no change in sight, it was concluded that the problem lay with those who failed “to do [God’s] will as fast as he makes it known.”[62] The entire Shiloh community, to his way of thinking, was being punished for its spiritual declension. Sandford ordered the “Nineveh Fast,” modeled on the days of repentance that followed the preaching of Jonah in Nineveh. At Shiloh this involved a seventy-two hour period, during the first half of which every living thing at Shiloh, including animals, infants, and the sick, were impelled to go without food and water. If healing did not occur after the prayer of faith, then the outbreak of smallpox was held to be the price of disobedience. Parents who detected rebellion, even bed wetting, in their children felt obliged to beat it out of them. The way was open for the leader to consider it within his remit to withhold the prayer of faith from the sick, as happened in the case of fourteen-year old Leander Bartlett.

Leander made the mistake of confessing to a friend that he planned to run away. Sandford deemed such a show of independence was the very spirit that lay behind the smallpox epidemic. Such blatant disregard for the rules laid down by the man of God precluded the boy from receiving the prayer of faith. Leander did die, not of smallpox but of undiagnosed diphtheria. The affair came before the court and Sandford was indicted for manslaughter with multiple charges brought by the Androscoggin Humane Society and the Cumberland County Conference of Churches. It became a landmark trial in Maine’s legal history. The decision of the court turned on whether or not Leander had received appropriate medical attention. The judge stressed to the jury that the law of the state of Maine did not view the failure to call a physician a matter of criminal negligence unless “criminal indifference” could be proven. It was Sandford’s duty to apply the method he did believe in, viz., the prayer of faith. The question now revolved round the issue as to whether or not he had denied the boy the benefit of the prayer of faith. The summing-up allowed that Sandford believed he was acting in the best interests of the whole community in seeking to stem the advance of smallpox. The jury took less than two hours to return a verdict of guilty. The case went to a number of appeals but the inability of juries to adjudicate on the issue of “culpable indifference” dragged the case out. It took four years before Sandford was finally declared not guilty. It was not to be his last brush with the law.

The seal of apostleship was not the end of Sandford’s discoveries of what he took to be direct revelations from God. His messianic vision continued to expand, and he announced a series of God-whispered revelations naming him the present-day embodiment of the Old Testament prophet Elijah now returned for the restoration and completion of God’s work. According to this vision, Sandford would be martyred for Christ on the streets of Jerusalem and rise again in three days, as predicted of one of the two witnesses in Revelation 11:3. It was a calling that possibly emboldened him to pray for the restoration from death of another life. His sister Annie and her second husband, Nat Brown, had to face the tragedy of watching their one-year old son die. Perhaps recalling that Elijah had brought to life the young son of the widow at Zerephath (1 Kgs 17:7–24), Sandford prayed for the restoration of the child. The baby did not revive and its body was taken to one of the cold winter turrets of the main building and kept there for sixty days, while the parents and Sandford and the ministers continued to pray for its restoration. When the child was finally buried, the funeral service was held at night. The incident was kept secret at Shiloh with only partial success. Rather than this failure casting doubt on his claim to the seal of apostleship and prophethood, a new level of elevation was claimed. It was nothing less than to the throne of David in preparation for the return of Christ, David’s greater Son. In March 1904, all who wished to remain with him were asked to take the pledge, “I believe that Frank W. Sandford of Shiloh, Maine, U.S.A. tells the truth when he makes proclamation that God said to him, ‘Elijah is here. . . . I have found David. I believe and accept him as such.’”[63] Not only was it an act of breath-taking arrogance, it was also an act of ennoblement totally alien to the strong Republican ideology of his upbringing.

Sandford continued to be irritated by stories spread of his autocratic rule and disciplinary measures that were for the generality of people nothing less than pitiless. When he was away from Shiloh for four years to engage on global evangelization, trouble accompanied him. In 1911, his missionary ship, the Coronet, following a series of ill-fated decisions rode out gale after gale in the North Atlantic during which six men died of scurvy and malnutrition. After the yacht finally limped into harbor, Sandford was convicted of manslaughter on the charge of “unlawfully, knowingly, and willingly” allowing a ship to “proceed on a voyage at sea without sufficient provisions.”[64] He was sentenced to ten years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a blow from which he never recovered. Following his early release, he went into semi-retirement and died in 1948 at the age of eighty-seven in a comfortable farmhouse in Hobart, NY, surrounded by his family and faithful disciples. Shiloh carried on for another five years as The Kingdom, Inc., with headquarters in New Hampshire and followers were to be found scattered in small pockets throughout the country. The organization exists today as a decentralized evangelical movement, with the memory of its founder still revered.

The Legacy of Sandford

Sandford’s enduring legacy lies largely in the influence he exerted on those who became adherents of early Pentecostalism. Two of the leading figures in the movement, viz. C. F. Parham and A. J. Tomlinson, had direct and formative contact with him. Charles Fox Parham (1873–1929), an independent Holiness evangelist, set up a healing home in Topeka, Kansas in 1898, two years before his visit to Shiloh. When Sandford came to conduct a mission in Topeka in June 1900, Parham was so impressed by him that he decided to visit Shiloh. On his way to Maine, he took the opportunity to observe a number of Holiness and other healing centres, notably those associated with Dowie, Simpson and Gordon. All in all, he spent six weeks in Maine and was deeply affected by what he observed. What impressed him about Shiloh was its expectation of an outpouring of the Spirit that would activate the conclusive movement towards global evangelization. On hearing glossalalic utterances for the first time, he was persuaded of their functional value for hastening the global outreach of the church. Parham began to envision that the Spirit would bestow known languages—“missionary tongues”—on believers in response to their faith. Earlier, in April 1900, he had printed a note in his periodical Apostolic Faith notifying readers that a married couple were residing at Bethel “to labour for Jesus until He gives them a heathen tongue, and then they will proceed to the missionary field.”[65] At the same time, “missionary tongues” seemed to resolve the contentious “evidence question” of Spirit baptism. The whole idea solidified on the first day of the new century, 1 January 1901, when Agnes Ozman (1870–1937) spoke in tongues. Parham was firmly persuaded that Ozman’s speech act “validated his conclusion about uniform biblical evidence with the Holy Ghost and Fire.”[66] It was a seminal moment in the history of global Christianity as it was on this theological understanding that classical Pentecostalism took its defining stand, and from it derived much of its remarkable impetus.

Ambrose J. Tomlinson (1865–1943) became a leading figure in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN), a church that lays claims to being the oldest Pentecostal denomination in the U.S.A., dating its formation back to 1896.[67] Tomlinson grew up on a farm in Westfield, Indiana, with parents nominally Quaker. Shortly after his marriage at the age of twenty-four he was struck by lightning, a physical and emotional jolt that turned his mind to studying the Bible and his heart to God. Blessed with ceaseless energy, he became active in the life of his Quaker fellowship. Contact with others introduced him to the Holiness movement and divine healing, the latter largely through a tract written by Carrie Judd Montgomery. Awakened to the Holiness message, he began to search for a deeper experience of God while engaging in colportage and evangelistic work in impoverished districts in Appalachia. His spiritual quest led him to make contact with a number of leading Holiness centres, among them Shiloh and Sandford. In the autumn of 1897, he was baptized by Sandford in the chill waters of the nearby Androscoggin River. Much of what he witnessed at Shiloh resonated with his expectations. When in 1900 he sought to establish a Holiness work in Culberson, North Carolina, it was Shiloh he took as his model. His ambition was never less than grandiose, approaching the scale of Sandford’s achievements. He envisioned a complex containing a large industrial school and orphanage, imaginatively conjured as “a Garden of Eden where God can come and talk with us in the cool of the day, and we will not be ashamed.”[68] However, he had to settle for a makeshift school, starting with twenty-four students. In purchasing a plot of land for the school, he asked for it to be deeded to “God Almighty and A. J. Tomlinson, steward or agent.”[69] It was seriously meant but, at the same time, it was expressed in terminology aping that used by Sandford.

It was not long before the small community was enveloped in heart-breaking

distress. Jessie, the infant daughter of two of the mission workers, became gravely ill and was sinking fast. Tomlinson was strongly supportive of the doctrine of “healing in the atonement,” and on the strength of this conviction the group did not call for medical attention: “We rallied our forces and met the enemy,” he declared, and “conquered by the blood.”[70] Throughout the anxious days the infant showed signs of rallying, only to relapse. The intensity and fervor of the prayer matched that of Shiloh in its warrior and battlefield imagery, replicating the bellicose “Shiloh charge” with its fusillade of prayer. The battle was waged well into the night; “Baby Jessie,” he reported, “was again seized by the enemy and almost passed away, but we rallied our forces, confessed our sins, begged forgiveness of each other & God, marched out and again met the enemy.” When dawn broke they had “routed the death angel” and the child was “alive and seems much relieved.” Nevertheless, the “enemy” could not be denied and in the infant’s worsening moments, the Tomlinsons and the child’s parents covenanted “to fast and pray as David did until she was either well or gone to heaven”—an allusion to the death of David’s first-born child with Bathsheba. A grief-stricken Tomlinson mourned, “We did all we could and turned every stone we knew.”[71] Here, as at Shiloh, when prayer and fasting seemed to fail the group turned

inwards, though this time without the emotionally charged inquisition that bordered on the vengeful at the hands of Sandford at Shiloh.

Tomlinson rose to prominence in the Church of God [CG], which he joined in 1903 becoming in rapid succession pastor of a few of its leading churches, co-editor of its magazine and moderator as well as clerk of its first General Assembly. At the fourth annual meeting his title was changed to General Overseer, a position that became permanent in 1914 until 1923 when tension between him and the twelve-man council of elders led to his resignation to form the Church of God of Prophecy.[72] For well over a decade Tomlinson had been the main architect of the CG, having almost complete control of the administration of the church and acting as its leading authority on doctrinal matters. One of the main areas of conflict within the leadership arose when the council suspected that he saw himself “as holding theocratic authority in the church”—a view that raises a suspicion of the lingering influence of Sandford.[73] Alexander makes the point that although the extent to which Tomlinson’s style of leadership was influenced by Sandford has never been determined,” it has not prevented others, notably Robins and Coulter, attempting the task.[74]

That the CG did not decline in the way Shiloh did owed something both to Tomlinson’s more balanced mindset which believed there must be a “constant yielding to authority in whatever form it appears—the Holy Spirit, the Bible, the Assembly, and to those who are over you in the Lord.”[75] As General Overseer, he recognized the superior jurisdiction of the General Assembly. Unlike Shiloh, the CG has grown markedly and in its centennial year had reached a global membership of over 6 million in 150 countries. It is to Tomlinson’s credit that he guided the church with energy and foresight for twenty of its most formative years, pushing its thoroughly Pentecostal agenda often in scenes reminiscent of Sandford’s revivalism, though without the latter’s waywardness.[76]

Daniel Warner and the Church of God (Anderson)

The Church of God (Anderson) is the second Holiness church to be examined for its position on divine healing vis-à-vis Pentecostal origins. Historically, it is not related to the several Church of God bodies rooted in the Holiness revival of Tennessee and the Carolinas in the late nineteenth century. It provides another example of a church founded by those outside Methodism who came to embrace the holiness message. That there was a sizeable number of such people is suggested by the report of a visitor who attended a Methodist love-feast. He told of Baptists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Congregationalists and Quakers who “had spoken of God’s work in their hearts.”[77] Daniel S. Warner (1842–95) was one such non-Methodist who went on to found the denomination that eventually became known as the Church of God (Anderson). Warner was converted in 1865, attended a few terms at Oberlin College, and then became a recognized minister of the Winebrennerian church for six years.[78] In 1877 he came under the influence of holiness teaching and

experienced entire sanctification, a concept foreign to the teaching of the Winebrennerian church. As a consequence, he lost his ministerial license, but was relicensed by a splinter group named the Northern Indiana Eldership of the Churches of God. In 1881, Warner withdrew from the Eldership to act on a long-sensed conviction that denominations were an expression of the evil of sectarian division in the church. At two camp meetings he declared himself free from all ecclesiastical systems and invited others to join him in proclaiming themselves simply as the Church of God. It was the first independent (“come-outer”) holiness religious body to emerge from the Holiness movement some fifteen years after the establishment of the National Camp Meeting Association. Warner’s new movement in espousing a “restorationist ecclesiology” prepared it to separate from the established denominations with few misgivings, and then set about establishing a believer’s church ecclesiology and a non-sectarian holiness soteriology.[79] Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s Warner continued to play a key role in propagating the message by means of the Gospel Trumpet, the periodical he edited till his death.

The periodical abounded with accounts of healing. One woman reader wrote to say, “It does my soul good to read the testimonies of how God is healing both soul and body, I believe He is willing to manifest as much power on earth today as He did when Christ was here in the flesh.”[80] Warner promoted the expectation of healing through hymns of his own composition, such as “O Lord, Thou Healest Me” (1887):

Thy heart, dear Lord, is full of compassion,

And touched with sympathy;

Why then should I continue to suffer?

I know Thou healest me.

Warner had first shown an interest in divine healing in 1876, the year before his experiencing entire sanctification when there were occasional reports of his praying for the sick. Two years before the founding of his new religious body, he wrote in his diary for 10 September 1879: “On Tuesday we had a faith meeting. Special faith and gifts were consulted. All who had infirmities presented themselves before the Lord, and several remarkable healings were performed. Sister Monnett, from Bucyrus, who walked upon crutches, was made whole and used them no more. Another sister was healed by the Great Physician of a spinal condition which she had had from her youth. The next day she was surprised to find that even the deformity had disappeared.”[81]

Warner laid claim to many dramatic healings including the deliverance of a woman from demon possession and the recovery of sight of another female at one of his revival services. The latter took place at the first camp meeting held near Bangor in south-western Michigan in June 1883. Emma Miller had been blinded for nearly three years by severe cataracts in both eyes, the lids of which were permanently closed. Nine months after her conversion she received a revelation that she would be healed. Soon after her arrival at the camp, she was so strengthened in faith by a further revelation that she requested her friends to provide her with paper and envelopes, promising to write to them. On the fourth day of the camp such was her confidence that she requested to be seated on the platform to allow the congregation to witness her healing. Though Warner had been called away from the meeting, other leaders prayed earnestly for her. About 5 p.m. her eyes were opened in an instant and such was the excitement provoked that the thunderous praise could be heard two miles away. Miller was able to go out into the bright sunlight without any unpleasant sensation and straightway wrote two postal cards. Some thirty-five years later, Byers was able to record that her sight was still clear.

Up to the summer of 1887 the evangelistic efforts of Warner were confined to the Middle West. The decision was made to make a more extensive tour that would take him as far west as Denver, Colorado. On June 24, 1887, one of the places he visited was a campsite about ten miles from St. James, Crawford County, Missouri. At the camp meeting he encountered a new situation. As soon as his party arrived at the camp, they were accorded a strange reception. Some came out dancing on one leg, some uncannily rolling their eyes, others speaking in tongues, or jerking, or falling stiff—a scene reminiscent of the mystifying manifestations of the Cane Ridge revival in Kentucky in August 1801 that featured strongly in the Second Great Awakening in the American South. At first Warner did not know what to make of such bizarre behavior. His report continued:

Unseemly and even hideous operations and contortions were carried on and called the manifestations of the Spirit and power of God . . . The supposed gift of tongues was alarmingly increasing. Indian war dances, etc., had turned the church of God into something quite different, a disgusting maze of confusion. . . . We had never seen such manifestation except in persons possessed with devils, and yet the Spirit of God showed us these were not so possessed, but were, for the most part, still owned of the Lord. We read 1 Corinthians 12–14, and showed that the gift of tongues was not of general usefulness, and was a sign to the Jews, not generally edifying to the church; that other gifts should be sought in preference . . . that spasmodic jerking is not mentioned in the Bible as a manifestation of God’s Spirit, but is ascribed to a malignant spirit.[82]

Writing in the post-Azusa period, one local, described as one who “was affected by that peculiar power that possessed the saints,” recalled: “We were under an influence similar to what modern tongues people are under. A few talked similarly to the way modern tongues people talk nowadays. Healing was claimed and the work seemed to be done.”[83] What Warner observed and the local man had experienced was a proto-Pentecostalism moment that was some twenty years ahead of the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1906. Of the events surrounding the Azusa Street Revival, the Los Angeles Times wrote disapprovingly in a stronger vein than the one taken by Bynum: “The night is made hideous by the howlings of the worshippers”—yet it is to that time and place that Pentecostalism has traditionally reckoned its dawning.[84]

Warner first made contact with his future colleague Enoch E. Byrum (1861–1942) on one of his evangelistic tours in Indiana. Byrum was raised in a devout “United Brethren in Christ” farming home and was converted at the age of fifteen.[85] He experienced sanctification at a Church of God (Anderson) revival in 1886. The following year, he purchased a half-interest in the Gospel Trumpet and provided Warner with editorial assistance for eight years until Warner died in 1895. Once Warner died Byrum took on his evangelistic role and travelled extensively throughout the United States and the world. He frequently travelled 40,000 miles a year holding evangelistic and healing meetings. He developed an abiding interest in divine healing early in life. Of the period shortly after his adolescent conversion he had this to say: “Although I had never received any definite teaching on the subject of divine healing, yet almost intuitively, it seems, I would call upon the Lord for help when afflicted, and would receive the needed help. Several times my mother seemed to be at the point of death. . . . With troubled heart, I sought the place of prayer to tell the Lord all about it and mother was spared.”[86] He engaged in healing before he ever preached or was ordained. In 1892 he published Divine Healing of Soul and Body, followed by Miracles and Healing: Startling Incidents and Experiences in a Christian Life, and The Great Physician and His Power to Heal. Laying claim to the gift of healing, he would often respond to a telegram or a letter and travel for hundreds of miles to pray for some stricken individual.

It was early in his evangelistic journeying that he was led to take a new direction in his ministry: “I realised the necessity of having some of the special gifts of the Spirit mentioned in the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians, and called upon the Lord for the gift of faith, which was granted to me, and later I was led out on the line of divine healing, wherein the Lord saw fit to bestow special gifts upon me, which were developed and increased accordingly as they were exercised.”[87] After some faltering early steps in this ministry he grew in confidence and could profess, “I have witnessed the healing of thousands of people of almost all kinds of diseases.” Then, in 1895, “the Lord made clear to me in various ways that he wanted not only me, but also the church, to advance on the line of divine healing and the graces of the Holy Spirit. There seemed to be many more failures in those for whom prayer was offered than we felt could possibly be to the glory of God.”

Exercised by this failure, his motivation was raised through a dream in which he was overcome by an urge to plunge into the deep water of a lake while others around him were frisking in the shallows. No great profundity was required for its interpretation: “It was only a dream, but the Lord made clear to me through this that it was just the condition of the ministry and the gospel workers. They were only playing along the shore, and not moving out into the deep, where he wanted to show a manifestation of His power in healing the sick and with victory and power over devils.”[88] Harvey Cox noted that one of the characteristics of Pentecostalism was what he termed primal piety, a spirituality that gives weight to “trance, visions, healing, dreams, dance and other archetypal religious expressions.”[89] It is an observation applicable also to its progenitor, the Holiness movement. One of its most powerful advocates, the MEC preacher Beverley Carradine (1848–1931), in his book Remarkable Occurrences has a chapter entitled “The Power of a Dream.” He related accounts of three preachers, “as widely removed in temperament as they are in the localities,” each of whom was profoundly influenced by a dream.

Of all Byrum’s unusual experiences, perhaps the most startling was the reputed raising of Nancy King Taylor from the dead in January 1899. Taylor declared that since that particular event she, in turn, had “witnessed some wonderful manifestations of healing power,” one of which she described that was on a par with her own revivification:

A man named Ellis Ziegler was taken to the hospital at Columbus, Ohio, for an operation. When the surgeons made an incision they discovered that he was full of cancers and that there was no hope of his recovery. Without doing anything further, they sewed up the opening and sent him home. He heard of my having been raised from the dead and sent for my husband and me. We went and at his request anointed him. God instantly healed the man. The cut, which the surgeons made, was about eight inches in length. This occurred several years ago, and he is a strong man today. The doctors afterward said to him, ‘We were not particular in sewing you up, as we only intended to make a respectable corpse.’”[90]

Byrum continued to pray for the sick, write, and hold evangelistic meetings until his death in 1942. Though Warner provided the stirring vision of a reformed New Testament church, it was left to Byrum as the de facto leader of the next generation to steer the church through the choppy seas of doctrinal dissension within the denomination and thus consolidate Warner’s legacy. His claim to have possibly two of the charismata outlined in 1 Cor 12:9–10 (viz., faith and healing) is one of the early indicators that the theological rationale for divine healing was beginning to bend towards the pneumatological concept of spiritual gifts, while still retaining a healing-linked understanding of the atonement—a development that came to general acceptance within Pentecostalism.

Today the Church of God (Anderson) is one of the largest of the 200 religious groups that are collectively referred to as “Churches of God,” the majority of which are either Holiness or Pentecostal. While after the Azusa Street event in 1906 the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) became Pentecostal in orientation, the Church of God (Anderson)

resisted such a move. The present stated position of the church is that it “does not

emphasise the charismatic gift of speaking in tongues generally associated with Pentecostal churches”—a position taken on tongues that is rather more conciliatory than that taken by Warner in his day. There is no specific reference to healing in the denomination’s current doctrinal statement.

Alma White and the Pillar of Fire Movement

Alma Bridwell White (1862–1946) has a place in footnote of American church history as the nation’s first female bishop, a preferment diminished by the fact that it transpired in the church she founded, the “Pillar of Fire.” She was converted as a teenager under the preaching of the Holiness evangelist and healing advocate, W. B. Godbey. Trained as a teacher, she taught in the western states of Montana and Nevada (1885–87) before marrying Kent White, a Methodist theological student. In 1893, partly through the influence of Finis Yoakum, then a specialist in neurological disorders in the Gross Medical College in Denver, she claimed the experience of entire sanctification.[91] So emboldened, she overcame her “man-fearing spirit,” and began preaching at her husband’s MEC services and became one of the leading figures of the Colorado Holiness Association. When she and her husband withdrew from the MEC in 1895, they began conducting revival services and preaching at camp meetings. Becoming increasingly frustrated with the conservatism of the leadership of the National Holiness Association, she organized her followers into the Pentecostal Union in 1901. Five years later the group became known as the Pillar of Fire (POF), the name given to its periodical that took its name from the fiery pillar that followed the children of Israel in the wilderness.

The permanent national headquarters was established in 1908 in New Jersey, and was named Zarephath after the biblical city where a widow baked for Elijah her last cake.[92] She took the message of holiness revivalism throughout the USA and established a base in London, starting with a printing press that rolled off the London Pillar of Fire. In all, she wrote over thirty-five books, composed some 200 hymns, produced two morality plays exposing the evils of drink, edited a number of other periodicals and purchased two radio stations, one in 1927 and the other in 1931. The central church of the denomination was the Alma Temple in Denver, next to the State Capitol. The building took ten years to complete and had a seating capacity for two thousand when finished in 1937. She became politically active through her support for the Ku Klux Klan in its anti-Catholic stance in the 1920s.[93] The periodical, Woman’s Chains, which she edited, was a strong advocate for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment that aimed to outlaw discrimination against women, a core objective of the National Woman’s Party. Her feminist approach to the women’s issue was rooted in biblical principles that she saw as applying equally to home, church and state. At the age of seventy she took up painting, turned out some 300 canvasses and had three exhibitions in New York of her landscape paintings.

Alma White was a woman of indomitable spirit, feisty and authoritarian, who carried the burden of marital disharmony throughout her lifelong marriage to Kent. It was a struggle that reflected and profoundly colored their respective ministries and theological positions. Her background helps to understand something of her feminist motivation and combative drive. She grew up in rural Kentucky, one of six sisters and four brothers when the nation was subjected to acute economic austerity in the aftermath of the Civil War. Her childhood was burdened with a sense of inferiority, feeling unappreciated by her parents and overworked in caring for her younger siblings when she was not helping in her father’s tannery business. She disclosed: “I was overgrown for my age and looked upon by everyone as being the odd and less attractive one of the family.”[94] She was often told at home that she was so “homely” that she should have been a boy. Her subsequent life can be read in Adlerian psychology as a compensatory reaction to the low self-esteem she suffered in childhood.[95] In her mature years she was in appearance heavyset and quite tall, described in Time magazine as “a resolute woman with the mien of an inspired laundress.”[96] Other descriptions depicted her as “a Cromwell in skirts” who was “almost terrifying in her intense earnestness.”[97] Time magazine strained itself in calling her “a mannish-voiced, gynotheocrat.”[98]

Alma White

One of the defining moments of her life took place in the second year of her marriage when their first child was eighteen months old. Stricken by typhoid, she was just conscious enough to hear her doctor say that she must not die. She recalled: “I promised the Lord then and there that if He would spare my life I would never cease to tell the story of redeeming love.”[99] It was a promise that had to be kept but left unanswered the nature of her spiritual qualification to bring it to fulfilment. That began to appear two years later when she made a strenuous effort to obtain the experience of entire sanctification. In March 1893, she received what she sought:

This proved to be the great event of my life, fitting me for the preaching of the Gospel. . . . Three weeks after I was sanctified I took the Lord as my healer. I said, “It is reasonable to believe that after the Lord has done so much for my soul, He will undertake for my body, if I have faith in His promise.” . . . At this writing [1937] it has been forty-four years since I took the Lord as my healer; and I have been in actual service ever since, travelling perhaps more than two millions of miles by land and sea, never having given up to spend a whole day in bed from physical disability.[100]

The liberating and enabling impact of the sanctification experience for Holiness women is well documented. Stanley has provided pen pictures of numerous American women, both black and white, who felt impelled to public ministry, taking Pentecost as the precedent for their “prophetic authority by which the authority of the Holy Spirit superseded human authority and validated women preachers.”[101]

However, her personally liberating Holiness experience came to cast a shadow over her relationship with her husband in his ministerial role. In her extensive writings, Alma was not loath to parade the weaknesses of her husband. Kent’s side of the story is less well known. A number of things riled him about Alma. Being theologically trained and an ordained minister in the MEC, he so disapproved of Alma’s typological and allegorical interpretation of Scripture that they sometimes spent hours of fierce debate well into the early hours of the morning, both talking for victory. An article in the New York Times described Kent as “an amiable man” of broad cultural sympathies. It added that when he wanted to attend a performance of Hamlet and take up the study of foreign languages, Alma persuaded him “these things were ungodly.” She pestered him in “wanting advice as to her soul in the middle of the night.” When she “got sanctification,” Kent had “a terrible time.” With his wife telling him he was not radical enough and the church authorities pressing him to tone down, the article concluded that “he must have had a tormented life.”[102]

When the Whites were first married Kent carried the expectation that Alma would perform the conventional role of a minister’s wife. Once Alma got into her stride their roles were quickly reversed, a swivel he was loath to accept and to which he never really adjusted. As the following episode reveals, it is difficult to see how he could easily have done so. On Alma’s arrival ten days into a mission he led in 1893, she found “there had been but little conviction and no conversions. The Lord had let them utterly fail. The first evening I was present my husband preached longer than usual, but no one made a move. Finally I was asked to say a few words. The Spirit of God came mightily upon me in the delivery of the message, and when the call was made for penitents to come forward there was not room enough at the altar for the number who responded.”[103] By this phase in her ministry, Alma considered Kent her assistant rather than a partner on an equal footing. She let it be known at one point that she did not expect Kent to attend all her services though it was a great help to have him present occasionally to preach or take part.

The tensions between husband and wife came to a head when, in 1909, Kent

embraced the new Pentecostal revival, while Alma was adamantly opposed to speaking in tongues. Kent left Alma and the Zarephath community and, despite Alma’s attempts at reconciliation insofar as they did not compromise her church work, the couple lived apart until his death in 1940. Alma was an impulsive versifier and poetized their separation:

I loved him more than tongue can tell

Alas! my love he spurned,

And far away in distant lands

From me his face he turned. . . .

When he had failed to grasp the prize—

The leadership he craved—

He scorned a woman’s work and place

And over “tongues” he raved.

His purposes she should fulfil

And all for him forsake;

And though achievements she should win,

The honour he should take.[104]

She persuaded her husband to join her party to conduct a revival in London late in 1909. When she returned to America in January 1910, Kent remained in England and joined the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFC), the first Pentecostal denomination to be formed in Britain. It began under the leadership of William Oliver Hutchinson (1864–1928) in Bournemouth and it was there that Kent first spoke in tongues in July 1910.

Alma travelled to England regularly to establish the POF in London and on such occasions travelled to Bournemouth. In 1915, on one of her visits to the church, Kent being absent, she was faced by hostile comments from Hutchinson. Stung by his words, she demanded to make a statement, but Hutchinson ordered her out. Not easily thwarted, she “stepped in between the seats, [and] continued to expose the demon worship of this so-called apostolic movement.” When she continued to berate the company, Hutchinson steered the congregation out, though twenty-two remained to listen. When she returned to her room in the lodgings provided by a member of the church, she found it locked and her luggage placed outside. Later, Kent wrote to her: “God help me I am not going to leave the fountain of living water for any flesh or human relationships.”[105] Despite her attempts at reconciliation, there was no lasting release from their quarrel, though a wistful affection for each other intermittently surfaced. As late as 1938, Kent wrote to their oldest son a letter in which he opened his heart: “I now cry out in my tears! O why should it be that I had to lose my Alma, my girlie!”[106] In 1922, Kent took up permanent residence in England where he served for the next seventeen years as a pastor in the AFC.[107]

Alma’s diatribes against Pentecostalism have to be seen in the light of their clouded relationship. For one, it meant they could never share the same platform again, tense as that was at times when they openly cut across each other. However, theological

differences alone hardly explain the vehemence of their feuding. Their misery was

compounded when overtures were made by Kent and the AFC to secure title of half of the Pillar of Fire estate through a civil action in the court. To forestall such action she filed a legal complaint against Kent for desertion. At the time of the trial, she told the media that it was Kent’s ambition to be the head, adding, “But my people would not have him as leader. . . . It was jealousy which drove him to leave me.” Kent was driven to admit that he “never dreamed [she would] rise up to dominate my life.”[108] At the windup of the case the Apostolic Faith leaders failed in their attempt to take over the POF, and any question of divorce was staved off.

The earliest stinging blast from Alma against the events at Azusa Street took place toward the end of 1906 when she commented, “The writer is personally acquainted with a number of people who have been caught in this slime-pit, and positively knows that they are without God and unwilling to make their crooked paths straight.”[109] Her main contention, commonly held, was that Pentecostalism was a cover for spiritualism, nothing less than a work of satanic deception.[110] She developed her argument in the book entitled Demons and Tongues.[111] She saw “Tongueism” as the work of Satan using “his mightiest weapon of warfare—that of counterfeiting the Holy Ghost . . . and to his great delight, multitudes of professors who have lost the spirit of Christ are ready for such a counterfeit.” Accusations tumbled from her pen, of which the following are a sample: “spiritualists attend their meetings and feel perfectly at home”; “many of these devotees of the Tongues movement have proved to be immoral-free-lovers, bigamists, etc.” and “any person, however profligate he may be, can get Satanic gibberish if he associates with these modern sorcerers.”[112] Some Pentecostals were not slow to retaliate in kind. Herbert Buffum derided her polemical stance as “turkey-buzzard vomit” splattered upon “God’s elect and select people.”[113] Theirs was a squabble that evokes the phrase “the narcissism of small differences” coined by Freud that encapsulates an observation that contempt grows most often between people who, though sharing much in common, inflate their differences.

Alma was particularly scathing in her opinion of William Seymour, the black leader of the Azusa Street Mission at the defining moment for classical Pentecostalism in April 1906. They met some weeks before this event at her Pentecostal Union Bible school when he called unannounced at her Pentecostal Union Bible school in Denver on his way to California from Texas to take up the pastorate of a small Holiness mission in Los Angeles. To all outward appearance he was hospitably treated when invited to join the school for dinner and asked to pray, to which he responded in a prayer spoken “with a good deal of fervor.” However, she disclosed that before he finished, “I felt that serpents and other slimy creatures were creeping all around me.” When he left the room, some students stated they felt he was devil possessed. She claimed to have met “all kinds of religious fakirs and tramps” in her day but Seymour had “excelled them all.” [114] Nothing happened by chance for Alma and she had a ready reason for why Seymour had called at the Bible school: “There was a cause for this. The Lord knew that Satan was going to use him in the outbreaking of the so-called ‘Pentecostal’ movement with the baptism of unknown tongues, on the Pacific coast; and permitted me to see the person that the devil was going to use, before the winds of perdition began to blow.”[115] It was predictable of Alma to personalize harshly the outcome of any person or activity that roused her antipathy. As Wacker observed, Alma was not one to “to waste time with nuances.”[116]

Divine judgment was swift to follow those who did not heed her warnings. To her, it was not by chance that some sickened and died prematurely.[117] Towns, like Dillon, Montana, that so provoked the wrath of God by their hostility to POF missionaries that it was stricken “with a long list of tragedies, as barren of spiritual life as the Sahara desert is of vegetation.”[118] If Los Angeles became the birthplace of Pentecostalism, it was but the outworking of divine justice for not heeding the message she had brought to the city in February 1904. Pentecostalism, infiltrated as it was by Satanic powers, was nothing less than a sign of divine retribution, inflicted because “God let the Holiness people of Los Angeles see their fireless condition and gave them a chance to repent, but with few exceptions they refused to do so. The devil even then was preparing a net in which to catch them. But they hardened their hearts and resisted the pleadings of God’s Holy Spirit, and were carried away in the most hellish outburst of demoniacal power [Pentecostalism] that has ever been known under the name of religion.”[119] Three years later she commented that at the 1904 Los Angeles Convention “there were strange spirits” operating among the Holiness people there, something that was nothing less than a prelude to the disaster of Pentecost.[120] Alma was noticeably sensitive to atmosphere, less so to people with whom she disagreed.

There were many features about White and the POF that were shared with Pentecostalism that made the vehemence of her attack on it inexplicable. Her meetings were noted for an exuberance that earned her group the sobriquet “Holy Jumpers.”[121] Jumping, pogo-like, had featured in the earlier First and Second Great Awakenings in America as well as other Holiness groups such as the Salvation Army and the Free Methodists. White, however, took her precedent back to the New Testament. Jesus words to “leap for joy” [Luke 6: 23] when persecuted were interpreted to mean jump up and down repeatedly. Her tent meetings in Denver in the summer of 1902 caused a

businessman nearby to petition against the “ecstasies” that were loud enough to keep his employees from sleeping at night and almost disturbed the repose of his customers.[122] Her meetings in Camberwell Public Baths, London, in November 2004 gave the press a field day. Reports made fun of the scene at the expense of the leading figures: “They howled like dervishes, danced like red Indians, and roared out anathemas till the blood rushed to their faces and their throats became hoarse.”[123] However, she drew the line at anything that hinted of Pentecostalism, a point made in her obituary in Time magazine: “Though she believed in enthusiastic unbottling of religious emotions, Matriarch White was always stern with Pentecostal excesses. ‘Sometimes our people get happy and skip around a bit,’ she said, ‘but . . . we don’t have any catalepsy or epilepsy.’” When some other followers in a Southern state ventured a bit of holy rolling, Bishop Alma told them, “You get right up or I’ll stick a pin in you.”[124] Such a prospect quickly achieved its end.

White addressed the unavoidable topic of the charismata presented in 1 Corinthians 12–14 in her chapter “Gifts of the Spirit” in Demons and Tongues. Her discussion centered on tongues with only passing reference to prophecy and healing. She demoted prophecy to preaching and, by so doing, opened the way for women to preach since their authority to prophesy was recognized in the early church (Acts 21:9). Why tongues became for her such a doctrinal bugbear is not entirely clear. Some of her followers were more even-handed on the issue. In a letter to Kent, a POF member wrote: “In regard to the Tongues Movement, I have always believed there was grounds founded upon the scripture for such an experience, and thought probably some among them were honest and sincere and their testimonies worthy of consideration.”[125]

Despite this qualified sympathy, none of her followers left the Pentecostal Union. Her difficulty seems to have centred on the Pentecostal understanding of tongues as the initial evidence of Spirit baptism. At a stroke, that position threw into doubt her own experience of sanctification, understood as Spirit baptism. It carried the potential to destabilize her whole ministry. As she saw it, the transformation it had wrought in her life had validated the completeness of the Spirit’s work in her: “There were no strange manifestations in this baptism. . . . The power of God rested upon me from day to day; and marvellous results followed my ministry in the conviction and conversion of sinners and the sanctification of believers. . . . Natural timidity which had hindered me through the years of my justified experience was swept away.”[126] Her additional comment, “There was no difficulty in speaking in my own tongue. I was enabled to express my thoughts in words that I had never used before; often I hardly knew the meaning of them,” would seem to be her response to the contentious issue of “missionary tongues.” Her reading of 1 Corinthians 12–14 was more an eisegetical exercise that imposed on the text a preconceived interpretation. It allowed her to interpret the first Pentecost as the day when the Jewish pilgrims were

enabled to comprehend what was spoken by the believers because they had received “the gift of hearing which was a greater miracle than that of tongues.”[127]

However, it is unlikely that the vehemence of Alma’s attack on tongues was confined to doctrinal considerations. In a scarcely veiled reference to Kent, she expressed her hurt: “I know of some who have become so hardened under the influence of this demoniacal power that they are entirely unlike what they once were. They turn away in cold indifference from those who are suffering on their account, and manifest no sympathy toward those whose hearts they are breaking or have broken.”[128] The tongues issue was more than a doctrinal rift. It became an acutely personal concern that both reflected and deepened the fraught state of their marriage. Tongues as the initial evidence of Spirit baptism proved to be the last straw in a relationship that was rarely less than strained. Their marriage increasingly imprisoned them, and release from it, though never legally sought, was not without advantage. The exercise of tongues was the one feature that most distinguished Pentecostal meetings from those of the POF, accentuating it as a well-defined boundary marker. It made more defensible the end of their marriage in any meaningful sense, and sanctioned their freedom to engage in separate ministries, a release reinforced by Kent’s move to England.

Alma claimed divine healing both for herself and for others. She was introduced to prayer for healing as a girl of twelve when her oldest brother took seriously ill. She traced his recovery to the prayers of their pastor and herself: “For twenty-four hours I prayed almost continuously.”[129] In 1895 while holding a mission in a potato-growing area she fell ill with pneumonia, but “the Lord touched my body, the fever broke and the symptoms disappeared.” As a result the “news of how I had been healed took wings” and the numbers in attendance shot up.[130] Three years later she had a major lung problem, severe enough for her doctor to advise her to discontinue her evangelistic work. She did not heed his advice to purchase a prescribed medicine “but began to pray for the Lord to undertake for me,” a refusal that characterized the most radical of healers.[131] She was equally adamant when in 1899 she fell seriously ill. While Kent wanted to call a doctor, she asked him to wait until she had another hour to pray. Whereupon, as was her usual recourse, she opened her Bible for guidance and her eyes fell on Jeremiah 17:5 (“Thus saith the Lord, ‘Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm’”) with the denouement that “needless to say the healing touch was imparted.”[132]

At the same time, she recognized that suffering could serve the divine purpose. In 1908, when the difficult decision to shift the headquarters from Denver to Zarephath was under consideration, her eyes became inflamed, a bane she took as a sign from God: “This affliction had been sent to me as a thorn in the flesh to spur me on to the right decision.”[133] The problem disappeared once the decision was made, most likely as a reduction in her stress level. She was fully aware of the benefits for health of fresh air and relaxation and insisted that the residents at Zarephath spent at least thirty minutes outdoors each day. Like some other leaders of the Holiness movement, notably W. B. Godbey, she was an advocate of vegetarianism and, by 1914 the POF had sanctioned it. It was accepted that eating animal flesh “feeds the flames of passion,” a view shared with health reformers in the nineteenth century such as Sylvester Graham.[134]

Healing featured in the services conducted throughout her extensive travels. Holiness meetings on Thursday afternoon were started in her home in Denver in 1896. Such occasions were likened to “a spiritual oasis in a desert” during which there were

“conversions, sanctifications and remarkable cases of healing.”[135] In her first visit to California in 1901 while walking in the centre of San Jose, she came across the owner of a candy store who introduced himself as a former neighbor when they lived in Denver. He reminded her that his wife had been given up to die by doctors, but “we called upon you to come and pray for her, and as you may remember the Lord raised her up.”[136] Five years after Zarephath had been established as the headquarters of the POF, the twenty-four year-old elder son of the Whites, Arthur, crashed into a cyclist who turned sharply in front of his car. The victim was found to have such severe internal injuries that there was minimum hope of recovery. One of Alma’s concerns was for the reputation of Zarephath if the young man were to die: “We had not been on the Atlantic seaboard long enough to establish our work and character in the public mind. At this time, there were but few automobiles owned among the laboring classes, and I was told by an able attorney that this would help to cause prejudice against the owners of cars.”

With others in attendance, she settled to pray into the night, and at just four o’clock in the morning, twelve hours after the accident, “I told the five persons who had been waiting on the Lord with me that the die was cast, that the man was either dead or it had been decreed in heaven that he should live. I asked one of those who were present with me to open the Bible and read what his eyes fell upon. He did so, and read, ‘The snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth’ [Ps.124:7–8].”[137] The young POF minister deputed to visit the injured man in hospital was able to report that the patient was recovering and had regained consciousness “at just four o’clock this morning.” A relieved Alma breathed: “This was the exact moment I had received the assurance that something in his case had been decreed in heaven.”[138] Fourteen years later “at a patriotic, probably Ku Klux Klan, meeting,” the above cyclist introduced himself to her “his face beaming with good will” as a witness to his recovery.[139]

With the arrival of Pentecostalism and Kent’s involvement in it, a degree of

ambivalence concerning divine healing crept into Alma’s views on the subject. Though the biblical warrant for divine healing could not be summarily dismissed, nevertheless the place Pentecostals gave it was, for her, nothing less than the outworking of satanic deception. They were among the unwary, caught in “the devil’s delusive net: The stories that are circulated in regard to the healing of diseases among these modern necromancers are Satan’s strongest bait. Those who go to the Pentecostal meetings seeking to be healed of their diseases have little thought of restraining their fleshly appetites or submitting to any course of discipline whereby God could be glorified. God has nothing to do with people who fail to take the rugged way of the cross; therefore it is the devil’s opportunity to give them a counterfeit.”[140] Pentecostals, she felt, could be likened to the seven sons of Sceva (Acts 19:15–16) who took it upon themselves to use the name of Jesus to exorcise the demon-possessed: “This is exactly the condition of these modern sorcerers; they will not straighten up their lives, but they want to do great things—to be healed and have the power to heal others.”[141] Besides, as she pointed out, their claims to healing were, of themselves, not self-authenticating: “The Tongues people claim miracle-working power in the healing of diseases, and so do the Christian Scientists. Who has any faith in Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy or any of her heretical teachings?”[142] It was a criticism as frequently answered as brought.[143]

Never loath to denounce individuals by name, Alma picked on Finis Yoakum for particular censure. White knew Yoakum well as he had been their family doctor in the early days in Denver. When he resigned from the profession, she asserted that he had turned away “from orthodox religion, and became engulfed in spiritism.”[144] Her accusation against him was that “he looked for signs and wonders, and became the victim of demon-working power.” His healing meetings in Los Angeles, with the manifestation of strange spirits, she declared, had “prepared the soil for the Tongues.”[145] For her, little or no credibility could be given to his claims to healing: “In London, I heard of a woman who claimed to be healed on receipt of a handkerchief that Dr F. E. Yoakum had blest and sent to her,” a practice she clearly dismissed.[146] The last time she met with Yoakum left her less than impressed. Yoakum told her that he expected the investment he had put into gold mines in Mexico would make him a rich man. At this point, “his whole conversation and demeanor showed that some strange power had hold of him. The once humble holiness professor was seeking the wealth of this world to make him great, as do many others caught in this hellish gibberish trap [of tongues].”[147] Yoakum remained an increasingly controversial figure and was considered something of a maverick. E. N Bell, one of the leaders in the early Pentecostal movement, let it be known that Yoakum was not really Pentecostal.

Conversely, A. A. Boddy portrayed Yoakum in a more sympathetic light. When the English vicar visited Los Angeles in 1912, he made contact with Yoakum and described his work at Pisgah on its northern suburb: “He has a Home for ‘downs and outs’; a great wooden Tabernacle for Preaching Services; a building called the ‘Ark’ for reclaimed girls and women. He is best of all known from his ‘Faith Healing.’ He is not strongly identified with the Latter Rain movement, but he tells us he has spoken in tongues at different times.”[148] Boddy, while more generous in his opinion of Yoakum, was vocal in pointing out to him what he considered were his shortcomings. His overall assessment of the man and his work was more positive than that of some of his other critics, both Pentecostal and otherwise:

Dr Yoakum has been called an optimaniac, an optimist who always sees the rosy side. He is inclined, like many others used in Divine Healing, to be in danger from a tendency to exaggeration, or to take a rosy view of things and events connected with his work. Possibly he is often unconscious of it, but his best friends feel that he should be careful about this. . . . You cannot but love the brother whatever mistakes he makes, and he seems to me to have made some through his impulsiveness and his guilelessness, and his belief that he is led by the Lord.

Rarely troubled by the criticism he received, Yoakum maintained his healing ministry in downtown Los Angeles. When not attending to the work at Pisgah, he was found in his office between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. laying hands on the indigent sick and any other who sought his help.

For Alma there still was a place for the charismata, though in circumscribed form. She was prepared to concede that “at the beginning of each new era in the history of both Jews and Gentiles there have been great religious demonstrations, and God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The true Church has never lost the gifts of the Spirit, nor the miracle-working power.” However, there were two provisos. The first is found in her statement that “it is not necessary . . . at the close of the Gentile dispensation, for miracles to be worked to prove the divinity of Christ,” a limitation that, to radical healers, was pointlessly restrictive.[149] While accepting that “the gifts of the Spirit are imparted now, and enjoyed by members of the true Church,” the other proviso set them in a dispensationalist framework, thereby consigning their fulfilment to the future. Her vision of the future was one with the nations coming to Christ, “there will be a greater fulfilment of prophecy in the working of miracles relative to the gift of tongues and the interpretation thereof. The dead will be raised, and wonderful things will be accomplished.”[150] This ran counter to the Pentecostal concept that the church was now living in the days of the latter rain and the healing signs of the early church were to be expected. Such an idea was so distasteful to her that Kent had been constrained on one occasion to put his hand over his wife’s mouth when she argued stridently against Pentecostalism’s claim to be in the van of the latter rain.

Alma White never moderated her hostility to glossolalia nor to the movement that practiced their use. Days before his death in July 1940 when a final reconciliation between husband and wife was sought, and possibly effected, Kent wrote in his diary, “There is an evil spirit in Alma raging against the tongues. . . . She has imbibed this bitter defiant spirit and it raged against me this p.m.”[151] It was less easy for Alma to dismiss divine healing because she had received it herself and ministered it to others. Anything that smacked of Pentecostalism and its methods was abhorrent to her. The circumspect wording in the current doctrinal statement on healing of the POF would be in keeping with her views: “We believe in divine healing for the body as clearly taught in the Scriptures. There are those who testify to divine healing in answer to prayer (James 5:14–16). We believe God also heals through the means of medical science.”[152]

Conclusion

The study of the three bodies considered here, all of them supportive of the Holiness message, reveals the diversity within the movement at the height of the “come-outer” period. It also reflects the impact of powerful personalities in shaping the direction these groups took. In exercising a healing ministry they opened the way for the acceptance of the full range of charismatic gifts outlined in the Lukan/Pauline corpus. Only one of the groups was sucked into the slipstream of post-Azusa Pentecostalism, the Church of God (Cleveland). It developed into a denomination primed by the proto-Pentecostal events of Cherokee County in 1896. Shiloh also would have been drawn in but for Sandford’s reluctance to admit tongues into the repertoire of the worship of the community for fear their exercise would undermine his total control and jeopardise Shiloh’s self-attributed “special role in history’s climactic events.”[153] It was less easy for Alma to dismiss divine healing because she had received it herself and attested to its efficacy in the lives of others. Her antipathy towards Pentecostalism was of such force that it restricted her to adopting a fairly minimalist position on divine healing. In her case, personal animus played a significant part in shaping her doctrinal thinking.

As for the Church of God (Anderson), divine healing began to drift into desuetude from the 1920s onwards without causing undue dissension within the church. A number of factors contributed to this trend. One of the most important arose from administrative changes that took place in 1917. After thirty years Byrum was released from the editorship of the Gospel Trumpet to engage in the ministry of healing. In 1924, he travelled over 41,000 miles throughout all parts of America “in answer to calls to instruct or pray for the afflicted.”[154] The new editor of the Trumpet, F. G. Smith, gave much less coverage to

divine healing, whether intentionally or not is unclear. Smith amplified apocalyptic themes in a way that intensified the church’s active separatism that underscored its strong “come-outer” spirit. To this shift, doubts about healing grew as leading figures in the leadership of the church were faced with sustained bodily suffering. Two cases, in particular, carried a silent rebuke to any simplistic views on healing. At one camp in 1903, the sudden death of the twin infant daughters of parents, both evangelists, despite the fervent prayers and fasting of all the ministers dismayed the membership.

Reinterpretation of the doctrine of healing became a matter for serious consideration when Charles Wesley Naylor, an able editorial assistant for the Trumpet was left with severe internal injuries after an accident in 1908. He was bedridden for the remaining forty years of his life. Naylor continued to write for the periodical and penned the words of numerous hymns sung throughout the denomination. He periodically pricked the memories of his readers to remind them that he had not received physical healing, and he also asked correspondents “not try to write comforting letters.”[155] For a church that at the time followed Byrum’s line of healing-in-the-atonement, such failures were hard to place within its theological scheme. Such experiences of suffering led the church to recast the doctrinal practice of divine healing and expand its interpretation to approve medical agency.[156] The denomination did not abandon its belief in divine healing. Such a relinquishment would only shore up “faith in physicians” but, at the same time, it opened a way for a greater understanding of God’s ability to work through the profession, expressed as “faith with physicians.”

21. See the sociological study by Finke & Stark: The Churching of America, 153.

22. Dayton, “Yet Another Layer of the Onion,” 89.

23. Matthew Simpson (1811–84) was strongly influenced by the teachings of Phoebe Palmer. A noted orator, he preached the oration at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral in 1865.

24. Fankhauser, “The Heritage of Faith,” chapter 5 “Conflict over Holiness Associations.”

25. Peters, Christian Perfection, 151. The sermon, delivered by A. J. Endsley, was printed in the Pittsburgh Christian Advocate.

26. Ware, Restorationism , 45.

27. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 43.

28. Dieter: “Primitivism in the American Holiness Tradition”.

29. Robins. Pentecostalism in America. Kindle version, chapter 1.

30. Baer, Perfectly Empowered Bodies, 152.

31. Stephens, Who Healeth All Thy Diseases, 135–36.

32. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 58.

33. Stanley, “’Bumping’ into Modernity,” 126 & 128.

34. The idea of a personal Pentecost is found in an entry in Wesley’s Journal for October 1762: “Many years ago my brother frequently said: ‘Your day of Pentecost is not fully come, but I doubt not it will, and you will then hear of persons sanctified as frequently as you do now of persons justified.’” (Peters, Christian Perfection, 206.)

35. Dayton, Theological Roots, 174.

36. The Emmanuel Movement began in 1906 under the leadership of Elwood Worcester, rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Boston. It was the archetype of medically supervised religious psychotherapy before the dominance of Freudian psychotherapy had become established.

37. Baer, Perfectly Empowered Bodies, 170.

38. Dayton, Theological Roots, 167.

39. Ibid., 133.

40. Godbey, Sanctification of Mrs W. B. Godbey, 4.

41. Ibid., 4.

42. Dayton, Theological Roots, 134.

43. Ibid., 134.

44. Nelson, Fair, 59. They described their first months of living by faith their “shabby period.” Helen confided to a friend that she had sewn twenty-two patches on Frank’s best coat.

45. This name was based on Acts 15: 28 (KJV): “For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.”

46. “Shiloh” was intended to be the name of the original five-storey building but came to be applied to the movement. The name was derived from Gen 49:10 (KJV) while the phrase “Till Shiloh come” was carved across the front panel of the chapel pulpit. Shiloh was interpreted as the forerunner of Judah, taken as symbolic of Christ.

47. Nelson, Fair, 73.

48. Goff, Fields White Unto Harvest, 73. Parham wrote of her in 1899: “She received the gift while in the Spirit in 1895, [and] could read and write, translate and sing the language while [in a] trance or in the normal condition, and can until now.” For Parham, xenolalia found its true purpose in missionary work. In light of the imminent Parousia, it enabled the rapid spread of the gospel in lands largely untouched because time was not “wasted” in the tedious task of learning an obscure language. (See McGee, “Shortcut to Language Preparation?”)

49. Nelson, Fair, 48.

50. Ibid., 113.

51. Wacker, Heaven Below, 71 & 82.

52. Nelson, Fair, 117.

53. Ibid., 55.

54. Ibid., 119.

55. Ibid., 116.

56. Ibid., 122.

57. Ibid., 127.

58. Ibid., 126.

59. Wacker: Heaven Below, 88. On “pleading the blood” in Pentecostal circles see Robinson, Pentecostal Origins, 254–55. On the other hand, the early British Pentecostal statesman, Donald Gee, warned against the “strangely fanatical practice which arose in certain quarters of supposedly ‘pleading the blood’ by a mere repetition of the one word ‘Blood.’” He objected to its being pressed “in a purely mechanical way [in] the vain supposition that the purely physical effect of the rapid repetition of one word was speaking in tongues.” In this understanding it became a “revolting habit.” (Gee, Wind and Flame, 59).

60. Nelson, Fair, 126–27.

61. Anon, “History and Times at the Kingdom,” para. 4. The standard of holiness set by Sandford for Shiloh people was that “our Lord wanted a consort that would be ‘fair’ as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners. ‘Fair’ meant no blemish, no trickery, beautiful from the heart out and not from some outside cover that masked the evil within. ‘Clear’ meant without guile, honest, transparent in our every word and act. ‘Terrible’ meant that nothing outside of the Lord Himself so frightens the devil as a human soul redeemed, purified, and transformed by the power of Christ within.” Nelson took the title of her book Fair, Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine from this source.

62. Nelson, Fair, 204.

63. Stanley, “Alma White,” 65.

64. Nelson, Fair, 335–43.

65. McGee: “Tongues, The Bible Evidence”.

66. Blumhofer. Assemblies of God, 84.

67. The church began in 1886 when eight people formed their Christian Union with the stated intention “to restore primitive Christianity and bring about the union of all denominations.” The sect united with another based in North Carolina. In the summer of 1896 a revival broke out in a schoolhouse in Cherokee County, a remote area in Appalachia. Around 130 people spoke in unknown tongues, an experience that they identified as Spirit baptism largely from Acts 2:4; 8:14–25; 10:44–46; 19:1–6. Many claimed to be healed. The group suffered early persecution from stone-throwing mobs that burned churches and whipped members. The growing group changed its name to the Holiness Church at Camp Creek in 1902. In 1906, four congregations from three states came together to form a general assembly. The following year its main centre shifted to Cleveland, Tennessee, and the title Church of God (CG) was officially adopted. With news of the Azuza Street outpouring, the CG became more up-front about its classic Pentecostal stance on Spirit baptism.

68. Robins, A. J. Tomlinson, 131.

69. Ibid., 133.

70. Ibid., 141.

71. Ibid., 141.

72. At its beginning it was called the “Tomlinson Church of God.”

73. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 197.

74. On the subject of Sandford’s influence on Tomlinson’s ecclesiology, see Alexander: Pentecostal Healing, 96–97; Coulter: “The Development of Ecclesiology”; 59–85; Conn: Like a Mighty Army, 169 & 178.

75. Coulter: “The Development of Ecclesiology,” 80. Coulter describes Tomlinson, in contrast to the majority of early Pentecostals as being “so concerned about the nature of the church as to be almost obsessed with the topic.” (60)

76. The account of one mission conducted by Tomlinson in Florida in 1908 is captioned “A Marvellous Outpouring.” (Conn: Like a Mighty Arm, 98–99)

77. Schneider, “A Conflict of Association,” 281. The love-feast was a fellowship meal that Wesley revived through his contact with the Moravians.

78. John Winebrenner (1797–1860) and a group of like-minded ministers separated from the German Reformed Church because the denomination disapproved of their support for “new measures” revivalism that was championed by Charles G. Finney.

79. Restorationists saw the Holiness revival as a “new Reformation” with the task to refashion the church. The magisterial Reformation had fractured Church into combative sects; the Holiness movement was called to the task of rechristianizing Christianity. The term “non-sectarian” is used in the restorationist understanding that the holiness gospel would overcome sectarian divisions and bring Christians together in holy unity—a captivating, if hopelessly rarefied, ideal.

80. Byers, Birth of a Reformation, 191.

81. Ibid., 115.

82. Ibid., 219–20.

83. Ibid., 221, with some rearrangement of sentences.

84. For a considered discussion of the origins of the Pentecostal movement see Creech, “Visions of Glory.” The grounds for Azusa Street’s priority rests on the fact that glossolalia do not, of themselves, constitute Pentecostalism. Tongues have to be placed in their biblical context within a theological understanding, and sustained within an ecclesial framework.

85. The United Brethren church had its roots in the Mennonite and German Reformed communities of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.

86. Byrum, “Experiences of a Minister,” No Pages. para. under “Healing”.

87. Byrum, “Travels and Experiences,” 6.

88. Ibid., 7.

89. Cox: Fire from Heaven, 82.

90. Byrum, “Raised from the Dead,” 2.

91. Finis Yoakum (1851–1920) in 1894 received injuries that were predicted as fatal when a piece of metal from a buggy driven by a drunken man penetrated his body. He was prayed for by a CMA worker and within four months he was awarded a license to practice medicine in California. He supported the Azusa Street revival and in his tabernacle in Los Angeles instituted regular healing services.

92. See White, Modern Miracles. The widow was rewarded by having her meal and oil increased during the remaining period of the famine. White explained, “I saw that the widow symbolized the true church, and that this place in New Jersey was to be a refuge, not only for the prophets of the Lord, but for the famishing multitudes to whom would be dealt the bread of life, and where the Holy Spirit would be poured out during a spiritual famine.” (168)

93. For Alma’s links with the Klan, see Neal, “Christianizing the Klan,” 350–78.

94. Stanley, Feminist Pillar of Fire, 8.

95. Compensation is a key concept in the personality theory of Alfred Adler (1870–1937) that holds it is the primary mechanism by which one comes to deal with attitudes towards oneself that are negative.

96. Time, 22 October 1922.

97. Stanley, Feminist Pillar of Fire, 1.

98. Time, 18 December 1939.

99. White, Modern Miracles, 56.

100. Ibid., 62–63.

101. Stanley, Holy Boldness, 7.

102. New York Times, 11 December 1910.

103. White, Modern Miracles, 65. (Emphasis added). Alma was a mistress of crafted censure.

104. Kandt, “In the Name of God,” 775.

105. Stanley, “Alma White,” 80.

106. Ibid., Stanley, 79.

107. The AFC adopted this name in 1911. For further details of the church, see Robinson: Pentecostal Origins, 94–96.

108. Stanley, Feminist Pillar of Fire, 82.

109. The Rocky Mountain Pillar of Fire: December 19, 1906.

110. Jessie Penn-Lewis in her War on the Saints (1913) was the most prominent British critic to take the same line of argument. The saying that Pentecostalism was “the last vomit of Satan” has been attributed to Campbell Morgan, a noted British evangelical leader at the time. This attribution remains to be substantiated.

111. White, Demons and Tongues.

112. Ibid., 12, 18–19.

113. Wacker, “Travails of a Broken Family,” 38.

114. White, Demons and Tongues, 67.

115. Ibid., 68.

116. Wacker, “Travails of a Broken Family,” 31.

117. White, Demons and Tongues, 68. Ibid., 802, 108–9, 143.

118. Ibid., 131.

119. Ibid., 69–70.

120. White, Modern Miracles, 145.

121. During the period 1901–6, Alma aligned herself with a Holiness group known as the Metropolitan Church Association (MCA) that was noted for its demonstrative worship. It was labelled “pentecostal Jumpers,” or simply “jumpers,” indicative of the elevation of jumping to a singular spiritual experience, taking warrant from, among other biblical references, Acts 3:5. She made an unsuccessful attempt to take leadership of the MCA , settling instead for the formation of the POF (Kostlevy, Holy Jumpers, 84, 129–30).

122. Stanley: Feminist Pillar of Fire, 50.

123. Ibid., 57.

124. Time, 8 July 1946.

125. Stanley, “Alma White,” 78.

126. White, Demons and Tongues, 88. Other Christians in the Holiness tradition who accepted the Pentecostal initial evidence doctrine accommodated it by viewing full salvation as a three-stage process—justification, sanctification, and Spirit baptism. This teaching was already adumbrated in some Holiness

circles pre-Azusa Street and drew the criticism of being the “third blessing heresy.” Within early Pentecostalism the place of sanctification in the ordo salutis was the contentious issue that became known as the “Finished Work” controversy. It was the first major schismatic dispute within the new movement. The dispute reflected the provenance of the two streams that formed the movement—the Wesleyan Holiness (three-stage) and the Reformed/Baptistic (justification-Spirit baptism, or two-stage) streams. (See Synan: The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 53–57.)

127. White, Demons and Tongues, 87.

128. Ibid., 76.

129. White, Modern Miracles, 20.

130. Ibid., 84.

131. Ibid., 89.

132. Ibid., 97.

133. Stanley, Feminist Pillar of Fire, 66.

134. Ibid., 69. The Rev Sylvester Graham (1794–1851) was an American dietary reformer, noted for his emphasis on vegetarianism. Inspired by the temperance movement, he preached that a vegetarian diet was a cure for alcoholism and sexual urges. The main thrust of his teachings was to curb lust. Alma held that sexual intercourse was to be condoned only when conception was sought.

135. White, Looking Back From Beulah, 300.

136. White, Modern Miracles, 115.

137. Ibid., 184–55.

138. Ibid., 186.

139. Ibid., 188.

140. White, Demons and Tongues, 44.

141. Ibid., 59.

142. Ibid., 14. Alma drew a droll satisfaction from spelling out in full the name of those oft-married leaders with whom she profoundly disagreed. In the case of Eddy her first husband, George Glover, died early in their marriage. Her second marriage to Dr Daniel Patterson ended in divorce, followed by marriage to Asa Eddy. Among others that she branded “rulers of Spiritual Sodom” was “Aimee Semple McPherson Hutton,” the foremost Pentecostal woman preacher of her generation. Aimee’s first marriage to Robert Semple ended with his early death. Her marriage to Harold McPherson ended in divorce, while her third marriage to David Hutton lasted barely three years. To those Pentecostals like Aimee, she warned: “God is unsheathing His sword and uncovering this cesspool of carnality” (43). The marital failures of these two female leaders made the need to keep her marriage, still legally recognized, all the more necessary.

143. The founding father of British Pentecostalism, Alexander Boddy in his series of “Roker Tracts” wrote one entitled Christian Science: A Soul Danger.

144. White, Demons and Tongues, 28.

145. Ibid., 29. Between 1901 and 1904, Yoakum preached frequently on divine healing at Holiness camp meetings and annual gatherings. He began to speak in tongues in 1902.

146. Ibid., 28. The biblical precedent for this action is found in Acts 19:12. Boddy’s view of the practice at Pisgah was guarded: “I feel that there is a danger in the wholesale fashion in which this perforce has now to be done, for possibly hundreds of handkerchiefs are sent out by one post to different parts of the world. There are and have been great numbers of disappointments.” (Boddy, “Dr Yoakum’s Work,” 251).

147. White, Demons and Tongues, 30.

148. Boddy: “Dr Yoakum’s Work,” 248. “Latter Rain” in this context is an alternative name for the Pentecostal movement that saw itself as in the last days when the Holy Spirit would be poured out in a way reminiscent of the “former rains,” interpreted as the first Pentecostal outpouring in the history of the early church. Pentecostalism was in this scheme indicative of the idea that the climactic end to the age was at hand, thus downplaying a progressivist view of the church’s cultural adaptation throughout the two millennia of its history.

149. White, Demons and Tongues, 14–15. A. J. Gordon’s remark that “there really is little if any difference between Paul at Malta (Acts 28:1–6) and Judson in India” makes the point.

150 Ibid., 89–90.

151. Stanley, “Alma White,” 80.

152. Anon, “Articles of Religion, XIII.” Online.

153. Stanley, “Alma White,” 69.

154. Stephens, Who Healeth All Thy Diseases, 166.

155 Ibid., 162.

156. One of the most important players in the transformation of the Church’s practice of divine healing was the ubiquitous itch mite. Infestations of these bugs were common and painful, but a solution of carbolic acid and water brought quick relief. Byrum conceded that anyone so bitten received “new light” on the subject, they should testify to the fact and then use the carbolic acid with a clear conscience. (Stephens: Who Healeth All Thy Diseases, 160).

2

The Reformed-Pentecostal Transition in America

JOHN ALEXANDER DOWIE

The Making of the Man

John Alexander Dowie (1847–1907) was the most publicized of all the healers

studied so far. In the last decade of his life, he and/or his followers were rarely out of the news on either side of the Atlantic. A local paper reported in 1895 that “it is but a few years that Mr Dowie has been at work and already his fame is as wide as the continent and not a day passes that does not witness a crowd of pilgrims from every section of the country who have come to have their sickness healed by him.”[157] A report in The New York Times in 1901 was representative of the coverage his organization received. The article carried the headline “Women Wreck Drug Stores: Faith Curists Start on the Warpath in Chicago.”[158] It told of a well-organized band numbering a half-dozen well-dressed, mature women smashing several pharmacies in central Chicago. As followers of Dowie, they were acting on their leader’s antipathy to medicinal products and, behind that, his deep-seated aversion to the medical profession as a whole. Their war cry was that drugs were the “agents of the devil” and on leaving the wrecked stores they invariably sang, “Praise Be the Lord.” The first store they entered set the pattern of treatment visited on the others:

Calling the proprietor to the front of the store, the crusaders upbraided him for dealing in traffics of the devil. Then one of the women, who seemed to be a leader, asked: “Don’t you know that all the ills of human-kind can be cured by prayer?”

“I am not aware of the fact, if such is the case,” said the druggist.

“Hurrah for Dowie,” shouted the woman. At that her companions drew canes and umbrellas from beneath their long cloaks and began to strike at the druggist’s head. He dodged the blows and took refuge behind the prescription case. Then the women turned their attention to the shelves and showcases and began to strike right and left. The besiegers were finally dispersed by the clerks of the store, who armed themselves with buckets of water, which they dispensed freely among the women.

The band attacked four other shops and only dispersed when they were threatened with a revolver in the last shop.

Dowie proved a sitting target for some of the literary figures of the twentieth century. The American journalist, H. L. Mencken, dubbed “a literary Vesuvius,” spewed his fire on religion, particularly anything emanating from the American Bible Belt. He poured scorn on the evangelists, naming William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and their like who stand “in the relation of a wart to the Matterhorn,” and were in the tradition of such “stupendous masters of theological imbecility, contrivers of doctrines utterly preposterous [as] Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy and John Alexander Dowie.”[159] More telling and lasting is the mention five times in the novel Ulysses (1921) by James Joyce, widely regarded as one of the major works of English literature. The book chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. It is noted for its innovative stream-of-consciousness technique and the avant-garde experimentation in its collation of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its luxuriant characterizations and broad humor, here directed against Dowie: “A sombre YMCA young man . . . placed a throwaway [leaflet] in a hand of Mr Bloom. . . . His [Bloom’s] slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. . . . Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie, restorer of the church in Zion, is coming. Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!! All heartily welcome. Paying game. Torry and Alexander last year.”[160] As Dowie was not in Dublin on June 16, 1904, Joyce’s narration was anachronistic. However, the evangelist had received such ample coverage in the world press that a library-haunting reader as voracious as Joyce would have informed himself about Dowie. The Dublin press regularly reported on his sermons and covered his visit to London in 1904. Though he did not preach in Dublin, Dowie visited the north of Ireland in late 1900 and again in March 1904.[161] In addition, Dowieite material would have been available in Zurich where the evangelist had established a church of around seventy members following a visit to that city in 1900. It was during Joyce’s self-imposed exile in Zurich that much of Ulysses was written during the years of the Great War (1914–18).

For Joyce, Dowie was so well-known that he became the badge of fundamentalist Christianity, which he scorned as wilfully as the Catholicism of his youth, a disdain that persuaded him to compare Ireland’s priests to “black tyrannous lice.” The emblematic status of Dowie comes out in this passage that names representatives of three different church traditions: “In the church, Roman, Anglican and Nonconformist: exemplars, the very reverend John Conmee S.J., the reverend T. Salmon, D.D., provost of Trinity

college, Dr Alexander J. Dowie.” Joyce captured the inflammatory rhetoric of Dowie and other American evangelists in a scene that parodied their “altar call”: “[W]ho’s this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion Hall? Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed four-flushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie, that’s my name, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok.”[162] Gilliver discovered that the words of the sermon underlined were to be found in an anti-liquor diatribe that Billy Sunday gave on several occasions and reproduced in a 1908 temperance pamphlet entitled “Get on the Water Wagon.” The words in italics were spoken by Sunday in an address in Kansas City in 1915.[163] That Joyce was not slow to prick the pretensions of the evangelist to cover the globe comes out in his whimsical allusion, “Frisco beach to Vladivostok.”

Dowie, a proud Scot, was born in Edinburgh, the son of John Dowie, a breeches maker.[164] His parents emigrated to Australia in 1860, and Dowie soon followed them and later found employment in the grocery wholesale business. He returned to Scotland in 1869 and, with a view to entering the Congregational ministry, attended Edinburgh University for two years. DeArteaga maintains that it was around this time that he came under the influence of Irving’s Catholic Apostolic Church.[165] In failing to complete any formal training in theology, he was essentially self-taught on biblical interpretation, leaving him no other authority than the inspiration of the Spirit and, time would show, without the need of a denominational framework. He never had a great opinion of theologians and settled for biblical literalism. In the course of one of his sermons, he flaunted his credentials in claiming Zion to be “under no fear of having a synodical examination in the heretical or other conditions of its pastor’s theology. . . . Theologians are a poor, miserable lot anyhow.”[166]

On his return to Australia, his first charge was the Congregational church at Alma, near Adelaide, followed by successive moves to two churches in Sydney. He married his cousin Jane Dowie in Adelaide in 1876. During his time in Sydney, he earned the reputation as a social reformer, a temperance advocate, and an advocate for free,

compulsory, and non-sectarian education. In 1878 he declared himself against the paid ministry and resigned his charge. His natural pugnacity was on display when he accused the Congregational church of being little more than “an aggregation of ciphers as far as spiritual power was concerned. . . . Mammon seemed to be President, and mean Cliqueism seemed to be the committee which managed its affairs. . . . [Many ministers] were rich and worldly-minded men’s flunkeys.”[167] By 1880, he was regarded as idiosyncratic. Once he entered politics by running for Parliament, he exposed himself to wide scale ridicule in the press. His defeat at the polls was attributed by him to the liquor trade in revenge for his attack on it during his campaign: “Mammon and Bacchus are the supreme rulers in the political arena here.” After a period at the Sackville Street Tabernacle in the Melbourne area, he left and opened in 1884 a new tabernacle in the nearby suburb of Fitzroy. His fight with liquor interests intensified when the charge of infringing a bye-law that banned street preaching led to his imprisonment for a month. The liquor interests were behind the introduction of the bye-law in an effort to trap him, and were allegedly behind the dynamite explosion set off near a chair where he had been sitting ten minutes earlier.[168] His was to become a life suffused by inflated drama on which his reputation would thrive.

J. A. Dowie

This pattern persisted when he embarked on an itinerant ministry in the years 1888–93, and particularly in the establishment in 1900 of Zion City on the shores of Lake Michigan, planned as a utopian exercise. On arrival in America, he engaged in an independent ministry that came to combine elements of Holiness teaching with healing revivalism. From 1890 to 1893 he preached in a variety of churches in the Chicago area with occasional evangelistic forays into Canada and the eastern states of the USA. Sometime after his arrival people began to address him as “doctor,” a title he was happy to assume, doubtless on the grounds that his healing ministry gave good reason for it. By 1893, he reached the decision to make Chicago his permanent headquarters. It was a decision eased by Chicago becoming the site for six months of the World’s Columbian Exposition that drew millions to the city.[169] He built a small mission, Zion Tabernacle, within a stone’s throw of the main entrance and opposite the site taken by Buffalo Bill. The high, arched façade carried the signage, “International Divine Healing Association.” In 1899, he designated himself the “Messenger of the Covenant” as recorded in Malachi 4:5. Other ritualized elevations followed in quick succession. Two years later he declared himself the third and final manifestation of the prophet “Elijah”—John the Baptist

being second—self-designated as the promised “Prophet of the Restoration of All Things” in preparation for the Parousia. The crown of his aggrandizement was reached in 1904 when he accepted the view that he was the embodied “First Apostle of the Lord Jesus, the Christ and the High Priest on Earth . . . of that High Priest in Heaven,” an office of such magnitude that he took to signing his name, “John Alexander, First Apostle.”[170] His frankly avowed purpose was no less than “to smash every other church in existence.”[171]

Some of the traits of character shown in this outline of his life can be traced to his years in Edinburgh, both as boy and student. His hatred of smoking, alcohol, and all drugs can be traced to his boyhood, together with his rhetorical mastery; possible Irvingite influence can be tracked down to his early years. Even before he had a conversion experience at the age of seven through hearing a street preacher, Dowie had developed a hatred of alcohol through its detrimental effects within his family circle. When as a six-year old he tried the experiment of smoking one of his father’s pipes on the crest of Salisbury Crags overlooking Edinburgh, he had such a bad reaction that at the age of ten he signed the pledge against tobacco, opium, and alcohol. In one of his sermons, a diatribe against “Doctors, Drugs and Devils,” he saw Noah as the one who started the “rot,” and ever since

the devil has been studying chemistry successfully because he has got not only

alcohol, but he has got hundreds of other poisons as well: “[I]nstead of having merely grogshops, where one poison is sold, YOU HAVE GOT PHARMACISTS, WHERE EVERY POISON IS SOLD, where the people can go to the devil elegantly. They can go in and buy their poison. They can take it in a little syringe and squirt it under their arms, and have hypodermic injections of morphine. They can swallow it in the form of cocaine. They take it in neat little tablets; you would think they were eating sweeties, and they are only eating damnation: And these drug stores are the stores of sorcerers and murderers.[172]

He made much of the fact that the Greek word pharmakeai, as in Revelation 21:8, is translated “sorcerer” in the Bible (KJV). On this tendentious reading, he announced that “no Pharmacist shall enter into heaven.”

There are a few clues as to why Dowie became involved in the healing ministry when set beside his fierce polemic against doctors and medicinal drugs. In his sympathetic

biography of Dowie, Gordon Lindsay made reference to Dowie suffering chronic dyspepsia in his youthful years.[173] He recounted a significant episode in his subject’s life when he was sixteen:

I was a poor, weak stripling. You could almost count every bone in my body, for I was nothing but skin and bone, as they say. I had been taking medicine all my life. One night I said: That is not the way to get healing; if my watch went wrong I should not take it to a blacksmith, but I would take it to a watchmaker; my body has gone wrong, and the Lord knoweth my frame. He remembereth that I am dust, and I will go to him, and I will never take another drop of medicine while I live. I have never taken a drop of medicine; I am a stronger man today than I ever was.[174]

The ferocity of his persistent attack on the medical profession owed something to his student days in Edinburgh. It seems that he acted as a visitor and “honorary chaplain” in Edinburgh Infirmary. Of that period, he wrote:

I say I was in a position early to know, to see, to hear, and in a perfectly impartial position: for I was the spiritual adviser and helper of large numbers of patients in the Infirmary. I stood entirely apart, I listened to diagnoses and I listened to prognoses, and I listened to the lecture when the subject lay there under chloroform, and I was at liberty to attend the operations and hear suggestions; and I saw the deadly results. I saw death in surgery and in medicine, and I heard from the lips of every professor, in varying form, these words: “We are guessing in the dark.”[175]

He added words attributed to Sir Astley Cooper, physician to Queen Victoria, that “the science of medicine is founded upon conjecture and improved by murder,” taken by him to mean that death was preferable to the “long, miserable, weary years” of suffering as the outcome of inept surgery.

His inflammatory sermon, “Doctors, Drugs and Devils,” instigated a riot by medical students in Chicago in 1899. Similarly, in London in 1904, two medical students from St Bartholomew’s hospital were each fined £10, having been charged with a breach of the peace when they threatened to hang him.[176] The disturbance in London seems to have been aroused largely by his castigation of the philandering of Edward VII, though two of his sermons, “Medicine, the Mother of Many Humbugs” and “The Pharmacist, the Deadly Cure-all Humbug,” doubtless added to their pique. In the course of his ministry, Dowie was arrested over one hundred times for engaging in healing without a license.

His robust manner of speech and the causes he adopted may also owe something to his Scottish background. In a sermon paying tribute to Queen Victoria, he basked in the fact that though he had “never been in close contact with Her Majesty,” he knew Dr Thomas Guthrie who “was a great favourite with the Queen.”[177] Thomas Guthrie (1803–73) was, after Chalmers, Scotland’s most admired pulpit orator of the nineteenth century and a leading social reformer. In the latter role he played a leading part in the formation of the Ragged School educational charity that provided vocational training for the multitudes of destitute children in Scotland’s cities. Dowie described Guthrie as “my own great friend” and that he “knew him very intimately” to an extent that Guthrie “personally told me many things connected with his visits to Balmoral.”[178]

Guthrie must have proved something of a model for Dowie both in his zeal for societal reform, and style of preaching.[179] He had been a champion of the temperance movement long before Dowie. He was a founding member both of the “Scottish Association for the Suppression of Drunkenness,” and his influential book, The City: Its Sins and Sorrows (1857), dealt with this issue. Some aspects of Guthrie’s preaching detailed in this description were applicable to Dowie: “Though without exceptional logical or theological ability, Guthrie’s vivid pictorial imagination and sympathetic rapport with his audience enabled him to fashion men’s emotions almost at will. His hearers became oblivious to their surroundings; a seaman, listening to Guthrie’s description of a nautical disaster, leapt up and removed his coat, ready to dive to save the drowning. James McCosh called Guthrie ‘the pictorial preacher of the age.’”[180]

Dowie’s preaching style was never less than colorful. He inflamed his opponents and spellbound his close followers, stirring conflicting reactions between them by his verbal fusillades against vested interests, whether commercial, social or ecclesial. His appeal to the emotions and his imaginative flights, like Guthrie’s, sucked in his audiences. When preaching, he maintained interest in his hearers by eliciting their participation by inveigling verbal responses, all in an atmosphere punctuated by spasmodic laughter and applause. He could play an audience by switching mood, “one minute winsome and the next rhetorically violent.”[181] A jaundiced press report on his foray into Madison Square Garden in 1903 commented on his demeanor towards his 4,000 followers from Zion City who travelled in support of his mission. In his address, when he “rebuked them, cajoled them, scolded them and patronized them like so many children, they lifted up their voices and hands in submission and adulation.”[182] A typical piece of raillery directed against those clergy who taught that sickness is a providential work to direct the soul towards God is found in this snippet:

If disease is a love-token as the ministers preach, why do they not practice it? I heard one the other day that said the Grippe [influenza] came to him; he found himself gripped. Did he kneel down and say, “Whom the Lord love He chasteneth; it is so good for you to give me Grippe. (Laughter) Oh, how you do love me. (Laughter) Oh, how you love me. Oh, Lord, just love my wife Jennie too, and give her the Grippe. (Laughter) And love Betty too; let her have the Grippe. Oh let us all be loved and gripped?” No he did not. . . . They are only a pack of clerical fools or liars who preach that; because the very moment they get sick they send off for [the] doctor . . . to come and take the Lord’s love token away. (Laughter and applause) [183]

One English journalist wrote that Dowie “turns off some rather smart jokes,” but accused him of exploiting those situations where condemnation pays and “so he denounces everything that stands in this way.”[184]

Healing in Dowie’s Early Ministry

There is no clear indication that Dowie came into the healing ministry through Holiness teaching. More likely it began in an apparently adventitious way in 1876 when he was the minister of a suburban Congregationalist church in Sydney. At the time a bubonic plague epidemic was sweeping the eastern states of the continent. He had buried forty of his flock and thirty others were lying sick on the day when the text of Acts 10:38 “stood before him all radiant.”[185] Deeply moved, he owned, “My tears were wiped away, my heart was strong, I saw the way of healing, and the door thereto was opened wide, and so I said, God help me now to preach that word to all the dying round, and tell them how Satan still defiles, and Jesus still delivers, for He is just the same today.”[186] He had already accepted that disease was not God’s will, but was fired by a new revelation of the healing ministry of Jesus. Though not immediately obvious, it was to prove a seminal moment for him to the degree that all his subsequent actions must be understood in light of this event and his interpretation of it.

Soon after, he was called to pray for a young girl who was dying. When he entered the room, the Christian doctor who was attending her opined, “Sir, are not God’s ways mysterious?” It was a politely-intended remark that only served to spark Dowie, with “divinely imparted anger,” to rejoin: “How dare you call that God’s way? . . . No sir, that is the devil’s work.” Claiming God’s promise, he sought immediate healing. The girl instantly fell into a peaceful sleep, and on wakening said to her mother, “I feel so well.”[187] He then went into the adjoining room where the girl’s brother and sister were lying, stricken by the contagion. The following day all three had recovered. It was not only these three since no other member of his congregation died of the disease. By any standard, it was a powerful vindication of his renewed faith in God’s healing power, and a spur to develop a continuing ministry.

It was in 1882 in Melbourne that divine healing became the centerpiece of Dowie’s ministry. Up to this point since the plague, he had continued to pray for the sick but as an ancillary to his preaching ministry, sensing that the events in Sydney six years previously had been an exceptional ministry for a time of emergency. The early months of 1882 were dark days for Dowie as financial, domestic, and church problems mounted and affected his health. A breakthrough eventuated when he decided to establish an

independent church in the inner suburb of Fitzroy, Melbourne. He determined that from the beginning he would preach and practice divine healing regularly in the church, which seated one thousand people. From then on, each February he convened a convention to commemorate the beginning of his ministry of divine healing. Numbers attending the new tabernacle shot up despite fierce opposition, an outcome from which he drew the conclusion that healing and church growth were symbiotically linked. In 1886, he formed the International Divine Healing Association, starting with Australia and New Zealand. At the same time, he forged links with Holiness/Higher Life healers in Britain and North America, enough to receive an invitation to attend the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness in London in 1885.

Unable to attend the Conference, Dowie explained his reason in a letter to its convenor, W. E. Boardman. In it he explained that he could not attend “this most important gathering [because] ‘the Lord hath need’ of me at this juncture in this outpost of the field.”[188] It is clear from the letter that he had come to a restorationist view of the Spirit’s work:

All over the world there are signs that “the old time religion” is returning to its primitive lines of spiritual power; and that, despite the forces of an organized and wide-spread formalism, true Christians are everywhere realizing that ‘the Spirit giveth Life.’ Amongst these signs, the revival of faith in Jesus as the Healer, and the perpetuity of the gifts of Healing by the Holy Spirit, are occupying a most important place. I . . . fully expect to hear that it shall be said of you, as was written of them of old, “God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to His own will” (Heb. 2.4).

He added that “organic diseases, such as cancer, have been healed as instantaneously and perfectly as diseases of a functional or nervous character.” The letter indicated that he planned to print a weekly paper to present “our teaching and experiences . . . before the church and the world.” The Conference Record gave a brief account of three representatives from Australia, one of whom referred to Dowie’s ministry as well as to a “most marvellous” work in South Australia where a healing home similar to that of Bethshan in London had been opened.

With his new-found liberty in the ministry of healing, Dowie experienced both physical and spiritual renewal. He felt stronger than any other period of his life and was able to survive with undiminished energy on only four hours of sleep. In a letter to his wife in 1886 he told of deeper spiritual experiences, a new sense of empowerment by the Spirit that gave him a gift of “discerning of spirits” that enabled him to “penetrate into the deepest, most secret thoughts of men.”[189] Buoyed in spirit, he became increasingly conscious that he was destined for bigger things and invested with an authority to brave lifeless ecclesiasticism and gain the ear of the masses. In the hours after sending his letter to Boardman, he walked out under the stars to a high edge in Melbourne where the city lay at his feet. Uncertain that he had done the right thing in stating that he intended to make a trip to America, he received guidance in what he took as a revelatory moment:

As I looked [up] . . . I knew that I had to carry the Cross of Christ from land to land, and bid a sin-stricken and disease-smitten world to see that the Christ Who died on Calvary had made ATONEMENT FOR SICKNESS AS WELL AS FOR SIN, AND THAT WITH HIS STRIPES WE ARE HEALED. I knew that I would never reach the abode of peace except by taking up that Cross and following Him in a life of still more complete denial of self. . . . I knew that it was right to leave that lovely Australasian land, and go forth on a pilgrimage carrying Leaves of Healing from the Tree of Life to every nation I could reach.[190]

After spending a few weeks in New Zealand, he with his wife and two small children passed through the Golden Gate, San Francisco, in June 1888. The next nineteen years were to see no diminution in healings claimed, nor troubles faced.

The first five years were spent in an itinerant ministry across United States and Canada. Wherever he travelled he aimed to establish branches of the International Divine Healing Association (IDHA), making them the means to channel financial resources properly. On more than one occasion he addressed large bodies of clergy, many outside the Holiness set, and won their support for his addressing local meetings. The first six weeks of an early mission in Chicago were held in the First Methodist Church, the oldest church in the city. In 1888–89 he embarked on a mission tour, travelling on the west coast from Mexico to British Columbia. His first Canadian mission was in Victoria, Vancouver Island. Among his supporters were clergy and prominent laymen, and “many hundreds” accepted the doctrine of divine healing. His first campaign in Toronto was supported by the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA).[191] However, it was his public relations coup in setting up “The Little Wooden Hut”—as passers-by caustically dubbed it—opposite the site of 1893 World Fair that attracted the attention of a public drawn from the whole continent. However, initial poor attendances proved disheartening and were in his assessment “simply noticed with supreme contempt.” It was a matter of holding on through the dismal winter of 1893–94 when services were held every day despite the fact that the number in attendance could fall as low as four.

With the arrival of spring the situation changed dramatically as people were freer to travel from further afield. Whenever a roll-call was made at the Hut it was not unusual to find that twenty states in the Union were represented. A number of the Chicago papers began to report favorably on the services, notably the Inter Ocean that in an April edition provided a long, well-illustrated and fulsome report. About 100,000 copies of that particular issue were printed carrying the report:

All classes, the poor and the rich, were represented in the congregation numbering 2,000 that occupied the chairs, stood in the aisles, fringed the walls, and, standing outside, hoisted the windows and craned their necks, not to see, but to hear. Long before the hour set for the services to begin, the Tabernacle was crowded.

Carriages drove up to the door, and stricken people were lifted from them and carried in.

Mothers brought misshapen children in their arms and went in.

The feeble, with tottering steps, were helped in by friends.

The bed-ridden were borne in on stretchers.

The sightless were there.

The deaf had fingered out to them the hope held out.

The thump of crutches was heard, as hundreds thus enabled to walk came in.[192]

In the period 1893–97 as numbers increased, five different buildings were used in Chicago to accommodate the crowds by now attracted to his ministry.[193] The third Zion Tabernacle was opened on 21 February 1897 with a seating capacity for 3,000 people. Even so, at its opening it was considered already too small. On the other hand, the Chicago daily newspapers gave the opening “not a single line of announcement, either advertisement or press notice,” a dearth reflective of the iciness of popular opinion towards Dowie and his works.

Much of the press hostility sprang from the ruckus surrounding the healing homes. Their location moved with that of the various tabernacles, and altogether four different large rooming houses were leased and furnished in the years 1893–97. The first site was close to the World Fair Park and accessible by railway and electric tram connections. The home set out to be neither hotel nor hospital. The sufferers were encouraged to see themselves as guests in the private home of the Dowies. Services were held twice daily and private consultations could be arranged. Several times a week Dowie conducted special healing services in a large lounge. A charge was made only for meals and room accommodation. A smaller, subsidiary home was opened two blocks away allowing its residents to share all the ministries of the main home. The purpose of the homes was defined: “First. The sick: children of God who are seeking Him alone for the healing in the name of Jesus and through the power of the Holy Spirit; Second. Those who are receiving instruction in God’s way of healing as set forth in the Holy Scriptures.”[194] The home was opened in May 1894 and by August the number of applicants had increased to such a level that the use of a third house was under consideration. The two homes accommodated seventy people and at times as many as one hundred people had booked extra rooms in the vicinity.

Such was the demand for places that thoughts of establishing a more permanent institution were floated. The appeal of the homes was not likely to weaken when testimonies such as the following continued to pour out in his new weekly newspaper Leaves of Healing: “Mrs. John Hayden, of Dixon, ILL, was blind and now sees, was unable to walk, suffering from locomotor ataxia, and was instantaneously and perfectly healed in the Home. . . . Mrs Maggie Parsons, of Madison, Wis., was also perfectly healed as she testifies, after many years of suffering; and the dear little girl, Ethel Foley, of Chicago . . . whose right leg had a large tumour, and was paralysed, is now perfectly healed and able to run about without crutch or brace.” Dowie set such store on his newspaper that he constituted it the seventh gospel (obtained by adding Acts and Revelation to the four Gospels): “These Leaves of Healing are God’s own work, as much as any of the six gospels preceding.”[195]

The Chicago press turned up the heat on the healing homes by printing salacious stories of dubious veracity. The Chicago Dispatch under the headline “Dr Dowie’s Lunatic Asylum” carried a lurid report based on allegations noised by some residents living in the select neighborhood of the earlier healing homes: “Dowie’s homes are a haven for low prostitutes from the avenues of sin. Dowie uses them to advantage at the home, and then sends them out into the country as proselytes to recruit victims, giving them a certain percent of the swag. . . . It is these women who flock along Edgerton Avenue, brush against the pure wives and daughters of the residents, and contaminate the air with their abandon that forms the most objectionable feature of Dr Dowie’s aggregation of freaks.”[196] Another story put about was that Dowie, knowing that one of his charges would die, sent her away under cover at night to a cheap hotel to maintain the reputation that no deaths occurred in his homes. The husband of the dead woman criticized the report as an “infamous lie.” Pressure was brought upon the State Board of Health to bring the charge that Dowie was practicing medicine without a licence. In return, the medical profession were lambasted by Dowie for having “rushed to their comrades of the Board [and] summoned their henchmen—mercenary lawyers, the policemen, the press and the pulpit—to save them from the wrath to come of a disillusioned people.”[197]

Dowie was first arrested early in January 1895 and throughout the trial conducted his own defence. While the trial was in process, the Chicago Board of Health passed an ordinance, which permitted only licensed physicians to attend any dwelling used for the care of the sick. In refusing to comply, he contended that healing homes were not hospitals because neither medicine nor treatment was used. In reply to the request from the Commissioner of Health to complete the form for the required license, he answered, “It is a pitiful sight to see the State Board of Health and the City Health Department moving against a good work at the instance of a lying press and a concealed band of interested doctors who feel that their craft is in danger because of tens of thousands of persons who are abandoning medicine and seeking and finding healing through faith in Jesus Christ.”[198] He later claimed that during 1895 he was arrested nearly one hundred times for violation of the order, spent portions of 126 days in court or jail, and invested over $20,000 in sustaining his defense.

As expected, Dowie proved formidable in the courtroom. Though convicted by lower courts, he never once failed to win the appeal when taken to a higher court. Not only were all the charges thrown out, the hospital ordinance itself was declared unconstitutional. The only legal restriction imposed on Dowie’s work was the securing of a temporary cancellation of second-class mailing privileges, a penalty that added to the postal expenses of Leaves of Healing. Once the judge ruled that testimonies of healing should be accepted as part of the evidence for the defense, the balance shifted in Dowie’s favor. Many solid citizens of Chicago—among them lawyers, professional men, police officers, judges, and city officials—were prepared to present affidavits vouching for the healing ministry in which he was engaged. As the hours of hearing the affidavits read out in court passed, it became evident that “incredulity and surprise gave way to genuine interest.” The validity of the statements owes much to the fact that if they were proved false, the witnesses could be charged with perjury.[199]

This legal battle has to be set in the wider context of health provision in America at the turn of the century. Shoepflin in his study of Christian Science makes a point that is valid for all alternative therapies: “At the time, scientific medicine and religious healing were locked in what many considered a life and death struggle for ascendancy, whose outcome seemed uncertain. . . . The limited authority of the medical community became notably transparent in the pitched battles fought by physicians . . . and other interested parties in America’s courtrooms and legislative hall. . . . The legislative successes [of alternative therapies] bespoke a strong position of cultural authority over health care until after the 1920s.”[200] Dowie found it “amazing” that, despite the legal tussles and adverse publicity, people were continuing to flock to the homes. The clamor outside contrasted strongly with the peace that ruled within the healing homes seven miles away.

A number of healings during this period involved people who because of their prominent family connections attracted widespread publicity. Sadie Cody, the niece of W. F. Cody, better known as the showman “Buffalo Bill,” was one such. Affidavits were filed from Amanda Hicks, a first cousin of Abraham Lincoln and Jean Harrison, a niece of President Harrison, the nation’s 23rd President (1889–93). The healing narrative of Hicks exemplifies the irresistible drawing power of Dowie’s healing ministry during this period that, with hindsight, was to prove his most convincing. Amanda Hicks was the Principal of Clinton College, a second level academy in the town of the same name in Kentucky. A victim of cancer, she was beyond the help of local doctors. John D. Rockefeller, a personal friend and supporter of the college, urged her to travel to Chicago and allow Professor Senn to operate, a procedure he was prepared to fund.[201] In the meantime, a number of former students at the college wrote to her from Chicago of the healings associated with Dowie. She was won over by their pleading and determined to take the 400-mile train journey to Chicago. One of her pupils made a canvas stretcher of a width designed to negotiate the door of the Pullman sleeper carriage.

On arriving in the city she was transferred to Ellis Avenue and a request was made to Dowie to visit her. Her party was astonished to be informed it was not possible to do so until and unless she gave up pain-killing morphine and all other drugs. Dowie was insistent that “there is no hope for the healing of anyone who will not first abandon that diabolical drug.”[202] Once this condition was met, the patient, now in a critical state, was moved to one of the healing homes on a bitterly cold winter day. Following prayer for healing, a change for the better became noticeable and the patient was shortly able to brave the bitter winds of the ice-bound city. Healings such as this allowed Dowie to taunt Ingersoll, the “Prince of Infidels,” with running away from serious debate and not facing the evidence of answered prayer for which the “Great Agnostic” so persistently called.

Hicks witnessed strongly to her healing throughout Chicago. Among the hearers were some of the professors of Chicago University, one of whom was Professor Miller who had previously taught Latin in Clinton College. When she returned home, the Clinton Democrat reported that she was received by a great throng of her loved ones and walked the mile to the college “her step as elastic, her eye as bright, her carriage as erect as ever in the days before her illness, when she was noted for those indicia of physical activity.” Not entirely swept away by a supernatural explanation for her recovery, the paper admitted than when a woman of Miss Hicks’ “unusual intellectuality, unquestioned veracity and incomparable Christian virtues” could so testify, it “would seem to overwhelm cynicism and confuse doubters. . . . [Divine healing] is a pretty doctrine, and not unchristian or fanciful, in spite of what dogmatists may say.”[203] However, not all received her account with open arms. As Dowie witheringly expressed it, “the wretched false-shepherds of the Baptist churches of West Kentucky” drove her from her position as principal. Free from office, she was able to visit Britain and was provided with the opportunity to recount the story of her healing in Oxford, besides touring Scotland with her friends on tricycles. On her return, she obtained a teaching post in Illinois and was therefore, as Dowie pointed out, within reach of anyone sceptical of her experience.

During the years 1894–1900, Dowie completed numerous schemes. His enterprises, now concentrated in the downtown area, numbered a bank, a printing plant, an orphanage, a day school, a college, a home for working girls, a home for prostitutes, and a four-storey healing home. He also launched and personally edited two widely circulated publications besides Leaves of Healing—a secular newspaper The Coming City later renamed Zion Banner, as well as a theological monthly A Voice from Zion. All these efforts helped him to dominate the American healing scene of the decade. In 1895, he, in effect, wound up the IDHA, finding no need to give credence to others engaged in a healing ministry. Supremely self-assured, he spared few his criticism, not least Maria Woodworth-Etter and A. B. Simpson. He rejected the trance evangelism of the former, and damned the latter and the CMA in the strongest terms, describing Simpson as “a bad man, and the Christian Missionary Alliance [as] rotten to the core in its doctrines, pretences, and practices. These are my deliberate convictions, based on what I believe to be abundant and unanswerable evidence.”[204]

The background to this criticism of Simpson lay, seemingly, in the proposal Dowie made that they join forces and stump the country to disseminate the message of divine healing. Simpson demurred: “No, Brother Dowie, I have four wheels on my chariot. I cannot agree to neglect the other three while I devote all my time to the one.”[205] In taking the answer as a snub, Dowie resolved, in Tozer’s view, to “tear Simpson to shreds,” starting with an address in Pittsburgh. An hour before the lecture, Dowie choked on a fish bone that left him unable to speak. The series of lectures was abandoned, and Dowie “crept back home to lick his wounds.” When Simpson was informed of the incident, he said simply, “Oh, Dowie. Yes, I committed that man to God long ago.’[206] Wacker summarized Dowie’s attitude to other healers as “too independent to endorse, and too irascible to work with other evangelical healers.[207]” The two men represent the two eras of divine healing, much of which can be inferred from a statement by Simpson, almost certainly with Dowie in mind:

There is a great deal abroad today in the name of divine healing that is most objectionable and often makes one blush to be associated with the word and the work. There are people who claim to be healers and to exercise special apostolic gifts and powers and are looked upon as “great ones.” . . . If there be a true Scriptural ministry of healing, it ought to be [as] simple, impersonal, modest and Christ-like as all the other ministries of the Gospel, to give prominence to no man or woman, to exalt Jesus only and to bring the person healed into closer personal relations with Christ his individual faith and holy consecration.

It is a statement that reflected, in very broad terms, the polarity between the earlier Holiness-sourced era, now heading towards the Pentecostal phase. The former was Christocentric, theologically creative, individualized in practice, restrictive in being sanctification-directed; the other was Spirit-centred, outward facing, personality driven, with mass appeal and conversion-directed.

The Zion Experiment

In 1886 Dowie announced the inauguration of the Christian Catholic Church (CCC) with its premises in a 8,000-seat tabernacle in Chicago.[208] Ever restless, he made known his longer-term vision that “we build up our permanent institutions outside of this city (as is my positive and fixed intention, God willing),” a relocation depicted as “our Exodus to Zion.”[209] A fortnight later, he declaimed: “[I] hope some day to stand upon the dome of a Zion Temple to hold from 10,000 to 20,000 persons, and . . . one day to look abroad over that lovely city and to bring visitors to look upon its beauties, its Homes, Colleges, Schools and say ‘This is Zion.’”[210] Dowie rarely failed to bring to fruition his plans or promote them with flamboyance. In the two hours before the beginning of the twentieth century, he disclosed to his congregation that land had been acquired on a site forty miles north of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan for this audacious project. Four years later, he unveiled plans for a religious community shaped by a rare mélange of biblical, utopian and modernist ideas. Zion City, located on the shoreline of Lake Michigan forty miles north of Chicago, became the site for a community of over 6,000 people, enough to make it one of the more grandly conceived utopian settlements in modern American history.

Lace workers from the Nottingham area were recruited during his visit to England in 1900. In Zion City he sought to establish a theocratic society that would be “a clean city for a clean people.” It was advertised as, “the one spot in God’s world that is free from rum,

tobacco, drugs, obscene literature and bill boards, vulgarity or profanity and the consequent vice and crime that follow.”[211] Mounted over the Tabernacle’s enormous platform were the crutches, casts, trusses, braces, orthopaedic shoes, pill bottles and wheelchairs, displayed to present unmissable evidence of the success of his healing ministry. Along its sides was a display of the letters “S” and “P” built from old cigar boxes, the two letters standing for “stinkpot,” Dowie’s label for the smoker. Some of the English lace makers created a problem by refusing to quit smoking. With the lace industry regarded as the economic bedrock of the new community, their status as key workers won for them some time to overcome their habit.

The new denomination encapsulated perfectly Dowie’s teaching, experience and temperament. A fierce critic of lifeless Christianity, he saw the only answer to the challenges posed by the contemporary ferment of theological liberalism and the pressures of modernity lying in the restoration of the beliefs and practices of the early church. In essence, if the church was to recapture its power, then it had to bypass the traditions of two thousand years of history and pattern itself on the primitive church. Indeed, he went further than other restorationists in declaring that the church must not only be restored, “but established in a manner which was beyond the power of the early Christians.”[212] He insisted: “I see no reason why in these ‘Times of Restitution of all things’ [Acts 3:21] we should not claim the restoration of every Primitive Power, and ask God to make the Christian Catholic Church in Chicago a Church as full of the Holy Ghost as the Church was in Jerusalem long ago.” The corollary of this position was the need to advance the charismatic dimension in the church if it was to function on apostolic lines. Well could he declare that 1 Corinthians 12 is “the most important chapter on church organization in the Bible. It is also the most neglected.”[213] A part of the chapter was incorporated in the prayer of consecration at the institution of the CCC: “May this Church be divinely endowed with the nine Gifts of the Holy Ghost, with the word of Wisdom, the word of Knowledge, Faith, Gifts of Healings, Workings of Miracles, Prophecy, Discerning of Spirits, Divers kinds of Tongues and Interpretation of Tongues, and with that gift of Love which is the crown of all, that precious gift which enables the Church to fulfil all.”[214]

Not only the gifts but the offices of the early church were needful for a repristination of church order: “Since the organization of the Primitive Church was Apostolic and Prophetic and Didactic . . . that same organization is just as necessary to-day as it was nineteen centuries ago”—a statement that raised the whole issue of a modern apostolate.[215] At the conference where the charter of the CCC was discussed, he rejected the idea that he should shoulder either prophetic or apostolic power, though the possibility of such attainment was not dismissed. When someone in the audience expressed his opinion that Dowie fitted the bill to be “the chief of modern Apostles,” it drew great applause to which Dowie responded: “I do not think I have reached a deep enough depth of self-abasement and effacement, for the high office of Apostle. . . . But if my good Lord can ever get me low enough, and deep enough in self-abasement and self-effacement, to be truly what I want to be, and hope in a measure I am, ‘a servant of the servants of the Lord,’ why then I should be an Apostle by really becoming the servant of all.”[216] It took another eight years before the depth of his “self-abasement” became sufficiently unfathomable to allow him to address “the church throughout the world . . . as the Apostle and High Priest on earth of that glorious priesthood whose head for ever and ever is he who is the High Priest forever after the Order of Melchizedek.”[217] He was of the opinion that once divinely appointed, the apostle would display the “signs of an apostle,” which he interpreted to include the exercise of all the charismata, among them and, notably in this context, “signs and wonders and mighty deeds” (2 Cor 12:12).

Where Dowie differed theologically from most of his contemporaries who advocated divine healing, notably A. B. Simpson, was to center healing in the distinctive Pentecostal pneumatology of gifts, power, signs, and wonders, without compromising the position that divine healing rests on Christ’s atonement. On the latter subject, he stated, “We teach that the atoning Sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ covers all kinds of sin and its consequences, of which disease is one.”[218] It was one of the guidelines that he maintained throughout his healing ministry, familiar to all adherents since they were printed as a recurrent statement in Leaves of Healing. Two others of relevance here are that “Disease Can Never be God’s Will” and “The Gifts of Healing Are Permanent.” Dowie held a simplistic view of the cause of disease: “These filthy diseases and painful infirmities can never be God’s will, and if we believe that ‘for this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil’ (1 John 4:8), then we must believe that He came to destroy disease, and that God is ever glorified in the destruction of disease in His people.”[219] It is a position that has been labelled “extreme dualism.”[220] The church is in bondage, he argued, through holding that God is the source of disease, a view captured in the hymn:

Oh, God in Israel sows the seeds

Of affliction pain and toil,

These spring up and choke the weeds

That else would o’erspread the soil.

This type of piety raised his hackles: “The Church of God cannot do this great work of destroying sin and sickness . . . if they are singing this kind of thing. . . . What an awful lie!”[221]

Tied to this stance was the incompatibility of sin and sickness. Healing was denied to the impure in heart: “God is never glorified in our sickness any more than in our sin, for both sickness and sin are clearly Satan’s work.”[222] Two consequences flowed from this position. One was that healing would not come to an impure heart. The inspiration behind this stance was the ministry of Jesus who in the order of his ministry first taught, then preached and then healed. Candidates for healing should proceed on this ordered sequence. This was one factor behind the establishment of healing homes because there new seekers would be taught the word and built up in the needed faith that “cometh by hearing.” For him, mass healing rallies, with their promiscuous mix of people, were vetoed. In taking this line, Dowie demonstrated his transitional locus between the Holiness and Pentecostal eras, the burden of this study. It followed from this view that sickness in the Christian was evidence of “sin in the camp.” This gave rise to much soul-searching as sufferers felt compelled to trace the source of their illness within the healing home community. Once the individual felt released from sin, the community became subject to heart-searching, not so much in fear of God’s judgement as sorrow that Zion’s defences had dropped so low as to allow the penetration of a Satanic attack. This stance was reminiscent of Sandford’s communal arraignment though pursued with less severity than at Shiloh.

This extreme position was tested to the limit by the tragic death of Esther Dowie, his twenty-one-year-old only daughter in May 1902. The young woman was using a hair curler heated by an alcohol lamp. Her father forbade alcohol in any form or for any purpose. Esther was as a rule a compliant daughter but on this occasion she had transgressed. Somehow she toppled the lamp and the contents splattered her dress and carpet. Immediately flames enveloped her. She screamed for help and when the maid and others reached her it was too late. She survived till the evening, but with burns covering 75 percent of her body she was beyond human aid. Her father conducted the funeral with 7,000 in attendance. Struggling to find a theodicy to interpret the accident, Dowie forwarded a view that was consistent both with his detestation of alcohol and his doctrine of healing: “The only act of disobedience, wilful or direct, that I ever knew her to commit was this one. She only once stepped aside from the path of obedience, and then the devil struck her with that ‘liquid fire and distilled damnation,’ which I have fought against all my life, and which I forbade her ever to use. Oh, the grief to us that this glorious life is put out by one blow of the devil!”[223] Csordas found a similar view among some present-day charismatic groups. Their understanding of demonology “is that the devil consistently preys upon people’s weaknesses.”[224]

Dowie rooted the permanence of healing on the verse that “the gifts of God are without repentance” (Rom 11:29), and healing, being one of the nine, is thereby ensured permanence. It is a view he claimed to have held for a long time. In a sermon preached on the gifts of the Spirit in 1904, he recalled a theology lecture he attended in his student days at New College, Edinburgh. The lecturer maintained that the gifts of healings had been withdrawn from the church. When the young Dowie protested, he cited the above verse from Romans. He recollected “the look of profound astonishment and of intense interest that began to gather on his face as he said, ‘Well, I lay aside this teaching for today; write a thesis on this subject, and let us hear all you have to say on it, Mr Dowie.’ I apologized to the Professor for interrupting him in his discourse, but said that I had felt divinely impressed. He answered, ‘You did right; if you have a divine impression to challenge my teaching, let it be known. It is the first time it has been done, but it is somewhat refreshing.’”[225] Thereafter, he noticed that when it came to the exposition of 1 Corinthians 12 “the theologians and commentators . . . act as if they were scared.”[226]

Newcomb records that on the launch of the CCAC in 1896, Dowie told his followers that he could not be an apostle at the time because “I know next to nothing about the last two gifts [tongues and their interpretation]. . . . An apostle must possess and be possessed by all the gifts of the Holy Spirit.”[227] Eight years later, he claimed to possess four of the gifts and had thus passed the self-imposed test that “if he has not these gifts, at least in some measure, no man can make him an Apostle.”[228] The question of tongues was never pursued, an exclusion that merits him the same criticism he so loudly voiced against those who dismissed the gift of healing. He may have harbored a subliminal fear that the free expression of tongues/interpretation and prophecy in Zion could undermine his authority in that, by their very nature, their exercise was outside his direct control. Such a prospect precipitated a high-handed response: “The gifts, of necessity, must be centred on the apostolic office.”[229] There is clear evidence that speaking in tongues was not acceptable in Zion. A woman who joined Zion in 1904 had the previous year come under the Pentecostal ministry of Parham in Kansas. She opened her new home for prayer meetings and as reports of tongue-speaking circulated in the city, she was forbidden to hold further meetings. The family was forced to leave once the Zion leadership brought pressure through its control of job opportunities.

J. A. Dowie: Apostle and High Priest

Besides “apostle,” Dowie’s grandiose title incorporated the office of “High Priest on earth . . . of the High Priest in heaven.” It was a designation that befitted a specific and quite novel view on healing derived from his interpretation of the relationship between the gift of healing in 1 Corinthians 12 and the healing ministry of elders set out in James 5:14–16. He started from the premise that “it does not follow because you believe in and accept the Lord as your Healer, that you are able to pray the prayer of faith for another. Moreover, it does not follow because you are a Christian, and have been used in praying the prayer of faith, that you have the gifts of healings; for the gifts of healings are something entirely separate from the ministry of the eldership, in the anointing with oil, and in the prayer of faith.”[230] The distinction is highlighted on those occasions when the ministration of the elders shows no sign of relief for the sufferer. At that point, “then the priestly office must be exercised.” This idea he took from the 16th verse, “the supplication of a righteous man availeth much in its working” (RSV), the understanding being that the apostle/priest is ipso facto the “righteous man.” He cautioned, “It will not do to try to put aside, or minimise that fact. . . . The priestly office is for a distinct and specific class of cases.”[231] It was an exegesis that served better his personal prerogative than justice to the texts. No one, other than himself, could have the last word in Zion. That had to wait until he was progressively stripped of his powers following a debilitating stroke in 1905.[232]

Dowie had more to say on the gifts in his own ministry than their place and usage in congregational life. He became cautious, to the point of coyness, when it came to considering their general operation in the setting of the church gathering. As he told his hearers, “Never forget that all the gifts of God are given in an orderly manner. God is not a God of confusion. These nine gifts are not scattered promiscuously. . . . They come in an orderly and natural manner, as all God’s gifts do. . . . It is simply impossible, notwithstanding the allegation of foolish pietists to the contrary, for a man to bound at one stride from a life of shameful sin . . . into the splendour of the glorious Divine life.”[233] The gifts are given to those in the church “who are humble enough, and pure enough, and wise enough, and unselfish enough to receive them.”—criteria that none but a few beyond himself could satisfy.[234]

Despite this guarded note, Blumhofer makes an important point in contending that Dowie’s specific interpretation of passages relating to the gifts in church life are less important “than the fact that he both repeatedly urged his followers to anticipate the restoration of the gifts and explained his own ministry of healing in terms of the operation of the gifts of healing. . . . He focused attention on the subject, assumed a relationship between spiritual gifts and the last days, and challenged others to a response of specific faith.”[235] It had to be “a specific faith,” not one tinged with such “diabolical counterfeits” that had to be reckoned with at the time, among them Christian Science, Mind Healing, Spiritualism, and Trance Evangelism. The last in this list signals Dowie’s aversion to the methods of Maria Woodworth-Etter (see next chapter). He relied more on the exclusive or cloistered group approach favoured by Simpson as against Woodworth-Etter’s healing line. But, above all he raised the profile of charismaticism through his healing ministry in a forceful, populist way that blazoned it in the headlines and column inches of the local, national and even international press.

Dowie’s Contribution to Divine Healing Teaching

It is opportune at this point, before looking at his legacy, to pick out those features in Dowie’s healing ministry that distinguished him from his contemporaries and contributed to the ministry of those who followed. Though significant differences existed between Dowie and earlier proponents of healing such as Cullis, Simpson and Gordon, there was much common ground between them. Dowie was not particularly innovative in the field of healing but made his mark more by pushing “a number of elements of the earlier faith cure movement to their logical conclusion” in a distinctly militant manner.[236] He objected strongly to Simpson’s position on faith that encouraged sufferers to claim healing despite any supporting evidence as to its reality. He objected to the line taken by the CMA that “you are not healed by feeling; you are healed by faith. What do your symptoms matter?”[237] By contrast, Dowie argued that healing must be complete before a claim could or should be made. The charge against Simpson became fiercely personal when he alleged that a case of healing advertised by Simpson was false. Dowie had investigated the circumstances behind the story and asserted that it had been perpetrated by a con man anxious to avoid returning to prison. The man had faked spinal injuries to secrete himself by signing into a hospital. For Dowie, “to say you are healed when you are not healed is to tell a lie.”[238] Possibly, an imbibed Scottish Common Sense Realism had predisposed him to place a premium on facticity.

Of greater significance, was Dowie’s antagonism towards medicine. While other healers were divided on the issue, they did not drive it with such passion or treat the profession with such contempt. The profession was not so much incompetent as morally depraved. He condemned many of them as “unmitigated scoundrels,” and taking them as a whole, “there is not a worse class of men on God Almighty’s earth today.”[239] In making this accusation, he invariably harked back to his student days in Edinburgh. He recalled the horror of meeting young doctors coming out of the dissecting-room, having plunged “their knives into the scarcely dead bodies of people while flesh was yet warm.” He noted their deterioration of character: “They became drunken dogs, oftentimes drinking to steady their nerves.”[240] He quoted the figure obtained from a medical society report in New York State that one fifth of the practising doctors in the country were victims of the misuse of alcohol and morphine. Doctors, for Dowie, were not only charlatans but, more seriously, their profession was diabolical, literally so and not just metaphorically. In his inflammatory sermon, “Doctors, Drugs, and Devils; or the Foes of Christ the Healer,” he accused the medical profession of being “directly inspired by the devil” and “the servants of the devil in the degradation and enslavement and destruction of humanity.”[241]

It is no surprise that when he preached a sermon on this line in Chicago in 1899, it instigated a riot by medical students. Such behavior was for him a sign that “they know that divine healing is the death-knell of medical practice everywhere.”[242] No other healer before or since carried quite the same animus against the profession, but then none had observed it in its modus operandi at first-hand. He took great rhetorical delight in relating many stories and sayings of medical men who had pricked the pretensions of their own profession. One such gem he picked from a medical textbook by Professor Chapman, of the University of Pennsylvania, and President of the Philadelphia Medical Society: “We cheat ourselves with a thousand illusions. . . . Dark and perplexed, our devious career resembles the blind gropings of Homer’s Cyclops around his cave.” Of course, it would not have suited his purpose to point out that this opinion had been voiced some fifty years earlier.[243] By the end of the twentieth century, advances in and accessibility to medicine had completely overturned such negativity.[244]

The prominence given by Dowie to Satan and the demonic in sickness outweighed that of the majority of the radical healers.[245] Gordon, for one, directed attention more to the work of Satan in modern Spiritualism and the counterfeit works of the Anti-Christ. Satan did not feature in any vivid way in Cullis’ thinking. Simpson made more of the indwelling and victorious Christ: “[B]y the cross Satan has been disarmed and now we may meet him as a conquered foe. . . . We must not fear him.”[246] While all acknowledged the ontological reality of Satan, they were less specific in pronouncing on his controlling role. For Dowie, not only was all disease indirectly related to sin, but also some disease was caused directly by demon activity: “All disease is the oppression of the Devil, but there are some which are possessions by the Devil, or by Devils.” [247] For biblical support, he expounded Luke 13:11 thus:

Our Lord Himself said to the woman in the synagogue . . . bowed down with a spirit of infirmity for eighteen years (it was not an infirmity—it was a spirit of infirmity; it was a devil that bound her), “Ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham whom Satan hath bound these eighteen years, to have been loosed from this bond?” Perhaps she was a bad-tempered woman, and had got into a rage and . . . as she was bending down, got a crick in her back, and the Devil held her there. Some of you are held there. You think it is rheumatism, but it is no such thing. It is a spirit of infirmity.[248]

He looked back to his own teenage years when he had prayed for his own healing: “I felt that something had gone out of me. I believe it was the Devil of Dyspepsia—truly it was a spirit of infirmity.”[249]

This concept of attributing specific illnesses to identifiable demonic forces was one that was advanced further in sizeable sections of the successor Pentecostal movement. Parham, for one, believed there were “demonised torments that feed upon the body in various diseases,” literally so. One demon, he maintained, lived in a Chicago woman’s cancer and “ate or absorbed over a pound of raw beef steak laid upon it each day.”[250] If demons acted to possess a person “congenial to them in some characteristic,” then, for Parham, it followed that there were “demons of witchcraft, of fortune dwelling, of insanity, of drunkenness, of gluttony, of idleness and of wonder working.”[251] This element of the healing message resurfaced with a vengeance in the neo-Pentecostal healing ministry in the post-World War II years of evangelists such as A. A. Allen, William Branham, and Don Basham. The latter’s directive for deliverance was blunt: 1. Identify the specific spirit; 2. renounce the spirit by name; 3. command the spirit to leave in the name of Jesus; 4. expel the spirit. He found coughing to be helpful because “in most cases spirits seem to leave through the mouth.”[252]

Kay found in his research that though the present Pentecostal worldview remains “dualistic, there was no settled view among those sampled as to whether or not Christians can be demon possessed, though there was greater agreement that they can be demon oppressed.”[253] Hollenweger, too, in his magisterial study of Pentecostalism was guarded in his view: “It is not possible for me to give a conclusive judgement on this subject.”[254] What, though, has become clear is that the present rapid growth of Pentecostalism in non-Western cultures, where belief in the spirit world is endemic, owes much to the ministry of deliverance put forward by Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity. David Martin cites the case of a Pentecostal minister in Korea who is claimed to have raised seven people from the dead and cast out demons from 400,000 people, fifty-nine of whom were crippled, and concluded, “Maybe Christianity itself began in a similar manner.”[255]

Where Dowie differed significantly from earlier faith healers in his ideas on sickness and healing was to give it charismatic breadth. For Dowie and his Zionites divine healing was conjunct with his restorationism. In the Zionite view, the long-lost faith and authority of the apostles was being restored, not only in word but in power. Lindsay, in seeking to explain Dowie’s downfall, wrote that he “utterly believed that as a fulfilment of prophecy, God raised him up to bring about a restoration of worldwide extent, of all things spoken by the prophets. This, if true, actually involved and anticipated nothing more or less than a dispensational change in God’s dealings with the human race.”[256] His conclusion was that it was Dowie’s conceit of office that made him attempt more than any man could or would be permitted to accomplish that set the stage for his ultimate disaster. Certainly, no other healer, either before or since, could match his pretentious aspiration as Dowie came more and more to incarnate end-time events in his own person. Harnly made a similar inference, contrasting Dowie’s early healing practice when “he presented himself as only a very humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty” with his latter days. Then, “this same healing was to be dispensed directly by right of his own authority. He was now Elijah . . . [and] the thought of failure was inconsistent with the dignity of his ecclesiastical position. His ruin came in his effort to be something more than a mere man.”[257] Wacker’s epigram encapsulates his decline perfectly: “[Dowie] became entangled in the momentum of his own apotheosis.”[258]

Dowie was, of course, not unique in his appeal to the vision of the primitive church. The urge to restorationism came to rest deep in the religious psyche of many Americans, particularly with the opening up of the west in the nineteenth century. A hymn composed by an itinerant preacher catches the mood:

Let Christians now unite and say,

We’ll throw all human rules away,

And take God’s word to rule us;

King Jesus shall our leader be,

And in his name we will agree,

The priests no more shall fool us.[259]

In nineteenth-century America, the battle-cry of the Reformation, “sola Scriptura,”

mutated to “No creed but the Bible.” Barton Stone (1772–1844) was among those who sought to overturn “the Great Apostasy,” a declension regarded as rife throughout the church age when judged against the criterion of faith and practice of the primitive church. When chided about his disregard of Calvin’s insights, he retorted that he was not familiar with Calvin’s writings, therefore could not be sure about the level of his agreement with the great reformer, before tailing off with the sting, “neither do we care.”[260]

Dowie was equally forceful: “Now, if I were a Presbyterian, I would run a good risk of being brought up for heresy; but I do not care two pins for the Presbytery, or the Synod, or the Assembly Theological Fossils, nor for any other Ecclesiastical Inquisition which I see on earth.”[261] It was this spirit of republican scorn for attributed authority that unleashed a large number of American religious movements such as the Mormons, the Stone /Campbell Restoration Movement, the Adventists and myriad Holiness groups. One speaker at a Holiness camp meeting in 1873 exulted that at long last “we have discovered the basis of Christian unity. . . . A unity not in ordinances, church government, forms of worship, or mere letter of creed—but in . . . the Baptism of the Spirit.”[262] This new concept of Spirit baptism as a catalyst for radical change and the force for a new unity presented a marked shift, indeed one of paradigmatic proportion for the future of Christianity. In giving restorationist experientialism a centrality hitherto unfamiliar, it provided the foundation for charismatic Christianity to become both an agent and beneficiary of the globalization process as it accelerated in the last quarter of the twentieth century.[263]

A. B. Simpson spoke for those who would have had no difficulty in agreeing with his statement that “we are to expect a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit in connection with the second coming of Christ and one as much greater than the Pentecostal effusion of the Spirit as the rains of autumn were greater than the showers of spring.”[264] The titles of avidly read books written by the foremost evangelical spokesmen of the age herald a sense of yearning allied to expectation. They included: D. L. Moody, Secret Power (1881); J. Wilbur Chapman, Received Ye the Holy Ghost? (1894); A. J. Gordon, The Ministry of Healing (1882), and The Ministry of the Spirit (1894); Reuben A. Torrey, The Baptism of the Holy Spirit (1895). In Torrey’s book, he asserted that “in my early study of the Baptism with the Holy Ghost, I noticed that in many instances those who were so baptised ‘spoke with tongues,’ and the question was often in my mind: if one is baptised with the Holy Spirit will he not speak with tongues? But I saw no one so speaking, and I often wondered is there anyone today who actually is baptised with the Holy Spirit.”[265]

The feeling was abroad that only a restoration of apostolic power could meet the religious crisis of the age. The sceptics and doubters were best answered by real evidence, a conclusion that Bushnell had reached in the mid-nineteenth century. Preaching over forty years later than the publication of Bushnell’s book, Dowie trumpeted, “Robert Ingersoll may sneer at the miracles of nineteen centuries ago, but all the sayings of Ingersoll cannot alter the fact that miracles are wrought today. . . . The infidels can ask for facts, and we are stuffing them down their throats until they have to stop talking.”[266] Expressed with no less élan, Dowieites carried that same message from Zion to that section of the religious world that was half anticipating it, but not with his disruptive intent.

There were other leaders, who promoted the healing message in a more measured way, less provocative and more decorous than Dowie—Arthur Tappan Pierson (1837–1911) and Reuben Archer Torrey (1856–1928). Both men were personal friends and each headed the Moody Bible Institute at different times. They were two of the few Americans invited to address the Keswick Convention, the latter during a break in the Torrey-Alexander mission in Britain in 1904. Both developed views on divine healing that were sympathetic to the general line taken earlier by their fellow American, A. J. Gordon. Like Dowie, both men were from the Reformed tradition, Torrey an ordained Congregational minister and Pierson an ordained Presbyterian minister. Torrey graduated from Yale University and Pierson from Union Seminary, New York. From 1891 to 1893 Pierson was minister of Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, London, during the period when Charles Spurgeon’s illness with Bright’s disease kept him from preaching. A prolific writer, he was heavily involved in the promotion of missions through his editorship of the Missionary Review of the World and played a key role in the Student Volunteer Movement. He was a consulting editor of the Schofield Bible and a contributor to The Fundamentals (1910), a series of booklets designed to stem the tide of modernism in theology.

ARTHUR T. PIERSON: THE FORWARD THINKER

In his The New Acts of the Apostles (1901), Pierson was upbeat about trends in global evangelicalism that recalled events paralleled in the book of Acts. In a reference to the biblical account, he pointed out:

Within forty years there were four distinct and separate outpourings in the Apostolic age, [so] who is competent to say that in the centuries succeeding there have been no other Pentecostal effusions. . . . May there not be modern saints upon whom the Spirit has not yet fallen in the Pentecostal sense, but would come in power in answer to believing prayer? Recent history argues, with the resistless logic of events, that Pentecostal wonders may be repeated. This modern missionary century has been made both lustrous and illustrious by outpourings of the Spirit, in some respects surpassing any recorded in Apostolic days.[267]

Pierson devoted one of the chapters in his Forward Movements of the Last Half Century (1900) to “The Growth of Belief in Divine Healing.” He started from the premise that “there is a Scriptural basis for the doctrine of divine healing in answer to prayer. . . . That the ‘prayer of faith shall save the sick’ admits no more question than the incarnation, atonement, or any other truth explicitly taught in the Word. But, we need to guard this admission by a few careful limitations.”[268] This cautionary note is a concise statement of his stance on the subject. For him, the subject was more than one of academic interest because of his own experience of healing. During his years of living in London, he suffered a catalogue of respiratory and digestive problems, which showed no improvement on his return to America. He was driven to ponder if his continued illness “was a rebuke from God, or was a case of Satan at war with the Spirit.”[269] During February 1897, after praying about his health problems, he became aware of being healed while walking along Boston Common. His doctor checked his ears and finding no infection announced that God had healed him. Every year afterwards, the 25th February was celebrated as the anniversary of his miraculous healing.

As a consistent supernaturalist, Pierson believed in the possibility of supernatural intervention, notably in divine healing as long as it was practiced decently and in order. He could detect no scriptural “hint of any purpose of our Lord that these displays of divine energy should ever cease.” If healings have reduced, it was in proportion “to the decline of evangelical faith, evangelistic activity, unworldliness of life and power in prayer.”[270] If there was wariness about contemporary healings, part of the blame rested with the “faith-cure delusion,” a phrase not so much representative of his own position as one used by critics of divine healing. He shared their charge against those healers who “rush to extreme position . . . using prayer as the only antidote to poison, the only healer of broken bones, the only preventative of smallpox, and the only substitute even for vitiated air” but, as against them, there are others “free from such fanaticism [who] hold the truth within spiritual and rational . . . limits.”[271]

For his part, he was critical of those Christians who have through their hectic lifestyle become tainted with the “materialism and practical atheism” engendered by modern notions of “the universe as a clockwork [with] blind ‘natural law’ the mechanical mainspring.” In their case, where illness is an outcome of divine chastisement or fatherly correction, the “first stop should be to the Physician, not of the body but the soul; not the poultice of figs, but the face to the wall; not the decoction of herbs, but the panacea of the gospel.”[272] In his view, there was no necessary antagonism between divine healing and human healing: “The discoveries, achievements and advances of medical science are wonderful, especially in anaesthetics, antiseptics, febrifugal and kindred remedies and appliances.” At the same time, “idolatry of medical science is wicked and absurd . . . as no remedy can even relieve without His blessing.”[273] In his judgement, faith-cure was the butt of much satire that sprung from a “violent hostility to everything supernatural.”[274]

His views on the origin of disease, the role of the atonement and the efficacy of faith were measured. He accepted that sickness is the fruit of sin, “but not necessarily the sin of the individual sufferer.” There is a societal side to suffering: “suffering is entailed not only by heredity, but by society; nor shall we be wholly delivered from partnership in the sorrows and sufferings of humanity till we are no longer part of an unredeemed society.”[275] His view on the atonement is brief, dispassionate and somewhat enigmatic: “There is redemption for the body and, while its consummation is found only in the resurrection, bodily health in its anticipation.” Citing six New Testament verses, he takes the line

adopted by A. B. Simpson that as our bodies become the temple of the Spirit and the life of Jesus is manifested in them, then that body ought to be “a better body, and feel the thrill of that divine life in better blood, brain, brawn, bone and nerves! The divine dwelling should have both a purifying and healing effect on even the material temple.”[276]

On the place of faith, he sided more with the faith-cure school in quoting approvingly the American showman Phineas Barnum: “Far more people are humbugged by believing too little, than by believing too much.” Turning the usual sentiment on its head, he opined, “Perhaps the notion that healing power is no longer exercised, hinders asking in faith and touching the hem of His garment, so as to be made whole. . . . A faith whose boldness and largeness of expectation border on presumption, is far better than unbelief that dares neither to ask nor hope for blessings which He only waits for our asking, to bestow.”[277] As a summation, he took a perceptive epigram from Coleridge who said of fanaticism that it is often only “the refraction of a truth yet below the horizon,” on which he enlarged: “Behind the ‘vagaries of faith-healing,’ may be hidden a precious truth which the mass of professing Christians live in too worldly a state to recognize or accept. Hence, those who do, driven by antagonism and ridicule, into separation and isolation, run to extremes; but such has been the history of every reform in morals or religion.”[278] Through his promotion of Keswick theology, the Welsh Revival, and to a limited extent faith healing, A. T. Pierson made a contribution to the origins of Pentecostalism, even as he repudiated the Pentecostal claim that tongue-speaking was the evidential sign of Spirit baptism.[279]

REUBEN A. TORREY: THE BRUISED HEALER

Reuben A. Torrey effected greater leverage on the nascent Pentecostal movement than Pierson, and can be rightly described as one of the most important evangelical leaders of his generation.[280] His views on divine healing were similar to Pierson’s with whom he shared the promotion of holiness teaching, premillennialism, missionary and evangelistic enterprise and an ecumenical mindset. The last he exemplified in describing himself as an “episcopresbygationalapsist.” Together with Gordon, Simpson and Pierson, he was part of the Reformed tradition, rather than the Wesleyan Holiness tradition, the two streams that came to form the classical Pentecostal movement.[281] All four found biblical support for the continuance of divine healing exercised with due sensitivity and restraint. Torrey, writing in 1924 warned, “There is a vast deal of charlatanism in connection with these much self-advertised Divine healers, and many of the so-called cures are framed up.”[282]

His earliest experience of divine healing occurred during his first pastorate at Garrettsville. As far as he could recall forty years later, he had never read any book on the subject or even heard of it. He was called to see a young dentist who was unconscious and in the terminal stage of typhoid fever. In his own words, he described how “an impulse came to me to kneel down and pray to God that he would heal the young man.” Immediately, he had an assurance that his prayer was heard despite the incredulity of the doctor and the deterioration of the man’s physical state. To those who brought the news of approaching death, he replied, “He is not dying, he cannot die now, he will get well.” As he anticipated, the young man did fully recover.[283] From childhood, Torrey had suffered from a chronic ear infection that led to a perforated drum and persistent discharge. When ministering in Minneapolis, he suffered a particularly distressing bout of pain. He recounted; “I said to myself, you pray for the healing of others, why . . . not ask God to heal your own ear. He healed me instantly.”[284] Two specialists who examined the ear found the drum had clearly once been perforated and was now completely healed over.

While still in Minneapolis, he participated in some other dramatic healings. While his own family used the services of their family doctor, it was customary for him to pray for them in times of sickness. One occasion when he was ministering away from home, his young daughter Blanche became seriously ill. In her distress, she expressed her longing for her father to be there to pray for her, on saying which she fell into a restful sleep. Soon after, she was able to return to school. It was later learned that her recovery coincided in the middle of the night with the precise hour of his impulse to pray for his daughter. Two other healings of note were to take place. The first involved a woman who had been invalided for four years and had been under the care of nine different doctors. Her relatives told him when he came to visit that though they were Roman Catholics, if she were healed they would become Protestants. He had an immediate assurance that the prayer had been granted and told the woman, “I expect you as soon as I am gone to get up and go about your work.”[285] The following Sunday, the woman travelled three miles to attend his church.

The second instance involved the two-year-old child of a Methodist minister. Her backbone was terribly misshapen and she lived in constant pain. Her doctors had given her not more than three years to live. When Torrey prayed for her, relief came immediately. That night she slept normally for the first time, and “even the defective part was made right.” Eighteen years later, he met her again, this time as “a beautiful, perfectly formed young woman” who was currently training for the mission field.[286] It was at this time that Torrey involved himself with the CMA and his name appeared as a new member of the Missionary Board of the Alliance in 1892, cementing his relationship with A. B. Simpson. He shared speaking engagements with A. J. Gordon at the First National Convention of Christian Workers in 1886. Both he and Pierson spoke at the Keswick Convention in 1904. The four leaders, all excellent communicators of the holiness message, shared an openness to divine healing and a post-conversion experience of the Spirit that made them harbingers of the Pentecostal movement, especially those groupings closer to the Reformed tradition, the largest of which was formed in America in 1914 as the Assemblies of God.

Clashes over Divine Healing

J. A. DOWIE

Torrey’s witness to divine healing was dented when he moved to Chicago to become Superintendent of the Moody Bible Institute, at the same time as Dowie was commanding the headlines in the local press. As well as holding his position at the Bible Institute, he took over the pastorate of the Chicago Avenue Church from Moody in 1894. Dowie had yet to move out of Chicago to Zion City, rendering a clash between the titans, Moody and Dowie, almost inevitable with Torrey the in-between. Dowie was roused when he heard through an intermediary that Moody “intended to fight divine healing and Dowie,” to which the latter resounded, “I venture to say that [Moody] that day did a thing he will live to regret.”[287] It was not long before the gloves came off. While preaching in California, Moody was reported as saying that if he were sick, he would not be a crank like these Divine healers. . . . Think of that crank Dowie calling ministers and doctors devils.”[288] Dowie’s riposte was to print a letter he had received from Torrey, Moody’s colleague. It revealed, in some depth, Torrey’s stance on divine healing up to April 1898:

Dear Dr Dowie – Four weeks ago today we lost a daughter aged nine years and twelve days by diphtheria. For twelve or more years none of our children had taken medicine, and they had all been healed in God’s way, this one included. The morning Elizabeth passed away, very early, Mrs Torrey came and told me she was choking. My faith failed and ultimately I went for a physician. I asked guidance before going, but now believe after asking guidance I went my own way, not God’s; the way of unbelief, not the way of faith. The child died.

Today our daughter Blanche has the patches, parched throat, and that indicates diphtheria. I have anointed her, and believe God has heard. She is already decidedly better, the patches partly gone and backache all gone; but Mrs Torrey especially wants you and Mrs Dowie to come over and pray, and to examine us to see if you can find any sin in the way.

We see nothing to hinder an immediate cure. I know it is a good deal to ask so busy a man to come; and, if you cannot, any way remember us in prayer.

You may, if you like, read this letter publicly. I believe I have dishonoured the Lord and would be glad to have people know the failure was not in Him, but in me.

Sincerely yours, R. A. TORREY

Next morning, Friday

Blanche is decidedly better. Had a good deal of pain during the night, but it is gone. The patches are almost entirely gone from her throat, and the sore and hard cord back of the ear is now soft as any one’s, but she is not entirely well yet. Please pray for her. I think God does a perfect work. Sincerely yours, R. A. TORREY[289]

Dowie wielded this correspondence as a sword to pierce a chink in Moody’s armor when he asked, “If I am a crank upon divine healing, what is Dr Torrey? I want to carry this war into Mr Moody’s own camp.[290]

Moody was challenged by a letter written in the religious press by Dr Frank DeWitt Talmage, son of the famous Rev. Dr Thomas DeWitt Talmage, the popular preacher and minister of one of New York’s most fashionable Presbyterian Churches. The letter contained a statement with reference to Torrey that accused his senior colleague Moody of having gone completely over to the “Dr Dowie faith-cure fanaticism.” The ageing Moody hit back:

It is true that Mr. Torrey at the time of the illness of his little girl did accept the teaching of Divine Healing, and trusted God to raise up his child from the disease, but it is no less true that he had an attendant physician at the same time to whose charge the case was entrusted,

In the Bible Institute I absolutely refuse to allow the teaching of Divine healing to be presented, and should a student refuse medical assistance in case of sickness, he would either have to leave the institution (thus relieving us of all responsibility in the case), or send for some competent physician to attend him.

[M]y own personal conviction regarding Divine Healing [is] as follows: God has wonderfully owned the unselfish labours of the medical profession. . . . I know of no higher calling, outside the ministering to the spiritual wants of men, than the alleviation of pain and suffering.[291]

With Moody’s death in 1899, Torrey was now left to fight his own battle, from which he did not emerge particularly well.

In an article he wrote for Ram’s Horn under the heading “He Speaketh Lies,” Torrey stated that Dowie in his publications had given the impression that “one of my daughters was healed of sickness in answer his prayers and those of his elders. This is entirely untrue. Neither [Dowie or his elders] knew of the sickness of my daughter until she was up and around.”[292] Dowie proceeded to print in Leaves of Healing two handwritten facsimile copies written to him by Torrey carrying the letterhead of the Moody Bible Institute. One was that written on 14 April, reproduced above, and another five days later, both clearly proving that Dowie and his elders knew of his daughter’s illness. In between the letters, Torrey had spoken to Mrs Dowie personally on the Saturday, and the Bible Institute by phone on the Sunday. Dowie was not slow to loose off a fusillade of invective to damage Torrey, accusing him of betraying his belief in divine healing in order to conform to Moody’s diktat: “He sold his principles for a place and a piece of bread, the coward, the liar, who has robbed God of His glory, and curses the Institute with his presence. May God in His infinite mercy speedily remove him.”[293] In Dowie’s eyes, “Torrey stands completely enmeshed in the web of his own hypocrisy.”[294]

Extra pressure piled on Torrey when Dowie printed part of a discussion he had with Newell, Torrey’s assistant at the Bible Institute. Newell would appear to have been overwrought to the point of emotional breakdown, describing himself “as one possessed by a thousand devils” and a “hypocrite.” He owned up to detesting and loathing Moody for his autocratic ways: “No man under him has a right to any opinion but that which Dwight L. Moody will approve.” Newell then added, “I will speak also for R. A. Torrey. We are both in the same condition. Our hearts are broken. Our spirits are suffering from the dishonour of the betrayal of our Lord. . . . Our faces and hearts are toward Zion.” To which Dowie avowed, “Before God, the Ever-Living God, that statement is true.”[295] Such criticism, the truth or falsehood of which was open to unfeeling conjecture in the public arena, must have been a source of distress to Torrey, a man who at all times comported himself as a Victorian gentleman, elegantly attired when preaching in a well-cut coat, starched shirt and bow-tie. Temperamentally very different from his arch antagonist, he recoiled from any thought of engaging in vituperative response. His sermons were noted for being precise, reasoned and dispassionate.

AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON

By the early 1900s circumstances changed. Dowie became preoccupied with the move to Zion City in 1901, and while he occasionally continued to attack Torrey, he found a fresh target in William Booth, in part, for renouncing the practice of divine healing within the Salvation Army.[296] In 1902 Torrey began a worldwide evangelistic tour with a former student Charles M. Alexander as song leader. He was in Britain in 1904 and again in 1905 when he held meetings for two months in the Royal Albert Hall and subsequently in large regional cities throughout the British Isles. It was estimated that 70,000 decisions for Christ were made, with the results in most cities surpassing those of Moody in his day. In 1912, he returned to academia as dean of the Los Angeles Bible Institute (BIOLA) and started the Church of the Open Door of which he was pastor until 1924.

The issue of divine healing was raised again with the arrival in Los Angeles in 1918 of another healing evangelist of a quite different stripe in the person of Aimee Semple McPherson. McPherson made Los Angeles the base of her operation while conducting evangelistic and healing missions throughout the country. In January 1923 her permanent base, the 5,300-seat Angelus Temple, was dedicated, a building that included a prayer tower staffed twenty-four hours a day. A month after the opening of the Temple, she founded a Bible School. The following year she began broadcasting on her station KFSG, making her the first woman to preach a sermon over the radio. Expenditure on this scale roused one rival pastor to remark sarcastically that she “put the ‘cost’ in Pentecost.”[297]

Part of McPherson’s immense drawing power lay in the remarkable success she had in the ministry of healing, despite her insistence that her meetings were 99 percent salvation and 1 percent healing, a protestation that convinced few. In the same year as the opening of the Angelus Temple, Torrey published his definitive booklet Divine Healing (1924) that contained, inter alia, thinly veiled disapproval of her message and methods. When Torrey wrote of “adventurers and adventuresses” in the healing ministry, it is almost certain that he had Aimee in his sights. There was for him “an especial need of a dependable book on Divine Healing at this particular time.”[298] A buried fear of a Dowie redivivus must have informed his writing the booklet, not least against those who exploited their “magnetic personality” and had a propensity “to thrive on controversy and scandal.”[299] His implied criticism of Aimee helps to define his post-Dowie position on divine healing.

Torrey’s core premise on healing was that God “does really heal people who are beyond the skill of the physician and beyond all human help.”[300] He presented his credentials for writing the booklet: “The clear teaching of God’s Word has been corroborated by thirty-five years or more of experience in my own body, and observation of the bodies of others.”[301] His objection, therefore, was not against divine healing as such, but more against the manner and emphases propounded by some others. The cardinal theological objection of like-minded conservatives was directed at the doctrine of healing in the atonement with the understanding that it could be “claimed” as a given right, a teaching Torrey regarded as an “extreme doctrine” held by some of his friends. However, on this issue he was more conciliatory than this opinion would seem to warrant, in taking the view that “the antecedent probability in any given case is in favour of healing; for health is the general will of God for his people.” He conceded that “in many cases the lack of faith is the fault of the praying elders or the fault of the sick man.” In the case of the latter there is “some unjudged sin or some lesson that the sick one has not as yet learned.”[302] At the same time, he objected to the current “fanatical teaching that if believers are sick that is conclusive proof they have sinned. Scripture indicates that it is not always the will of God to heal even some of the ripest of his saints.”

On the question of medical intervention—“a question of great importance”—he was equally guarded, believing sometimes it is wrong, sometimes not. He presented a recent case where it was wrong. The mother of a young child in his congregation sought prayer when the doctor had given no hope for his survival. Unable himself to go, he sent his assistant who reported an immediate improvement. The doctor next day was equally impressed and sought to give the boy some more medicine. The mother disagreed and told him, “You told me you had done all you could. We took him to God in prayer and he has healed him, and you are not going to get credit for the cure.”[303] Her response, Torrey accepted, was right in the circumstance. On the other hand, he had met believers who had fallen into “legalism and bondage,” some of whom were “positively morbid,” one fearing they had committed the unpardonable sin in taking medicine. Again, “many excellent Christian people,” or their children, were dead by refusing treatment. Such tragedies have only served to bring “the bible truth of divine healing into great disrepute.”[304]

Two aspects of contemporary healing practice provoked his censure, both of which reflect his distaste for the more outré sides of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. He considered James 5:14–15 as “the clearest, plainest, fullest and most explicit passage in the Bible on [divine healing],” a text he interpreted with unbending literalism.[305] When the sick person is advised to send for the elders of the church, then it follows that “he is not to send for some self-appointed busy-body who goes about with a little bottle of oil to be used in his loudly-advertised ‘ministry of healing’ to which he has been called, or fancies he has been called. . . . He is not to ‘attend meetings for three days’ (or three hours, or three minutes) to get under the spell of psychological influences that are akin to Coueistic auto-suggestively therapeutic influences.”[306] When he drew attention to the fact that the word for “elders” is always masculine, it is almost certain that Aimee McPherson in particular and Pentecostals in general were in mind, implicitly if not exclusively: “He is not to send for some woman who is peculiarly gifted in prayer, or who thinks she is, and who has a peculiarly psychological, magnetic, or hypnotic personality. . . . He is not to be brought into the mesmeric atmosphere of a meeting where there is skillfully planned, highly emotional music and swaying of the body and passings of the hand and shouts of Hallelujahs, that excite the imagination and thrill the body.”[307]

Allied to this restriction to elders is the question he posed, “Is there any warrant in this passage for public meetings where divine healing is emphasized, where crowds are instructed to come to the front and where they are anointed with oil and prayed with?” The answer advanced was that “there certainly is not. . . . The praying and healing was to be done in the quiet of the home of the sick believer.” He summoned evidence from the New Testament that healing was neither advertised nor emphasized in ways that were presently publicized. By contrast, he maintained that the apostles “certainly did not have themselves photographed in various dramatic attitudes of prayer beside the sick. . . . [The] shameless advertising of themselves and of their exaggerated cures pursued by the late John Alexander Dowie and by quite a host of imitators today, is simply nauseating, and distressingly painful, and it is also utterly unscriptural, and anyone who practices it will be discredited by anyone of spiritual discernment.”[308]

His quarrel with practitioners such as Dowie and McPherson marked in its own way the end of an age. Going were the days when divine healing was directed towards growth in holiness, sought in expectant and reflective quietude in sympathetic Christian settings and practiced where the personal charisma of the officiant was subdued. Entering the stage from the first decades of the twentieth century was a new style of healing evangelist, progressively Pentecostal in orientation. Their personal magnetism and eye-catching publicity proved attractive to mass audiences gathered in auditoriums of diverse ambience. Bouts of emotional fervor were frequently unleashed that drew the charge of fanaticism, insanity and demonic activity. It became increasingly clear that the nascent Pentecostal movement, the offspring of the Wesleyan Holiness/Higher Life movement, was not going to accommodate itself smoothly into existing church life. It was inevitable that the arrival of the new movement would have a bearing on the future of the radical healing message. For one, divine healing was one of the core tenets of Pentecostalism in a way it never was in the broad Holiness movement. Within the latter there were significant figures, such as Andrew Murray, Boardman and Torrey who both accepted divine healing and practiced it in sedate ways but it never became an article of faith at either the Keswick or the American Northfield Conventions. Their misgivings about the excesses surrounding contemporary divine healing reduced their influence on the Pentecostal movement, though Torrey’s book on Spirit baptism was judged to be heading in the direction of the movement.[309] One British observer of his mission throughout Britain in 1904 and 1905 reported that his “logical presentation” of Spirit–baptism as an experience of power for witness “did much to establish the doctrine”.[310]

157. Cedar Falls Gazette, 13 August 1895.

158. The New York Times, 8 February 1901.

159. Mencken Prejudices, 59. Bryan is best known for his part in the Scopes Trial (1925), presenting the fundamentalist case against the teaching of evolution in the public schools of Tennessee.

160. Joyce: Ulysses, Online.

161. For an account of Dowie and his impact in Britain and Ireland, see Robinson, Pentecostal Origins, 39–48.

162. Merrion Hall was completed in 1862 for the large Brethren assembly in Dublin. At its peak it needed seating for 2,500 people and eighty Sunday School volunteers.

163. Gilliver, “Billy Sunday,” Online. Billy Sunday (1862–1935) was a talented baseball player who launched out as an independent evangelist in 1893. His vaudeville turn and recourse to earthy language drew large audiences.

164. Dowie constantly played up his Scottish background. He claimed that he was “of the clan from which Ben [Mountain] McDhui takes its name; . . . not Dowie, Dhui, as every Gaelic Scotchman knows.” As a fervent devotee of Queen Victoria—though not the principle of monarchy—and the British Empire,

assimilation of British-Israelite teaching came readily to him. It made it tenable for him to make the outlandish claim that it was at Ben McDhui that “the last of the Israelitish kings found a refuge as tradition says. . . . [T]oday it is an Israelitish descendent [Victoria] who sits upon the throne of her father David, king of Israel.” (Leaves of Healing, 7 October, 587)

165. DeArteaga, Quenching the Spirit), 113. A corroborative source is lacking. Faupel is of the opinion that it is very likely that Dowie would have been aware of the teachings of the Catholic Apostolic Church. He sets out five “striking parallels” in the theologies of the two movements, one of which is the distinctive belief in the vital role for the missionary-minded “Ministry of the Seventy” (Luke 10:1), known in Dowie’s organization as the Restoration Host. Other areas of agreement include the naming of the two churches (Dowieite CCAC and Irvingite CAC—[Christian] Catholic Apostolic Church); both hold to the concept of the “Elijah Ministry”; both movements saw themselves as forerunners to the return of Christ; agreement on the nine-fold gifts of the Spirit (1 Cor 12:7–11) and apostolic rule and prophetic guidance. (Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel, 134.)

166. LH, 1 January 1898, 187.

167. Cook, Zion City, 9.

168. Lindsay, John Alexander Dowie, 76–83.

169. About half the American population visited the Exposition. It was for America what the Great Exhibition of 1851 symbolized for Victorian Britain, its arrival as a world power.

170. The 7,000 who gathered in the sanctuary in Zion ratified the new order. (Wacker, “Marching to Zion,” 496–511.)

171. Gordon, “Dowie, John Alexander (1847–1907).” Online.

172. LH, 1 January 1898, 189.

173. Lindsay, John Alexander Dowie, 15. The parents of Gordon Lindsay (1906–73) were members of Zion City and he was born there. He was a leading figure in the healing and charismatic movements in post-war America. His magazine, and organization, The Voice of Healing, publicised the work of such healing evangelists as F. F. Bosworth, William Branham, and Oral Roberts.

174. Halsey, “The Genesis of a Modern Prophet,” 312.

175. LH, 10 April 1896, 390.

176. The Times, 14 June 1904, 3.

177. LH, 10 July 1897, 586. The Dowies’ social pretentiousness grew with their fame/infamy. Jane Dowie attracted criticism for her lavish spending on Parisian couture, likewise attracting censure for the opulence of their residence in Zion City.

178. LH, 10 July 1897, 586. The crowning titbit was the Queen “often” asking Guthrie, “Dr. Guthrie, tell me more about Jesus.” Presumably, the two men met when Dowie was a student in Edinburgh in his early twenties. Guthrie was then in his late sixties and retired. Thus, there was the opportunity for an ambitious young student to be influenced by an aging preacher and social reformer.

179. Dowie’s remedies for social problems were radical for his times. He attacked from a progressive stance the evils of labor, capital and politics, as well as racism. He was outspoken against war, capital punishment and abortion. Cook maintains that Dowie “easily qualified as a foremost preacher of the social gospel” (Cook, Zion City, 16). If that assessment is correct, Dowie’s social gospel was of a different complexion from that of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1916) who gained the title “Father of the Social Gospel” for his democratic reformism that sought the advance of the kingdom of God through societal reforms carried out in the teaching and spirit of Christ.

180. Cameron, Dictionary of Scottish Church History, 382. James McCosh (1811–94) was a theologian and a prominent philosopher of the Scottish Realist School. He was elected President of Princeton in 1868.

181. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies,” 750.

182. New York Times, 17 October 1903, 1.

183. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies,” 751. He took exception to a hymn of “that excellent Christian lady,” Frances Havergal, written when she was in pain in the Swiss Alps: “I take this pain, Lord Jesus, from thine own hand”—a sentiment he described as “an absolute insult to God” (LH, 7 September 1894, 27).

184. Liverpool Daily Post, 21 October 1897.

185. Cook, Zion City, 8. The verse reads, “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power . . . he went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”

186. LH, 7 September 1894, 29.

187. The full account is set out in Lindsay, John Alexander Dowie, 22–25.

188. Anon., Record of the International Conference, 171–75.

189. Lindsay, John Alexander Dowie, 84.

190. LH, 31 August 1894, 6–7.

191. Opp, The Lord for the Body, 93, 95.

192. Reprinted in LH, 21 September 1894, 58–61.

193. The World Fair was held in more open land seven miles from the city centre, an express train journey of fifteen minutes. A significant factor in the poor attendances coincident with the winding down of the Fair exposed its relative isolation from city bustle. Later locations moved towards the centre.

194. LH, 31 August 1894, 13.

195. Wacker, “John Alexander Dowie,” 15. Dowie’s sermon material concentrated on the Gospels to the relative neglect of the epistles: “I find my Gospel inside of the four first books of the New Testament. . . . There are points upon which I differ with Paul” (LH, 10 September 1904, 716).

196. Lindsay: John Alexander Dowie, 107.

197. Ibid., 112.

198. Ibid., 121.

199. The following is one of the shorter affidavits. “The complainant, Maguire, was a resident living near the early healing homes who complained of disturbances, such as loud coughing and the running of the printing presses, as well as depreciation in the value of neighbourhood housing.

STATE OF ILLINOIS: In the Superior Court of said COUNTY OF COOK.

Leo. J .Maguire vs John Alex. Dowie.”

AN affidavit supportive of Dowie was presented: “Mrs. H. E. Merrifield, being first duly sworn upon her oath, deposes and says, that she resides at 6247 Oglesby Ave, in the City of Chicago, and is the wife of H. E, Merrifield: that for fifteen years she suffered constantly with neuralgia in the head and stomach; also, from bladder, kidney and uterine disease: that she was about to undergo an operation by Dr Watkins, whose office is on Eighteenth Street, near Wabash Avenue; that having heard of Dr Dowie, she thereupon went to him; that said, Dowie prayed with her, and she was cured and completely healed, and has since and is now in good health—MRS H. E. MERRIFIELD (signed)

Subscribed and sworn to before me this 10th day of July A.D. 1895. W. H, QUINLAN, Notary Public.”

(See LH, 2 August 1895 which is given over to publishing the affidavits.)

200 . Schoepflin: Christian Science on Trial, 2–3.

201. Nicholas Senn (1844–1908) was Professor of Surgery and Surgical Pathology at the prestigious Rush Medical College, Chicago. His textbook Experimental Surgery (1889) aimed to lay the experimental foundation for the future of American surgery. He was the pioneer in America of the use of radiation therapy in the treatment of leukaemia (1903).

202. LH, 7 December 1894, 194.

203. The article was reprinted in LH, 7 December 1894, 195.

204. LH, 4 December 1897, 110. Despite his penchant for castigation, Dowie was prepared to accept biblical truths from whatever source: “[I]f the Roman Catholic Church [the Greek Church . . . the Episcopalian Church . . . the Baptist Church] has got a truth I am going to say it, and I do not care who takes the other side. . . . [M]ore than that, I am going to get that truth, if I can, into the Christian Catholic Church. (Applause)” (LH, 706) Mullin draws attention to his ‘surprising charitableness to Roman Catholicism, in contrast to the venom he poured out on Protestant clergy.” (Mullin: Miracles, 206).

205. Simpson was referring to the motif of the Fourfold gospel, and considered Dowie was placing too much emphasis on Christ as Healer.

206. Tozer, Wingspread, 135. Tozer was a major figure in the CMA and a natural supporter of Simpson, and his legacy.

207. Wacker, “Marching to Zion,” 500.

208. In 1904, it was renamed the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion.

209. LH, 10 September 1904, 714. This edition printed the proceedings of the service that constituted the CCC on 22 February 1896

210. LH, 10 September 1904, 731.

211. LH, 24 September 1904, 807.

212. LH, 23 October 1904, 74 (emphasis added).

213. LH, 10 September 1904, 709.

214. Ibid., 732.

215. Ibid., 717.

216. Ibid., 718.

217. LH, 24 September 1904, p 797, 792.

218. LH, 28 September 1894, 75.

219. LH, 7 September 1894, 26.

220. Alexander: Pentecostal Healing, 59.

221. LH, 13 November 1896, 43.

222. LH, 7 September 1894, 26.

223. Lindsay, Dowie, 217.

224. Csordas, The Sacred Self, 195.

225. LH, 3 December 1904, 201.

226. LH, 13 November 1904, 143.

227. Newcomb: Dowie, chapter 13. Newcomb was the manager of Zion’s publication department. As an idealistic twenty-seven-year-old journalist, he responded to Zion’s message and Dowie’s personal charisma. From 1904 onwards, he became increasingly disenchanted by what he witnessed. His insider account of Zion is presented in fictionalized form, only Dowie and his successor Voliva retaining their identity. Other Zionites are pseudonymous. It must, therefore, be treated with caution but, nonetheless, it comes closest to giving an authentic feel to the moves behind the scene that led to the discrediting of Dowie.

228. LH, 23 October 1904, 45.

229. LH, 13 November 1904, 139. That Dowie was not particularly trusting of “the plain-folk” (Am.) comes out in his remark: “The Vox Populi is not the Vox Dei. Sometimes it is the voice of the Devil. It speaks wisely only when it allows one wise man to guide it.” (LH, 13 November 1904, 141.)

230. LH, 26 November 1904, 171.

231. LH, 26 November 1904, 171.

232. His dominance of Zion’s healing ministry is evidenced in statistics collected at the time by an academic researcher. Prior to the move to Zion City, Dr Henry Goddard, a Psychology Fellow at Clark University, made a study of the healings at the Chicago Divine Healing Home. Of the 1,600 healings claimed, 88 percent were at the hands of the Dowies (76 percent treated in person, 7.5 percent prayed for at a distance, and 4.5 percent by Mrs Dowie), 7.5 percent in answer to their own prayers and 4.5 percent prayed for by friends (Goddard; “The Effects on Mind of Body,” 442).

233. LH, 13 November 1904, 141.

234. LH, 29 October 1904, 45.

235. Blumhofer:, “The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church,” 133.

236. Mullin, Miracles, 204.

237. LH, 25 September 1897, 764–64.

238. LH, 25 September 1897, 766.

239. LH, 22 April 1902, 727.

240. LH, 22 April 1902, 727–28.

241. LH, 10 April 1896, 390.

242. LH, 25 March 1905, 728. He made much—too much—of the fact that the NT Greek for “sorcerer” (pharmakoi) is the same as for pharmacy. He may have gleaned the observation from A. J. Gordon in his chapter 7, titled “The Testimony of the Adversary.”

243. Nathaniel Chapman (1880–53) was a leading figure in American medicine, but like many other leading figures cited by Dowie, he was very dated by the early twentieth century. Chapman founded the Medical Institute of Philadelphia in 1817, a body considered the first medical postgraduate school in the United States.

244. Kay found that 94 percent of Pentecostal ministers in a more recent survey in Britain agreed with the statement, “I believe modern medicine is a God-given blessing,” while all believed in the laying on of hands (Kay, Pentecostals in Britain, 100).

245. Dowie believed that Satan and his demons were a pre-Adamic race, condemned by God to hell to exist as disembodied spirits. In not accepting this judgement, they set out to penetrate God’s defences by

seduction and deceit. By such means, Satan infiltrated the human race, after seducing the angelic hosts charged with its protection, thereby condemning humans to sickness, death and judgement. The cross brought about the defeat of Satan and it is for the church, empowered by the Spirit, to establish Christ’s kingdom throughout the earth. The church, like Israel before it, has failed throughout history in its mission. The present age would terminate when a man or movement acted in perfect obedience to God’s call: “Dowie determined to be that man.” (Faupel: “Theological Influences,” 237.)

246. Simpson: The Lord for the Body, 134.

247. LH, 10 April 1896, 387.

248. Ibid., 175.

249. Ibid., 175.

250. Goff, Fields White unto Harvest, 44.

251. Wacker, Heaven Below, 92.

252. Harrell, All Things Are Possible, 226–27.

253. Kay, Pentecostals in Britain, 152–53.

254. Hollenweger, The Pentecostals, 380.

255. Martin, Tongues of Fire, 147.

256. Lindsay, Dowie, 208.

257. Harnly, “John Alexander Dowie,” 7.

258. Goff & Wacker, Portraits of a Generation, 10.

259. Noll, A History of Christianity, 143.

260. Noll, America’s God, 231.

261. LH, 19 June 1897, 535.

262. Ware, Restorationism, 36.

263. For discussion of this issue see Sturla J. Stalsett, Spirits of Globalization.

264 . Blumhofer, “Restoration as Revival,” 153. The “Latter Rain” (the “showers of spring”) motif when taken up by Pentecostalism became one of the apologetic weapons to answer its critics who pointed to the dearth of historical precedents for the movement.

265. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, 42.

266. Mullin, Miracles, 205.

267. Pierson, The New Acts, 16. The four outpourings recorded in Acts are the day of Pentecost (ch. 2), and those associated with Samaria (ch. 8), Caesarea (ch. 10), and Ephesus (ch. 19). These texts are foundational to the classical Pentecostal doctrine of subsequence and evidential tongues.

One significant strand in the missionary movement was the outpouring of the Spirit in the Mukti Mission in India around the same time as the events at Azusa Street in 1906. In the second edition of The Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire, published in December 1906, Minnie Adams included a section on the restoration of glossolalia at the Mission. Adams, an American Methodist missionary, assisted Pandita Ramabai (c.1858–1922), the founder of the Mukti Mission and the inspiration of numerous other educational, social and health enterprises that were acknowledged by the Indian government in 1989 by the issue of a postage stamp bearing her image.

268. Pierson, Forward Movements, 389.

269. Robert, Occupy Until I Come, 237.

270. Pierson, Forward Movements, 391.

271. Ibid., 402.

272. Ibid., 398. Pierson, a man of stern demeanor, took exception to a “witty editor” who stigmatised the advocates of faith-cure as those who “neither use a fig-poultice nor care a fig for a poultice.” The fig-poultice reference is to the remedy commanded by Isaiah for Hezekiah’s ailment (2 Kgs 20:7). It was the text favored by those who saw no incompatibility between medical treatment and divine healing, together with Paul’s recommendation to Timothy to take wine for his stomach’s sake. (1 Tim 5:23)

273. Ibid., 402–3.

274. Ibid., 403.

275. Ibid., 400.

276. Ibid., 400. The six biblical references are: 3 John 2:1; 1 Thess 5:23; 1 Cor 6:19; Eph 5:30; Rom 8:11; 2 Cor 4:10–11.

277. Ibid., 401.

278. Ibid., 404.

279. In an article in The Christian in 1907, Pierson deplored, on the basis of eyewitness reports of tongue speaking at the Mukti Mission in India, and elsewhere, Pentecostals exalting tongues above the other gifts and thereby opening themselves to the charge of self-display, schism, and fanaticism. While not condemning tongues as such, he felt that none of the cases he had studied conformed to biblical practice.

280. Torrey’s biographical timeline: 1878: graduated Yale Divinity school; 1878–82: Congregational minister in Garrettsville, Ohio, 1882: theological study at Leipzig and Erlangen, Germany,1883–89: pastorates in Minneapolis, 1889–1908: Superintendent/President Moody Bible Institute, Chicago; 1901–4/1911: worldwide evangelistic tours including British Isles, 1911–24: Dean of newly-founded BIOLA (Bible Institute of Los Angeles). He served as editor of the final two volumes of The Fundamentals, the twelve-volume anti-modernist publication that defined historic fundamentalism, trademarked by its stress on biblical inerrancy and its opposition to evolutionary theory.

281. Menzies, “The Non-Wesleyan Origins,” 83–98.

282. Torrey, Divine Healing, 62.

283. Ibid., 34.

284. Ibid., 47–48.

285. Martin, R. A. Torrey, 71–72.

286. Torrey, Divine Healing, 31.

287. LH, 8 April 1899, 458.

288. Ibid., 460.

289. Ibid., 460–61.

290. Ibid., 460.

291. LH, 24 March 1900, 699 (emphasis original).

292. LH: 10 March 1900, 641. The Ram’s Horn had a circulation of 56,000 in 1896, making it the fifth largest interdenominational paper in America.

293. LH, 24 March 1900, 699.

294. Ibid., 690.

295. Ibid., 700.

296. Booth’s ban on the practice of divine healing was a factor in the estrangement from his daughter Kate and her husband Arthur Booth-Clibborn.

297. Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson, 16.

298. Torrey, Divine Healing, 6. Woodworth-Etter is another possibility, though she died in 1924 at the age of eighty.

299. Harrell, All Things Are Possible, 16.

300. Ibid., 61–62.

301. Torrey, Divine Healing, 7.

302. Ibid., 26.

303. Ibid., 58.

304. Ibid., 60.

305. Torrey, Divine Healing, 17.

306. Émile Coué de Châtaigneraie (1857–1926) was a French psychologist and pharmacist who introduced a method of psychotherapy based on mantra-like, conscious autosuggestion. The Coué Method prescribes the routine repetition of the assertion, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” He classed Couéism with Christian Science and other mind cures.

307. Torrey: Divine Healing, 18–19.

308. Ibid., 42.

309. Though he wrote and preached extensively on Spirit baptism as a second work of grace in the believer’s life, Torrey rejected tongues as its evidential sign. He harmonised the evidential signs in Acts with the charismata of 1 Cor. 12:7 where tongues are one of the nine gifts. Taking verse 29 as his interpretive key (“Do all speak in tongues?”), he interpreted this as undermining the case for evidential tongues. On the other hand, he saw Spirit baptism as a power for service/witness, an understanding widely adopted in classical Pentecostalism.

310. Waldvogel (m. Blumhofer), “The ‘Overcoming Life,” 152.

3

The Global Legacy of Zion

FRAGMENTATION AND SPREAD

Dowie’s stridency, his distinctive views on divine healing, his proto-Pentecostal leanings, his overweening ambition and the later waywardness of his theology, all combined to make him an internationally known, though largely scorned, figure. Nonetheless, his legacy was considerable in the nascent Pentecostal movement. His fall from grace before his death in 1907 had certain positive effects on his legacy. With his domineering presence no longer an obstacle, the new regime at Zion City was unable to keep outside influences at bay for long. Parham made an unsuccessful bid to take over the city but managed to see many of its citizens won to the Pentecostal cause. Many of those Zionites who had become disillusioned with Dowie expressed their feeling by leaving the city. Having distanced themselves both geographically and emotionally, they no longer had to speak for him. They were able to carry his core themes—faith, consecration, holiness and healing—to other settings without attracting the opprobrium that was attached to his name.

Glenn Voliva, the new leader of Zion, fought to keep out other religious groups by the direst of warnings. One notice read that any who wanted to establish a dissentient group were labelled “bum tramps and vagabonds, with less honour than a gang of highway robbers and thugs.” Any Zionites who invited outside speakers were castigated as “traitors, porch climbers, election thieves and tally-sheet mutilators.” Interlopers were advised to “go and establish a settlement of your own.”[311] Despite such strictures, some Zionites who had received reports of the Azusa Street revival invited Parham to address inhabitants interested in the Pentecostal message. Voliva was unable to stifle Parham during his six-week stay and a steady stream of residents joined the Pentecostal ranks, some of whom occupied prominent positions in Zion before being deprived of membership of the CCC. They included its general ecclesiastical secretary, Dowie’s personal secretary, the mayor (to be) of Zion City and the conductor of the 100-piece Zion City Band. The mayor, Eli N. Richey, and one of his sons, Raymond, were to become leading figures in the Assemblies of God (AOG), the denomination that was to become the largest Pentecostal denomination within America.

Raymond T. Richie (1893–1968) spearheaded some of the methods of healing

revivalism in the 1920s that were taken up by the few major revivalists who came on the scene in the middle years of the post-war years. In his mission in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1923 over eleven thousand conversions were recorded. People who had been healed formed a parade, accompanied by a truck “piled high with discarded crutches.”[312] Fred F. Bosworth (1876–1958), the bandmaster at Zion, also became a noted healing revivalist. One

admirer wrote of him that, “by the late 1920s the Bosworth Revival had electrified dozens of cities . . . and the work of this man had already a profound impact on an entire generation of Americans.”[313] He also became a pioneer in radio evangelism. His book Christ the Healer (1924) remains in print and is considered a classic in Pentecostal circles and beyond. Coming out of semi-retirement in 1948–50, Bosworth joined the enigmatic William Branham (1909–65) in some of his campaigns, and acted as a well-regarded advisor to the post-War II charismatic evangelists such as Oral Roberts.[314] Roberts, in turn, played a major part in facilitating the spread of the Pentecostal understanding of the charismatic gifts to the mainline Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church.

Gordon Gardiner has provided the fullest account of the impact on the Pentecostal movement of people who formerly had identified themselves with the Zion movement.[315] The biographies all demonstrate the nexus between nineteenth-century Holiness restorationism and twentieth-century Pentecostalism. Zionite teaching provided a structure that allowed adherents to adjust to the Pentecostal experience. Once Dowie’s message was divested of its apostolic excrescences and socio-political pretensions, his focus on the end-time, dynamic work of the Spirit was for many Zionites consistent with the theology of new movement to which they were drawn. This comes out in the reflections of two women who were prominent in Pentecostal ministry. Marie Burgess Brown (1880–1971), who with her Ulster-born husband Robert Brown (1872–1948), pioneered Pentecostalism in New York, regarded Zion theology as the foundation on which her sixty-four years of ministry was built. Her Episcopalian family moved to Zion in 1901 where Marie

obtained work as a food demonstrator. When Parham came to Zion in 1906 she accepted the Pentecostal message and received her Spirit baptism the same night as Bosworth. Fifty years later, she acknowledged her debt to Zion: “If it hadn’t been for the truths of the Word of God as I learned them there, I would not be here today. I would never have been able to stand through all these years.” Lilian Yeomans (1861–1942), also ordained as an AOG minister, came from a Canadian medical family. It was while she was practicing medicine that she became addicted to morphine. Every known medical intervention failed until she came under the ministry of Dowie in 1896 and made a full recovery. In 1907, she received her Spirit baptism and soon after established herself as a recognized Pentecostal evangelist and teacher, serving on the faculty of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Bible College where she taught courses on church history and divine healing. In the 1930s she produced four short books on divine healing, all of which remain in print in a composite edition. In the same decade, she said of Zion: “some people say that Dr Dowie’s work is dead. No! It is more alive today than ever.”[316]

AFRICA

There is no place where Dowie’s influence lives on more than present-day South Africa. The rural backwater of Wakkerstroom in south-eastern Transvaal has been dubbed “the South-African Azusa Street.”[317] Dowie’s influence on South African Pentecostalism has been recognized as greater than his on American Pentecostalism. It took root in 1897 when Dowie placed Johannes Buchler (1864–1944), a South African Congregationalist minister, in charge of the “African work.” Buchler had been a Congregational minister before his resignation over the issue of infant baptism. In 1895, he formed an independent congregation of black worshipers that he called the Zion Church, named after a Dutch hymnal of Moravian origin.[318] Around 1897 he came across a copy of Leaves of Healing and found himself in agreement with its message. He then began a correspondence with Dowie that led to his congregation being given recognition as a Christian Catholic Church affiliate. In 1898 Dowie announced that Buchler, as Overseer for South Africa, was extending the ministry beyond black believers to include Afrikaners in the South African Republic, Orange Free State and Cape Colony. Accepting an invitation from Dowie to visit the denomination’s headquarters in Chicago, he became embroiled in conflict with the First Apostle, sickened, as he was “by the sycophantic personality cult.”[319] On his return he conducted an independent ministry that continued to emphasise divine healing that made him one of the earliest advocates of divine healing in South Africa.

Wakkerstroom came into the picture once Pieter le Roux (1864—1943), a Dutch Reformed missionary who had been active in the vicinity since 1893, was appointed to work with a Zulu congregation. Le Roux had been a student of Andrew Murray and was drawn to Murray’s views on divine healing. He knew about Zion through Leaves of Healing, reading it on the recommendation of Buchler. Convinced by Dowie’s teachings, particularly on divine healing and the eschewal of medical help, he was not prepared to desist from preaching divine healing despite church directives to refrain. This led to his resignation from the DRC to conduct an independent ministry among Zulus in Wakkerstroom. In March 1903 he and 400 African co-workers and converts joined Dowie’s Christian Catholic Church. They invited Dowie to send a representative, and as a result, Daniel Bryant was appointed by Dowie as Overseer for South Africa. Shortly after Bryant’s arrival in 1903, 141 converts, joined by le Roux, were baptized by immersion. By 1905, a local group of 5,000 Zionists had formed, and it was largely from this base that a whole series of Zionist and later Pentecostal churches emerged.

Daniel Bryant, an American Baptist, had joined with Dowie in Chicago five years before his arrival in South Africa. Once there, his ministry was largely confined to white congregations in Pretoria and Johannesburg. With the dissolution of Dowie’s reign in Zion City, Bryant returned to America, resolved not to serve under Voliva. In sailing back in April/May 1908, his ship passed another heading for South Africa that was carrying John Lake and his Pentecostal party. If Bryant was initially hesitant about the Pentecostal message, Lake was to play a large part in disseminating it. Bryant returned to the Baptist ministry, forming his own Grace Missionary Church in a splintered Zion City. Carrie Montgomery recorded that when she preached at Zion City in 1910 the Pentecostal group joined with Bryant’s people for her services, one of which had about eight hundred in

attendance. She described Bryant as a man “who seems a wise, sane leader and who

adheres to the Scriptural teaching of divine healing as Mr Dowie taught it to the people in his earlier days.”[320]

John G. Lake (1870–1935) was among the earliest leaders to bring Azusa-initiated Pentecostalism to South Africa.[321] Lake came from a large family in Ontario that was constitutionally disposed to severe health problems. His one durable childhood memory was of a house where someone was either sick, or dying or dead. While eight of the family of sixteen died prematurely, three of the remainder were to find healing in Zion City. John, as a young man, had been afflicted with chronic rheumatism that brought him to breaking point when he suffered excruciating pain in his legs. Seeking relief, he travelled to Dowie’s Healing Home in Chicago and while there he was prayed for by an older man, and his legs straightened immediately. In 1898, his wife, whose tuberculosis had reached its terminal stage, was healed instantly. In 1901 he moved his family to Zion City, served as an elder and became a close friend of F. F. Bosworth who was to become a major healing evangelist in the 1920s. Three years later, when Dowie’s financial problems surfaced, he relocated to Chicago where he resumed a very successful business career. It was his Spirit baptism in 1907 that helped to deflect him from his prosperous lifestyle into healing evangelism in South Africa: “I am through,” he declared, “with everything in life but the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”[322] When Lake, his wife, seven children and four other missionaries left for Africa in April 1908, travelling third class, he left behind a $50,000 annual salary as well as his seat on the Chicago Board of Trade.

The family settled in Johannesburg in a home provided for them by a woman who was a stranger to them. She had met them through a vision in which she was directed to offer a home to an American missionary family of two adults and seven children. It was the start of a miracle-laden ministry that saw numerous healings, but not that of his wife Jennie. She died eight months after their arrival, her death being attributed to malnutrition and physical exhaustion. Husband and wife worked as a team in their healing ministry. As people passed through Luke’s office, ushered in line by his wife, he laid hands on them. Those who were not healed instantly were sent to another room. When Lake had finished with the many sick, he would bring into the room Jennie, whom he believed had the gift of discernment. She would proceed to reveal to the individual the secrets of their heart that were hindrances to their recovery. Many confessed to the sins in their lives thus revealed, and repented, at which point they were prayed for again, often successfully. Those who refused to repent, despite owning up to their revealed failures, went home invariably unhealed. With the death of his wife, Lake was often deeply affected by loneliness that led to his return to America in 1912. Even though his stay was limited to four years, his efforts laid claim to 1,250 preachers, 625 congregations and 100,000 converts and unnumbered healings. On his return to America, he resumed a pastoral and healing ministry with the determination to establish a chain of healing homes across the country. It was a task he was unable to complete after suffering a fatal stroke at the age of sixty-five.

Lake helped to found in South Africa a new movement, the Apostolic Faith Mission. In 1913 le Roux joined the Mission and became its President after Lake’s return to America. It was a position he was to hold for twenty-eight years. His African fellow workers still considered themselves Zionists but a majority was prepared to add to their belief system the distinctive tenets of Pentecostal teaching. It was out of this Zionist/Pentecostal intertwining that the remarkable explosion of new African Zionist churches sprang. By the year 1990, there were as many as 5,000 separate Zionist denominations that, together, accounted for 30 percent of the denominational affiliates of the black population in the country. Without doubt, this particular link between America and Africa has played a major part in the formation of Christianity in modern Africa. The establishment of the Zionist Moria pilgrimage and healing center near Pietersburg in northern Transvaal is reminiscent of Zion City in its role as a sacred space constrained by a theocratic ethos. It is the headquarters of the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), and has been described as “a local equivalent of the Vatican City in Rome or Mecca in Saudi Arabia.”[323] It is also considered a location that stands apart, and that allows it to form a contrast to the political power of Pretoria and the economic power of Johannesburg.

The ZCC’s first Bishop, Engenas Barnabas Lekganyane, initiated the first gatherings at Moria in 1910.[324] His vision was to start a Christian church that would be truly African in its customs and culture without compromising Christian values. Every Easter around one million ZCC members journey to Zion City Moria for what has become the largest religious gathering in sub-Saharan Africa. A further two pilgrimages take place each year when again the mix of preaching, prayer, healing and celebration is the spiritual fare. The whole scenario is not dissimilar, though bigger in scale, to the American camp meeting, only this time most people sleep in their vehicles. The conference has attracted the national leaders of post-apartheid South Africa. In 1992 one observer noted that “not even the presence of the political leaders Mandela, De Klerk and Buthelezi at the festival detracted from the Bishop’s glory.”[325]

The sociologist Bryan Wilson drew attention to those African movements that showed a remarkable convergence in style with Dowie’s regime in Zion City. He pointed to the acquisition of a piece of land that carried a particular significance for native churches in South Africa, both because of land scarcity and because new churches can function almost as surrogate tribes within defined territories. The self-contained Zionites living on their ten-mile square patch on the flat shore lands of Lake Michigan shared a similar predilection. The prominence that Dowie gave to healing and his dualistic acceptance of demon possession were emphases that could be absorbed readily in Africa.[326] Other Zionist practices such as triune immersion and pacifism, even the format of ministerial certificates, stem from Zion City and the Apostolic Faith Mission.[327] Dowie’s berating of drink, smoking, swearing, medicine, gambling, dancing, secret lodges, and the consumption of pork closely mirrors taboos among African Zionists, with the exception of dancing.

Dowie’s authoritarian streak was epitomized in the formation of the Zionist Restoration Host, his company of foot-soldier evangelists who took an oath of allegiance by which all personal family ties and obligations, and all relations to all human powers were declared to be subordinate to the terms of the oath. Dowie created a church with many offices, the incumbents of which wore resplendent colorful robes on occasions when liturgical trappings were requisite.[328] Both authoritarian leadership and distinctive dress characterize African Zionist churches. To the outside observer, what sets them apart is their dress, usually white robes draped with colored sashes. In the case of the ZCC, it is mainly military-type uniforms in khaki, green and gold. Dowie’s claim to be the Messenger of the Covenant, Elijah, and the First Apostle carried a titular grandiosity often outdone by African Zionist leaders. An intense devotion to the leader that allows for their privileged lifestyle is common to both movements .The lavish spending power of the Dowies, and his business acumen, are matched in Moria, whether it be the Rolls-Royce driven by Bishop Ignatius Lekganhyane, or the fleet of forty-five cars maintained by his successor, or the business empire overseen by the latest leader. In both cases spiritual power is expressed in the idiom of material symbols.[329] Rumors were rife towards the end of Dowie’s life that he had come round to accepting polygamy, a marital arrangement that some Zionist churches allow.

In Wilson’s summation, “Africans accepted those features in Dowie’s organization that suited local circumstance and crystallized their own tendencies of religious response, but Dowie’s movement provided them with a seminal model.”[330] The Zionist form of Christianity proved peculiarly attractive on African shores. For Hastings it seemed indeed to share so many themes with African traditional religions that “once it had adopted an African persona and broken any links with its white genitors, it was easily forgotten that it had anything but an African origin.”[331]

BRITAIN AND EUROPE

Dowie’s impact on European Pentecostalism, though not as profound as on parts of Africa, was still considerable. In August 1900 he left for Europe and on his return four months later was able to report that the Zion banner had been planted in England, Ireland, Scotland, France, and Switzerland. In all, he preached in thirty-two centres in Britain and Ireland, and twenty in Germany and Switzerland. In 1904 Europe was the final leg of his world tour. In April, he started his visit in France and from there proceeded to Switzerland (Zurich), Germany (Berlin), and England before returning to Zion in June. His travels did nothing to change his style. Provocative as ever, he managed to incur the wrath of those who knew something of his reputation. Medical students in London caused a riot at St. Martin’s Town Hall into which Dowie was pushed through a double cordon of policemen. The crowd howled and charged, but the police stopped hostile rushes towards the outer doors. Each student was fined £5 for his trouble. An editorial in the Daily Mail the following morning denounced the authorities for “encouraging and protecting” him: “If the students had succeeded in ducking this aged fraud, no great harm would have been done. He is able to rely on the whole strength of the police for no other purpose except to fleece the public. His meetings should be suppressed. He deserves no more consideration than the ‘welcher’ of the racecourse.”[332] In turn, Dowie downplayed the reaction to him in Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, attributing it to the fact that the protestors’ “back was up.” By contrast the meetings on the continent were “quiet and orderly.”[333]

The strength of Dowie’s influence can be gauged in the effect he had on three figures in the nascent Pentecostal movement in Britain and Europe, viz., Arthur Booth-Clibborn, Smith Wigglesworth and Gerrit Polman.

Arthur Booth-Clibborn

Arthur Clibborn (1855–1939) was born in Co. Westmeath, Ireland, into a family with a long Quaker tradition.[334] Influenced by Holiness teaching, he received his Spirit baptism in 1877 and became one of the first recruits to the Salvation Army on its arrival in Ireland. In 1887 he married Catherine (Kate) Booth, the eldest daughter of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. The newly-named Booth-Clibborns continued their work in France and francophone Switzerland, where Kate was known affectionately as “La Maréchale” (the Field-Marshall). Towards the end of the century the Booth-Clibborns grew increasingly disillusioned with the Salvation Army. The breaking point came when they ceased to dedicate the last of their ten children to its ranks. In 1900, defying the will of headquarters, they made representations to the Dutch government on behalf of pacifists in prison.

Arthur’s pacifism sprang from his Quaker background. The “Hallelujah Quaker,” as he was dubbed on his first arrival in France, remained faithful to his vow of 1881: “I stated that I could never forgo any of the essential truths of Quakerism, and I entered the work on that understanding.”[335] He also challenged the Army’s strictures on premillennialism and divine healing. He declared that he “was led into the truth of the Second Coming . . . and the Scriptural character of Divine Healing in the Faith Home of Pastor Stockmayer” in Switzerland in 1882.[336] Seated on the platform at the International Convention on Holiness and Divine Healing in London in 1885, he heard A. B. Simpson give his famous address that came to be titled “Himself.”[337] It was later printed in many different languages and sold over one million copies.

Booth-Clibborn’s interest in divine healing was further stimulated by contact with Dowie through Leaves of Healing and then by meeting him both in London and Paris in 1900. Observing the reception that Dowie received in London, he was challenged rather than dismayed. He, too, knew what it was to suffer violence in his Salvationist work on the Continent. Anyone as passionate for pacifism and divine healing as Dowie had his respect. Earlier, he had come to the conclusion that “war only came into the Christian church when healing went out. Now healing comes in and war goes out.”[338] The fact that both anti-war protest and healing at the hands of Dowie were witnessed directly by Booth-Clibborn only deepened his regard for Dowie. Any reservations he may have had were overcome when the two met in Paris, and Dowie told him “some of his own personal experiences of the power of God, and the openings of the Kingdom of Heaven to him, and the return in his own life of apostolic powers and even apostolic manifestations.”[339]

Dowie’s presence in London gave him the opportunity to test the validity of this disclosure. He was impressed that, although the parade of the City Imperial Volunteers on their return from the Boer War was greeted by a frenzy of enthusiasm, “the voice of John A. Dowie rang forth in the city, preaching the Everlasting Gospel. I noticed that this soldier of Christ was received in London with a passion of hatred only equalled by the passion of approval which met the soldiers of the City Imperial Volunteers.”[340] A healing that he witnessed impressed him even more:

I noticed that a lady who had literally staggered through the streets to Dowie’s hall, dying, half blind, crippled and blood poisoned through thirteen years of Bright’s disease, pronounced as incurable by the best doctors had been instantaneously and perfectly healed when, after a tumultuous gathering, with thousands shouting in the streets for his blood, J. A. Dowie had laid hands on her and prayed. Instantly she felt a warm stream of life pass down her face and back. She put up her hand and found the great lump was gone from the back of her neck. She looked at her crippled finger; it was straight. She rushed down stairs full of a new life. In the omnibus, on seeing a clock in the street, she shouted, “My eyesight is healed.” She has been in perfect health since then.[341]

It was the attack on Dowie in the Daily Mail that had drawn the woman to the meeting who concluded, “If the world speaks so very badly of him he must be very good, and he may be a prophet of God.”[342]

In November 1901 Booth-Clibborn detected a number of things that seemed to him to substantiate Dowie’s claims. This led him to spend the next month in intense prayer and discussion with Kate about the direction of their future ministry. She had a distinct distrust of Dowie and Zion but, despite her reservations, Arthur wrote to Dowie: “I have decided to offer myself to you, dear Doctor, for Zion, and do so, firmly believing it to be the will of God, and his Great Gift to me in answer to years of prayer. I had thoughts of starting a separate Mission till I got light about the Elijah matter, as that was the great obstacle. It could only be either a gigantic error or a gigantic truth. . . . I take it you are in the spirit and power of Elijah as the Herald of the Second Coming, the John the Baptist of the Millennial Dawn.”[343] Their resignation from the Salvation Army was announced in its newspaper the War Cry at the end of January 1902. The reason given for their leaving was expressed as their desire “to obtain liberty to preach what they speak of as ‘a full Gospel’ and a painful explanation of what they mean by a full Gospel is afforded by the announcement that the Commissioner has accepted the teaching of a person named Dowie.”[344]

In July, the Booth-Clibborns arrived in Zion City and stayed for four months. It was the beginning of a miserable time for Kate. Twice, within the first month, she defied Dowie publicly. She alone remained seated when the congregation rose to affirm Dowie as Elijah, the prophet and forerunner of Christ. When Dowie condemned William Booth for not reproving the rich, she rose and shouted that his allegation against her father was a lie. The last sermon she was permitted to preach in Zion was to a congregation of 5,000 on the biblical description of David as a man “after God’s own heart,” delivered as a riposte to Dowie’s castigation of him as “that dirty dog David.”[345] Yet, when she asked Dowie why he had not ordained her husband, he replied “It is you I want and I will not ordain him without you.”[346] But, as she wrote to her close friend, the noted social reformer Josephine Butler, “I cannot give my ten beautiful children to this man.”[347] To another friend she wrote, “so much in him revolts me and violates the highest spiritual instincts I have.”[348] No mention is made of the Dowie episode in her biography, only hints from her son Theodore that this period was for his mother “a veritable Via Dolorosa.”[349]

After spending only four months in Zion City, Kate prevailed upon her husband, against his will, to leave Zion City, though not the Zion movement. Arthur was appointed the Zion representative in the Netherlands. They lived in Amsterdam and Brussels for about two years and then moved to Paris for Arthur to take charge of the Zion work there in 1904. It was during this period that Arthur first met Gerrit Polman, of whom more later. During their year in Paris, Arthur, dauntless as ever, preached in his usual provocative style on the streets, drawing the ire of inflamed mobs. In 1905, he was attacked with an iron bar that pierced his skin. Blood poisoning set in and one leg became gangrenous. At first, he refused medical help but was eventually saved from death after undergoing four operations.

By submitting to surgery, he violated a cardinal principle of Zion and his discharge as “Overseer Clibborn” ensued when two emissaries from Chicago arrived to announce his dismissal. For the rest of his life he was crippled in his right leg which was subject to phlebitis if he walked a distance, forcing him at times to use a bath chair. He was never to be quite the same man again, more content to remain at home, writing poetry, composing over 300 hymns, playing his auto-harp and engaging in Bible study, largely in the more esoteric aspects of eschatology. As late as 1927, Kate was to write, “For the first time in long, long years, I notice how bravely he is ceasing to talk of the past and of the negative.”[350] The dark cloud of his disillusionment with Dowie is revealed in a letter he wrote in April 1908: “I see where I went astray . . . by joining Dr. Dowie and believing in his special mission. I was led into a labyrinth in that way which was not of God, and nearly killed by the devil; I lay in bed a year in Paris and barely escaped with my life.”[351]

When Booth-Clibborn arrived back in England in 1906 he was a very sick man. He stayed first at the home of Catherine Price in Brixton and this allowed him to assess Pentecostal spirituality at first hand. The Price household presented the earliest record of Pentecostal home meetings in Britain. It was through this contact that he began to identify with the new movement and, arguably, by so doing made his greatest contribution to it. Of all the early leaders, he was the one with the highest public profile in British religious circles. The Booth name lent some degree of respectability to a sorely-pressed movement living with the obloquy of charges of fanaticism and Satanic deception.[352] His periods of illness meant that never again would he be the preaching force of his former days but, by his august and benevolent presence at public meetings and conferences, he encouraged the younger leaders and was a persuasive force in bringing a wider European dimension to the leadership of British Pentecostalism.

The high public profile of his wife and the contribution of three of their sons to the wider international movement kept the Booth-Clibborn name to the fore in Pentecostal circles and beyond. He had wider and more varied experience than any of the other British leaders. As stated in the original preface of his pacifist tract Blood against Blood, he was “living at the heart of things.”[353] There was, however, one factor that militated against his achieving high leadership status in the movement. Neither he nor Kate spoke in tongues as the initial evidence of Spirit baptism. In Confidence (June 1911) it was reported that “Mr Booth-Clibborn said he had not yet spoken in tongues, and would not be satisfied until he did.”[354] That he expressed so openly his frustration indicates the importance

attached to the experience, without which leadership was virtually barred, more from a personal sense of failure than a doctrinal diktat.

His pacifism influenced many young men, such as Donald Gee, who became leaders of the Pentecostal movement in Britain and beyond. Booth-Clibborn’s internationalism contrasted with the essentially isolationist posture of the Pentecostal movement in the post-war period. It was he who responded to the Berlin Declaration of 1909 that issued from the conference representing German Pietism which damned the Pentecostal movement as demonically infiltrated. The Declaration embodied hostility towards the nascent German movement that Hollenweger held made it “the target of more harsh attacks than any other Pentecostal church in the world.”[355] Booth-Clibborn penned an article in Confidence that set out to answer the charges made against the movement. The article was written while he was visiting Europe where he had made contact recently with ten different centers, which afforded him the opportunity to sound out opinion on the Declaration: “From personal enquiry I know some of the signatories of that Declaration have not . . . examined it with the thoroughness which such a declaration required.”[356] He was the foremost among British Pentecostals to maintain a continuing involvement with the European Pentecostal scene. His familiarity with events on the continent enabled him to mount a robust defence of the new movement.[357]

It was through his influence on his own children that Booth-Clibborn made his most telling contribution to Pentecostal advance. With Kate frequently campaigning away from home, a situation made all the more necessary by the need to provide financial support for the family, Arthur played a major role in the parenting of the children in their teenage years. In November 1908, while preparing for exams to enter Cambridge University, William, the fifth-born of their ten children, was pressed by his father to attend a weekend of meetings in London which, as it turned out, stretched till the following Wednesday. On the Saturday evening, father and son attended the small mission run by his former Zion colleagues, Harry and Margaret Cantel. It was shortly after this that William received his Spirit baptism at a home in Plumstead with fifty people present. The Booth proclivity for active engagement soon surfaced: “At the age of fifteen, God graciously filled me with the Holy Spirit, and called me to the ministry. With my father, I travelled all over Holland and Germany and parts of Poland and Russia, preaching the Gospel and the message of the Pentecostal outpouring.”[358] He later trained at the Moody Bible Institute and went on to found churches in Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States. He finally settled in Portland, Oregon, where he founded Immanuel Temple, and died in 1969.

William was noted for his ability to preach in seven languages, two more than his father, his masterful violin playing, his hymn “Down from His Glory” to the tune “O Sole Mio,” and his spirited pugnacity.[359] Besides William, two other of the Booth-Clibborn brothers were to identify with the Pentecostal movement: Eric (1895–1924) and Herbert affiliated with the American Assemblies of God. In 1924 Eric and his wife Lucille and baby daughter travelled as missionaries to French West Africa, the present Burkina Faso. Within nineteen days of their arrival he died of dysentery, leaving a young widow expecting their second child, a son named Stanley. Stanley in adulthood became Bishop of Manchester (1979–92). In 1917, Herbert published his book, Should a Christian Fight? An Appeal to Christian Young Men of All Nations, in which he argued that for Christians there was no alternative to pacifism. In this, he was embracing his parents’ anti-war stance.

Harry and Margaret Cantel

Mention of the Cantels draws attention to their place in British Pentecostalism. Harry Cantel (1865–1910) was born in France in 1865. After his arrival in America, he was appointed secretary of the YMCA in New Orleans in the late 1890s. He first met Dowie in 1899 and was ordained to the ministry by him in the same year. The following year he was sent to England and later was made Overseer of the Zion work in the British Isles. His success in advancing the work of Zion in Britain earned him recognition by Dowie. In 1907 he married Margaret Fielden (1878–1926), the daughter of one of the elders in Zion City. Soon after, he travelled back to Zion to investigate the impact of Parham’s visit there to advance the Pentecostal cause. While there, he was convinced of the message, which led him to seek Spirit baptism. Back in London, he persuaded the majority of his group of the validity of the Pentecostal experience. Thus was formed by assimilation the first recognized Pentecostal meeting in Britain. As well, he and his wife established a residential home for divine healing.

Cantel’s leadership was cut tragically short by his sudden death from peritonitis in 1910. Two years later, Margaret Cantel opened a missionary guest house that had a large drawing room, commodious enough for holding services. “Maranatha,” according to Donald Gee, became “one of the best-known and best-loved Pentecostal centers not only in London, but for the whole British Isles, and far beyond.”[360] Gee recalled a meeting when the crush of people in the room caused an overspill up the staircase where Arthur Booth-Clibborn sat “beaming on everybody like an old patriarch.” Margaret Fielden Cantel died at the age of forty-nine and a tribute to her in The Latter Rain Evangel referred to her “praying for the sick and afflicted who found her Home a place of deliverance, fasting that the demon-possessed might be delivered (and they were delivered).” The writer recalled travelling with her in England and Scotland in the summer of 1922: “We found her name and her Home were household words. An aged saint, whose daughter had been marvellously delivered from demon-possession in that Missionary Home, told us that she never failed to pray daily for Mrs Cantel and everyone who passed up and down those consecrated steps.” [361] Familiarity with Dowieite teaching had clearly left its imprint on the ministry of both Cantels.

As Overseer of Zion in Britain, Harry Cantel had an impressive record. Taking the second half of 1904 as a snapshot, the documentation shows that the Restoration Host in the British Isles had visited 22,000 homes and distributed 67,000 invitation cards and printed sermons, while the Guards had “rendered efficient service.”[362] The inroads of Zion in the north of Ireland can be taken as a case study of the effort put in to extend the message of Zion. A summary for the quarter ending December 1904 showed that six workers operated in the province. Three centres were specified—Belfast, Londonderry, and Cloughmills, the latter about twelve miles from Ballymena.[363] Over 5,200 houses had been visited, almost 500 saloon bars visited, 1,500 copies of Leaves of Healing sold and 8,000 copies of Zion literature distributed. That the work of the Restoration Host was making some inroads is substantiated by two events. When five Zion missionaries were in Lurgan on Easter Monday 1904, they reported that “there was a very strong feeling against our work because of a modern Demetrius, who preaches to the Orangemen against Dr Dowie, for he is greatly enraged at the way he speaks against secret societies, thereby bringing their craft into danger.”[364] Later in the year a warning was issued to the Presbyterians in Ballymena to be aware that “a reverend disciple of the extraordinary disciple Dr Dowie is to visit [the town], and explain to those who are foolish enough to give audience to the principles of the Zionist movement.”[365]

The unnamed “reverend disciple” was none other than Harry Cantel who paid a visit to Ireland in October 1904 during which he baptized six believers in Belfast. He spent two nights in Dublin where over 1,000 attended his “limelight lectures,” though the second one had to be cut short because of “the ravings of lewd fellows of the baser sort,” but not before hundreds filled in cards to receive literature.[366] Healing services were held on both afternoons. His visits to Ballymena and Londonderry in the course of four days “were even more lawless, for the uproar centred in their Town Halls.” In Londonderry “hundreds who had been cursed with the darkness of ignorance and prejudice saw by the light of the stereopticon the realities of Zion.”[367] However, when the party reached Belfast “the haven of their desire” had been reached at last. “Vast audiences of teachable people gathered in the Exhibition Hall, both at the two limelight lectures and the Divine Healing services.”[368] The only disturbance came from “a party of students from the adjoining Medical College” who calmed down enough to ask questions of Cantel who pointed them “to the only Way of Healing.”[369] The similarity of the reactions to Dowie and to his acolytes is a measure of how far his reputation for trouble had travelled. Weight must also be given to the censorious rhetoric directed at things hitherto considered innocuous by many listeners, such as membership of Masonic and Orange lodges, and the eating of pork and the rejection of all things medical. Allied to these considerations was the religious conservatism of most audiences short in tolerance of restorationist views of Christianity.

Smith Wigglesworth

The Zion incursion into Britain and Ireland raised the public profile of divine healing, possibly also the concept of the apostolic office, and may have eased the move of some toward the Pentecostal experience. Evidence of direct links of Dowieism with Pentecostalism is scant. In Ireland, Benjamin Fisher who was baptized by Anthony Herring-Cooper, the second Zion Overseer for Ireland, is almost certainly the person who played a prominent part in the planting of the Apostolic Church in Ireland.[370] However, a more explicit link is that of Zion with Smith and Polly Wigglesworth. Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947)

became famous for his worldwide and legendary healing ministry, one that did not end with his death. Books and recordings of his sermons remain a current publishing success and he continues to draw the attention of biographers.[371] Not least among the astonishing facts that surround him and his memory is that he only became known outside West Yorkshire after he reached the age of 48.

Smith Wigglesworth, born into an impoverished family in Bradford, was forced to work from the age of six to contribute to its financial support. Without an adequate education, he did not learn to read competently until he reached adulthood and that rarely beyond the pages of the Bible. His published sermons were taken down in shorthand. The diversity of Victorian religiosity is mirrored in his spiritual journey. He was christened and confirmed in the Church of England, associated with the Methodists, attended Salvation Army meetings and was befriended by a Brethren workmate who persuaded him to receive believers’ baptism. Each of these denominations held a significant place in his life. It was at a Methodist meeting that he made a commitment to Christ at the age of eight. He spoke of his confirmation at the age of thirteen as his first conscious experience of the Holy Spirit. A young, attractive Salvation Army officer, Mary Jane (Polly) Featherstone, won his affection and they were married in 1882, both in their early twenties. The Brethren friend taught him plumbing, a trade in which he proved to be successful to the point that he was able establish a thriving business.

Polly Wigglesworth (1860–1913) proved to be the driving force behind her husband’s personal development. In later years he paid her this tribute: “She was always such an inspiration to holiness. She saw how ignorant I was, and immediately began to teach me to read properly and to write.”[372] Following her death after thirty years of marriage, he said of her that she so shaped his life that “she was practically the means of purging me through and through.”[373] Polly was converted at the age of seventeen and, blessed with a vivacious if headstrong temperament, threw herself into evangelistic outreach. On coming to the notice of William Booth, she was offered an officer commission in the Salvation Army without the requirement to undergo the usual prescribed training.[374] The fact that eighteen years into their marriage she was baptized in London by Dowie in 1900 creates something of an enigma. Usually baptism by Dowie was tied to membership of Zion. Even if baptism did not categorically include membership in Zion, it almost certainly indicated acceptance of Zion’s teaching and practices. How this connection with Zion came about has been a matter of some mystery, and the related issue of its bearing on their joint future evangelistic and healing ministry calls for some explanation, though any impression that Zion was the one determining influence on their ministry is difficult to sustain.

Shortly after their marriage in 1882, the Wigglesworths established a small mission in a rented hall in a district in Bradford that was largely unchurched. Polly did most of the preaching in the Bowland Street Mission because her husband was subject to nervous tension when in the pulpit. Notwithstanding this inhibition, he was not so handicapped when it came to preaching outdoors, and he remained quite unabashed in personal evangelism. At the same time his plumbing business prospered and it was through this circumstance that he first made contact with divine healing meetings. Leeds, nine miles from Bradford and the regional capital of West Yorkshire, was the main centre for the purchase of his plumbing supplies. It was on one of his frequent visits to the city sometime in the late 1880s that he came across a group that conducted divine healing meetings. While little is known about this body of believers, it is almost certain that they had contact with the Bethshan healing home in London under the leadership of Elizabeth Baxter and W. E. Boardman. About this time, Polly broke her official association with the Salvation Army and joined the Blue Ribbon Army, the temperance and evangelistic organization supported by Elizabeth’s husband, Michael Baxter. With this precedent to stir him, Wigglesworth started similar meetings with a Holiness ethos at his Mission in Bradford. Soon news of dramatic healings began to spread, their source identified on the scroll backing the platform, “I am the Lord that Healeth Thee” (Exod 15:26).

The Leeds/Bradford area was one of the first areas to see the establishment of the Zion movement in Britain. The first mention of Leeds in Leaves of Healing was recorded in May 1896. In the course of a sermon in Chicago, Dowie welcomed “two from England—our sister, Mrs Walshaw, and her companion, Miss Smith, one from Halifax, and the other from Leeds, England. . . . And that is not the first that have come from England. We are going to have a number this year, and we are going to have a large blessing.”[375] Lydia Walshaw was later to play a prominent part in the early Pentecostal movement in Britain, acknowledged by Gee as among the pioneers of British Pentecostalism.[376] She was the wife of a Halifax solicitor who led a company of missionary intercessors under the name of “Emmaus.” The next mention of Yorkshire is three years later under the heading, “Testimony of W. C. Clough, Leeds, England—Saved and Healed through Leaves of Healing and Zion’s Work in South Africa.”[377]

Articles published a few months later reported that the work in Leeds was growing rapidly. Bradford was first mentioned in an August 1899 edition. The report is based on a letter from Clough in which he commented on the distribution of Zion literature in the district. Evidently he had visited Zion City the previous spring and returned home with an ample supply of literature to distribute. Parts of his letter were quoted that indicated his enthusiasm to see the spread of Zionism in the area for which he was responsible. He mentioned sending literature, inter alia, to Leeds, Bradford, Wakefield, and Huddersfield, revealing also that “a good earnest man in Bradford says they would like to have a meeting there with the power to help the sick that Zion has. He says they have a nice house to meet in, but they have not the power.”[378] By August 1900, an “ordained officer,” Robert McTell, was placed in charge of the Zion work in Bradford.[379] With this background information it comes as little surprise that a number from West Yorkshire waited to be baptized by the general Overseer himself during his mission to London. Of the fifty adults baptized by Dowie on Saturday afternoon, 13 October 1900, in the Caledonian Road Public Baths, Islington, London, ten were from Yorkshire—five of whom were from Leeds and three from Bradford, of whom Polly was one and the remaining two from nearby places. That Polly alone of the couple was baptized by Dowie and not her husband calls for explanation.[380] For her husband, a Zionite baptism would have been both unnecessary and unscriptural. He had previously been baptized by immersion at the age of seventeen, having been influenced by a Brethren colleague at work. Four years earlier he had been confirmed in the Anglican Church.

Piecing together this documented sequence of events makes the link between the Wigglesworths and Zion a little clearer than has been hitherto possible.[381] The association of Polly with the Blue Ribbon Army would almost certainly have brought her into the ambit of Elizabeth Baxter whose ministry of holiness and healing was widely known, not least through the pages of the widely read Christian Herald. The newspaper, launched in 1876, was the brainchild of Michael Paget Baxter.[382] The Bethshan message firmly linked holiness and healing and throughout his entire ministry Wigglesworth stressed the connection between the two.[383] He was quoted on one occasion as saying, “My wife and I always believed in scriptural holiness but I was conscious of much carnality in myself. A really holy man once came to preach for us and he spoke of what it meant to be entirely sanctified. [After ten days of prayer], God did something for me. . . . We counted that as the baptism of the Spirit. And so, at our Bowland Mission we stood for both healing and holiness.”[384] It is possible that the “holy man” referred to was Reader Harris QC, the founder of the Pentecostal League of Prayer. The League was founded in 1891 as an interdenominational mission and prayer fellowship to promote scriptural holiness on Wesleyan Holiness lines. Harris launched the periodical Tongues of Fire in the same year.[385] The Bowland Mission became one of the centers of the League and was listed in Tongues of Fire with the Wigglesworths its stated leaders.

As the influence of Bethshan on the healing movement in Britain diminished from the late 1880s, the way was open for Zion to become the dominant player in the transatlantic healing movement. There is no indication that before 1899 the Dowieite movement made much advance on the ground in Britain. The first positive hint that things were starting to stir was the report in 1899 that “in England, Scotland and Ireland there are many gatherings of the Friends of Zion, especially in London, and in Leeds the work is growing very rapidly. The cry from the United Kingdom is very earnest, and we hope to send one or more Elders there early next year.”[386] Two months later a correspondent wrote from London that his gathering was looking for larger accommodation, adding “our little room was full last Sunday.” He rejoiced that the General Overseer was planning “to come next year, to open up the work.”[387]

This advance was preceded by two other developments that made Zion known to a growing band of British Christians. The weekly Leaves of Healing, revived in 1889, began to reach an ever-widening readership. Much of the success of the Zion message was owed to its worldwide circulation. It was by this means that W. C. Clough in South Africa and, in all likelihood, Lydia Walshaw in Halifax first became aware of Dowieism. Clough declared, “Leaves of Healing has been a great blessing to me, and to many more in Africa, and also in England. It was through [it] that I was baptised . . . by Overseer Buchler, of the Christian Catholic Church in the Transvaal.”[388] The next step in the induction of these two was to travel to the Zion work in Chicago. In the case of Lydia Walshaw this was 1896, so it is more than probable that she was acquainted with the American scene a couple of years beforehand. It can be assumed that the foundation of a substantial Zion work in the Leeds/Bradford area was being laid by anything up to five years before the appointment of Robert McTell as its recognized leader.

The earlier quotation concerning “a good earnest man in Bradford says they would like to have a meeting there with the power to help the sick that Zion has. He says they have a nice house to meet in, but they have not the power,” raises the tantalizing question as to his identity. Three details from this description can be addressed, viz. (a) “they have a nice house to meet in”; (b) “they would like to have a meeting there”; (c) “they lacked the power to help the sick that Zion has.” The possibility is that Wigglesworth was the man to meet descriptor “good earnest.” He certainly matched the “nice house” element by living in the Manningham district of the town.[389] A local history of Bradford at that period detailed that Manningham “comprises a large proportion . . . of the best residential property in the borough.”[390] As a successful business man, Wigglesworth would have had the financial resources to own a house with a lounge that was large enough to accommodate a fair number of people. It is more than likely those people who would be attracted to such meeting would be from a working-class background. The other two details are more problematic, each posing a question. Why meet in a home when the Bowland Mission was available? Is it not inconceivable that any work associated with Wigglesworth was lacking in “healing power?”

The issue of having the meeting in the home can be resolved by suggesting its purpose. It may not have been a public meeting that was in mind. It may have been more of a meeting of the more dedicated members of the Mission concerned about the direction of the work and, in comparison with news of Zionite activity in America and elsewhere, the paucity of healings in their work. The question of the missing “power to help the sick” can be related to Wigglesworth’s spiritual journey. Wilson dates the period 1885–93 when his Christian commitment was diminished, even for a period to a backslidden state. Though his restoration was completed in 1893, a sense of vulnerability may have cooled his self-esteem, even more so if he had yet to conquer the state of nervous tension that beset him during his early efforts to address an indoor meeting. This particular inhibition was a source of some bemusement to the Leeds leaders who found it surprising that he brought people to them from Bradford for healing when, as they believed, “he could get these people healed in Bradford just as easily.”[391] Possibly this remark applied to the period when “the power” was missing at Bradford. Though no definite conclusion can be drawn on the measure of the impact of Dowieism on Wigglesworth, it is certain there was some, even if it came in large part through his wife. This likelihood accords with the conclusion Gardiner reached: “It is perfectly reasonable to believe that Polly imparted much of her Zion beliefs and practices to her husband.”[392]

In a letter sent to the Boddys, he told them of a memorable day in the past: “I had the clear witness of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit 14 years ago last July [1897], and this brought a marvellous manifestation of God in special gifts to sick ones, and a constant living and seeking to bring others to Jesus.”[393] It was possible that from around that time he ceased bringing members from the Bradford mission to Leeds to be prayed for healing. The huge flag hoisted outside the Mission carried on one side in large letters the text: “I am the Lord that Healeth Thee,” and on the other: “Christ died for our sins.” The message conveyed by the flag was to become the leitmotif of his ministry, a task he could not share with his beloved Polly who died unexpectedly in 1913. His entry to the world stage will be examined in a later work.

Gerrit R. Polman

Gerrit Roelof Polman (1868–1932) and his second wife Wilhelmine were the pioneers of the Pentecostal movement in the Netherlands.[394] Gerrit was the illegitimate (“onecht” = “not genuine”) child of Coenrad Roelofs, a forty-three-year old farmer, and his unmarried twenty-eight year old stepdaughter Hendrikje Polman. Being illegitimate, Gerrit inherited his mother’s name while his middle name acknowledged his father. He was the first surviving of the six children born to the couple, three of whom died shortly after birth. His formal education did not extend beyond the elementary stage. From the age of twelve he engaged in farm work in an area largely devoted to stock-breeding. On Sundays, the family attended the Netherlands Reformed Church in Zwolle, a distance measured by an hour’s walk. As a teenager, he assisted in teaching Sunday-school classes, but it was not until his twentieth birthday that he had a conversion experience. In the same month he was conscripted into the army where his sense of obligation to witness to his fellow conscripts was tested. He was shaken out of his indecisiveness during the next Christmas holiday period after attending a Salvation Army meeting. The Salvation Army had just started in the country and it was to their ranks he attached himself in 1890 shortly after his ten months of conscripted service ended.

In November 1891, Polman left the home farm for the Salvation Army training school at Rotterdam. The core purpose of the school was to turn cadets into soul-winners for which they were equipped by visiting slum districts, and selling the Dutch counterpart of the War Cry. The material conditions faced by Army officers were demanding. Their meagre salaries were seldom met as other expenses such as rent, heating and light had to be paid first. Unsold copies of the periodical were their financial responsibility. After six months training, Polman was made lieutenant and in 1892 was assigned to Arnhem. Shortly afterwards he was elevated to the rank of Captain. Over the next five years, he ministered in nine different locations that included a stint in The Hague, which at the time had the largest corps in the Netherlands. In June 1897 he married Maria Brinkman who, before she joined the Army, was director of a nursing home at The Hague. This experience equipped her to become matron of the Army’s new nursing home at Amsterdam before her marriage.

In September 1897 Polman took charge of the Army’s land colony at Lunteren, some twenty kilometres north-west of Arnhem. The colony had been instituted two years previously for the rehabilitation of discharged prisoners and tramps from the Army’s shelters. The colony was one of the schemes to relieve poverty addressed in Booth’s best-seller In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890). Booth-Clibborn, the first Commissioner for the Netherlands, formed a high opinion of Adjutant Polman and commended him as a person who was “in every respect equal to his task. His thorough knowledge of farming enables him to bring the colony to prosperity, while his spiritual influence is a great blessing for the men.”[395] In 1899 Booth-Clibborn had the sad duty to conduct the funeral of Maria Polman who died of pneumonia one month after the funeral of their stillborn son. Polman was a fervent believer in divine healing, but unavailingly so on this occasion. Dowie’s visit to Europe in 1900 had stimulated him to raise questions about divine healing and the imminence of the Parousia with his cadets in the Army’s training school, doctrines that were anathema to General Booth. His transfer to take charge of the male training school in Amsterdam took place around the time of Dowie’s visit. Despite these many changes of place and responsibility, “he remained free of the slavish fear of superiors that the firm discipline of the Salvation Army works out in many a heart. He had always, under all chastisement, felt a strong urge for independence, and this one day led to a rupture.”[396]

The immediate cause of Polman’s departure was the resignation of Arthur and Catherine Booth-Clibborn from the Army in January 1902. The resignation of such prominent leaders stirred up tension within Dutch Salvation Army circles. The stress heightened when all officers were forced to renew their promise of loyalty to the movement. Polman refused and within a few weeks resigned from the Army. The following year, he married Wilhelmine Blekkink (1878–1961), who had been born and raised in the Dutch Indies where her father had been principal of a primary school earmarked largely for the children of Dutch expatriates. Polman’s admiration for Booth-Clibborn as a person, his pacifism, advocacy of premillennialism and divine healing, all of which ran counter to Army doctrine, appealed greatly to Polman’s independent temperament and attracted him to Zionism. Many other officer colleagues who left the Army were likewise drawn.

Among them was Albert Edward Marpurg, secretary of the Army’s social work and interpreter for General Booth on his visits to Europe. Marpurg, at the time laid aside by stress from overwork, obtained copies of Leaves of Healing from Booth-Clibborn. It came as no surprise that Marpurg and his wife, on leaving the Army, set sail for Zion City in 1902. The following November he returned and held meetings in Amsterdam, where

every Friday evening he read in translation portions from Leaves of Healing. On the

couple’s return to Zion City, it was agreed that once their studies were completed they would work among the 50,000 people of Dutch descent living in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In like manner, Polman, while still in the Salvation Army, was also gripped by reading Leaves of Healing in its German edition Blatter der Heilung. The article on the healing of Ethel Post seems to have won him over to the cause of Zion. It was given in a talk to a group of sceptical doctors at which Dowie described the healing in his usual graphic terms as “an osteo-sarcoma [or] tumorous cancer of the jaw coming out, filling up with flesh, and filth and bones.”[397]

Thus, shortly after his resignation from the Army, Polman became a member of the Christian Catholic Church. Possibly influenced by a letter from Dowie printed in Leaves of Healing that called believers throughout the world to march to Zion, the Polmans set sail for New York. At the time, a large crusade was under way for two weeks in October 1903 after being primed by 3,000 members of the Zion Restoration Host who canvassed the whole city with literature delivered to every house and business concern. The Polmans were among those baptized by immersion at Madison Square Garden on 1 November, the same day that Wilhelmine became a member of Zion. From New York they went to Zion City where they were to live for the next two years. Most of the time they stayed in Elijah Hospice, a large hotel where Albert Marpurg, now returned to Zion, had worked as a clerk.

At the Ministerial Training School Polman studied Greek and Hebrew, in both of which he was judged to have become “quite proficient.” Such effort was preparation for the Polmans to carry the message of Zion to their own country. In undertaking such a task they had to be ordained before they could lead a church, preach, and administer the ordinances, otherwise in Zion-speak, make known, “the glorious Everlasting Gospel of Salvation, Healing, and Holy Living.”[398] On 14 July 1904 they were ordained deacon and deaconess, followed in January 1906 by an act of consecration for ministry as messengers of Zion with hands laid upon them for “a special baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Their assignment was to continue and build upon the work started by Arthur Booth-Clibborn in their native country. They left immediately after the service and, by so doing, missed out on the collapse of the house of Zion.

Polman started prayer meetings immediately after their arrival in Amsterdam. Many of the twenty-five friends who first gathered were former Salvationists. This circle of believers was to become the nucleus from which Dutch Pentecostalism grew, starting towards the end of 1906 after the Polmans began to receive reports of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in America. Such reports came particularly through The Apostolic Faith, which was first distributed from Azusa Street in September 1906. This ultimately resulted in their leaving Zion and entering into the Pentecostal experience.

Stirred by reports of the Welsh and Azusa Street revivals, and enthused by reports of charismatic manifestations, the group formed round Polman became Pentecostal in 1907. In October 1907, Wilhelmine was the first to receive Spirit baptism while Gerrit had to wait until the following year at the first Sunderland Convention in 1908. The Polmans soon established themselves as leaders of the Dutch Pentecostal movement that from its earliest years established close links with the British movement. The first Dutch missionaries served with the “Pentecostal Missionary Union for Great Britain and Ireland.” In April 1908, Polman started the publication of Spade Regen (Latter Rain). From Amsterdam the Pentecostal message gradually spread throughout the country. In 1912 the attractive Immanuel Hall was opened, one of the first buildings in Europe specifically designed for Pentecostal worship. The largest part of the building provided accommodation for visitors, as well as a training school for missionaries.

From the beginning of the new work in Amsterdam the message of healing was upheld. An early announcement of meetings in Spade Regen promised “a full deliverance for spirit, soul and body is being preached.” In August 1908, Wilhelmine reported to Mary Boddy: “Our hall is just packed every Sunday and Wednesday. A great many are saved; backsliders have been saved over; many are sanctified. Demons have been cast out of several and the sick have been healed.”[399] Exorcisms seem to have a degree of prominence, at first during the public meetings but later more privately. The meetings attracted a number of spiritualist mediums, consonant with the widespread perception that the Pentecostal movement carried spiritualistic sympathies. This assumption was fed by the acceptance of spiritualism by several Reformed ministers, one of whom agreed to hold “séances on biblical basis,” and speaking in tongues. Polman believed that he had received the gift of discernment and the spiritual power to fight the adversary. In “our meetings,” he commented, “spiritists are frequently coming, but it does not take long before they are discovered as such and they do not stay unless they want to become delivered.”[400]

Though physical healing was a regular feature of the meetings, caution was exercised in publicizing specific healings. Over the first twenty-three-year period of its appearance, Spade Regen recorded a mere twenty-one healings, many of which were stated to have been verified by the medical profession. Articles on healing were quite sparse and those that did feature were largely translations from sources outside the country. Most articles made the point that healing was an integral part of the atonement, otherwise expressed as “keeping victory through the Blood.” One such article used Dowie’s tract God’s Way of Healing without acknowledging its source. Polman subscribed to Dowie’s modus operandi in the exercise of divine healing: “The first is the direct prayer of faith; the second, intercessory prayer of two or more; the third, the anointing of the elders, with the prayer of faith; and the fourth, the laying on of hands of those who believe, and whom God has prepared and called to that ministry.”[401]

Contrary to Dowie, however, Polman did not inveigh against medical help, though he maintained that reliance on faith was preferable to medical intervention. The pressure to take the way of faith exclusively was greater during the earliest decade than subsequently, but never enough to dispel a sense of ambivalence that hung over the whole issue. In a letter written by Wilhelmine to a couple who had sought medical help for their son dying of a brain condition, she advised them to call on a doctor to diagnose the illness to ensure they kept on the right side the law, giving it a purely instrumental application: “You and your dear wife indeed trust and believe firmly in God’s help, you do not lean upon human arm, thus you will not grieve God with this. It is only to obey the government.”[402] Later, the Polmans were prepared to call a doctor to attend their own children.

In December 1922, in the only article he wrote on the subject in Spade Regen, Polman wrote of his dismay surrounding the issue of medical intervention, believing it had caused great damage. He pointed a finger at an unidentified healer who apparently condoned the call on doctors, but made it a schismatic issue. His accusation was that the man “has made a doctrine out of it, formed a sect from it, and has condemned others who do not believe the same.”[403] In this he differed from one of his compatriots, the lay evangelist C. R. van Leeuwen. Van Leeuwen developed an independent healing ministry in Amsterdam, and was involved in the running of a faith home named “Eben-Haezer” in Muiderberg within ten miles of the city. By his own reckoning he claimed 4,000 healings in the period c.1894–1901. He was sympathetic to Dowieism, and was the publisher a

paper Zion Boodschapper (Zion Messenger). He took the Dowie line in his scorn of medical science. In 1910, the Netherlands Reformed Church in Muiderberg issued a warning to its members against the people of the faith home. Van Leeuwen’s involvement in the healing ministry was illustrative of similar groups dotted throughout the country. Their more extreme views in all likelihood dampened any inclination on Polman’s part to overplay healing.[404] His greater struggle was to convince others of the distinctive Pentecostal position on Spirit baptism and charismatic gifting.

The Pentecostal work at Amsterdam became a model for Pentecostals in neighboring countries. Alexander Boddy spoke of Amsterdam as “the purest work in Europe . . . in some senses, an object lesson to leaders in other centres.”[405] Several leaders from Germany and Belgium received their Spirit baptism in Amsterdam. As a couple, the Polmans had an extensive ministry in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, France and Great Britain. They were regular speakers at the main international conferences (Sunderland, London, Mulheim and Zurich). Polman participated in the International Pentecostal Council that held meetings during 1912–14. They hosted the International Pentecostal Conference in Amsterdam in 1920. It was the first occasion after the Great War for European leaders to assemble again. After many years of separation, Arthur Booth-Clibborn was able to meet up again with Polman, his old Salvation Army protégé and former Dowieite colleague. The Irishman had played a major part in Polman’s personal development. His Salvation Army years taught him organizational and communication skills while Booth-Clibborn had activated his espousal of pacifism. Dowie introduced him to the “advanced truths” of divine healing, baptism by immersion, premillennialism and fired an expectation for the restoration of charismatic gifts. Where he did not follow Dowie was in his rejection of the latter’s agenda to” smash every other church in existence.” By contrast, Polman’s aspiration lay in Pentecostalism becoming the first-fruits of a revivification of the Christian church in its global witness.

311. Blumhofer, “A Pentecostal Branch,” 4.

312. Balmer, Encyclopaedia of Evangelicalism, 487.

313. Harrell, All Things Are Possible, 15.

314. Walter Hollenweger, who was before his retirement Professor of Mission, University of Birmingham, England, knew Branham and interpreted for him in Zurich. He said of Branham, “He possessed an extraordinary diagnostic gift and could identify the illnesses (sometimes even the names) of persons he had never seen. Unfortunately, his healing prognosis was accurate only in rare cases.” (Hollenweger, Pentecostalism, 229.)

315. Gardiner, Out of Zion. Gardiner lived in Zion as a boy and was converted at one of its Faith Home meetings.

316. Quotations from Blumhofer, “A Pentecostal Branch,” 5. A few at the time of his death were prepared to go much further by denying his physical death, a veneration that is normally reserved for those who achieve cult status. The Washington Post published a remark made by an elder of the New York Zion Church that was overheard on the day of Dowie’s funeral. The man declared, “It is ridiculous to say he has died. He is immune from death and this he will demonstrate by appearing on the earth, gifted with more power than he has hitherto possessed.” (Washington Post, 11 March 1907, 18).

317. Anderson, “The Segregated Spirit,” 229.

318. Burpeau, God’s Showman, 65.

319. Ibid., 66.

320. TF, September 1910, 195.

321. An account of the people and events that softened South Africa for Pentecostalism is found in Burgess, DPCM, 227–38. The preaching of the Xhosa prophet Ntsikana (d.1821) as its earliest reference.

322. Liardon, God’s Generals, 177.

323. Anon, “Moria to become local Mecca,” 23 February 2005. Online.

324. The ZCC adopted a biblical name for Jerusalem that, in turn, was related to the ancient religious site of Mt. Moriah where Abraham was to sacrifice his son. Dowie harbored the ambition that Jerusalem would become the final destination for his Zion movement.

325. Anderson, Zion and Pentecost, 145.

326. Something like 15 percent of those who join the ZCC does so because they seek healing. People in black townships in South Africa are still largely underprivileged, making efficient medical facilities scarce and expensive. (Anderson, “Prophetic Healing.” Online)

327. Maxwell, “Historicizing Christian Independency,” 251.

328. When Dowie visited London in 1904, he was protected by the “London Company of Zion Guard, uniformed as in Zion City.” The Guards were first recruited to patrol the neighborhood of the healing homes in Chicago around 1899 to prevent vandalism. They wore uniforms similar to that of the police. Their cap badge was a bronze dove with an olive leaf in its beak flying over floodwater across which the word “Patience” was braided in gold letters. Bibles were carried in their holsters. (See Robinson, Pentecostal Origins, 41.)

329. Chidester, Christianity, A Global History, 465.

330. Wilson, Magic and the Millennium, and Third-World Peoples, 57, n. 30.

331. Hastings, The Church in Africa, 1450–1950, 500.

332. New York Times, 24 October 1900, 7. A “welcher” here is a person who did not honor a racecourse bet.

333. LH, 18 April 1905, 828.

334. This section on Booth-Clibborn is based on Robinson, Pentecostal Origins, chapter 3.

335. Scott, The Heavenly Witch, 54.

336. Wiseman, Elizabeth Baxter, 224.

337. The theme of the address was that it is Christ himself who is greater than any momentary blessing of healing or sanctification.

338. Confidence, February 1913, 36.

339. LH, 26 July 1902, 463.

340. LH, 21 June 1902, 289. The Volunteers were raised by the Lord Mayor of London and equipped by the City Corporation. They sailed for South Africa in January 1900 and returned the following October.

341. LH, 21 June 1902, 289.

342 Ibid., 289.

343. “Our Loss in Holland,” in The War Cry, 25 January 1902. At this point, the Booth-Clibborns had been assigned to Holland, very much against the wish of Kate who harboured a special affinity with France.

344. The War Cry, 25 January 1902.

345. Scott, Heavenly Witch, 202.

346. Van der Laan, Sectarian Against His Will, Netherlands, 65.

347. Scott, Heavenly Witch, 203.

348. Ibid., 203.

349. Strachan, The Maréchale, 201.

350. Scott, Heavenly Witch, 212.

351. Letter, 7 April 1908, in Cloud of Witnesses to Pentecost in India, (No. 6, 1908).

352. During William Booth’s lying-in-state 150,000 people filed past the coffin. In 1912, on the day of the funeral, offices in the City closed and 40,000 lined the streets. Queen Mary was among those who attended the funeral service. Such was the degree of family rupture between Kate and her father that a period of seven years elapsed between their last contact and her attendance at his deathbed.

353. Booth-Clibborn, Blood against Blood, 3. While based in the Netherlands, the Anglo-South African [Boer] war (1899–1902) raged. Arthur wrote the book as a protest against the war. The first edition was published in the early part of the first decade of the century.

354. Their son confirmed that they never did, but added that “all their sympathies were with the Outpouring. . . . How could it be otherwise when nine of their children received their Pentecost.” (Booth-Clibborn, The Baptism in the Holy Ghost, 74.) A. B. Simpson was another who sought the tongues-evidential experience for five years without success, and distanced himself and the majority of the CMA from the movement.

355. Hollenweger, Pentecostalism, Origins, 337.

356. Confidence, August 1910, 183. The word ordering in the sentence has been changed.

357. His line of defence was to make play with the charge that the Pentecostal movement was “from below”: “Brethren, is it not time something did come from below, from the dust, from the nothing; from our uttermost repentance and humiliation, from the midst of an absolute acceptance of despisal and death at the hands of the world”? (Confidence, August 1910, 184.)

358. Booth-Clibborn, “Too Much.” Online.

359. The story is told of him that in dispute with an Australian pastor in Sydney during which he did not get his way, he started to wrestle with him. The pastor said of him later that “in Queensland they still talk of his sermons. No one ever preached like him. He was a genius if ever there was one.” (Chant, Heart of Fire, 110)

360. Gardiner, Out of Zion, 241. Gee received his Spirit baptism at the home.

361. LH, April 1926, 13.

362. LH, 11 March 1905, 677. When Dowie visited London in 1904, he was protected by the London Company of Zion Guard, uniformed as in Zion City. They were first recruited to patrol the neighborhood of the healing homes in Chicago around 1899 to prevent vandalism.

363. LH, 11 March 1905, 677.

364. LH, 20 August 1905, 580.

365. The Irish Presbyterian, November 1904, 176.

366. The “limelight lectures” used the stereopticon, a “magic lantern” projector that allowed one image to dissolve into another.

367. LH,18 March 1905, 710.

368. Ibid., 710.

369. The medical school was that of Queens University Belfast. The Exhibition Hall was most likely the civic Ulster Hall.

370. LH, 27 January 1906, 400. Though Fisher’s baptism took place in Barrow-in-Furness, England, that makes the conjecture even more likely since Belfast and Barrow were major shipbuilding centres at the time with a tradition of migration of workers between the two. Anthony C. Herring-Cooper took up his position in 1904 in succession to Daniel Bryant, the first Overseer, after the latter was sent as Overseer to South Africa. Herring-Cooper joined Zion through his healing from chronic constipation, having received encouragement to seek healing from reading testimonies in Leaves of Healing.

371. The most recent biographies by British writers are Cartwright, The Real Wigglesworth, and Wilson, Wigglesworth.

372. Frodsham,. Smith Wigglesworth, 10.

373. Wilson, Wigglesworth, 25.

374. Hywel-Davies, Life of Smith Wigglesworth, 38.

375. LH, 8 May 1896, 439.

376. Gee, These Men I Knew, 86.

377. LH, 13 May 1899, 439.

378. LH, 12 August 1899, 807.

379. LH, 25 August 1900, 570.

380. Gardiner makes the point that, “Usually baptism in water by Dr Dowie was followed by becoming a member of Zion.” While baptism did not necessarily entail membership of Zion, “it most certainly included belief in Dr Dowie’s teaching and practices.”

381. Anon., Healing Evangelists 1881–1957.

382. His wife was a frequent contributor to the periodical and some of her articles were later published in book form under the title Divine Healing.

383. When he became Pentecostal, he was adamant that “there must be a purging of the old life. I never saw anyone baptised [in the Spirit] who was not clean within.” (Hywel-Davies, Smith Wigglesworth, 60.) He accepted the three-stage sequence of conversion-sanctification-Spirit baptism that characterized the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, as against the two-stage conversion/Spirit baptism of the Reformed-Baptistic tradition. The two positions stirred the Finished Work Controversy, which caused a major split in the early decades of American Pentecostalism.

384. Hywel-Davies, Life of Smith Wigglesworth, 59–60.

385. That divine healing, if not particularly stressed, was not dismissed by the League is suggested in a brief obituary of a member. In Tongues of Fire a tribute was paid to Mrs F. W. Staveley who had been the founder in 1883 of the “Berachah” healing home at Stockport, referred to as the “Liverpool Bethshan.” (Tongues of Fire, February 1905, 5)

386. LH, 28 October 1899, 561.

387. LH, 16 December 1899, 252.

388. LH, 13 May 1899, 561.

389. LH, 3 November 1900, 64. Their listed address is given as 70 Victor Road, Manningham, Bradford, Yorkshire.

390. Anon, “History of Manningham,” 7. The book was published post-1895, but probably not much later. Bradford was the leading centre of the British worsted cloth manufacture and there are indications that many of the Zion sympathizers were machine operatives in the mills. Wigglesworth would have been a cut above them in income.

391. Wilson, Wigglesworth, 33.

392. Gardiner, Out of Zion, 244.

393. Confidence, October 1908, 11 (emphasis added).

394. The biographical detail is based on Van der Laan, Sectarian Against his Will, 199.

395. Ibid., 80.

396. Ibid., 80. The quotation is from Reformed pastor G. A. Wumkes in his study of the Pentecostal movement in the Netherlands published in 1916.

397. Dowie, “You Dirty Boy!’ 30–31.

398. LH, 17 July 1904, 408.

399. Van der Laan, Sectarian Against his Will, 242.

400. Ibid., 243.

401. Ibid., 244–45.

402. Ibid., 245.

403. Ibid., 245.

404. Mrs Polman’s caution is revealed in her remark about those claiming the gift of prophecy. She was of the opinion that “if we had accepted every prophecy that had been sent to us, we should all have been dead, but such are all put in the waste-paper basket.” (Van der Laan, “Proceedings, 1987,” 78–79.)

405. Confidence, June 1909, 131, 134.

4

The Feminine Contribution

CROSSING THE DIVIDE FROM HOLINESS TO PENTECOST

One of the more novel features of the healing movement was the role of women leaders in shaping its theology and practice. Outside of exclusively female settings, women rarely attained to leadership position in mainstream churches despite their numerical superiority within them. The ideology of “separate spheres” that based its justification on supposedly innate gender differences was not to be dispelled without prolonged effort. Geddes and Thompson’s influential The Evolution of Sex (1899) described men as “katabolic” (energetic), women as “anabolic” (passive). From this it was deduced that men alone could meet the requirements of engagement with the market place, while women presided as the “angel of the house”—a perception generally accepted by both parties. However, from around 1890 societal changes were subtly reshaping gender politics. One change is taken here as a representative exemplar of the process, viz. the so-called “the revolt of the daughters,” that reflected, in part, the increase in the number of young middle-class women who had received a secondary education and whose expectations and self-confidence had been quickened by the spate of new private schools for girls–15,000 in England in 1895.[406]

In January 1895, an article by Blanche Crackanthorpe entitled “The Revolt of the Daughters” appeared in the periodical The Nineteenth Century. The writer reported that “a habitué of London society” had been heard to remark that in a very large percentage of households “war, open or concealed” existed between mothers and daughters, and it was “serious.”[407] It had reached such a state that a leading London doctor had become concerned about a new phenomenon in his practice, to wit that of mothers “broken down in body and perplexed mind” over difficulties with their daughters. Likewise daughters consulted him whose nerves had “gone wrong” because their mother neither understood nor sympathized with them. For Crackanthorpe, the situation was such that she believed “the psychological moment has arrived in which to probe, to diagnose, and to prescribe for, the hidden disease.” In fact, the “disease” had been identified and named as “neurasthenia” by the American neurologist, George Miller Beard in 1869. It was an indeterminate medical condition, one that gave rise to a state of nervous exhaustion, characterized by fatigue, headache, irritability, and ill-defined physical and emotional symptoms. Women were in the majority of those affected, and were prescribed a different treatment regime from men.

Joining the fray was Alys Pearsall Smith who contributed a further article to The Nineteenth Century. Alys was the daughter of Robert and Hannah Whitall Smith, leading figures both in America and Europe in the Higher Life movement in the 1870s, and the catalyst behind the Keswick Convention. In the essay she complained about the discriminatory expectations that middle-class parents have for their sons as against their daughters. Grown-up sons, she expostulated, started on an independent career, while daughters “are condemned to a life of dependence at home, their energies limited to the social and domestic duties of the household, all their talents cramped and thwarted, and every impulse to do something for the world outside treated as unwomanly and revolutionary.”[408] She saw the revolt of the daughters less a revolt against the “conventionalities,” more a rejection of the widely accepted view that a woman belonged to other people, but now “she demands to belong to herself.” Alys at this stage in her life lived with her parents in England, though unusually for her time, she travelled unchaperoned across the Atlantic to attend during term time Bryn Mawr College. Bryn Mawr was a women’s liberal arts college located ten miles west of Philadelphia, launched in 1886 as a Quaker institution. To the seventeen-year-old Bertrand Russell, later renowned intellectual, who first met her in a neighbor’s home, she seemed more emancipated than any woman he had ever met. Though Alys was five years older than him, he fell in love with her at first sight and they were married five years later, in what turned out on his part to be a loveless marriage, the first of his four.

Alys, admittedly, was not ahead of other women who were to become leading figures in different spheres of activity. Her interests were in the temperance movement, women’s rights, and socialism. Among the women before her, two were pivotal in the rise of the healing movement on the eastern side of the Atlantic—Dorothea Trudel in Switzerland, and Elizabeth Baxter in England.[409] W. E. Boardman, who was to become a prominent healing and holiness advocate, found the biography of Trudel “somewhat startling,” in that it changed his negative take on divine healing. A. J. Gordon attested to her name being “highly honored” and remarked that the story of her life and labors “has been widely read and has caused great searchings of heart in many who have pondered it.” The biographer of Mrs Baxter also implied that she was the “real founder” of Bethshan, the healing home in London that became the focal point for the healing movement in Britain in the 1880s.[410] Boardman, its putative founder, readily acknowledged that “in the little corps of Bethshan, the Lord has made some of His precious daughters elders in the faith. I know the Lord uses them just as freely, if not more so, than He uses me.” In this chapter a study of two equally forceful American women examines the contributions of Maria Woodworth-Etter and Carrie Judd Montgomery to the advocacy and practice of divine healing.

The chapter ends with two Excursuses. The first looks at the gender complexities surrounding the neurasthenia “epidemic” at the turn of the century; the second examines the contested roles played by the Divine Healing and Christian Science movements in combating it.

MARIA WOODWORTH-ETTER: A MINISTRY OF POWER ENCOUNTERS

Maria Beulah Woodworth-Etter (1844–1924) shared a background common to a number of other Holiness/Pentecostal leaders that, on the face of it, would appear to be the sine qua non for their distinctive ministry. Such was the common thread of their difficult early life that it led one historian of the Pentecostal movement to comment: “Indeed, personal tragedy so closely preceded the conversions of some that one is all but compelled to recognize a causal relationship between these relationships.”[411] Born in Ohio, Maria Underwood was only twelve years of age when her alcoholic father died suddenly, allegedly of sunstroke. Her mother was left with a family of eight children with little to support them. The daughters were forced to leave home to find work, and thus were denied a formal education. The family had limited religious involvement but, despite that, Maria was converted at the age of thirteen through attending a Disciples of Christ meeting.[412] In her teenage years she developed an abiding sense of a call “to go out in the highways and hedges and gather in the lost sheep.”[413] The only way she could see this aspiration being realized was to marry an earnest Christian man engaged in mission work. When she did marry, it was to Philo Woodworth, a Civil War veteran and small-time farmer. Income was small and tragedy frequented their family with the death of five of her six young children. Her own health was so delicate that at times she was close to death. Her husband, who had suffered a serious head injury in the Civil War, became overburdened by their distressing circumstances and succumbed to moodiness, probably depression, which she described as “derangement.” They were divorced in 1891, the year before Philo died. The one daughter who survived did not outlive her mother. She died in 1924 from injuries received in a bus accident. The one bright spot in her personal life was her supportive marriage to Samuel Etter in 1902 that was to end with his death in 1914.

Maria edged her way into preaching despite her numerous handicaps. Neither the Disciples nor her husband countenanced women preaching. She had little formal education and when she first tried to study “everything seemed empty and vacant.”[414] However, once she attached herself to a local Quaker meeting her life began to change. It was among them that she received what she claimed as her baptism in the Holy Spirit in answer to a prayer for an “anointing.” She said of the experience that it gave her a “power that has never left me.”[415] During the same period, she experienced a series of visions that deepened her faith and quickened her call to evangelize. Her growing success as an evangelist led to her taking up an itinerant ministry from 1880, just after the death of her fifth child. Early on, the United Brethren and then the (Winebrenner) Churches of God supported her financially in her evangelizing in the Midwest states. These two churches allowed her to operate as an independent evangelist, open to the call of different denominations to conduct local missions. For a short time she assisted, in an unspecified way, in the work of D. L. Moody in New York and had occasion to attend one of A. B. Simpson’s meetings. It soon became obvious that she was a preacher of a different stamp from either of these two leaders.

The direction of her ministry changed dramatically following her mission in a Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in Indiana in 1883. She found the church had

become so formal that she felt “it would require a great display of the power of God to convince them of the reality of experiential religion.” For three nights she prayed for God “to display His power in His own way, to show the people that [he] was working.” Then the unexpected happened, a scene that was to be reproduced on a larger scale and in stages throughout her many years of active evangelism:

The third day one of [two] aged sisters fell prostrate and became cold and rigid, as if dead, with no signs of life excepting the beating of her pulse. We laid her on the pulpit sofa. She remained there the rest of the day, and during the evening meeting two other ladies fell over in the same way. . . . Several of the brothers and sisters stayed and sang and prayed all night with them. The next day six others fell over; one young lady was overpowered while standing her eyes wide open. A sweet smile was on her face. It was lighted up with the glory of God, and she looked like an angel. She stood that way about two hours. They then carried her home with five others. . . . I had never seen the like.[416]

Scenes like this attracted the local press and led to thousands attending her meetings attracted by the publicity, and she soon became dubbed the “trance evangelist.” The national press became involved when she held a mission in Hartford City, Indiana, in 1885 when twenty reporters were assigned to the story.

The Cincinnati Enquirer was one of the papers that gave her a fair press while others were scathing. One headline story was the conversion of one of the leading citizens of the community. John Cantwell was a leading lawyer in the state and well known for his religious scepticism. When he attended one of her meetings he was fascinated when he saw Woodworth-Etter in one of her trances. He watched as she stood at times “with her face and hands raised toward heaven, and then at other times as tears streamed down her face all the time going through the motions of preaching and pleading with sinners to come to Christ.” Intrigued by what he had seen, he invited her to his home. Maria seized the opportunity to tell her own story: “I told him of more of my experience than I had ever told anyone. While we were talking the power of God fell upon us all. I was almost blind with the glory of God. My hands looked transparent. He broke down and began to weep. We all got on our knees. This was the first time this strong man, this tall cedar, had ever bowed before the living God.”[417] News of Cantwell’s conversion spread quickly, and opened the way for other local notables to come to the mourner’s bench in the Cincinnati Opera House.

Maria B. Woodworth-Etter

A new dimension was added to her ministry later in 1885 when she began her healing ministry. She explained its provenance simply: “The Lord showed me . . . that I had the gift of healing and laying on of hands for the recovery of the sick.” This claim to divine revelation came at a time when she was exhausted while conducting a revival in Columbia City, Indiana. Her initial reaction was one of reluctance to engage in such a ministry because she assumed that the preaching of such a doctrine “would bring all the cripples in the country, and I would neglect the salvation of souls. The Lord showed me He would take care of the work.”[418] From then on, her fame among her supporters and notoriety among her critics rested on her seeming ability to induce trances and bring healing at most of her revivalist meetings. Her methods were consciously very different from the Presbyterian reserve of A. B. Simpson. When she attended one of his meetings at New York in 1885 she wrote that she “was surprised to see it so cold. Not one was saved or healed, and no signs of the Holy Ghost baptism.” Simpson did not favor public and fevered displays of emotion and cautioned that praying for the sick “can never be made a professional business or a public parade. . . . We hope the wonder-seeking spirit will not be allowed to take the place of practical godliness and humble work for the salvation of men.”[419]

Woodworth-Etter began to take a different trajectory, pioneering a new approach to healing that was to prove the harbinger of the “power evangelism” that came to the fore at the end of the twentieth century, and closely identified with the self-styled Third Wave and John Wimber.[420] Wacker expressed her role in the mot juste that Woodworth-Etter was among those who “made ecstatic behaviour normative” in the public meetings of the growing evangelical subculture of Holiness revivalism and Pentecostalism.[421] She was among the first, if not the first, to introduce the healing line or queue and popularized the trance state as a sign of being “under the power.” At her mission in Muncie, Indiana, where the scoffers and infidels “were the first to fall under the slaying power of God,” there were “dozens lying around pale and unconscious, rigid, and lifeless as though in death.” In 1913, while facing a charge of obtaining money under false pretences at Framington, west of Boston, she was asked by the prosecutor about the allegation leveled that she used hypnotism in her meetings. She responded: “In the largest of my audiences I have known hundreds of people struck down by the power. I have never studied hypnotism. Noted hypnotists from Europe have come to my meetings to investigate this wonderful power which has come over me hundreds of times, and many have said this power is so different from hypnotic power. Some of them have even said, ‘If there is a God, this is God.’”[422] The phenomenon was to come later (c.1994–2000) to widespread notice in the Toronto Blessing where it was more often referred to as being “slain in the Spirit,” though as a state it was not unfamiliar in religious awakenings throughout history.[423]

The excitement that surrounded Woodworth-Etter’s ministry was as attractive to some as it was repellent to others. Carrie Judd Montgomery who attended the revival in Oakland in 1889–90 was inspired by what she observed: “I have never before or since attended any gathering where there was such conviction upon the people. . . . The noise of penitential prayer went forth like the sound of a wailing sea. I had never seen such shining faces. . . . Mrs Woodworth was wonderfully anointed when she preached. The power of God rested upon many of the people in a remarkable way and there were unusual manifestations of the Lord’s presence in the midst.”[424] A few reporters and editors acknowledged that the revivals were beneficial to the religious and social life of their communities but the great weight of professional and editorial opinion was sceptical and hostile.

A reporter at the Oakland revival made an entirely different assessment to that of Montgomery. For him, the services produced “mental debauchery.” She was dubbed “the voodoo priestess” and there were stories that carried unflattering headlines such as “A Farcical Religion,” “Cataleptic Capers,” and “Under a Woman’s Spell.”[425] A New England journalist reported that the interior of the mission tent resembled “a veritable madhouse” and made frequent use of the adjective “cataleptic,” some lying for hours without moving a muscle. Others continually embraced and kissed, some shook “to and fro in a tango movement,” and some performed a “turkey-trot sway” as if they were in a “cabaret or hootchy-kootchy show.” It was all too reminiscent of “the tabled confusions of Bedlam.”[426] One report in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1887 gave the grounds for such irritation:

When the excitement was at its whitest heat Mrs Woodworth seemed ubiquitous. One moment she would face her shrieking auditors from the platform, wringing her hands, screaming to God for mercy in a voice that sounded high and shrill above the wailings of her congregation; the next, prostrate upon her face, tearing her hair, and writhing in the imaginary embrace of some demon from below; then flying about among the people, encouraging, arguing, commanding them to help her drive the fiend from their midst; again upon the stage, stamping her feet tragically upon the imaginary form of the “Old Boy” himself, and then, as the great climax to her exhausting efforts, shrieking “Victory!” at the full power of her lungs.[427]

However, her most unexpected critic was none other than John Alexander Dowie who at first had given Maria his support. In an article, he declared that her writings and preaching showed that she “is ignorant of the very first principles of the truth of God concerning the doctrine of divine healing. . . . Her ‘so-called ‘revelations’ are but shameful diabolical delusions.”[428] Woodworth-Etter put his attack down to his people losing confidence in him and attending her meetings instead, provoking him to become “mad with jealousy.” In attributing her teaching to the devil, he had committed the unpardonable sin, and she was content to leave him in “the hands of God.”[429]

A recurring motif in Woodworth-Etter’s evangelism was that of “power.” Dowie was forceful in his denunciation of this emphasis:

Everything is subordinated to the continuous craving, croaking cry for “power,” and to a declaration over and over again that that “power” is present, “the very same power that came on Pentecost!” Hence she is continuously declaring that men and women must come up within reach of her touch and influence to there confess their sins and receive the “power.” She declares this “power” is the power of the Holy Ghost, and is in accordance with Joel 2:28–29 and Acts 2:16–18, and women of all ages and children and young people of both sexes have come under “the influence,” as she calls it, and trances, dreams, visions and revelations “from the Lord” are

alleged to have been given to these.[430]

As far as Woodworth-Etter was concerned, those like a student from one of the Cleveland colleges who spoke lightly of the power of God during one of her meetings, would have to face the consequences. This particular individual collapsed on his way out and had to be carried to his home. One of the city ministers, who likewise dismissed the power in one of the meetings, found himself unable the same night to preach in his own church for “God had shut his mouth. He came back to our meeting the next day to make confession. He said God had brought him down through a wonderful experience, and he wanted to warn the people not to fight the power of God in those meetings.”[431]

Maria acknowledged that she was totally dependent on the Holy Spirit. Often, if not always, when preaching she had no idea what she should say, but invariably the power was given and “All I had to do was to open my mouth.”[432] However, there were occasions when she had to admit her powerlessness to control some of the more bizarre manifestations such as featured in her tent crusade in Oakland in 1890. Her dismay found expression in the local press when she told a reporter that “a great many of these manifestations are made by those who are possessed of the devil and have not the power of God, and to the unconverted all cases look alike.”[433] One man who came out of a trance barking like a dog finished up hospitalized in a mental institution. She alleged he had been paid by others to disrupt the service and had been taken over by Satan for making sport of the power of God. It was a defense that threatened to undermine any legitimacy it may have claimed.

The power evangelism practised by Woodworth-Etter was deemed essential for the same reason as it was later espoused by Wimber and other like-minded exponents a century later.[434] The rationale sustaining it maintains that “any system or force that must be overcome for the gospel to be believed is a cause for a power encounter. . . . Power encounters [are] the clashing of the kingdom of God with the kingdom of Satan.”[435] It was a scenario played out often in Maria’s meetings. One benighted soul found himself centre stage in this two-kingdom clash: “For five years I was devil-possessed. . . . I was taken to Sister Etter’s meeting in Chicago. . . . They tried to take me to the chair to be prayed for. Immediately I got angry and began to curse and swear, the devils taking full possession. It took five men to hold me. Sister Etter began to rebuke the insane and all other devils to come out. The power of Satan got broken. The devils came out screaming.”[436]

This prominence given to raw spiritual power can be set in a context that views such manifestations as exemplifications of a paradigmatic shift within the broad evangelical subculture. In this scenario each power encounter can be understood as the engagement of the divine with the human in ways barely conceived since the days of the primitive church in placing spiritual power in the hands of otherwise unremarkable believers. The history of western Protestantism over five centuries has been encapsulated in a series of epochs defined by the three successive leitmotifs of pardon, purity, and power.

In this formulation the magisterial Reformation contended with the issue of pardon (justification), the Pietist/Methodist/ Holiness tradition with purity (sanctification/perfectionism), and the Pentecostal/Charismatic with power/empowerment. In this schema, Woodworth-Etter played a significant part. A journalist, describing her revival in Hartford City, Indiana, in 1885, wrote indecorously of her effect on the rougher element in the town: “By some supernatural power she just knocks ‘em silly when they are not looking for it, and while they are down she applies the hydraulic pressure and pumps the grace of God into them by the bucketful.”[437] Such a battled-scarred spirituality would have little sympathy for the modern concept of the “theology of weakness.”[438]

In her theological understanding of healing Woodworth-Etter was at one with the radical healers. She was not an original thinker on the subject and is open to the accusation of plagiarism in formulating her ideas on the topic. Warner has shown that her work Questions and Answers on Divine Healing (1904, rev. 1922) is almost word for word the same as that found in The Grace Healing (1899) written by J. W. Byers.[439] Nevertheless, Questions and Answers can be taken as an accurate representation of her position on healing throughout her long ministry. When it came to healing, she exceeded other healing evangelists as assessed by the number who claimed healing under her ministry. She took a conventional stance on the radical healing triad, treated here in the sequence faith-means-atonement.

Wacker pointed out that Pentecostals turned healing grace into a healing contract. Where other Christians considered prayer for healing as more petition for God’s favor, Pentecostals considered it more as a causal agent. F. F. Bosworth likened faith for healing to a move on a board game where each player moves in turn: “Our move is to expect what he promises when we pray, which will cause us to act our faith before we see the healing: “because the healing comes in the next move, which is God’s move.”[440] Such an understanding led to a boldness that persuaded Maria to affirm that “God will answer the prayer of faith, even if he has to bring all heaven down.”[441] Again, “Jesus will be to us just what our faith takes Him for”;[442] therefore, “If we waver or doubt, we should not expect anything, for God will not hear us.”[443] To the query about recourse to medicine, her response was that the Bible “nowhere commands the use of medicine with prayer and faith.” In practice, this view is not as stark as it looks. In an interview given in 1914 when asked about medical assistance for her terminally ill husband, she told the reporter that doctors had treated him. She enlarged: “I don’t tell people not to see doctors, you know; but I do tell them, when doctors have failed to cure them, ‘come to the Lord.’”[444] Although she did not advise against medical help, she was of the view that those not healed remain so from a lack of faith, a deficiency she associated with her second husband. When tackled by reporters to explain why she could claim healings for strangers in her meetings while her husband was prevented by ill health, she retorted that he would remain an invalid until he could accept his healing by faith. Such stridency was premised on the radical reading of such verses as Isaiah 53:5 as carrying the irrevocable promise of healing through Christ’s atoning work on the cross.

In contradistinction to the older view that Christ’s miracles were for the sole purpose of substantiating his divinity, she was swift to disagree, using the potent analogy of “law”: “No. He healed according to the law of redemption, and because of his great compassion to suffering humanity.”[445] She expressed it more baldly, “Divine healing is taught in the Atonement, as much as the salvation of the soul is.”[446] Other biblical authorization was summoned: notably, the charismatic healing powers set out in 1 Corinthians 12:9; the ministry of church elders to the sick in James 5:14; the eschatological expectation of an end-time “Latter Rain” outpouring as was read into Joel 2:28–32.[447] However, of all the biblical endorsements for the ministry of healing it was the atonement that was foundational: “Divine healing is a redemption blessing for the entire Holy Spirit dispensation.”[448] When Carrie Judd Montgomery visited the remarkable revival in Dallas, Texas, in 1912, she remarked that “it is interesting to note that Mrs Etter teaches healing in the Atonement (in the same way that we were taught by the Holy Spirit Himself many years ago”). There is a suggestion in this comment that by this stage the atonement apologetic was becoming less salient.[449]

Woodworth-Etter, at the age of 68, began to take a prominent role in the Pentecostal movement around 1912 when she played a leading part in the Dallas revival. A Pentecostal church had been pioneered in the city under the leadership of F. F. Bosworth (1877–1958). The meetings attracted attention mainly through the many dramatic healings that featured every night for five months. Among them were the healing in the same evening of three deaf and dumb sufferers, all strangers to each other, who “hugged, kissed, wept, shouted, and praised God for perhaps twenty minutes, because He had opened all their ears, gave them their voices, and saved their souls.” One of them was a fifty-four-year old woman, one of three sisters born totally deaf and dumb to parents who were first cousins. At the time, she was a teacher in a school for deaf and dumb children in Austin, Texas. Of her healing, she wrote: “Sister Etter put her finger in my mouth at the root of my tongue and then on my ears, commanding the ‘deaf and dumb spirit’ to come out. God instantly opened my ears and gave me a voice.”[450] Such events, multiplied almost daily, brought Maria to international attention throughout the Pentecostal constituency. The list of Pentecostal leaders who flocked to Dallas has been likened to a Who’s Who of early Pentecostalism. Included were people who shortly would become leaders of the Assemblies of God (AG), a body founded in 1914 that was set to become the largest Pentecostal denomination in America.[451] Among them was Englishman, Stanley Frodsham (1882–1969), who became the editor of all AG publications in 1921 as well as the biographer of his friend Smith Wigglesworth.

Woodworth-Etter did not fit easily into the early Pentecostal movement. She continued to present herself as an independent spirit, a quality in evidence from her early days of ministry with the Winebrenner church. Her relationship with the Pentecostal leadership was one of constant conflict. Her trances and faith healing were tolerated largely because many new churches were raised on the back of her successful missions. However, tensions mounted, and she was dismissed from the church in 1914 on the ill-defined grounds that her ministry had caused “some dissatisfaction.”[452] There is no indication that she joined any other group, though she had the support of the AG in many of her later missions during the period 1914–28. Though her sympathies lay most closely with the AG she never sought its accreditation. This was partly because the early leadership had restrictive views on women in pastoral ministry, but one suspects largely because she could see no place for man-made boundaries when her expectation was that the Second Coming would take place before her death. She said of her teaching: “I never permit any doctrinal points, no ‘isms’, no antagonistic points to be aired or brought up in my meetings; nothing but Christ and Him crucified, and the Resurrection.”[453] She confessed that when Pentecostalism first appeared she withheld approval on two grounds: it harbored false teaching and did not rein in extremism on the part of some adherents. In her early ministry she, in effect, equated the trance experience with the initial evidence of Spirit baptism. Prior to 1900 there would appear to be only one reference in her writings to speaking in tongues. Describing her first husband’s conversion in a Methodist Church, she stated that it was “very bright and [he] seemed to speak in other tongues.”[454] She also indicated that people spoke in tongues from the very beginning of her public ministry, though such incidents were not documented.

The period 1905–12 has been called Maria’s “silent years” with fewer reports of mission activity in marked contrast to her frequent updating hitherto of published testimonies. It was not entirely a matter of age because from 1912, then aged sixty-eight, she reinvented herself and hit the gospel trail with a restored dynamism that recalled the 1880s. For the remaining twelve years of her life she became an important figure in the Pentecostal cause to the mutual benefit of herself and the movement. She would appear to have resolved her remaining difficulties with the movement and was in a position to welcome the support of Pentecostal people. Just as significant was the need of the movement for her to promote the cause.

After the heady days of the Azusa Street-inspired beginnings, the rate of growth of Pentecostalism in America slowed sharply. Anderson noted the concern of the leaders of the movement: “The cry ‘Back to Pentecost’ coupled with lamentations over the decline of the movement, was a dominant theme of numerous articles.”[455] To some of its critics it justified their charge that it was revealed as little more a passing fad once the novelty had worn off. Woodworth-Etter was seen as the one figure capable of capturing the glory of the first days. In 1916, Robert Craig, pastor of Glad Tidings Temple, San Francisco, urged his fellow leaders to follow her example: “If the Pentecostal ministry would study her life and count on God, expecting the supernatural to be revealed in each meeting, what a mighty agency ours would be in the hands of God.”[456] Pentecostals from all over America invited her to conduct urban missions throughout the country. A feeling permeated the upper ranks of the movement that Maria was the one who had the “message that would take them forward to greater heights of Pentecostal glory and power.”[457]

Two surprising backers of Maria were a couple of Englishmen who had been educated at Eton College, Windsor, one of Britain’s most prestigious public (private [Am.]) schools. Stanley Smith (1861–1931) and George Studd (1859–1945) were among her supporters.[458] Smith and George Studd’s better-known brother, C. T. Studd, were both members of the “Cambridge Seven,” a band of young Cambridge University students who surrendered themselves to support Hudson Taylor and his China Inland Mission in 1885. Smith wrote a fulsome appreciation that introduced Maria’s book Acts of the Holy Ghost:

It is a book I value next to the Bible. In special seasons of waiting on God I have found it helpful to have the New Testament on one side of me and Mrs. Etter’s book on the other, this latter is a present day record of the Acts multiplied. Mrs Etter is a woman who has had a ministry of healing since 1885, her call as an evangelist being some years previous to this. I venture to think that this ministry is unparalleled in the history of the Church, for which I give all the glory to the Lord Jesus Christ.

He then quoted from a letter sent to him by his friend George B. Studd, the tone of which was warm: “I know Mrs Etter and her work first hand. . . . She is sound in the faith and mightily used of God, and has been so for years. . . . Like the ‘sect’ that Paul belonged to (Acts 28:22), the Pentecostal movement is ‘spoken against’; and so is anyone who is used so mightily as Mrs Etter is. Yes, she is indeed ‘a true handmaid of the Lord.’ Fear not, of course there is chaff as well as true wheat in the Pentecostal movement, and doubtless strange things and unwise happenings—but God is in it.”[459] Her books, whether uncut or abridged, have been translated into languages as different as French and Hindustani and continue to be produced in glossy covers. In the preface to the fifth French edition, a pastor wrote that the Pentecostal revival in France owed much to her writings.

Much of the way that Woodworth-Etter practiced in her meetings has filtered down to become almost standard among later healing evangelists. The notion of the “healing evangelist” owes much to her ministry. To the dismay of many whites, she pioneered racially integrated services in the southern states in the 1880s. She popularized the idea of anointing handkerchiefs for posting to sufferers living at a distance. When a healing line or crowd grew too large she stretched out her arms to encompass the seekers, then either praying for them en masse or calling for the support of other ministers to assist her. She won a wider acceptance for the notion that being “slain in the Spirit” and other dramatic manifestations, including healings, were evidence of divine power. Most characteristic was her verbal command over the sick in rebuking the spirit of their infirmity “in the name of Jesus,” and commanding the sufferers to act in a way of which they were hitherto incapable—the lame to walk and the bedridden to rise. Disease was rebuked in the name of Jesus. Frodsham commented of her meeting in Dallas: “We noticed that in almost every case Sister Etter dealt with the disease as if she was dealing with the devil himself,”[460]

Hers was a theology of power encounter, what Kydd categorizes as the “confrontational model,” citing the healing ministry of Blumhardt and John Wimber as exemplars.[461] Benny Hinn is one of the current healing evangelists who hark back to Woodworth-Etter. In the words of Pullum who interviewed him, not only does he “align himself with Kathryn Kuhlman,” but he also claimed to be a part of a long line of healing revivalists that can be traced all the way back to Maria Woodworth-Etter, who began her long,

illustrious career as a healing revivalist in the late nineteenth century. Since Aimee Semple McPherson was influenced by Maria Woodworth-Etter, and since Kathryn Kuhlman was influenced by Aimee Semple McPherson, Hinn claimed to belong in the same stream of healing revivalists. “We belong in the same lot,” boasted Hinn.[462]

For a more subdued and studied ministry of healing than that displayed by the three women referred to by Pullum, one has to turn to Carrie Judd Montgomery.

CARRIE JUDD MONTGOMERY: RESERVED PROPONENT

Carrie Judd Montgomery (1858–1946), despite her admiration for Maria was of a different stamp. Highly intelligent and well educated, “upscale in breeding” in Wacker’s depiction, she had a quiet and unobtrusive manner that, if anything, enhanced her burning zeal and entrepreneurial spirit.[463] Albrecht sees her as a woman who was “a unique mixture of gentle refinement and trailblazing pragmatism, quiet dignity and efficient promotion, tender compassion and tough-minded executive abilities.”[464] She played a significant part in three evangelical movements: the early faith healing movement, the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA) and the nascent Pentecostal movement. To the healing movement she brought her gifts as an accomplished writer, editor, and public speaker, and became one of its most influential advocates. Both she and her husband were creative in the various schemes they established. The slightly-built “Little General,” as her husband affectionately called her, was a woman of large vision with a big heart for the work of God.

Caroline (Carrie) Frances Judd was reared in Buffalo, NY, the fourth child in a

family of eight children. Her father as a young man had studied law at Union College in Schenectady, NY, but his amiable disposition, more attuned to reconciliation than litigation, left him with little future in the profession. Instead, he held for thirty years the position of cashier in the local American Express Office. A cultured man, he encouraged his children in studious pursuits. He arranged for Carrie to begin the study of Latin at the age of nine followed by French. Her mother ran a well-ordered home and, in her daughter’s words, “succeeded in keeping our love and loyalty that even the most stubborn of her flock could not bear to cause her grief.”[465] No mean poet herself, Emily Judd encouraged Carrie’s literary bent. Her first poem was published in the Buffalo Courier when she was around fifteen. Two years later, she entered Buffalo Normal School to take a four-year teacher training course. One other useful experience that was to prove advantageous later was obtained when she took a break from the training college to assist at a sanatorium. There she helped to edit its Health Magazine, and took on other administrative tasks, all valuable preparation for editing her own journal and running her future healing homes.

Though Orvan Judd was brought up Presbyterian, to ensure family harmony he took on his wife’s Anglicanism, which led to the children being baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church. The family were fully observant churchgoers, each day starting with family prayers. Carrie became a Sunday School teacher, brought help to the poor and engaged in temperance work. The family was not without its tragedies. Two of her sisters died from tuberculosis while two brothers and her father survived prolonged and critical illnesses. These heartbreaks gave her an insight into the need for compassionate concern for the afflicted and needy. As sorrows multiplied, her faith was tested and as she approached seventeen, a spiritual struggle—“the tempest of my soul”—engulfed her. It was through reading the New York Weekly Witness that she first became acquainted with holiness teaching that led her to make an act of “uttermost surrender.”[466] Subdued in spirit, she acknowledged that “God was obliged to use the bit and bridle of sickness and suffering in order that I might be able to say at last from my heart ‘None of self and all of Thee.’”[467] When she was eighteen an accident was to prove the turning point in her physical and spiritual journey.

In the winter of 1876 she slipped on an icy sidewalk, which affected her spine and developed into hyperesthesia, defined as an abnormal increase in sensitivity to sensory stimuli, such as of the skin to touch or the ear to sound. She described her condition in graphic terms: “For more than two years, turning over alone or moving myself a particle in bed was simply an impossibility. . . . I suffered intensely with my head; the violent, tearing pain, the terrible sense of weight, and the extreme sensitiveness made a soft, small pillow feel like a block of stone, the pressure of which was crushing my brain to atoms. Much of the time we were obliged to exclude from the room all excepting those who had the care of me.”[468] She found it impossible to read or write in the isolation of a darkened room. Growing steadily weaker and, feeling her life was ebbing away, she yielded herself completely to God’s will.

Meanwhile, her father noticed a small item in the Buffalo newspaper describing the wonderful answers to the prayers of Elizabeth Mix. Impressed by what she heard, Carrie asked her sister to write to Mix to pray for her. Though, as she indicated, she “had often heard of faith-cures before this and there had been read to me some portions of W. W. Patton’s book, Remarkable Answers to Prayer, but, although not discrediting them, none had ever produced so great an impression on my mind as this short account of Mrs Mix.”[469] In her reply Mix drew attention to James 5:15 with its promise of physical healing, adding,

Now if you can claim that promise, I have not the least doubt but what you will be healed. You will first have to lay aside all medicine of every description. . . . When you receive this letter I want you to begin to pray for faith, and Wednesday afternoon the female prayer-meeting is at our house. We will make you a subject of prayer, between the hours of three and four. I want you to pray for yourself, and pray believing and then act faith. It makes no difference how you feel, but get right out of bed and begin to walk by faith. Strength will come, disease will depart and you will be made whole.[470]

At the appointed hour the two groups, one in Connecticut and the other in Buffalo, New York, met for prayer. While family members prayed downstairs, Carrie requested Clara, her nurse, to read from the Bible. Clara read some verses that recorded a healing from the Gospels, which arrested her attention “in such a way as to create a new faith within me.” At which point she quietly and without excitement said, “Clara, I will get up now.”[471] For the first time in more than two years, she was able to walk to a chair in her bedroom and after four weeks she had strength enough to visit a neighbor’s house. Within six weeks her recovery was complete, and in the aftermath she rejoiced in the “one great blessing” to come from her ordeal, viz. “a realization of the personality and presence of the Holy Ghost,” an experience that she came to identify with Spirit baptism.[472]

As news of Judd’s healing spread, the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser picked up the story and published a lengthy article, entitled “A Modern Miracle.” The national and international press were soon onto the story. Letters flooded in and many clergy called at her home, most to listen to her story “in deepest humility . . . others came full of unbelief, and their mouths full of arguments.”[473] One of the most welcome of all her visitors was Sarah Mix, accompanied by her husband. The two women prayed for Carrie’s sick friends, making it her first step in a lifelong healing ministry that was modeled in part on what she learned from Sarah Mix.[474] She began a correspondence with Charles Cullis that opened the way to see his work at first hand in Boston. At first, she thought there might be an opening in the Cullis’ project for her to receive training as a deaconess but she received no clear guidance on the matter. Instead, in response to the numerous letters, among others from England, she felt a pressing need to help her correspondents by giving “more light and help than I could in a brief letter.” This desire found its fulfilment in her decision to write a book that would help “to pour life and comfort into those weary hearts.”[475]

The small book entitled The Prayer of Faith was published by Revell in 1880.[476] Its appearance was quite an achievement for the young, twenty-two-year old Carrie who, in her own words, “had from childhood been a member of the Episcopal Church, and who had been very reserved on the subject of religion.”[477] Writing over fifty years later, she made the point that “I had not received teaching from any human being on the subject of Divine Healing, so all the precious truths that came to me when writing this book came directly from the Lord. . . . My readers must remember that in these long-ago days there was very little literature published on the subject of Divine Healing. Dr Cullis had published two small books which contained testimonies of healing, but, so far as I know, there were no books published in this country at that time which contained Bible teaching on the subject.” In an introductory note her rector attested to the “entire credibility” of her testimony, adding that the facts of the case were well known to all in Buffalo. In the book she outlined the story of her own healing and then chapter by chapter marshaled scriptural verses in an artless manner to back the case for present-day healing as well as chiding those “unwilling to accept what God, of His exceeding goodness, is so willing to give.”[478] The book, if anything, increased the tide of letters with requests for prayer but also carried notes of praise from those who experienced “new light shining upon God’s promises through this little volume.” Reminiscent of her own healing, many of those who wrote to her sought to arrange a mutually agreed, synchronised time when prayer for their healing would be offered.

One of the better-known people to read the book was George Pardington (1866–1915) who was to become a leading scholar in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, and its first historian. The son of a Methodist minister, George as a ten-year-old schoolboy was wrenched severely by a teacher. Within weeks his whole body became misshapen: “The cords and muscles of the arm, shoulder, neck and back, the chest and bowels were thrown forward, the hip and shoulder drawn up, and I became a helpless cripple. I was all twisted out of shape by the rigidity of the muscles and cords, and when I lay upon the floor on my back, my body formed a complete arch, my head and heels only touching the floor.”[479] During the next two years he received electrical, homeopathic and hydropathic treatments, and when it came to shaping a plaster cast around him he had to be placed on a stretcher with one or two persons sitting on him to keep his body in as straight a position as possible until the plaster dried. No improvement was discernible, and his condition deteriorated to the point where death seemed imminent.

While there, he was given a copy of The Prayer of Faith. By the time he had reached the end of the first page he “felt just what I had been expecting the Lord would send me. July 2nd, 1881, I took my last dose of medicine, upon which I had been living since the first of my illness.”[480] On returning home, he wrote to Judd who replied that she would pray for him on two successive Thursday evenings in July at eight o’clock. At that precise date and time there was no immediate change but within a few days he was able to control his head and walk outside alone, though he remained misshapen: “All my old physicians and friends were watching me to see if my faith would reach to my deformed condition. I still wore my supports. On Thanksgiving day I gained the victory. I took off my case, and walked forth in Jesus’ name. Every day my spine grew straighter.”[481] The following year he travelled to Buffalo and was anointed by Judd and received a great many spiritual and physical blessings. When he had begun studying for the ministry in 1885, he described his spine as “perfectly straight.”

However, he had another physical breakdown two years later. This time he made contact with Simpson’s Berachah Home, New York, an introduction that led to a lifelong affiliation with the CMA. He made a partial recovery, but spent the rest of his life bent over at the waist. He managed to complete his education at New York University and Drew University, earning a PhD degree in 1898. He and his wife Anna taught at the College where he held a number of positions from 1898 until his death in 1913. In the absence of elevators, students carried him up the stairs to his classroom. Paddington, as a leading teacher-theologian of the Alliance, was in an influential position to see the healing emphasis maintained in its doctrine and practice.

Carrie Judd Montgomery

In England The Prayer of Faith was well received and attracted the attention of W. E. Boardman and Elizabeth Baxter. Mrs Baxter translated the work into German and

arranged the publication of the book, first in German and then in French. The German version was issued in many editions, and she was delighted that “it was greatly valued by spiritual people of Germany, and that [Pastor] Christlieb always kept a copy of it upon his desk.”[482] A woman who had been healed at the hands of Pastor Stockmayer translated the French edition. Through Baxter’s agency a Swedish edition was issued, followed by a Dutch edition.

The wide acceptance of the book encouraged Carrie to publish a magazine that would present “testimonies to the Lord’s wonder-working power.”[483] The first print of Triumphs of Faith appeared in January 1881, and continued until 1946 under her personal editorship. The gift of $50 from her older brother Charles paid for the 1,000 copies of the first edition that were distributed freely to any who were interested.” The subscriptions started to roll in, ensuring the future of the periodical. The monthly usually carried an editorial written by Judd and articles related to Higher Christian teaching and divine healing, as well as news items on healing homes and missionary work. The inaugural edition carried news of yet another venture that had already started, viz., meetings held every Thursday evening at her Buffalo home, styled the “Faith Sanctuary.”

In her autobiography fifty years on, Judd pointed out that “one can hardly realize what it meant in those early days to start a little meeting of the kind which I have just

described. In the first place such a meeting was a complete innovation, as I had never heard of a meeting where teaching on Divine Healing was made prominent.”[484] The other feature that was new to her experience was the involvement of her Episcopal friends and the interdenominational character of the gatherings. She confessed: “Having been a member, since childhood; of the Episcopal Church, I felt a little fear of mingling with other denominations, lest I might, unconsciously imbibe some false teachings. . . . As I think now of my many beloved friends among the different denominations, I am constrained to smile at my former narrowness, though it was never in the least from any ill will, but only from the reserve of my religious education.”[485] As news of the Faith Sanctuary spread, sufferers who wrote from a distance sought leave to attend the meetings and stay overnight or longer. Though the family home had some spare accommodation, the pressure of requests turned thoughts to establishing a detached Faith Home.

On April 3, 1882, Faith-Rest Cottage, so-called because the name indicated “merely a ‘Faith-Rest,’ not a permanent Home,” opened its doors. A two-storey house near the family home was rented. It provided a place where the sick or exhausted could meet to seek spiritual and physical renewal through daily Bible studies and prayers for the sick. Modeled on the faith principle practiced by George Muller and Charles Cullis, she

announced at the opening, “We have not at any time felt at liberty to name a sum for board, as we desired that all who came, poor as well as rich, should feel that they were partaking of the Lord’s own hospitality.”[486] Dependent as it was on voluntary contributions, the home had periods when it faced financial difficulties, but always managed to pull through.

The Buffalo press boosted it to a position of fame that Carrie probably neither sought nor appreciated for the comparisons it made. The Faith-Rest Cottage was likened in its healings to the Shrine of St. Anne de Beau Pré, a village twenty miles downstream on the St. Lawrence from Quebec, and its seeming miracles were more wonderful than any accredited to the holy coat in the cathedral at Treves [Trier] on the German/French border.[487] In a sense, the comparison was not totally inapt in that some of those who journeyed to a faith home likened the experience to making a religious pilgrimage. Eight years after its opening, Judd attested that “this little home has been a sort of ‘Mecca’ for weary feet, and many dear healed ones look upon it as the cradle of their life of trust. And though this little home is neither large nor grand, scarcely more than a ‘Bird’s Nest,’ as dear Mrs Baxter named it when here from England, yet happy songs abound in it”—a description that brings down to size the faith home when compared to basilica and cathedral.[488]

Eller R. King was among the early visitors to receive the ministration of the Faith-Rest Cottage. Aged twenty-three, she was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, barely able to travel from Cleveland to Buffalo. She had received some copies of Triumphs of Faith before reading The Prayer of Faith and subjecting herself to a divine directive to travel to Buffalo. The morning after her arrival she was anointed in accordance with James 5:14–15.[489] At that point

the power of God came upon me surging through my body until every nerve tingled with life to my very finger tips. The pain that had been so long in my left lung went instantly. Also the pain and suffering in the lower part of the right lung. After that I never coughed any more. My strength came back immediately, although it took a little time to put on flesh which I had lost. But I received strength so rapidly that in a week I returned to my home and finding my maid had been called away on account of her father’s death, I took charge of my home and did all my house work.[490]

King, beforehand, had promised God that if she were healed she would do anything that was required of her. It was an intense struggle for her to keep this promise when her pastor asked her to take charge of the revival service one night. At first, she refused but finally felt compelled to fulfil her obligation. The lesson she took from her inward battle was quite clear: “I want to say to those who are seeking healing that I feel certain if I had not kept that vow, and been obedient to the calling of God I would have lost my healing. God heals people to glorify Him, and He requires that we keep our vows.” Shortly afterwards, as Mrs. Whitney, she was ordained a minister of the United Brethren church and was still in harness in 1936.

With her book, periodical, and healing home all established, it was predictable that Carrie should become a seminal figure in the healing movement. In the early 1880s she gave her first address at a friend’s Presbyterian church to which she had been invited to give a talk on her healing. Of the evening, she conceded: “I looked almost like a child, as I was very small and frail. . . . I felt a helpless, broken thing in that high pulpit.”[491] However, her fame was such that she was given a personal invitation by W. E. Boardman to speak at the 1885 International Conference in London. In 1887, the year that A. B. Simpson called a small group of leaders to discuss the establishment of a loosely-knit alliance within the Higher Life movement, Judd was appointed its first recording secretary. By that stage, she was committed to Simpson’s fourfold message and to evangelical coalition building. For her, there was no inconsistency in becoming a recognized leader within the CMA, and in 1891 enlisting with her new husband, George S. Montgomery, in the Salvation Army. She considered neither of these commitments to be at odds with her Anglican affiliation. Later, William Booth made the married couple honorary officers in the Salvation Army, a non-commissioned status that allowed her husband to retain his business interests.[492] In the decade 1880–90, mainly in her twenties, Carrie had already a formidable portfolio of achievements: “In only a few short years she had been raised from her deathbed and thrust into public ministry. She had written a highly popular, ground-breaking book on divine healing, established a well-known faith home, become a sought after preacher, initiated an influential monthly publication, and influenced a generation of a newly established denomination.”[493] Her marriage in 1890 opened up new opportunities both for her husband and herself for wider service in an entirely new setting.[494]

George S. Montgomery (1851–1930) was born in Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland into a Presbyterian family that migrated to America when he was sixteen. By 1880, he was a wealthy man, largely through his part ownership of a gold mine in Mexico and several silver mines in Nevada. A few years later he lost his fortune after a day of wild speculation at the Pacific Stock Exchange, a reverse that made him temporarily suicidal. By 1888, he recouped his fortune, first as a mining engineer in Mexico and, on return to America, becoming a successful broker, investing in Californian property, high-yielding mining lodes and varied corporations. On his return to San Francisco he adopted high-society privilege, and became a member of the exclusive Bohemian Club. Soon, the effects of his self-indulgent lifestyle and the long-term effects of the tropical fevers he had picked up in Mexico began to take their toll. In September, 1888, he set sail for Japan because he found travelling was the only temporary respite from his chronic pain. When alone in his stateroom, he believed God was calling him for the last time. Whereupon he fell to his knees, confessing his sins and need of a Savior.

When he returned to America in December, his health had deteriorated to the

extent that his physicians declared him incurable. A doctor friend, George Smith, begged him to attend meetings then being conducted in Oakland by John Alexander Dowie. He went to the last two meetings of Dowie’s eight-month campaign, but to no apparent effect. Smith then persuaded Dowie to pay Montgomery a private visit. The morning following Dowie’s visit and laying on of hands, he became aware of “the new life which had been imparted, and felt I could run like a boy.”[495] The change in his life was striking in its immediacy and force. Carrie observed after their marriage that “since his full consecration he has only been blessed in his business as he fully committed each detail of it to God, seeking divine wisdom in each move and being sure that he was absolutely seeking first God’s kingdom and glory before any other consideration.”[496]

In June 1889, George, as yet a bachelor, attended a summer healing camp in Illinois, publicized as the “Convocation of Christian Workers.” Carrie was one of the speakers and though she had settled for the single life, George persuaded her otherwise. They were engaged by Christmas and married the following May, 1890, he thirty-seven and she thirty-two years old. Within weeks they had settled in San Francisco and, wasting no time, set up a rescue mission in the centre of the city’s infamous red-light “Barbary Coast.” It was the start of many and varied enterprises initiated by the couple and made possible by the wealth amassed by George. In 1891 they founded a small settlement nestling in a sixty-seven-acre edge of sloping hill land on the east side of the Bay five miles north of Oakland. It was known as Beulah, later Beulah Heights, which they envisaged becoming a city with strict temperance regulations that would be “populated by the redeemed” with walls [of morality] so high that the devil couldn’t get in.[497] It was at this spot a large, three-storey building that became the new faith home was built. It was opened in 1893 under the name of “Home of Peace,” and placed in the charge of a retired missionary couple.[498] Immediately, many seekers arrived, “waiting on the Lord for His healing touch and for a new quickening of their spiritual life.”[499]

George also donated various lots of the Beulah property to the Salvation Army to establish its Rescue Home (1892), Home of Rest (1892), and Beulah Orphanage (1895). In the latter, hundreds of children, between fifty to a hundred at any one time, were cared for in the period 1894–1907. He also provided a lot to establish the first Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People (1895) in California. Beulah also attracted missionary interest, and Shalom Training School was established in 1894 to send out young people for full-time Christian service within the broad Holiness tradition.[500] As well as coping with all the construction work, and the arrival of their only child Faith, Carrie busied herself evangelizing and conducting healing services in Oakland. The outreach met with such success that a CMA church was soon established. As the Beulah development expanded, the need for a church to serve the community grew. A large chapel was built and regular services were conducted by Carrie each Sunday.

With her involvement in so many diverse activities, it is not surprising that Carrie’s focus on healing began to lose momentum. The economic depression of 1893–97 led to financial stringency that forced the closure of the Home of Peace.[501] When it reopened in 1897 its use changed to the housing of missionaries on their way to or from the mission field, a change prompted by the opening of the Shalom Training School three years earlier. Both Montgomerys struggled with health problems; Carrie particularly in 1898 suffered a relapse of her former condition. She described it in such terms as “tortured brain and terrible hyperesthesia,” “the spine so inflamed prompt that each nerve seemed a separate flame of fire.” One doctor described her sympathetic nervous system as having “gone crazy.”[502] In a spirit of acceptance, she discovered that “as I humbled myself under the mighty hand of God, He showed me that in some things I had misunderstood His will and had leaned to my own understanding.” At the same time her faith took a knock when “two Christian women thought they had it from the Lord that I was going to die.” It was through the ministration of her husband and “a dear consecrated lady in Oakland” that faith revived. Though a third woman prophesied that she would be “raised up speedily,” she issued the caution not to “depend on impressions that do not harmonize with the word of God.”[503] In a letter she wrote to A. B. Simpson, dated 13 June 1898, she was able to report that “Jesus came and touched me with His divine power yesterday morning between two and four o’clock. I felt the power of God working in my spine, and it seemed as though iron bands were being removed from my back.”[504] Early in 1911, she was again struck by a severe illness, this time with a debilitating heart condition. With the prayer support of her husband, together with Sadie Cody who worked at Beulah Heights and “dear Dr Yoakum,” she was enabled to take possession of “the final victory.”[505] By that date George and Carrie Montgomery had committed themselves to the nascent Pentecostal movement.

The Montgomerys took a great interest in reports emanating from Azusa Street from April 1906. George decided to go to Los Angeles and personally investigate the situation. He returned with a glowing account of what he saw and heard and was thoroughly convinced that “God was mightily working to bring His people to a deeper knowledge of Himself, and to a place of increased power for service.” Carrie was initially cautious, but when a Pentecostal Mission was started in Oakland she was impressed by what she saw: “I had myself received marvellous anointings of the Holy Spirit in the past, but I felt if there were more for me I surely wanted it, as I could not afford to miss any blessing that the Lord was pouring out in these last days. Still I was cautious, and weighed everything carefully and prayerfully.”[506]

Reports of similar outpourings in India and England, as well as the experience of the Spirit related by her closest Christian friends, convinced her of their authenticity. Some aspects of the movement perplexed her.[507] She was concerned that “many of the manifestations did not seem at all like the work of the calm, majestic Spirit of God.” Nothing reveals more her reserved temperament and upbringing in the via media tradition of Anglicanism than the thrust of her prayers at the time: “I then prayed that if it were His will He would let me receive His fullness while waiting on Him alone, or with some Christian friend. I asked Him also for quiet, sweet manifestations, which would reveal His majesty and dignity, and not such as might seem like excitement of the flesh.”[508] Though Carrie visited the Azusa Street Mission in January 1907, it was not until June 29, 1908 that she received her Spirit baptism, in the majority Pentecostal understanding as evidenced by speaking in tongues.

Her prayer was answered as she received her Pentecostal “fullness” in the home of a close friend in Chicago. It was marked by a hesitant start, after which the cadence changed: “For nearly two hours I spoke and sang in unknown tongues (there seemed three or four distinct languages. . . . A ‘weight of glory’ rested upon my head. . . . I was filled with joy and praise to God with an inward depth of satisfaction in Him which cannot be described. The rivers of living water flowed through me and divine ecstasy filled my soul. Passages from the Word of God came to me with precious new meanings. Not long after this I had a vision of the work of His Cross as never before.”[509] Not long afterwards, George also “received this blessed outpouring. We both realised a greater power for service, and increased fellowship in prayer and praise.” To these was added another effect: “We have experienced and taught divine healing for many years but never have we personally known such a constant indwelling of the Healer as since we received our Pentecostal baptism.”[510]

The Pentecostal experience soon began to open up new areas of ministry for the Montgomerys. The most obvious was announced in the Triumphs of Faith in 1909: “The Lord has been making it very clear of late that it is His will for us to give up the Orphanage.” Places had been found for all the children both through relatives and publicly funded

orphanages, the number of which had increased in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Her Spirit baptism had given her a new impulse in that “since my recent Pentecostal baptism, the Word has become more preciously opened to me than ever before, and I believe He wishes me to go forth again in [missionary oriented] ministry.”[511] Carrie’s interest in foreign missionary work owed much to her links with the CMA, and her frequent contact with missionaries who had passed through the Home of Peace. Her Spirit baptism, if anything, intensified her involvement.

Now freed from a major responsibility, the Montgomerys and their daughter were able to set off on a worldwide missionary tour that took in Hawaii, Japan, China, India, and finished up in England. They were able to assess at first hand the global advance of the Pentecostal movement that in most instances developed from existing Holiness mission stations. The most notable of these was the Indian orphanage, known as Mukti (“salvation”) and founded in 1898 by Pandita Rambai (1858–1922) at Kedgoan, a hundred miles south-east from Bombay. There they met the many girls who had received their Pentecostal baptism, and were “greatly interested in a prayer meeting held by these Spirit-filled girls.”[512] Carrie preached at the Easter Day morning service followed in the afternoon by the observance of the Lord’s Supper with 1,000 girls in attendance.

After sixteen months travelling, the couple were glad to finish the final leg of their travels in London. The timing coincided with the second Sunderland Conference hosted by A. A. Boddy, the Anglican vicar of nearby Monkwearmouth, and acknowledged leader of early Pentecostalism in Britain. They were already known to Boddy through Carrie’s writings. The lead article written by her appeared in the November 1908 edition of Confidence, the monthly periodical edited by Boddy. Entitled “The Promise of the Father,” it related the story of her Spirit baptism. About fifty leaders of the new movement attended this particular conference, drawn from Europe and America. Carrie wrote warmly of the fellowship they enjoyed: “No words can describe how precious and helpful were these days of blessing at Sunderland, when many dear Spirit-filled saints were gathered together from different lands, most of them having the same testimony as to the glorious infilling of the Holy Ghost, and some still hungry, coming as seekers for this blessed fullness.”[513]

This event allowed them to meet Smith Wigglesworth who had received his Spirit baptism the previous October after Mary Boddy had laid hands on him.[514] Carrie was greatly encouraged by meeting people who had been healed through reading The Prayer of Faith. One woman told her, “I was healed in answer to prayer through reading your book, twenty-eight years ago.” Lydia Walshaw, the wife of a Halifax solicitor, related that “at the point of death, twenty-four years before, God had allowed the little book to get into her hands, and through its teachings she had been raised up through the power of God.” In response to her invitation, the Montgomerys visited her home, and had the opportunity of speaking to the large congregation in her Emmaus Mission.[515] Among others she met in Sunderland were Cecil Polhill, of whom they had heard much, and Pastor Jonathan Paul (1853–1931), the German Pentecostal leader. Most rewarding of all was an opportunity to meet once more her “beloved friend,” Elizabeth Baxter, noted in the 1880s for her leadership of Bethshan, the prototype healing home in London. “[She] had been like a mother to me during her previous visits to the United States, and who had honored me more than once by coming to my ‘Faith Rest Home’ in Buffalo, before my marriage. On one of these occasions she was accompanied by her good husband and her son, Paget, now proprietor of the Christian Herald, London.”[516] Three years later Boddy visited Beulah Heights and then in 1914 had a stopover at the Cazadero Camp convention. Wigglesworth was like “a victorious warrior” at the camp, and “much used” in healing the sick. Boddy was of the opinion that the camp fulfilled all expectations largely because “Mrs Carrie Judd Montgomery’s name was a guarantee against fanaticism or wildfire, and the meetings were controlled by the Spirit.”[517]

On her return to Beulah Heights Carrie put a stronger emphasis on overseas missionary work. The Home of Peace doubled up as a respite residence for the sick as well as a rest home for missionaries in transit or on furlough. She made some more visits to foreign lands, at times with her husband to Mexico, interspersed with preaching tours across America, spreading the message of holiness and healing ever wider. She completed her last nationwide tour at the ripe age of seventy-three. However, the major part of her ministry still centred on the Oakland area. In 1910, she started an inter-denominational divine healing meeting on Monday afternoons in downtown Oakland that continued for twenty-five years. The motivation for this lay in the need she saw to restore harmony among the different assemblies and groups of people “who believed alike on essentials but differed on non-essentials. . . . We asked as a token of the Lord’s approval that He would definitely heal someone in the first meeting, and this prayer was answered.”[518]

As numbers increased, more spacious accommodation was found but the one constant that remained was “the after meeting to pray for the sick, laying on hands according to Mark 16:17–18.”[519] She maintained her regular Tuesday afternoon meetings at Beulah Chapel with prayers for healing, Bible teaching, and testimony. In 1913, an all-day Union Missionary Prayer Meeting was introduced on the first Thursday of each month in the Chapel to intercede for world evangelization and the needs of the mission field. The report of the meeting in February 1914 caught something of the atmosphere of Pentecostal worship: “[As well as intercession] the spirit of worship was marvellously manifested, so that at one time we could only spend the hour in adoration. Many broke forth in heavenly singing in new tongues, and the Presence of the Lord Himself was so manifested as to crowd out the thought of ourselves or each other, and we saw ‘no man save Jesus only.’”[520] Central to Pentecostal experience was the belief that “true worship ought to seek one goal: to make Jesus’ presence real.”[521]

Carrie, by receiving Spirit baptism at the age of fifty-two, was able to bring a wealth of experience to the Pentecostal movement. She never sought to isolate herself within any body in which she had any involvement. She is regarded as a charter member of the Assemblies of God (AG) since she officially identified with the Pentecostal movement and received her Certificate of Ordination from the group that evolved into the AG in 1914. Her position was consolidated when she applied for ordination with the Assemblies of God in November 30, 1917. Her ministerial status did not preclude her the following year from preaching, at the request of A. B. Simpson, at a week-long CMA convention at the Old Orchard camp. In her review of the week, Carrie commented that “the Lord gave us great liberty in Bible teaching about the Holy Spirit’s fullness, divine healing and kindred subjects.”[522] Her prominence within the CMA continued for at least another decade while George continued to serve as an Honorary Vice-President until his death in 1930.

Part of her mission was to act as a bridge-builder within Pentecostalism, and between it and the wider evangelical community. She grieved that “the enemy is striving in these days to keep God’s people from unity. Nothing but the love of Jesus can weld our hearts together. . . . [The] communion of saints in Christ’s love is the most important thing, it is absolutely vital.”[523] One of the high points in her visit to the Sunderland Conference in 1909 was the opportunity to partake of the Lord’s Supper. Versed in Anglican ways and shaped by its historical conditioning that favoured moderation, she exulted that it was “a service of unusual sweetness and solemnity.” Its beauty was enhanced by the fact that many different nationalities were represented, some of whom “knew nothing of the ritual of the Established Church of England, [yet] . . . a marvellous hush fell upon us and we realized that . . . we were all blessedly one in Christ.”[524] Her engaging personality, sense of decorum, and controlled piety fitted her well for such a mediating role. Throughout, she never compromised her Pentecostal spirituality but sought to clear up misunderstandings and address contentious issues from a scriptural standpoint alone. The one quality above all that others found to admire was her love and compassion for people: “We may have thought that we need other credentials, such as gifts of healing, miracles, gifts of tongues, etc., and while all the gifts of the Holy Ghost are most desirable and precious and useful, yet the main thing . . . is the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.”[525] It was this emphasis, tuned as it was to the charismata listed in 1 Corinthians 12 and the supremacy of love in the next chapter, that lent weight to her standing in circles where the rougher edge of Pentecostalism could seldom reach.

Carrie Montgomery played a significant part in three religious movements with which she identified: the Faith-Healing/Holiness movement, the CMA and the early Pentecostal movement. Her contribution to faith healing was both profound and lasting. For one, she lived long enough to witness the fresh wave of divine healing that started towards the end of World War II with the arrival on the scene of Oral Roberts and William Branham. She can be numbered among those who passed on to Pentecostalism, and it in turn to the post-war Charismatic Renewal Movement, those beliefs that had their origin in Faith-Cure theology.[526] In its own way, her first publication The Prayer of Faith was a remarkable achievement, in not that it displayed theological acumen but that it appeared at all. For a young woman aged twenty-two with no formal theological training to have produced such a book at the time was exceptional. It preceded the more theologically informed works of A. J. Gordon, A. B. Simpson, and Andrew Murray and won for her their respect, particularly that of Simpson. In all probability, her book attracted a more popular readership than those of her male contemporaries. Her poise and unassuming temperament brought to the healing movement a gracefulness that stood in sharp contrast to the caustic muscularity that attended the ministry of J. A. Dowie and the theatricality of Woodworth-Etter. Women, particularly those from the middle-class, were drawn to her writings and were the main contributors of testimonies to healing in the pages of Triumphs of Faith. Many such women had their own particular problems as the following Excursus explores.

EXCURSUS: COMBATING NEURASTHENIA

From the middle of the century, American authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne remarked so often upon the frailty of American women in comparison with their European counterparts and their colonial predecessors that “the conviction that women were less healthy, less robust than their mothers and grandmothers became a nineteenth-century commonplace.”[527] From the 1870s, doctors started to identify the condition that seemed to strike male and female high achievers as “neurasthenia,” a protracted and vaguely understood illness that has been likened more recently to chronic fatigue syndrome and the class-ascribed “Yuppie Flu.” It was popularized by the American neurologist George M. Beard of New York in his book American Nervousness (1869). Dr John Pemberton in 1885, the year before he invented Coca Cola as a nerve tonic for neurasthenics, described Americans as the most nervous people in the world. Beard maintained that life in the fast lane for educated and professional men and women had triggered in seemingly healthy men and women, usually urbanites, physical pain, emotional distress and chronic exhaustion. His contention was that neurasthenia set in “when people drained their bodies of nervous energy, thereby causing organs to malfunction and

allowing any number of symptoms to arise, including indigestion, fatigue, muscle and back pain, impotence, infertility, depression, and irrationality.”[528] This excursus sets out to show how the message of healing put forward by two alternative therapeutics, faith-cure and Christian Science, played a part, particularly among middle-class women, in countervailing the anxiety attached to the epidemic of neurasthenia.

In his work on adolescence, G. Stanley Hall, hailed as the father of American psychology, wrote in 1904: “In a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with American girls, along with rapidly increasing development of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy.”[529] In Britain, Sir James Crichton-Browne, a leading light in British Victorian/Edwardian psychiatry, made a study of adolescent girls attending a private school, and interpreted their headaches as clearly due to “overpressure” and advocated that girls in this age group should not undertake “brain-work” after 7 p.m. He added that the recent decision to allow women to attend classes at St Andrews University, Scotland, was “a downhill step to confusion and disaster” because of their assumed delicateness, the source of which owed much to a woman’s reproductive system.[530]

For one doctor, higher level education meant that “women could now . . . spend the entire period between the beginning of menstruation and the maturation of their ovarian systems in nerve-draining study.” In 1901, an American gynecologist complained that “the nervous force, so necessary for the menstrual function is wasted on what may be compared as trifles to perfect health. The poor sufferer only adds another to the great army of neurasthenia and sexual incompetents. . . . Bright eyes have been dulled by the brain-fag and sweet temper transformed into irritability, crossness and hysteria while the womanhood of the land is deteriorating physically.” Male chauvinism was then displayed without qualm in the conclusion drawn: “She may be accomplished . . . but her future husband will discover too late that he has married a large outfit of headaches, backaches and spine aches, instead of a woman fitted to take up the duties of life.”[531]

As far as the health of middle class women in the period was concerned, they were caught on the horns of a dilemma. Either they settled for accepting the state of invalidism or, in challenging it, suffered the fate of becoming subject to the prevailing condition of American nervousness. By the 1870s, the invalid had become one of the most familiar cultural figures in American literature. A whole chapter in Abba Goold Woolson’s Woman in American Society (1873) was devoted to “Invalidism as a Pursuit,” in which she complained that the invalidism was apparent on every hand:

One may have a wide acquaintance among women and yet know but one or two who have no physical ills to complain of. The majority everywhere are constantly ailing, and incapable of vigorous exertion. In any summer hotel containing, it may be, a hundred ladies from various parts of the land, there will be but a very small number who are capable of an occasional walk of several miles. . . . The greater number make no pretensions to physical ability, but sit in the parlors day after day, sunk in cushioned rocking-chairs, and pecking away at embroidery over which they are never in danger of losing breath. . . . With us, to be ladylike is to be lifeless, inane and dawdling. . . . Instead of being properly ashamed of physical infirmities, our fine ladies aspire to be called invalides.[532]

This cultural stereotype of feminine fragility became increasingly challenged towards the end of the nineteenth century as women began to filter into positions of responsibility. Even so, such women felt so undermined by prevailing medical opinion that even feminists became hesitant about their own claims of strength. The head of the all-female Bryn Mawr College, looking back to the 1870s, wrote in 1908, “We did not know when we began whether women’s health could stand the strain of education.”[533]

In treating neurasthenia the medical profession sought to lessen the stressful impact of modernity on sufferers. One of the best known of the therapies was Mitchell’s “rest cure,” that was largely the preserve of women. His rest cure, often prescribed in the United States and England for upper-class women, average age thirty-three, required the patient to spend six weeks or more in bed where she was fed and washed by carers, forbidden to read, speak or use her hands, and directed to gain weight on a high-fat diet. Massage was used to avert muscle atrophy. Such treatment was the antithesis of that recommended for men who were prescribed to travel and engage in vigorous physical exercise. Doctors took the view that women were “innately changeable, volatile, mobile; but women themselves are healthier if they remain still.”[534] However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the gender stereotypes promoted by Beard and Mitchell were becoming increasingly questioned. One feminist urged the growing ranks of young college women to avoid neurasthenia by dedicating themselves to helping the urban poor. Social work, she

argued, would allow them to escape the neurasthenic dispiritedness awaiting those who sequestered themselves within their home or a rest-cure institution. Another writer suggested that women improve their lot by embracing modernity, redefining their work, and managing housework along the most up-to-date business models so that women would have the same economic freedoms as men.

Opp, in a well-argued piece, showed that one of the most striking features of the divine healing periodicals was that while many of the theological expositions on divine healing were written largely by men, women wrote most healing testimonies. The healing of women’s bodies was at the centre of the movement because it was assumed in the Victorian era that women were by nature both more sick and more religious than men. One outcome of this situation, he maintained, was the way the healing testimonials

“ultimately undermined the position of medicine and therapeutics in nineteenth-century society. Discussions of medicine, the role of doctors, drugs, and the body were located to subvert conventional medical assumptions. The religious discourse of the faith healing narratives provided a legitimate space for women to reconstruct their own experience of illness and to renegotiate their relation to medicine and medical culture.”[535]

Nothing demonstrates the change in attitude among middle-class American Holiness women to sickness so well as the case of Almena Cowles from Amherst, Massachusetts. At the age of twenty she had to abandon the teaching profession when she was diagnosed as suffering from “spinal trouble and neurasthenia.”[536] For the next seventeen years she suffered periods of intense pain and times of complete prostration. The first sixth months of 1878 were spent in Boston City Hospital followed by an eight-month stay from January 1881 at the Adams Nervine Institute just outside Boston.[537] While there, for a time she was “under the perfect rest treatment, not being allowed to raise my hand to my head, or do anything for myself.”[538] It was central to the rest cure treatment that obedience to medical authority was required to overcome or, at least, endure chronic ill health. Despite the best efforts of her physicians, her condition showed no improvement and arrangements were made for her to transfer to the Home for Incurables in Brooklyn, New York. With her health deteriorating, the subject of faith healing came twice to her mind, yet was “each time dismissed, with the conviction that it was not for me, and even with some doubt about its being for anyone in this age of the world.”[539]

During a subsequent stay in the Nervine Institute Cowles wrote to Sarah Mix four days after reading Carrie’s The Prayer of Faith that came to her as a source of “wonderful help and strength.”[540] Though the book was a help, it presented her with a problem. The writer’s insistence on a faith that was prepared to trust God implicitly ran counter to the rationale of her medical treatment: “About acting faith,” she wrote, “I would not be

allowed to do more than at present, unless I say my pain is gone or greatly relieved.”[541] She was faced with the choice either to follow Mix’s advice to “get right out of bed and begin to walk” or to obey medical advice and suffer the consequences. The decision to take Mix’s advice was eased for her by the Nervine Institute physicians discharging her since there was no evidence that their treatment had worked. Describing the weeks before the planned move to the Brooklyn Home, she wrote: “I left off medicine, although I had it with me, and claimed Christ as my Physician, knowing He had the power to make me well, or in His wonderful love and mercy take me home. I requested Dr C., a former physician, to bring me some faith people. I knew none by name, and had never met one person that understood this faith.”[542] She was prayed for on 30 August 1881 by three faith people, two of whom were medical men. A week later, she wrote to Mix, rejoicing that “I was healed by the dear Lord, after being anointed in His name by Dr Peck, and I am gaining strength every day.”[543] Continual relief allowed her to “take up one duty after another” without recourse to “medical helps of any kind, since I trusted God for healing.”

Curtis sees in the Cowles narrative a break, albeit incomplete, with the ethic of submission that featured in the medical care of women at the time. For her, women such as Cowles, and countless others like her, “submission remained an element of the experience of illness and recovery despite efforts of reformers to link the achievement of physical health with personal agency and voluntary activity.”[544] As shown, an element in rest cure was submission to an authority outside the self to achieve recovery or relief. Much then can be made of Cowles’ paradoxical assertion that her healing was not the result of her self-assertion, rather “I’m not allowed to use any will-power, but rest in God’s love and receive strength from Him moment by moment.”[545] Curtis contends that “where the rest cure had failed, resting in God succeeded, empowering [her] to arise and walk without overstepping the medical theories and gender norms that required her to remain passive in the curative process. . . . Acting faith without effort offered women like Cowles a way of consenting to the rhetoric of passivity.”[546]

The oxymoronic concept of “acting faith without effort,” otherwise described as

“active submission,” was a belief expanded on by Sophia Nugent in two articles in Triumphs of Faith. She drew the conclusion from Col 3:5 (“For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God”) that “our own life ended with His on Calvary,” and called upon her readers to “take the full consequences, and allow Him to live out His life in you: then, without any cause of boasting on our part, ‘the life of Jesus shall be manifested in our mortal flesh’ [2 Cor 4:11, KJV].” She foresaw such thinking could lead some of her readers to “shrink, and imagine that your will being brought to Him will make you an enervated, mindless being, with no spirit in you, and that it will take all common sense out of you?” Her response to such neurasthenic-contextualized apprehensiveness was to make clear that “it is an exchange of will, not a loss of will. Do you call St. Paul an enervated Christian? Yet whose will was more completely submitted to his Lord than his was?”[547] In a later article when she asked, “If He alone lives, does it not leave me a nerveless, weak creature, without backbone, and very little muscle,” her response was again robust: “Far from it! [It] means that every force of your soul is set to active submission. It is no passive life, for He enters our will, and inhabits it, and takes it for his sceptre, and there is not a moment in the day in which he does not employ it.[548] The same point was made in a separate article by the Rev. A. P. Moore in what appears to be an address to men, and as such is expressed in more muscular terminology. The rest of faith, he maintained, “is not inconsistent with warring and racing and watching and toiling. Nay, brethren, it is the nerve-power of the soul which enables us for conflict.”[549] The usage of “nerve” language in these quotations is noteworthy and can best be understood in the prevailing context of neurasthenia.

Opp makes the calculation that women contributed more than eighty percent of testimonies in Triumphs of Faith in the period 1890–98. Equally significant was the active role played by women who were inconspicuous, yet stimulated faith healing by giving themselves to the comfort of the sick. Their healing ministrations form the background to many narratives that are typically unaffected and unaccredited. “Active, informal networks of women,” Opp contends, “reinforced the lines of communication established by faith healing literature sent through the mail, and these networks continued to operate even after more formal structures dedicated to faith healing had been established.”[550] The point is well taken and can be illustrated in the events leading up to the healing of Anna Prosser (1846–1903).

Anna was reared in a prosperous middle-class family, nominally Presbyterian, but “engrossed in fashions and worldly pursuits.”[551] Her “ever indulgent parents” provided her with an education designed to give her entrée to fashionable society. In her early twenties she began to face the challenge to Christian commitment through the influence of a few friends in her home town of Buffalo. She became more involved in church life, and was invited to take charge of a Sunday School class of girls, not one of whom was, she confessed, “so ignorant of the Scriptures as her teacher.”[552] Shortly after attending a grand reception and ball given for President Grant at Niagara Falls, she was suddenly stricken with “a violent congestive chill” that turned out to be the beginning of a wretched period of invalidism for about ten years, marked by a multiplicity of ailments. She was upset when she heard of people who said there was nothing the matter with her “only nervousness,” a judgement that drew from her the retort that such people must have “never suffered from the complete prostration of the nervous system.”[553] For periods, only her carers were allowed into her room. Even her sister on some of her visits from New York was excluded. During her ten years of confinement, she was treated by nine different doctors. The last of them admitted he could do no more for her, and had reached the opinion that she had but a few weeks to live. Alternatives were sought, including a visit to a clairvoyant, possibly a medium, and for eighteen months she was placed under the care of “a magnetic physician.”[554]

It was at this point that Anna came into contact with an unnamed woman engaged in the ministry of healing, initially through her sister who had rented a house nearby in Buffalo to provide help after the death of their mother. By this time Anna had drifted into Unitarianism and with hindsight later assessed her spiritual life at that time “deplorable.” The day came when her sister told her of a Christian woman of whom she had heard who prayed for the sick in her own home and that many had been restored without any usage of medicine. Her first reaction to her sister’s suggestion that she allow the woman to see her was to laugh derisively. As far as prayer was concerned she was of the mind that she could pray for herself without outside help. Her sister went to see the healer in person and found her “very lovely and winning in manner.” This was praise sufficient for Anna to agree to the woman’s visit, “with the secret hope that she might say something which would show me how to make my peace with God and prepare for death, for I had not a shadow of hope that she could help me physically.”[555] The woman turned out to be “a very plain, elderly woman with great, searching, dark eyes which seemed to discern my inmost thoughts.” The woman insisted that Anna move to her home “without my nurse or any member of my family, and yield implicit obedience to her. This I thought it impossible to do, as I had for five years been dependent upon my nurse, and the going to the home of a stranger entirely alone, filled me with fear.” Further visits from the woman persuaded Anna, “after a great struggle,” to leave her home unescorted.

On arrival, Anna was carried upstairs by the driver who conveyed her, and laid upon the bed in a modest, small room. “Day by day,” she related, “I listened to God’s holy word and blessed messages, given, I believe, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, as it always seemed the very thing needed at that particular time, until the day came . . . prostrating myself before God I cried unto Him for forgiveness.” Faith in Christ for salvation and healing, in that order, followed. Her first gain after ten days was the ability to walk down the stairs for the first time in five years. After a few weeks she was fit enough to walk three miles a day “without injury, and but little fatigue.”[556] It took, however, three years for her to summon up enough confidence to return to her own home. She was aware that some would query why her healing was not instantaneous as in apostolic times. Her response was that it was nonetheless a divine work because of being gradual. That her experience of healing was so prolonged had the effect, she believed, that she did not miss many valuable lessons in the patience of faith. Her first steps into public ministry were under the auspices of the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and work among slum-dwellers.

With her involvement in such work, she found herself “continually seeking what [she] termed the ‘baptism of power.’” It was while attending a Holiness convention on the morning of June 23, 1890, between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. that, as she recorded, “the Holy Ghost had taken entire possession of my spirit, soul and body . . . and my anxiety as to the matter of power for service was forever now at an end.”[557] While attending another Holiness convention, she came to embrace the doctrine of healing in the atonement. Hitherto, she believed it was the divine will to heal only those who were “designed for a special work.” On her way home she visited friends in two different cities and was faced with requests to speak on the subject of divine healing, and following a leading of the Spirit, she “tremblingly obeyed,” by anointing about fifty people for healing.

Her healing ministry culminated on 1896 with the opening of a Faith Home on her fiftieth birthday, some seven years before her death. For its first three years, she reported, “the sick were coming and going continually. . . . Many cases might be mentioned of healing, both of guests and the sick of other towns who have written to us requesting prayer.”[558] In addition, she maintained her work in the slum area around the Rescue Mission in inner Buffalo. Such efforts effectuated her original vow, made before her initial healing, to devote her life to the service of God, “if he would in mercy heal my body.” Throughout her work she was sustained by the moral support provided by “her beloved and tried friend,” Carrie Judd Montgomery and “a dear sister evangelist from England,” who was in all probability Elizabeth Baxter.[559]

The accounts of Cowles and Prosser reveal that the phrase “acting faith without effort” is not to be taken to imply that the path of faith remained unproblematic. The modus operandi of Mix and Judd placed exacting demands on those seeking healing. The call to act in faith entailed legs that had not touched floors unaided for years to be trusted to take a first step, and poor eyesight made to negotiate awkward turns. Contemporary therapies had to be dismissed, and the professionalism of their practitioners in effect dismissed. The problem of cognitive dissonance, defined as the emotional tension created by two simultaneous, conflicting ideas battling for resolution, had to be confronted. For Cowles, faith healing “was all so different from what I believed; it was so different from what my friends believed; how could I confess it?” She also recognized that the blessing of healing could not be received as she wished, “quietly, and say nothing about it.”[560]

Her own healing was not instantaneous but progressed gradually, and there were times when her faith was “sorely tried.” Even two years into her recovery she could write, “I believe when my faith is strong enough and my consecration complete, the blessing will be ‘perfect and entire—wanting nothing.’”[561] Sustaining such faith proved a trial: “I am not yet trusting with the firm, unwavering faith which claims the promise; but God grant I may, and the fullness of blessing for soul and body may be mine.”[562] In the editorial following Cowles’ testimony, Judd applied extra pressure on those who were “satisfied with only a partial healing,” and typified it as a ruse “which the devil cunningly names ‘patience’, in his endeavours to appear to us in the guise of an angel of light.”[563] The life of faith was rarely without its own setbacks and uncertainties. Even so, the anticipation of release from the thraldom of invalidism, inspired by the example and healing message of Judd and Mix, overrode the qualms of many women sufferers, and opened the way for them to work among the disadvantaged in the wider society.[564]

There are two sides, positive and negative, to “acting faith” in the light of the advent of Christian Science. On the positive side it provided sufferers with a fresh conceptual framework that overturned any fixed view of their condition. Dowie made the valid point that people who are sick in many instances turn in on themselves, subjected to the self-absorption that pain engenders: “When you are sick you have no time for others, no matter how much your heart desires it. . . . Those who tell you that disease drives you closer to God, makes you lose self, and all that kind of thing, say what is not true.”[565] Baer argues that “by supplying the patients with effectual language and meaning based on supernatural causality, divine healers enabled them to objectify their experiences and re-enter a larger relational world. . . . [The helpless] no longer accept their disease as unavoidable.”[566] When Jennie Smith, the so-called “railway-evangelist,” whose spinal problem necessitated her to be placed flat on a camp bed wheeled by railway staff, reached a point when her faith was great but unfulfilled, she avowed: “I could not say ‘Thy will be done’ to suffer on. I felt compelled to overcome this feeling . . . but it was, I believe, the severest struggle of my life.”[567] It was an attitude matched by numerous other women that marked a reassessment of the nature of suffering. Bending’s observation that “pain without a supportive structure to give it meaning seems at best futile and at worst malign” is well taken.

The earlier understanding of afflictive providence in its own way did provide such a sustaining structure that gave meaning to those who suffered. Affliction was deemed a divine chastening, customized for growth in Christ-likeness, activated by a consciousness of fellowship in the Saviour’s suffering. Pain, as such, can then be turned to spiritual advantage, even to joy:

I read in faith

God’s dealings with his children. He is just,

And gives to all some cross. ‘Tis in themselves

There lies the power of turning to a joy,

Or bearing, as a fretting load, the pain

To each appointed as his human test.[568]

Such an understanding, however, began to collapse from the 1860s as suffering became less a mystery and more a problem, the latter of the two being more amenable to a

solution.[569] Solutions were drawn from different discourses, particularly those emanating from medical advance from the 1880s.

Increasingly, the religious arguments that supported the spiritual benefits of suffering came into question with the rise of Darwinism. Darwin intimated as much in a letter to his Christian friend Asa Gray: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ [wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. . . . I am inclined to look at everything as resulting [from] what we may call chance.”[570]

Such was the change in perception of the subject that William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) could write that “a strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. . . . We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous.”[571]

The theological world could not remain immune to such changing perspectives. From the mid-1860s, sermons that dealt with pain addressed it more as a problem, rather than an active force for growth in holiness. One outcome was a weakening emphasis placed on the penal interpretation of the atonement, giving way instead to others that carried a diminished punitive emphasis. Divergent views on the atonement were advanced, but the trend was to lower its position in the ranking of doctrinal significance and to give greater prominence to the Incarnation. A greater emphasis on the Incarnation in both the Broad Church and the liberal edge of Nonconformity can be seen as a theological

response to the zeitgeist in its ethical revolt against any theological justification of suffering as an expression of God’s justice. Inspiration drawn from the life of Jesus cushioned such stark evangelical doctrines as those of eternal and vicarious punishment.

The radical healers, invariably conservative in their theology, were not in a position to downplay the penal substitution understanding of the atonement. Instead they took their interpretation of Matthew 8:17 (“himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses”) and 1 Peter 2:24 (“by whose stripes you were healed “) as core texts round which to form a rationale for their ministry. By adding the extra dimension of physical healing to the atonement, they directed attention to it as the source of relief from suffering: in effect, they widened the scope of the “stripes” to incorporate bodily healing. By extending its range the radical healers added a new dimension and depth to their apologetic, and raised its prominence in a way irrespective of the merits of their interpretation of the texts. [572]

The atonement provided a compelling doctrinal rationale that was inestimable in its emotional resonance. Such regard was and remains the cherished hold of the doctrine among conservative-minded Christians. Little did the radicals realize that by giving bodily healing and soul salvation the same remit, they were unknowingly opening a floodgate that allowed a huge surge of expectation of healing that has today culminated in millions of people at the global scale being swept into the Christian haven. One example is cited in Chesnut’s study of the Pentecostal boom in Brazil. The first Afro-Brazilian woman to be elected to the Brazilian Congress was like millions of her fellow citizens who converted to Pentecostalism through her experience of divine healing.[573] His account plots the transition from economic disfranchisement to divine empowerment that is “most dramatically initiated or manifested by healing.”[574] It was the same sense of empowerment that unlocked for Victorian neurasthenics opportunities for self-denying social engagement.

EXCURSUS: THE CHALLENGE POSED BY CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

Abraham Lincoln’s daughter-in-law, Mary Eunice Harlan Lincoln, was the wife of his eldest son Robert. The public picture of her was that of a plain, shy, and sickly woman, something of a recluse, one whose social phobia forced her husband into having to make excuses for her absence at social soirées. A more considered explanation of her condition was that she was the victim of neurasthenia that was prevalent among many upper-class women of her generation. One biographical vignette suggested that “one refuge from this paralyzing malady might have been religion, and Mary Harlan Lincoln embraced a religion almost tailored for neurasthenic women and other chronic sufferers: Christian Science.”[575] Her debt to the movement was acknowledged in her will that provided handsomely for the Christian Science church. Neurasthenia, of course, was not confined to women, though the number of men so afflicted was significantly fewer.[576]

One such male had his testimony to healing published in Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy. The writer was a minister’s son “who had failed to profit by continuous teaching in the old thought.”[577] For eight years he had been treated for neurasthenia and had been attended by eleven doctors. His attention was drawn to Christian Science by a friend, for which he breathed, “Thanks to Almighty God.” He recounted that before he accepted Christian Science, “I was taking three times daily forty minims [drops] of cod-liver oil and three of creosote, also three drops of Fowler’s solution of arsenic, and on the month or so previous had bought eighteen dollars’ worth of patent medicine. . . . I was restricted to the simplest means of diet. . . . I started to read Science and Health, and before I had half-finished the book, at once I was eating everything that any one does. I read the book eleven times straight ahead and many times skipping about. The book has done the work and I am a well man.” Not all coverage was so earnest. Foremost was the satirical oeuvre Confessions of a Neurasthenic (1908), written as the autobiography of an imagined neurasthenic by a doctor who had regularly treated such patients. A sample extract catches the tone of the piece:

I was of the opinion that perhaps Christian Science was better adapted to my needs [than the Theosophy Mutual Admiration Society]. It would be a stunner to be able to address a little speech like this to myself: “The joke is on you, old chap; you don’t feel any of those symptoms you have complained of all these years. Why? Well, because you haven’t anybody and haven’t anything to feel with. Mind is all there is to you and—and—and I’m afraid there is not enough of it to give you much trouble.” I liked Christian Science pretty well, although the name seemed to me somewhat of a misnomer. The main part of it consisted in trying to make me believe that nothing is or ever was. Just a great big, overgrown imagination. However, I cannot refrain from perpetrating that old gag about their taking real money for what they did for me.[578]

The quote summarizes the general understanding of Christian Science of those outside its ranks. Nonetheless, such whimsicality does not do justice to the complexity of Christian Science.

It is more constructive to examine the origin, ideology, and methodology of Christian Science, to better understand why the radical healers were so antipathetic to it. They resented deeply any attempt to class faith healing among the mind-cure, metaphysical therapies that blossomed towards the end of the nineteenth century. Warfield, following Hasting’s influential Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, lumped together Christian Science, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Faith Healing on the grounds that they all alike depended on the power of suggestion, and had “in one way or another closely connected themselves with religion.”[579] To the Princeton professor, the coupling of faith and prayer as therapeutic agents left him “frankly shocked.” Warfield quoted other writers in support of his strictures. One described mind-cure as “faith-cure run to seed,” while another considered faith-cures as nothing other than mind-cures wrought by “anything that will enable a sick person to change their thought, [as] asserted scores of times by Mrs Eddy herself.”[580] For some of the critics of the healing movement, the whole idea of “acting faith” came perilously close to Christian Science by advocating the possibility of a faith that acts as though healing had taken place. Such a stance, it would seem, was not far from Christian Science in its call to dispute the reality of disease. This charge, indeed, was brought by Dowie against Simpson’s principle of “acting faith,” in that it seemed to make a claim for healing that was yet, if ever, to become a reality.

Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) founded the Church of Christ (Scientist) in 1879, which from 1882 till the present had its headquarters in Boston. She was brought up in New Hampshire in a Congregationalist family. Frequently ill as a young woman, she turned to help from Phineas Quimby, who remodeled mesmerism into mind cure. Quimby had reached the conclusion that the success of mesmerism did not depend on its procedures but resided more in the patient’s positive mental attitude and confidence in the healer. Eddy believed that her sudden recovery from severe neck and back pain in 1866 owed everything to her discovery of the key to Jesus’ healing miracles. She assumed a calling to embark on a healing ministry that found its formulation in the Christian Science textbook Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875). Massachusetts Metaphysical College, established in 1881, prepared practitioners to spread the message of Christian Science and engage in healing.

The heart of Eddy’s teaching was a form of philosophical idealism, best described as theistic monism that maintains that minds and mental representations alone exist; there is no independently existing world. Theistic monism is a philosophical position that denies the existence of material substance, of everything except God. Terms such as Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, and Love pepper Science and Health as synonyms for God. While accepting the historicity of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth, death, and bodily resurrection, she drew a distinction between Jesus the man and Christ, and the divinity that he manifested. Evil and sickness have no ultimate reality, and are destroyed once the subject becomes “aware of God’s power and love, rather than by medical treatment.”[581] From this position, Eddy believed that she had uncovered the means to vanquish error, heal disease, and overcome death. In effect, she considered she had recovered the essence of Christ’s holistic ministry. If God is all, in a totally all-embracing sense, then evil and sin and everything that flows from them such as moral impurity and sickness do not exist. That humanity feels fettered by such weaknesses merely reflects a false consciousness, referred to as “mortal mind,” which misinterprets external stimuli: “Sickness is a growth of error. . . . The soil of disease is mortal mind, and you have an abundant or scanty crop of disease, according to the seedlings of fear. Sin and the fear of disease must be uprooted and cast out.”[582]

In 1879 the Church of Christ, Scientist was founded in Boston, and reorganized on a permanent footing in 1892. The movement was consciously founded “as a church designed to commemorate the word and works of the Master, which should reinstate primitive Christianity and the lost element of healing.”[583] The belief was promoted that Christianity could be reinvigorated by Eddy’s discovery of the truths that had allowed Christ to work miracles: “Divine Science derives its sanction from the Bible, and the divine origin of Science is demonstrated through the holy influence of Truth in healing, sickness and sin.”[584] For her, Christian Science was nothing less than the “El Dorado” of Christianity. It operated on the principle of empirical verification, and what better evidence could be provided than that of healed bodies: “The best sermon ever preached is Truth practiced and demonstrated by the destruction of sin, sickness, and death.”[585] She was confident that the on-going accumulation of empirical evidence proving that the divine Mind produces health, harmony, and immortality, “will gather momentum and clearness, until it reaches its culmination of scientific statement and proof.”[586] Her response to the question of why the healing element had been lost provides further disclosure of the Christian Science mindset. The decline of healing within Christianity owes much to the fact that “our systems of religion are governed more or less by our systems of medicine. . . . The schools have rendered faith in drugs the fashion, rather than faith in Deity. By trusting matter to destroy its own discord, health and harmony have been sacrificed. Such systems are barren of the vitality of spiritual power.”[587] It is only when “mortal mind” is made the servant of Christian Science that it can become Christ-like.

Initially, most of Eddy’s early followers were not seeking spiritual comfort but physical healing, endorsing, in Wacker’s phrases, the “timeless bond between physical infirmity and religious anxiety [and] between physical health and religious assurance.”[588] An article in Triumphs of Faith was probably right in thinking that “many of [Mrs Eddy’s] disciples . . . do not fully understand her religious belief. . . . Her views are so incoherent, chaotic and mystical that it is difficult to discover her real ‘working basis’, or to reduce them to a system.”[589] Healings were her foremost advertisement and played a large part in the rapid spread of her teachings, giving rise to the claim that Science and Health had sold more than 400,000 copies by 1900. Christian Science offered sufferers hope and its practitioners the prospect of a financially rewarding vocation. When patients first visited a practitioner a detailed unburdening of their affliction was not required, only a general statement of the condition that would allow the practitioner to “act more understandingly in destroying it.” Once the complaint was identified, the treatment, or “argument” began. Eddy maintained that “the struggle for the recovery of invalids goes on, not between material methods, but between mortal minds and immortal Mind. The victory will be on the patient’s side only as immortal Mind through Christ, Truth, subdues the human belief in disease.”[590] As the healing scheme worked on the principle of “demonstrating over false claims,” the practitioner set out to help patients to recognize their inherent health by denying their problems and affirming that evil does not exist. It was essentially a talking therapy similar, in this regard, to later depth psychotherapies.[591]

With “mortal mind” so deeply seated, repeated treatments, or “demonstrations,” were often needed to destroy the illusion of suffering. Years of prayer and “regeneration of character” were sometimes required, but over time testimonies of healing began to accumulate in the monthly Christian Science Journal and other publications. Many victims of false belief did not bother to summon a practitioner but cured themselves directly by reading Science and Health. It was expected of Eddy’s followers to make an effort to cure themselves first. Since illness has its source in believers’ erroneous thought patterns, the ultimate responsibility must lie on their shoulders. Not only were there testimonies of physical healing, there were cases of spiritual transformation, expressed by one member as a change “from a worldly, godless agnostic to a God-loving Christian.”[592] Physical healing was the gateway to inward spiritual grace. Or, as one modern apologist of Christian Science expressed it, “Healing is not miraculous intervention but the natural result of spiritual awakening.”[593]

Like spiritualism, Christian Science had a mixed reception from the Christian community. Some explained the ideas of Eddy and other mental curists as popular expressions of resistance to the widespread advance of scientific materialism.[594] It addressed the great perplexing questions of sin, sickness, and death and opened the way for women, in particular, to carry the promise for patients of “a perpetual series of occasions for hope.”[595] It is not surprising that between 1866 and the 1890s Christian Science became one of the largest religious groups in America. Such was its growth that some predicted that it might become the largest religious community in the country. The dedication of the imposing Mother Church in 1895 reflected the wealth and status of many of the white, middle-class adherents of the church.[596]

A leading minister in Chicago who declared that there was hardly a pastor in his part of the country, especially its large cities, whose attention had not been alerted by Christian Science “because of the inroads it has made on the faith and stability of his members. Some of the most refined, some of the most sincere people have been led away by the seductive and quasi-Christian spirit of its teachings.”[597] One such was Lilian Yeomans (1861–1942), the daughter of a Christian surgeon, who graduated with an MD and practiced medicine in her home town of Winnipeg. Through her struggle with stress, she became addicted to morphine. She then sought release in a variety of ways and places, subjecting herself to a detoxification programme, placement in a sanatorium for nervous diseases and sessions with a Christian Science practitioner in New York—all to no avail. Finally, thoroughly disheartened, she travelled to Zion City where on the 12 January 1898 she was both healed of her addiction and baptized by Dowie.[598] She was unlikely to know that Henry Goddard (pioneer Fellow in Psychology at Clark University, Worcester, MA) published a paper in 1899, which placed Dowie and Christian Science in the same “modern schools of mental therapeutics.”[599]

The warmest commendation of Christian Science came from the noted Congregationalist preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, a proponent of evangelical liberalism, who is reported as saying of Science and Health that it was “one of the most wonderful books in the world.”[600] In 1884 the Unitarian minister Cyril Bartol insisted that the new movement was “no local, passing craze, but deserving and sure to have more attention than it has received.” It was his view that, by contrast, the churches tended “to speak of sickness as a friend . . . a pure piece of Providence.”[601] The liberal Episcopalian Richard Heber Newton adjudged its rise as a challenge to the seeming powerlessness of his own communion, despite its claim to apostolic succession. He chided, “Not even the most sensational representative of our new journalism tells of any crowds flocking about Lambeth Palace, to lay hands upon the multitude of lame and blind and sick folk, who sorely need some healing.”[602] While he recognized the cures attested by Christian Scientists, he did not accept their interpretation. For him such cures sprang from the growing, scientifically-informed consensus about the power of the mind to effect healing.

On the other side, the attitude of proponents of divine healing to Christian Science was one of outright hostility, a reaction that was not returned by Eddy who always maintained its orthodox origins. Her attitude to ministers was conciliatory and, on one occasion at least, she refused to address an audience because clergy were absent. A. J. Gordon, who saw Christian Science at first hand in Boston, launched fierce attacks on its theology, which be believed “is infecting souls with the subtle poison of pantheism and theosophy.” He outlined its appeal: “The large use of the Bible, the strenuous demand for holiness and self-abnegation in the disciples, the results apparently effected in the ministry to the sick, these are powerful considerations for attracting converts.” It seemed particularly attractive to younger women who “are drawn into the system under the impression that they are getting some finer quality of Christianity, only in the end to be lured into fatal misbelief.”[603] His explanation of its lure lay in the prowess of Satan “to parody Christianity by inventing spurious imitations.”[604] Simpson adverted to a friend who had just recovered “from that terrible snare of Christian Science, who had been under its power until her heart and spirit had been almost drawn from Christ.”[605] Under the title “Christian Science Unmasked,” Carrie Judd felt so strongly about Christian Science that she reprinted in five parts the lecture given by the Free Methodist minister, Wilson T. Hogg. Hogg declared the whole system “the greatest humbug of the age; an insult and disgrace to the intelligence of the nineteenth century.”[606] Anna Prosser was so irked by Christian Science that she protested, “I would far rather be an invalid all my life, than be healed by the power of the anti-Christ, and thus lose my soul.”[607]

There can be little doubt that Christian Science was one of the greatest threats the healing movement faced in the 1890s. J. M. Buckley, editor of the Methodist Quarterly Review, sensed that the Christian Science practitioners had greater success than the faith curists. The latter, he explained, expected instantaneous cures that almost inevitably

resulted in disappointment. The former, on the other hand, usually ran a course of treatment that allowed nature to work, thus avoiding disappointment. He also contended that, despite their disclaimer, Christian Science cures depended on the curative qualities of faith and suggestion, even if it was the contagious faith of friends. In the 1890s, with the faith healing movement in decline and Christian Science making strides, faith healing, for the general populace, came increasingly to be identified with Christian Science. This misconception showed itself in two instances in Canada, those of Rebecca Fletcher and William Howland. Living in Toronto, Fletcher, secretary to the Toronto Mission Union, felt a call to open a healing home in the city. The need was sparked by her visits to boarding houses where people in search of medical-free healing found temporary accommodation. When they sought more specific advice and direction on the topic they were invariably pointed towards Christian Science, a belief system she deemed “a perfect counterfeit of divine healing.”[608] Her response was to open a home “to prevent such an evil,” a project that came to fruition in the opening of Bethany Home in 1895, which became closely linked to the Canadian branch of the CMA.

The other instance involved a leading figure in the Toronto branch of the CMA. William Howland was the founder of the Toronto Mission Union, and an acclaimed reforming mayor of the city from 1885 to 1887.[609] Both he and his wife Laura were drawn to divine healing, and with this link his sudden death from pneumonia in 1893 at the age of forty-nine raised questions in the local press. It was hinted that if he had sought medical aid earlier and not been inhibited by the faith healing teaching, he might well have survived. The Toronto News carried the headline “Is Christian Science Responsible for the Untimely End?” It railed against the delay in calling a doctor, pronouncing it “almost criminal in the eyes of those who regard Christian Science as a travesty of the name.”[610] While it was remiss to identify Christian Science with this case, it was understandable in the light of its contemporary dominance in the field of spiritual healing. If it had happened in the previous decade, it is likely that A. B. Simpson would have been exposed to blame. In this particular instance, by shooting at the wrong target, the press spared the Toronto CMA a public lashing.

Christian Science threatened to undermine the divine healing cause up to the 1920s when it began to show signs of waning. The arrival of Pentecostalism reinforced the element of threat it had hitherto experienced from evangelicalism in general. Blumhofer, the historian of the Assemblies of God in America, observed, “The perception of Christian Science as an arch enemy suggests how close evangelical teaching on healing and Christian Science teaching were. When early Pentecostals listed their enemies, Christian Science usually led the list. Early Pentecostal periodicals contain many articles exposing the errors of Christian Science suggesting that they felt especially threatened by it.”[611] A. A. Boddy at an Anglican clerical conference commented that “many in these days follow the fascinating and strange teaching of Christian Science.” He did not deny the validity of its claims to healing, and even went as far as to describe it as “a wonderful system,” but doctrinally deficient in that “it does not recognize the atonement for sin, as for its followers there is no sin and no disease.” This somewhat muted assessment reflected the context in which diverse theological views were being aired. However, at an earlier conference, he had been more disapproving, and spoke more in the tone of his pamphlet, Christian Science: A Soul Danger. He told his audience that Christian Science, even allowing for its “marvellous cures by mental suggestion, [nevertheless] robs thousands of their eternal salvation,” and its healings are “backed up by the cordial support of the devil.”[612]

Despite their many differences, both movements proved themselves tailor-made for spiritually-minded neurasthenics insofar as the malaise was amenable to the changing of the individual mind-set. The point at issue surrounding “the placebo effect” and “mind over matter” continues to absorb recent research into the mind-body debate. Today, there are centers in thirty medical schools in America currently engaged in research into the role of belief in healing.[613]

406. Searle, A New England? 60.

407. Nelson, A New Woman Reader, 262.

408. Ibid., 272.

409. The story of these women is detailed in Robinson, Divine Healing.

410. Wiseman, Elizabeth Baxter, 81.

411. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, 104. He cites Parham, Seymour and Ozman as cases in point.

412. The Disciples were a restorationist movement founded by Thomas and Alexander Campbell, both

father and son Presbyterian ministers. The Disciples sought to return the church to the ideal of New Testament Christianity, taking the Bible alone as its creed and congregational autonomy as its polity.

413. Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 7.

414. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 17.

415. Blumhofer, The Assemblies of God, 34.

416. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 36.

417. Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 40.

418. Woodworth-Etter Signs and Wonders, 58.

419. Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 155 & 149.

420. The Third Wave, a term coined by Peter Wagner, began around 1980 and spoke for believers who were neither classical Pentecostals nor denominational Charismatics.

421. Wacker, Heaven Below, 54.

422. Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 229.

423. The St Louis Globe-Democrat in 1890 was more even-handed than most in its appraisal of the revival in the city by making the case that the “religious trance is as old as religion itself.”

424. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 130.

425. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies,” 742–43.

426. Wacker, Heaven Below, 101–2. (“Hootchy-kootchy” = sensual belly-dance.)

427. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies,” 745.

428. Leaves of Healing, (henceforth LH) 8 March 1895, 382.

429. Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 81.

430. LH, 8 March 1895, 382.

431. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 68.

432. Wacker, Heaven Below, 114.

433. Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 96, n.32.

434. Others include Peter Wagner, Bill Surbritzky, and Maurice Cerullo.

435. Springer, What Comes After Renewal? 13.

436. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, 95.

437. Baer, “Redeemed Bodies,” 747.

438. For an emphasis divergent from Pentecostal chutzpah, see Dawn, Powers, esp. ch. 2. In Percy, Power and the Church the writer examines why the language of confrontation plays an important part in the culture of new religious movements. He draws attention to the underlying paradox of preaching “a gospel of power in a form of powerlessness.”

439. Byers was a minister of the Church of God (Anderson). Warner downplays the charge of plagiarism by suggesting it would probably have been “safer in faulting her for selecting an indiscreet ghost writer or editor” (Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 199). Her busy life would have precluded her from closely supervising such a writing project.

440 Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 92 (his emphases).

441. Woodworth-Etter, The Holy Spirit, 83.

442. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 186.

443. Woodworth-Etter, The Holy Spirit, 26.

444. Warner, The Woman Evangelist, 277.

445. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 186. By “law of redemption,” she was referring to the role of the atonement and the promises decreed in it.

446. Woodworth-Etter, The Holy Spirit, 85.

447. See chapter 6 in Woodworth-Etter, The Holy Spirit, entitled “The Prayer of Faith Will Save the Sick,” 81–88.

448. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 186.

449. In Kimberly Alexander, Pentecostal Healing, the author discusses the place given to the atonement in the early healing movement. In her analysis, she constructs two distinct models of healing theology—the Wesleyan-Pentecostal stream and the Finished Work Pentecostal stream. Differences in emphasis between the two models on such topics as the origins of suffering, pneumatological understanding and the role of the atonement in healing are exposed.

450. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 153–56. This was an especially noteworthy healing in that the handicap suffered by the woman would seem to bear out the conclusion that its cause was most likely genetic, such as an outcome of cousins marrying.

451. The AG is today the largest international denominational Pentecostal church with over 50 million adherents spread in nearly every country in the world. (Miller & Yamamori, Global Pentecostalism, 19.)

452. Warner, “Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Heritage, 14.

453. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 260.

454. Warner, “Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Heritage, 14.

455. Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, 138.

456. Warner, “Maria B. Woodworth-Etter,” Heritage, 14.

457. Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel, 279.

458. Smith was the son of a successful London surgeon. He participated in D. L. Moody’s 1884 London campaign and engaged in street evangelism.

459. Preface to Signs and Wonders, 1916 ed.

460. Alexander, “Models of Pentecostal Healing,” 179.

461. Kydd, Healing Through the Centuries, 19–59.

462. Pullum, Foul Demons, 144. Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–76) began her healing ministry in 1947 and in the 1960s began a highly-rated weekly healing programme on CBS. Benedictus (“Benny”) Hinn (b. 1952) is an equally flamboyant evangelist whose life was transformed when he attended a service conducted by Kuhlman. Soon after he was freed from the stutter that had afflicted him from childhood, a moment that he claimed marked the beginning of a lifetime of miracles. His “Miracle Crusades” have taken him across the continents and his daily half-hour programme This Is Your Day was distributed worldwide.

463. Wacker, Heaven Below, 203.

464. Albrecht, “Carrie Judd Montgomery,” 101.

465. Montgomery, Under His Wings, 10.

466. Baer, “Perfectly Empowered Bodies,” 97.

467. Montgomery, Under His Wings, 47. The quote comes from a poem/ hymn (“Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow”) by the French Reformed pastor, Theodore Monod. It was composed in 1874 at the Broadlands Conference, a gathering of upper-class evangelicals, which helped to launch the Holiness Conventions at Brighton (1874) and Oxford (1875) that in turn became the precursors of the Keswick Convention. The hymn is redolent of the Holiness piety that played a large part in later Victorian evangelicalism.

468. Judd, The Prayer of Faith, 10.

469. Ibid., 13. Patton was the minister of First Congregational Church, Chicago. He was president of Howard University, the black university in Washington, D.C. in the period 1877–89.

470. Judd, The Prayer of Faith, 14–45 (ITALICS ORIGINAL).

471. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 56.

472 Ibid., 58.

473 Ibid., 59.

474. The news of their joint engagement helped to raise the profile of the Mixes’ healing ministry. Sarah Mix died from tuberculosis some five years later in 1884. Her book Faith Cures was published in 1882.

475. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 65.

476. Fleming H. Revell Co. was by 1890 among the largest publishers of religious literature in America. Fleming, a Presbyterian layman, was the brother-in-law of D. L. Moody and his company prospered through publishing Moody’s sermons and tracts, as well as the many writings of the mounting number of fundamentalist and premillennialist authors.

477. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 64–65.

478. Judd, The Prayer of Faith, (TF), 34.

479. TF, February 1885, 46.

480. Ibid., 47.

481. Ibid., 47–48.

482. Pastor Theodore Christlieb was professor of practical theology at Bonn. A Lutheran in the scholarly Pietist tradition who emerged as a leader of its renewal at the time, he is noted for his sponsorship of Robert Pearsall Smith’s visit to Germany in 1875. In his Modern Doubt and Christian Belief (1874), he maintained that “in the last epoch of the consummation of the church . . . she will again require for her final decisive struggle with the powers of darkness the miraculous interference of her risen Lord, and hence the Scriptures lead us to expect miracles once more for this period.” (McGee, Miracles, Missions, 50.)

483. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 76.

484. Ibid., 79.

485. TF, December 1884, 267.

486. Ibid.

487. Albrecht, “Carrie Judd Montgomery,” 115, n. 28.

The basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré is noted for miracles. One of its builders, Louis Guimont, worked on the original church around 1658 despite suffering severe curvature of the spine and needing the aid of a crutch. When the work was finished, he was able to walk freely within three days. Since then, visitors to the church who have prayed have left behind their canes, crutches and walking aides as evidence of their healing. The main wall at the entrance area of the basilica is today covered with crutches.

The cathedral of Trier claims possession of Christ’s seamless garment (John 19:23). As a relic, it has attracted over centuries devotion and is associated with miraculous powers. On its return to Trier in 1810, Napoleon expressly forbade miracles to be sought. In 1844, when it was open for exhibition many healings were reported.

Kydd makes the point that “the reliquarial approach to the miraculous dominated Christian thought and practice with regard to healing much longer than any of the others.” (Kydd, Healing, 117).

488. TF, July 1890, 147.

489. Judd was a stickler for following the direction set out in these verses. In the beginning of her engagement with the healing ministry, she had to face the issue of elders (invariably male) being instructed to anoint the sick.This was solved by a calling on “dear brother Gregory,” an elder of the MEC. Then, “later on I was led by the Lord to realize that it was my privilege to lay hands on the sick according to Mark 16, 18, because the promise was given that ‘these signs shall follow them that believe’”—the biblical quote she interpreted as gender-free. (Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 80–81.)

490. Ibid., 116.

491. Ibid., 71.

492. Storms, “Carrie Judd Montgomery,” 279.

493. Albrecht, “Carrie Judd Montgomery,” 107.

494. Both the rector of the family Anglican church and A. B. Simpson officiated at the wedding that was held at her parents’ home.

495. Storms, “Carrie Judd Montgomery,” 278.

496. TF, March, 1902, 50.

497. Stock, “George S. Montgomery,” 5. The frequency of the use of the word Beulah at the time in Holiness circles was entirely disproportionate to the frequency of its biblical reference. It is found only in Isaiah 62:4, where its meaning in Hebrew is “married” and, as such, is a symbolic name which the land of Israel is to bear in its future prosperity after its time of being “desolate” and its inhabitants “forsaken.” Holiness people saw themselves as a “new Israel, which returning from exile, had been restored fully to God’s favour in the land of Beulah.” (Jones, “The Beulah Land,” 7).

498. The Faith-Rest Cottage in Buffalo was for a short time kept open by some of Carrie’s friends but with their commitment now to California, arrangements were made to close the work there.

499. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 150.

500. The greater San Francisco area on the Pacific seaboard was in a prime position as a launch-pad for missionary endeavor in East Asia and Central America and the western seaboard of Latin America. A century later the Home of Peace functions as the packing and shipping of supplies centre for about a hundred missionary organizations.

501. In America between June and December 1893, 8,000 businesses, 360 banks and 156 railway companies failed. The unemployment rate reached 20 percent and Coxey’s Army, aka the “Commonweal of Christ,” was one of a number of demonstrations of workless men to march on Washington in 1894.

502. Christian and Missionary Alliance, 6 July 1898, 11.

503. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 159–60.

504. Christian and Missionary Alliance, 6 July 1898, 11.

505. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 195.

506. Ibid., 164.

507. As with Alma White, Carrie had some difficulty at first in locating Spirit baptism into the narrative of her spiritual experiences. She had hitherto understood that the blessings received during her initial healing in 1879 constituted her Spirit baptism. That experience “was real and lasting. How could I cast it away?” Then the insight came that “I was not to depreciate His precious work in the past, but to follow on to receive the fullness of the same Spirit.” This viewpoint she saw as modeled on the biblical account of Spirit insufflation in John 20:22 (“the precious work”) and the outpouring on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2 (“the fullness”). By contrast, Alma White rejected the need to go beyond her experience of sanctification.

508. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 166.

509. Ibid.,169.

510. TF, August 1908, 170.

511. TF, December 1909, 268.

512. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 180. News of the 1905 Welsh revival sparked revival at the Mukti Mission. Speaking in tongues first broke out there in December 1906 and owed much to the influence of the American Holiness missionary, Minnie Abrams (1859–1912). Abrams left India in 1908 and preached in the House of Peace in Oakland during a promotional tour.

513. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 184.

514. Wigglesworth was later able to link up with the Montgomerys at the Cazadero Camp convention convened by them in 1914 in the spectacular setting of the giant redwood forests of northern California.

515. Lydia Walshaw merited a place in the potted biographies of those Pentecostal pioneers known personally by Donald Gee in his These Men (sic) I Knew, 84–86. Gee said of her that “congregations never became bored or fogged when Mrs Walshaw was speaking.”

516. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 185.

517. Confidence, December 1914, 223–24.

518. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 196.

519. Ibid., 198.

520. TF, February 1914, 47.

521. Wacker, Heaven Below, 88.

522. Montgomery, “Under His Wings,” 187.

523. TF, December 1910, 266.

524. TF, July 1909, 153.

525. TF, July 1909, 152.

526. DeArteaga, Quenching the Spirit, 121. For the history of divine healing in the post-WW II period, see Harrell, All Thing are Possible.

527. Curtis, “The Lord for the Body,” 148.

528. Shuster, “Neurasthenia.” Online.

529. Hall, “Adolescence.” Online.

530. Crichton-Browne, “Very Victorian Psychiatrist,” Online. Until relatively recently the psychiatric disorder hysteria was assumed to be a dysfunction of women, and caused by a wandering uterus (hysterion=uterus).

531. Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female Animal,” 116.

532. Woolson. Woman in American Society, 190, 192.

533. Herndl, Invalid Women, 112.

534. Showalter, Hystories, 66.

535. Opp, “The Word and the Flesh,” 213–24, 215.

536. TF, March 1884, 49.

537. A contemporary press report on the Nervine Institute highlights its affluent class milieu, “Rich rugs scattered here and there over polished hardwood floors, graceful draperies, engravings and etchings of good pictures, and best of all, books, go to make up a cosy homelike interior. . . . And, indeed, everything about the place shows that the managers have a realizing sense of the soothing and healing influences of aesthetic surroundings. . . . Patients are reading, writing, talking or strolling about, as the spirit moves them. (Boston Daily Globe, April 18 1887)

538. TF, March 1884, 50.

539. Ibid., 51.

540. Mix, Faith Cures, 59. Letter sent to Mix, dated August 1881.

541. Curtis, “The Lord for the Body,” 153.

542. TF, May 1882, 66.

543. Mix, Faith Cures, 6, dated 7 September 1881.

544. Curtis, “The Lord for the Body,” 153.

545. TF, May 1882, 66.

546. Curtis, “The Lord for the Body,” 155.

547. TF, May 1884, 108.

548. TF, April 1885, 91.

549. TF, January 1884, 11.

550. Opp, The Lord for the Body, 40.

551. Prosser, From Death to Life, 10.

552. Ibid., 22.

553. Ibid., 25.

554. Ibid., 31. The anonymous author of Vital Magnetic Cure also wrote Epitome of Spiritualism and Magnetism, (Boston, 1876). In the former he wrote, “Many contend that Nerve-Force and Electro-Magnetism are identical and that in depressed vitality or paralyzed nerve force the deficiency is made up.” In other words, when the battery of the body is run down it needs to be recharged by electrical energy. This was done in a variety of ways, one of which was to rub vigorously the patient’s spinal column. Other practices, arcane to the outsider, originated in mesmerism, and often had links with spiritualism. About this time, her father married a spiritualist medium.

555. Ibid., 31.

556. Ibid., 38.

557. Ibid., 102, 105.

558. Ibid., 169.

559. Ibid., 179.

560. TF, March 1884, 51.

561 Ibid., 52.

562 Ibid., 53.

563 Ibid., 54.

564. Neurasthenia peaked at the turn of the new century and by the 1930s was rarely diagnosed. Reasons include the abandonment of the “nervous energy” model of health in modern medicine; the rise of psychoanalysis and the use of new therapies in the treatment of psychosomatic disorders; the commonplace acceptance of urbanization and the opportunities it afforded women in the work force and participation in social life. (See Shuster, “Neurasthenia.”)

565. Baer, “Perfectly Empowered Bodies,” 240.

566. Ibid., 240–41.

567. Smith, From Baca to Beulah, 182. After she regained the use of her legs, Jennie became a full-time evangelist with the WCTU and a national leader within the National Railroad YMCA in its mission to railway men.

568. Bending, Representation, 44.

569. See Robinson, Divine Healing 1830–1890, 281–94, for more developed consideration of this shift in the understanding of pain and suffering.

570. Darwin to Asa Gray, Letter, 22 May 1860. Online.

571. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 294.

572. The Pentecostal scholar and accredited minister of the Assemblies of God in Great Britain, David Petts, in his doctoral thesis “Healing and the Atonement,” maintains that the Matthew passage avoids “any suggestion that Jesus vicariously took sicknesses upon himself” (128). Also, he rejects the view that the Petrine verse teaches that physical healing is “in the atonement” (154), thus putting himself at odds with his denomination, which holds in its “Fundamental Truths” that physical healing is provided in the atonement. His opinion is indicative of current majority scholarship.

573. Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil, 146.

574. Martin, Pentecostalism, 105.

575. Neely, Lincoln Family Album, 20.

576. Well-known men were diagnosed with the malady such as philosopher William James and sociologist Max Weber. Incorporating neurasthenic characters into fiction also became fashionable in the writings of Henry James, Thomas Mann, and André Gide, some of whom were neurasthenic themselves. (Schuster, “Neurasthenia.” Online)

577. Eddy, Science and Health, 618.

578. Marrs, Confessions, 87.

579. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles, 202.

580. Ibid., 209.

581. Livingstone, “Christian Science.” Online.

582. Eddy, Science and Health, 188.

583. Fuller, Alternative Medicine, 61.

584. Eddy, Science and Health, 146.

585. Ibid., 201.

586. Ibid., 380.

587. Ibid., 146.

588. Schoepflin, Christian Science, 60–61.

589. TF, March 1889, 53.

590. Eddy, Science and Health, 145.

591. “Talking” is somewhat overstated. Especially in the early stages of treatment after the illness had been identified, the CS practitioner remained silent. One practitioner testified in a court case that “I prayed—our whole interview took about twenty-five minutes. I remained all this time in silent prayer.” Prayer in this context is not to be understood as the same as the prayer of faith. The prayer of the practitioner was “an affirmation of the Truth that God, ‘the Principle of man, and not a person, produces all good’” (Schoepflin, Christian Science, 65). The essential message was that it was impossible to have a disease because no such thing exists.

592. Whorton, Nature Cures, 124.

593. Poloma, “Comparison of Christian Science and Mainline Christian Healing.” 337.

594. See Robinson, Divine Healing, 278–80, for the similar challenge of Spiritualism.

595. Schoepflin, Christian Science, 85.

596. In research published in 1926 the value of church edifices in American urban areas was calculated across the denominations. In dollars per head, the values of some representative churches were—Christian Science $359, Episcopalian $243, Congregationalist $224, Presbyterian Church USA $214, Roman Catholic $63, Mormon Church $41. (Wilson, Sects and Society, 149.)

597. TF, September 1890, 198.

598. She went on to pioneer Pentecostal work in Alberta and later served on the faculty of Aimee Semple McPherson’s Bible College, teaching courses in church history and divine healing.

599. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 108, 124.

600. Cunningham, “Impact of Christian Science,” 888.

601. Cunningham, Ministry of Healing, 52–33.

602. Mullin, Miracles, 182.

603. TF, December 1886, 277.

604. Ibid., 279.

605. Ibid., August 1893, 176.

606. TF, January 1891, 7.

607. TF, March 1890, 51.

608. TF, May 1890, 105.

609. Howland’s impact on the city earned it the sobriquet “Toronto the Good.” As champion of the poor, Howland and his CMA colleague John Salmon, visited the poor areas distributing food and praying openly over the sick.

610. Opp, The Lord for the Body, 74.

611. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 37, n. 32.

612. Confidence, December 1913, 231.

613. Bararacco, Prescribing Faith, 86–87.

5

The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition in Britain

COMPETING SPIRITUALITIES IN FIN-DE-SIÈCLE BRITAIN

The period from the late nineteenth century to the Great War (1914–18), known as the Belle Époque, was the “golden age” for the upper classes in Europe. In America, the era was referred to as the “Gilded Age” during which some industrialists and financiers made vast fortunes, among them Andrew Carnegie who published The Gospel of Wealth in 1900. The term fin-de-siècle as pertained to the end years of the century carried somewhat different connotations, suggestive of a mélange of extravagant opulence, cultural decadence, societal change, and taxing challenge. The leader of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation wryly remarked that with every new sign of industrial unrest “the Millennium was at hand,” perhaps wittingly stealing a theme from evangelical chiliasm.[614] In Britain social and political agitation surrounded questions of democracy, suffrage, women’s rights, organized labor, and the complex issues raised by the nation’s colonial responsibilities arising from its industrial and financial global power. By the end of the century, the world-historical process of rationalization that Weber conceptualized as leading to the secularization of advanced societies was partially, at least, demonstrable. This did not mean so much the erosion of individual faith, more the decline in the power and centrality of organized religion. One of the areas of greatest decline in churchgoing between 1886 and 1902 occurred in London’s suburban districts where attendance declined by a third. These were the very areas where the challenge of scientific naturalism and the drift to equate religion with myth and superstition seeped into the consciousness of the educated minority. The novelist Thomas Hardy’s poem, in which he imagined himself in attendance at “God’s Funeral,” provided the title A. N. Wilson gave to his book on the period. The poem’s powerful imagery is captured in lines such as these:

And tricked by our own early dream

And need of solace, we grew self-deceived. . . .

Till in Time’s stayless stealthy swing

Uncompromising rude reality

Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning

Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be . . . [615]

Wilson’s thesis is that by the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the great writers, artists and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many had abandoned belief in God completely.

Not all, of course, were swept along on this tide. The literary historian Holbrook Jackson spoke of “the unsatisfied spirit of the age,” of a hollowness that found refuge in esoteric mystical knowledge that recalled an ancient gnosticism.[616] The turn of the century witnessed a flurry of innovative religious movements, some of which sought to ground spirituality on empirical science, and even healing outside received medicine.

Metaphysical Alternatives

When Jackson published his account of fin-de-siècle cultural trends, he saw the 1890s marking a transition from “not only one social system to another, but from one morality to another, one culture to another, and one religion to a dozen or none.” The era was defined by him as one that saw “the development of a transcendental view of social life” that ushered in “the beginning of the revival of mysticism,” saluted as “the spiritual movement of the age.”[617] Spiritualism became an influential precursor to a variety of beliefs that can be loosely described as occult.[618] Two movements typified the institutional form that such ideas took—the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by the Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877) was an eclectic collection of Western occultism, Buddhist and Hindu teachings. She claimed her Tibetan Masters (her personal spiritual guides) dictated the book.

The more elite and clandestine Hermetic Order attracted noted personages from the comfortable middle-class, such as Florence Farr, the Ibsenite actress, E. Nesbit, author of children’s books, Mina Bergson, sister of the idealist philosopher Henri Bergson, and W. B. Yeats, Irish poet and playwright. Yeats for a short time recruited Maud Gonne, a leading figure in Irish nationalism, as well as other friends from his own Irish Protestant background with a leaning to Celtic mysticism.[619] A sub-group known as the Second Order believed that as adepts moved up through the grades of mastery of revered and ancient techniques they could gain control over the invisible forces that control the universe. Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) in 1904 participated in a break-away group of the Golden Dawn before renouncing it in favor of mystical Christianity. Her book on mysticism published in 1911 was the standard work on the subject for fifty years, just as her much later Christian Healing: A Consideration of the Place of Spiritual Healing in the Church of Today (1940) was to become a classic within the leadership of mainstream churches.

Like most metaphysical systems, early Theosophy had a connection with healing, in its case through mesmerism. Blavatsky took issue with those Christian theologians who, “while claiming to heal by divine commission, denounce all lay mesmerist healers as either humbugs or sorcerers.” She drew attention to the claim of the American mesmerist, A. E. Newton, that in 1886 he had been involved in the healing of 150,000 sick people, a tally “more than all the instantaneous cures effected by all the holy wells and shrines and professed healers within our historical period.”[620] She spoke of her associate, Colonel Olcott, who claimed to heal more than fifty paralytics in Ceylon, “in each case using the name of Lord Buddha,” the invocation of whose name “was as necessary as was the name of Jesus to many healers of the Romish church.” Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) was to become the co-founder and first President of the Theosophical Society, and the first notable Westerner to make a formal conversion to Buddhism.[621] It was through their mutual interest in spiritualism that they first made contact.

In 1880, Olcott paid his first visit to Ceylon where he was formally endorsed as a Buddhist. When a party of Catholic missionaries turned a borehole near a Buddhist pilgrimage site into a Lourdes-type shrine, Olcott feared that it would cause a rush of local Buddhists into Catholicism. In an attempt to break the Catholic monopoly over this crucial slice of the religious marketplace, Olcott appealed for a monk to step forward and perform healings in the name of Lord Buddha. When no response was forthcoming, he decided to do the work himself. His first healing took place in 1882 when a man with a paralysed arm and disabled leg sought help. Recalling his youthful experiments in mesmerism, he made a few desultory passes over the man’s arm. News of the man’s healing spread across the island and transformed his mission to that of a charismatic white Buddhist healer.

Publicly Olcott attributed his healings to the Buddha, privately he credited Franz Mesmer. His celebrated cures popularized his Buddhist message among the Sinhalese peasantry and inspired messianic expectations among the poorest. When he visited London in 1884 he called in the office of the London evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, then under the editorship of the crusading journalist W. T. Stead. It reported that Olcott claimed to have been instrumental in the healing of 8,000 persons over thirteen months. The article related that “he is said to have performed almost every cure as recorded in Old or New Testament. He has made the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak, the blind to see; the paralysed have been restored to the full use of their limbs, the cripples have walked; and, although he cannot boast of having raised the dead or healed a leper, he asserts that he cured a man suffering from elephantiasis, who was the nearest approach to a leper which he had to do with.”[622]

Blavatsky called on Olcott when he was in London to desist from his work of healing, mainly because his demanding schedule was leaving him physically exhausted: “Our headquarter building [attracts] two and three hundred patients a day . . . and the President was often unable to find time to even get a cup of tea before 5 p.m.” Olcott’s success was such that requests had piled up for him to visit and “publicly heal the sick as he did in Ceylon.”[623] For his pioneering mission efforts and attendant healings, Olcott was acknowledged as “the Apostle Paul of Theosophy” whose form of religion was described as “Protestant Buddhism.”[624] That Theosophy presented a challenge in its day to Christianity was a cause of concern to Jessie Penn-Lewis, who characterized the period leading up to the Welsh Revival in 1904 as one when “the Prince of Darkness was working insidiously among the people, undermining their faith in the Scriptures as the Word of God, silencing the preaching of the Cross to the utmost of his power, and drawing off great numbers into Theosophy, Christian Science and Spiritualism.”[625]

The intrusion of the occult into an otherwise conventional ministry of healing is disclosed in the story of Edward George Henry Montagu (b. 1839), a scion of one of the leading aristocratic families in Britain. On the eve of his birth his mother was appointed a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria, who shortly after his birth kissed his infant hand.[626] A lifelong bachelor, he inherited the title of eighth Earl of Sandwich in 1884, was later elevated to Viscount Hinchingbrooke, and served as Lord Lieutenant of his native Huntingdonshire from 1891 till his death at the age of seventy-six in 1916. In his early life he was a soldier, then a minor diplomat and eventually elected a Member of Parliament. A staunch churchman, he was much inspired by the writings of Dean Farrar who exerted a tremendous influence on the Victorian middle-classes, notably through his books, Life of Christ (1874) and Life and Works of St Paul (1879). Sandwich’s religious convictions were described in Memoirs as “real, absolute, childlike faith” that became more manifest when he became involved in the work of healing the sick.[627] In temperament, he was noted for his caring nature that he sometimes covered with a cloak of sarcasm. For over fifty years he took a personal interest in the welfare of the sick and impoverished that led him to attentive involvement in the management of five hospitals. During the Boer War he opened his home to sick and wounded officers with only minimal assistance from the medical profession.

Throughout his diaries there are hints of his possessing a healing power that came to light through the treatment of his butler George Andrews who had suffered intense pain for about two years following an operation for a tumor on his spine. Through a cousin, Sandwich heard of James Moore Hickson who was becoming known as an Anglican faith-healer, and whose ministry will be discussed fully in a subsequent book. He traveled to London to invite him to come and see Andrews. Hickson immediately on introduction said, “You have the same power that I have,” a remark that so astonished him that he feared to question it. Shortly afterwards, Hickson spent the night at Hinchingbrooke and both prayed for the butler. Andrews told his employer that he experienced absolutely the same sensations from him as he had from Hickson.[628] Andrews’ spinal condition improved temporarily to the extent that he was able to walk unaided, only to die a year and nine months after the visit of Hickson. The significance of the incident lay in the fact that Sandwich was inspired to engage fully in the ministry of healing. His book My Experiences is largely given over to written testimonies from people for whom he had prayed during the years 1912–15. Some of the testimonies were written in French by Belgian refugees after they arrived in England. As Chairman of the Belgian Relief Committee, he was one of the first to offer them hospitality at Hinchingbrooke.

Detecting biblical warrant for his gift of healing, Sandwich cited 1 Corinthians 12:9 as showing that to some shall be given the power of healing: “I do not presume to lay claim to any personal power. It is a gift on the same conditions that other special gifts are bestowed upon men.” He saw it as his “duty to exercise the gift bestowed upon me to the best of my ability whenever and to whosoever I am directed.”[629] Faith had a place in that “Christ is the healer; man by faith is His instrument.”[630] A constant question he fielded was whether faith was necessary in the patient, to which he replied, “This cannot be so; I have treated a baby and a child with complete success . . . and others who, as far as I know, had no belief in the power.”[631] When praying for the sick he laid hands on them, praying loudly, often using extracts from the Book of Common Prayer which he knew by heart. A nephew for whom he prayed successfully twice spoke of feeling “a strong electric current down my arm to the hand he was holding.”[632]

In April 1912, the Bishop of Ely wrote to Sandwich inviting him to meet the newly constituted Clerical and Medical Committee. The Committee was set up as a response to the “rapid development of ‘Spiritual’ and ‘Faith’ healing movements”—a sure sign of a quickening concern about the whole subject.[633] The brief laid down for the Committee was threefold: to continue investigations into the meaning and scope of spiritual, faith and mental healing; to consider how the dangers connected with such treatments by persons not medically qualified might best be guarded against; to promote all legitimate co-operation between the two professions. The Committee was made up of ten leading clerics, the Dean of Westminster acting as chairman, and eleven senior medical professionals, three of whom had received knighthoods for their research findings in medicine. The chairman was Herbert C. Ryle, the second son of Bishop J. C. Ryle, former Bishop of Liverpool, who did not share his father’s evangelical sympathies.

Sandwich agreed to attend the Inquiry, aware that the Committee’s brief and composition were stacked against his thaumaturgic (Gk. thauma- “wonder,” “miracle”) understanding of healing. In reply to Ryle, he wrote that he would only attend the Inquiry on the understanding that his faith and experiences were not open to argument or discussion because “human understanding is imperfect and the members of the Committee will not be able to understand, nor can I explain what I do not understand.”[634] A summary of his evidence to the Committee appeared in its report published in 1914 and reads much as expected. He spoke of his healing power as a divine gift and mentioned several cases in which he had witnessed pain relieved permanently, and cures in people “suffering from cancer, paralysis, sciatica, neuritis, tic, blindness, mania,” all entirely on direction or intuitions from the spirit world as to what cases he should treat.[635]

Up to this point, it is difficult to detect any major difference between Sandwich and the radical healers. There is, however, no indication in the literature of any interaction between the two, in part attributable to the social divide and circles in which they operated. Also, his ministry was to the individual in cloistered settings. However, if the full story behind the healings of Sandwich had become known to the Holiness/Pentecostal healers, then a theological chasm would have opened between them. When Sandwich told the Committee that he acted entirely on direction or intuitions as to what cases he should treat, it was treated doubtless as a seemingly innocuous statement. However, nine days before the Committee met in June 1912, the Erskine Memoirs recorded that Sandwich received a message from a Dr Coulter that informed him, “I want you to make my speech for me; I thought I would give you a short outline today. The other speeches will be technical, and I wish you to have the spiritual element. . . . Be very patient. It is the first step in a great movement. Tell them that you believe the material age is over and we are on the brink of enlightenment.”[636] The last sentence with its premonitory feel calls for an introduction to the mysterious Dr Coulter.

In September 1915, the 100-bed Coulter Hospital opened in a house in Grosvenor Square, London. It was accepted by the War Office as a primary hospital for injured officers. The Hospital had been founded by Mrs Charlotte Herbine, an American

psychic from Indianapolis, who had raised money for it while visiting the Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.[637] The Hospital was named after Dr Coulter, the spirit of the dead family physician with whom Mrs Charlotte Herbine had communicated since childhood.[638] Dr Coulter had directed her to go to England as he wanted to contact certain Englishmen.[639] One of these was the Earl of Sandwich, the first President of the new Hospital. Herbine met often with the Earl at Hinchingbrooke where Dr Coulter’s spirit communicated with him either through the medium of Herbine or the Earl’s niece, Mrs Scott-Gatty. At no time did Sandwich receive directions directly. They were delivered to his niece, who wrote down the words that flowed “with lightening rapidity and without a pause.”[640] The communications were quite specific. On one occasion in November 1915 he was directed to tell a particularly select group that his healing ministry was being “assisted by a friend in spirit, with whom you communicate in a variety of ways, and that the other world is knit together with the earth, all bound up in close ties of love and affection and unfailing interest.”[641]

In 1912, at the request of Dr Coulter, the seventy-five-year-old Earl and Herbine visited India, of which he recounted, “I have treated old and young, high and low, in palaces and cottages, in a Mohammedan mosque, in a Hindoo convent—indeed, wherever I have been directed . . . I have been met with unbounded confidence and with contemptuous disdain—all that is nothing to me.”[642] For inclusion in her book with the sub-title Letters from Dr Coulter (1919), Herbine requested Sandwich to introduce the final chapter by providing a detailed account of “his marvellous cures.” The chapter was rounded off with a paragraph from Mrs Herbine and a lengthy tailpiece from Dr Coulter. The paragraph reminded readers that “healing of the sick was one of the great works of the Master. He gave power to his disciples to heal and cast out devils. That power has been given in the later days, and among them so honored is Lord Sandwich.”[643]

The contribution ascribed to the uncanny Coulter portrays him at his benign best, something of a folk philosopher and social critic, unexceptional for the most part, though heterodox in Christian doctrine. In the final Letter, Coulter confesses to a great dislike of Black Magic, “because it is based on superstition.” Illustrative adages include: “A taste of life is like a taste of wine, delicious, exhilarating, fascinating; you are in the fields of discovery, and your object is to learn; If you would find God, the real Father, full of love and tender sympathy, you would not fill your prisons with men sent to wear their lives away that the whims of cruel people may be satisfied; What you need is a revolution within yourselves, to make you see the needs of brother-man; Great nations are destroyed by the low rule of human passion.”[644] Maxims such as these exemplify Alex Owens’ point that “at the turn of the century, when occultism in Britain was often closely tied to progressive politics and a benign worldview, the problems implicit in occult rationalizations lay in abeyance.”[645] At the more elevated end of the social scale, where Sandwich and Herbine were clearly placed, the occult was in such circles seen as a progressive movement that rattled the cage of a philosophical naturalism. The attraction of spiritualism seeped into circles where the belief that “Christian spiritualism is no contradiction in terms” was becoming accepted.[646] As such, it substantiated the case for an afterlife and verified a miraculous dimension to human existence at a time when the sense of the transcendent was faltering, and the battle fields of Europe were red in blood.

Evangelical reaction to the healing exploits of Sandwich was muted, in part because they were not widely known outside the Sandwich circle. The review of the Erskine Memoirs that appeared in the Anglican periodical The Churchman was soothing in suggesting that there was “no ground for doubting that Lord Sandwich, always a devout man, believed himself so qualified and empowered, and little reason, one thinks, for doubting that he actually brought assuagement of pain and healing.” There was an acknowledgement that the matter would for some “be vitiated by Lord Sandwich’s conviction that he was under the direction of a deceased American physician.”[647] Absent from the review is any attempt to measure such healings against the benchmark of biblical norms. Any response on these lines faced the prospect of being regarded as the expression of a minority position.

One such respondent was the American cleric Henry B. Wilson, who became in 1905 the Anglican priest in charge of a mission in Brooklyn, New York. Through his frequent visits to nearby hospitals he saw many of his prayers for healing answered. Forced to change location by stress, he became rector of St John’s Church in Boonton, New Jersey, in 1907. In 1910 he formed the Society of the Nazarene, the aim of which was to deepen spiritual life and to impart health to body and soul by prayer and the laying on of hands or anointing. In this he was strongly influenced by Hickson, who had formed a similar organization, the Society of Emmanuel in England. Wilson wrote a number of books on healing, as well as publishing the monthly magazine The Nazarene that contained teaching and testimonies related to healing. Largely by these means he promoted the ministry of healing in the Episcopal Church in America and prepared the denomination for the highly visible visit of Hickson in 1919 and 1920.

In his book Ghosts or Gospels: The Methods of Spiritualism in Healing Compared, Wilson raised the issue of Sandwich and Dr Coulter, together with some observations on Hickson. He warned his readers that Spiritualism “in many quarters has invaded the field of Spiritual Healing.”[648] The book was dedicated to the Society of the Nazarene for their “fidelity in exercising the healing power according to the Master’s Method and for their zeal in guarding it from superstition and ignorance.” It was written “not in a spirit of controversy or criticism of others, but solely with the view of keeping before other minds the methods of Jesus.” Such methods were all the more needed at a time when the healing ministry was becoming “confused with the primitive spiritistic belief in Demonism.”[649] The need of the hour was a re-education of all psychic persons to recognize that the gift of healing is not the result of departed spirit control and cannot be excused: “All the teaching of the Gospels points to the fact of an impassable barrier between the visible and invisible realms of the Kingdom.”

Though Hickson had played an influential part in encouraging Wilson in the establishing of the Society of the Nazarene, he was not immune to Wilson’s criticism of him for lending his acceptance to the control that Dr Coulter had on Sandwich. Similarly, some senior clergy in the Church of England were concerned about aspects of Hickson’s ministry. The Bishop of Oxford, H. M. Burge, was informed by Harold Anson by letter in August 1923 that Hickson used to say he worked his cures through a spirit called Eva: “Then he gave up that, and now I think sincerely believes that he works them through Our Lord.”[650] This allegation would support the idea that Hickson in earlier days would not have objected to the idea of Sandwich being subject to Coulter’s control. The beliefs that Hickson held about psychic forces and possession are discussed in a later work.

The Holiness Alternative: Keswick and its Message

Annie Besant (1847–1943), who became President of the Theosophical Society in 1907, sought some accommodation between Theosophy and Christianity in her Esoteric Christianity (1905). The book presented an occult understanding of Christian teachings that emphasized the mythical and symbolic meaning of biblical texts.[651] For Owen, this newly formulated mysticism in its critique of the Enlightenment project was part of the necessary route to an “interiorised encounter with the divine.”[652] This last phrase could have been applied equally to the thrust of the Keswick message, despite their quite different convictions. The experience of a realized union with Christ as a distinct and second stage in Christian experience lay at the heart of the Higher Life/Keswick message. There were leaders in the Keswick movement also averse to the Enlightenment project, who found themselves more in tune with a mystical element within some modes of Christian spirituality. One of the founding members of the movement warned against “leaving out the mystical element in our teaching and keeping to the hard lines of scientific theology.”[653] Keswick’s response to the collapse of formal dogma that marked the period barely escaped the “kind of non-doctrinal, Wordsworthian, sub-pantheism that gradually permeated all denominations.”[654] Bebbington has drawn attention to the resonance that Keswick had with Romanticism, a core element of which is an organic conception of reality that held humanity and nature to be in a symbiotic relationship. F. B. Meyer expressed this relationship in serene terms when he argued in 1890 that God’s presence was in every crocus, in every firefly in the forest and that everything was “as full of God’s presence as the burning bush.” He declared that appreciation of God’s creation came not so much by scientific method as by “the virtues of purity, simplicity and childlikeness.”[655]

While Meyer was no pantheist, another speaker was taken to task for his utterance that “every man has a little bit of God.” It provoked the criticism that the tenor of his address had gone “to the verge of a pantheistic view of the world.”[656] Meyer found in nature a genuine context for something even more profound, something that lay at the heart of Keswick spirituality, viz., the indwelling power of Christ through the Holy Spirit. In one of two profound experiences he had during the Convention season, Meyer recollected walking alone at night up the hillside, longing for a deeper communion with God: “[T]he wind was driving the clouds across the lake and past me, and now and again they dropped a few drops on my upturned face.” As the wind blew, he prayed, “Father, as I breathe in this breath of the evening air, I breathe in the gift of the Holy Spirit.”[657] Though he had no great gush of feeling, the validity of the experience changed his ministry and spurred his advancement of the Keswick message on the international stage. By 1914, one early historian of the movement commented that the poetry and mysticism that Charles Fox, a former curate of William Pennefather, had brought to the Convention was becoming rare, an indication, perhaps, that the revival-of-mysticism era was ending as the dark clouds of war were approaching.

A central thrust of Keswick teaching from its beginning has been to draw the

attention of the evangelical constituency to life in the Holy Spirit. For decades prior to the Welsh Revival and the arrival of Pentecostalism there was for the most part “a conspiracy of silence” among evangelicals regarding the person and work of the Spirit.[658] Little was explored beyond the Spirit as a member of the Trinity, and an honorific in creedal confessions, but rarely recognized as the transforming force indwelling and empowering the lives of the individual Christian, and restoring the vibrancy of the primitive church. A. T. Pierson described Keswick as “a fountain of spiritual life . . . closely reproducing the

assemblies of the primitive apostolic church.”[659] Keswick, though, was quite circumspect when it came to supernatural manifestations and was content to keep within bounds the work of the Spirit to indwelling as a force for holiness, service and witness. Despite Keswick’s caution towards any emotionally charged display, an attitude seriously tested in 1905 when 300 Welsh visitors fresh from the Welsh Revival descended on the Convention, there were those more open to a wider perspective. F. B. Meyer, for one, linked the Welsh Revival to the teaching on the charismatic gifts outlined in 1 Corinthians 12. Even though he did not himself move into this dimension, he could look back in the 1920s to the Welsh Revival as “days of Pentecostal overflowing.”[660]

A number of speakers who addressed the Keswick convention both favored and practiced divine healing. All accepted the Keswick understanding that controversial

issues should not be aired openly. Prominent figures in the healing ministry such as Otto Stockmayer, Andrew Murray, and Lord Radstock all spoke at the main tent meetings and Elizabeth Baxter addressed the Ladies’ Meeting yearly from 1876 to 1883. Cecil Polhill (1860–1938), who was to become a leading figure in, and financial patron of, British Pentecostalism, was another participant at Keswick.[661] A member of the acclaimed Cambridge Seven, he reported on the missionary situation along the Tibetan border.[662] George Grubb, noted for his “rip-roaring Irishness,” was a leading speaker who was among those commissioned by the Convention to advance the Keswick message globally with the aim of infusing fresh life into far-flung mission outposts. Described as a man of “sheer faith who fully expected and often saw the most improbable occurrences in answer to prayer,” he was a firm believer in divine healing.[663]

In 1890 during his visit to a Wesleyan Mission in Ceylon and just before he was called upon to pray for a young girl “troubled with hysteria,” Grubb was quizzed whether or not he accepted divine healing. His reply was affirmative: “Of course, I said I did most certainly.”[664] At the 1890 Keswick Convention, he reported the healing of a deaf and dumb boy, only to be challenged subsequently about the permanence of the cure. In a letter to The Christian, he did not deny a reversal of the boy’s condition, but sought to set the problem in the wider context of unanswered prayer. At the same time, he reaffirmed his position: “The truth of divine healing needs no support from me, for it is supported by Scripture and manifest in Christian experience.”[665] He was familiar with Bethshan, addressing a missionary meeting there in May 1905.[666]

Another who definitely practiced divine healing was the Afro-American evangelist and missionary Amanda Berry Smith (1837–1915) who addressed the Ladies’ Meeting in 1882.[667] In her autobiography, she mentioned that when she received the blessing of sanctification in 1868, “I had often prayed for sick people, and asked the Lord to bless the means that were used, and so many times He did it, as I believe in answer to prayer [even though] I had never heard of Dr Cullis, Dr Boardman, or Dr Mahan.”[668] Through her own experience of suffering, she did not go as far as the most radical of the healers in rejecting all medical intervention or ascribe continuing illness to a lack of faith. In 1890, when she returned from Africa in a state of exhaustion to stay in Liverpool, she was visited by her “dear friend” Mrs Staveley, founder of the “Berachah” healing home at Stockport. Her friend had often written to her on the subject of healing when she was in Africa, and had sent her a supply of literature on the topic. When she told Staveley that she was taking medication, she was dismayed by her host’s reaction. Registering her surprise, Smith commented: “Somehow I did not seem to be able to see the teaching as they did. They could not understand how anyone so strong in faith as I seemed to be, did not see it.”[669] Her attitude was that those who denigrated medical help were in bondage by submitting to “a spirit of will-worship.”[670]

Keswick’s integrating role in British evangelicalism, from which the Pentecostal movement never sought to be divorced, was evidenced in the part it played in the spirituality of the leaders of the new movement. The three strands that blended to shape British Pentecostalism were present at Keswick at different times in the persons of Alexander Boddy, William Burton (Anglican), George Jeffreys (Congregationalist), Smith Wigglesworth, William Oliver Hutchinson and Thomas Mogridge (Wesleyan Holiness), and Nelson Parr (Brethren). Of these men, Boddy stands out as the founding father of British Pentecostalism. According to his daughter Jane, Boddy had been a fairly nondescript Christian in his youth, “but a change came when he went to a Convention at Keswick.”[671] In the year following his Spirit baptism, Boddy recorded that on his visit to Keswick in 1908 he was “glad to see there faces we had looked into at the Sunderland Convention.” Boddy was to host the Annual Whitsuntide Pentecostal Conventions at Sunderland in the years 1908–1914.

However, indications of tension between the Keswick and Sunderland Conventions could not for long be held in abeyance. At the 1907 Keswick Convention, Boddy had squared up, as he perceived it, to the inadequate spirituality of Keswick by distributing thousands of copies of his pamphlet Pentecost for England. Shortly before, he had issued a challenge in declaring that “those who have ‘Tongues’ will be present, and unable and unwilling to control them when moved by the Spirit.”[672] From him, it was an uncharacteristically acerbic and unbiblical warning. The disagreement of Pentecostals with Keswick teaching lay in their understanding of Spirit baptism, which for them was a power baptism that opened a way into a new charismatic dimension, one effecting “a paradigm shift of such proportion that one spontaneously responds in tongues.”[673] Where Keswick majored on “victory” and “resting in the Lord,” Pentecostals took the more American Higher Life position that stressed “power for service.” Pentecostals were disappointed by what they saw as the woolliness of the “teachers of the receive-by-faith school.”[674] Boddy, after his observation that “many of us thank God for Keswick in the past,” went on to declare that the Lord is calling His people to go forward “to an experimental Pentecost, their birthright because of the shed blood of Calvary.”[675] Gee, for his part, acknowledged that those who identified with the Pentecostal movement in its earliest years were Christians of mature spiritual experience who “had tasted a previous experience of the Spirit’s grace and power in connection with the Holiness and Keswick Movements.”[676]

BETHSHAN LINKS TO BRITISH PENTECOSTALISM

Foreshadowing of Pentecostalism in the Eleventh Hour

Bethshan had links with both Keswick and the nascent Pentecostal movement. Max Reich and Elizabeth Sisson were two of the prominent names to appear in the Eleventh Hour—the successor to Thy Healer—and Confidence.[677] Both gave their allegiance to the Pentecostal movement with the closure of Bethshan. There are two references to the healing home in Confidence, which featured both Max Reich and the healing of Elizabeth Sisson in 1909.[678] In 1904, at the height of the Welsh Revival, Reich had featured in an

article in the Eleventh Hour carrying the title “Divine Healing at Bethshan” that

announced “the usual Wednesday afternoon of prayer for God’s sick ones.” It was Reich’s role at one meeting to introduce Seth Joshua, the colorful Welsh evangelist associated with the Forward Movement of the Presbyterian Church in Wales, who had a strong influence on Evan Roberts and through him on the Welsh Revival 1904–5. Joshua had given a remarkable address in full Pentecostal vein two years before the happenings at Azusa Street. He assured his audience that, “We should soon cease to speak of these manifestations of the Spirit, such as gifts of healing and of tongues, as we do now, with bated breath, if there were no hindrances to God’s working, for we should see these gifts restored to the Church, and daily exercised as a matter of course.” Describing a recent visit to a large asylum that saddened him to the point of tears, he said:

I was forced to ask myself, How far has satanic power come to grapple with men and women? Will there not come a day when the Church will arise, and an anointing of the Spirit take place upon some in particular, who will be able to grapple with Satan upon his own ground? The thought comes to me with almost prophetic force, and I see a glint of light sometimes; for among the tens of thousands thus shut up, thus held in the chains of Satan, are some of the most precious of God’s saints. I know it is an enigma; I know that I touch one of the problems of life; but I feel, I trust, a prophetic thrill and throb that the Lord is not far away from coming to give us the solution of this great question.[679]

Joshua’s words bear out Gee’s appraisal that it is impossible, and would be historically incorrect, to dissociate the Pentecostal movement from the Welsh Revival: “Its most formative result was the creation of a widespread spirit of expectation for still greater things.”[680]

Joshua reassured any of his listeners who might have been alarmed by any display of Welsh-type emotional fervor that “in this quiet room you do not experience outbursts of revival ecstasy. Such are not for gatherings of this character.” Their call was to the ministry of intercession and “thus send currents of healing and of blessing far and wide.” Far and wide blessing was indeed one of the ripple effects of the Welsh Revival as within a decade all five continents experienced its potent surge.[681] The Eleventh Hour carried reports of global revival in the final years of its publication. One such was an article by J. Pengwern Jones, a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist missionary working in the hill country of Assam, northeast India. Under the title “Revival and Healing in the Khassia Hills,” he presented a report from the area around Sylhet. He relayed that since the news of the revival in Wales two years previously “the Christians live at a much higher level . . . and they can never be the same again; the non-Christians have a respect for Christianity which they never had before.” The article described the healing of a poverty-stricken woman suffering from a painful skin disease over many years, who was cold-shouldered by neighbors threatening to drive her from the village :

One day, while praying earnestly in this way in the midst of a crowded meeting, she cried, “God has given me medicine; He will heal me with this medicine,” and began rubbing her poor body with both hands. In a short time she stood up, saying, “I am well, God has taken away my disease, He has heard my prayer.” And it was so. There she stood, a living testimony to the power of God, in the midst of that awe-struck crowd. What wonder that many who had come to scoff remained to pray. God has many ways of bringing the heathen to acknowledge Him “Lord of all.”[682]

Though accounts of healings taking place in the British Isles continued to be published in the Eleventh Hour, they were not as numerous or as regular as in earlier days, and rarely as dramatic as the story just retailed.

A noticeable difference in the content took place in The Eleventh Hour around the middle of the first decade that coincided with the Welsh Revival (1904–5) and the Azusa Street Revival that started in the spring of 1906. The two revivals intertwined and produced a flurry of articles dealing with healings, notably in India and the Los Angeles area, as well as accounts of the recent manifestations of charismatic gifts in both areas. There was a definite quickening in tempo of newsworthy and stirring stories following the more pedestrian material printed up to the end of 1905. Much of the later enlivened reportage was sourced outside the British Isles and culled from other publications.

An article reprinted from Faith Work in India, and published in 1907 by Minnie F. Adams (1859–1912) carried the heading and subtitle, “A New Outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Mukti: Accompanied by the Gift of Tongues.” It told of her Swedish colleague who headed the weaving department with its 500 girls under her at the Mission Industrial School, who had “received a baptism of the Holy Ghost and prayed in an unknown tongue.” She reported that there was great rejoicing at the outpouring of the gifts of the Spirit at Mukti, “all of which are exercised by some amongst us (except miracles), in more or less power according to our faith.” Prayers for healing were practiced in private and were “not something for show.” When she visited a boys’ school at another mission centre “the Holy Ghost was poured out upon the boys” and, similarly, “the Lord poured into my mouth a little chorus in Hebrew, of praise and invocation to the Triune God, which was attended with great power.”[683]

Most of the reports of revival events outside Britain came from the heart of the action, Azusa Street, Los Angeles, where, in Warfield’s words, the “Welsh excesses” of 1905 were as nothing to what befell . . . in the summer of 1907 (sic) when the so-called Pentecost Movement—the Los Angeles Revival—shook with its full force.”[684] In the April 1907 edition of The Eleventh Hour, a first-hand report written by Frank Bartleman, and published by Carrie Judd Montgomery in Triumphs of Faith, recounted the experience of the Rev. S. J. Mead, a lately returned and respected missionary from Africa. When he heard a young black woman speak in tongues, “he readily interpreted the message just spoken, giving the name and dialect of the tribe in Africa to which the language belonged”[685] Another article was dredged up some seventeen years after the actual event it covered. It appeared in the September 1907 issue of The Eleventh Hour, and presented an account of Maria Woodworth-Etter’s mission in St. Louis, Missouri, that aimed to evoke memories of “the peculiarities and characteristics of the meetings at that time.”

The piece recalled scenes far removed from the sober milieu familiar to the editor. It described the scenes at the first tent meeting, with 8,000 people in attendance: “Men stood on the seats with their hats on, cigars and pipes in their mouths, coats off and sleeves rolled up; women with old, dirty aprons and dresses on, bare-headed and bare-armed.” Despite such an intimidating start, hundreds were healed and people came “two thousand miles to be saved from the thraldom of Satan and sin.”[686] To have selected such a piece meant that Elizabeth Baxter was conscious of a shift in the culture of divine healing—one that saw it becoming democratized, transposing it from the comparatively few to the mass, from pietistic drawing rooms to secular auditoria, from its dock in tested holiness teaching and launched into the choppy waters of the pneumatological gifting. Gone, or going, were the days when the sick were subjected to a process of catechesis by Boardman prior to anointing and when Simpson could criticize healers who took part in “the indiscriminate public anointing of all who came forward.”[687]

Baxter kept fully conversant with developments on the revival scene, drawing on content from the earliest Pentecostal periodical The Apostolic Faith, first issued from Azusa Street in September 1906. The first article selected was a report from Seattle where “eight have been saved, ten sanctified, and six received the Pentecost, and are speaking with tongues.”[688] An English correspondent sent her a report of “a Pentecostal revival” in Woodland, California. He told of a woman, crippled for thirty-two years, who was healed when “a little six-year-old girl, who had received the baptism, and speaks with tongues, walked into [her front room] and said, ‘Jesus wants to heal you; the Spirit has sent me to put my hands on you.’” Instantly, the toes that had been drawn up under her feet were straightened and she began to walk.[689]

Finis Yoakum and his Pisgah Home were given considerable coverage in at least four issues in the period 1907–8. In an article written by George Montgomery who, having observed Yoakum’s work among alcoholics and consumptives, yearned: “Would God there were many such men in the land!” He contended that criticism leveled at Yoakum by Christian people whose “inability to demonstrate the power of God to help in their misfortunes” had the effect of driving thousands of the best members out of evangelical churches into Christian Science.[690] Another article, this time by W. H. Daniels, the biographer of Charles Cullis, described Yoakum’s use of handkerchiefs applied to “afflicted persons, as tokens of faith, for their healing.” During an evening at the Consumptives’ Home, Daniels reported meeting with “a brother who had been familiar with various missions for divine healing both in England and America,” who remarked that the charity work of Yoakum was “accomplishing a greater work in the name of the Lord than anything which had appeared since apostolic days.”[691] The “brother” in question from England was almost certainly J. M. Pollock, Boddy’s brother-in-law, of whom more below.

The previous two paragraphs are illustrative of the keen, if tentative, interest that Elizabeth Baxter, as editor-in-charge of The Eleventh Hour, took in the events taking place in the post-Azusa period. She was prepared to advertise for purchase two new tracts by Boddy, Speaking in Tongues and These Signs shall Follow. The scene might be subdued at Bethshan, but happenings were bubbling elsewhere. This she acknowledged in an editorial addendum to the article dealing with the revival at Woodland, California, in which she hailed “these things [as] wonderful. We are living in days in which the power of God is being manifested in remarkable ways.” What struck her was that God was working through “the more simple and untaught” than through trained missionaries.[692] At the end of a lengthy article by J. M. Pollock in which he defended vigorously the use of handkerchiefs in the ministry of healing, having witnessed its effectiveness during his visit to Yoakum in California, she appended a note: “God ‘wrought special miracles by the hand of Paul’ [Acts 19:11], when he used handkerchiefs. We are living in a special time. God keep us both from fleshly imitation and fleshly belief.”[693] A growing suspicion, however, that the “flesh” was creeping in, and that special times do not last began to emerge.

When Elizabeth Baxter began to write of “the extravagances” that characterized the movement, she may have had in mind one of the episodes recorded in The Eleventh Hour.[694] An article written by S. C. Todd, a missionary in China, he warned of the dangers facing those new missionaries who expected the gift of tongues (xenolalia) to allow them to communicate the gospel without the need to study the language of their hearers. He told the story of two young women expecting to speak supernaturally in Chinese. Reluctant to learn the language, they had eked out a bare existence by teaching a little English. After five years of waiting in vain, their physical and mental health had deteriorated to the point of emaciation, and “a benumbed spiritual state” had forced them to shun all Christian fellowship. After supervising their nursing back to a degree of health, Todd was grieved that they had spent, “five wasted years. And now a body wrecked by privations, fastings, climate, and disease; shelved, never, perhaps, to be used again either in the home or foreign field.”[695] The writer confessed, following the events at Azusa Street, that he, too, “rejoiced that at last the hard problem of acquiring these heathen languages had been solved,” only to find after two years it was obvious the problem was no closer to a solution.

Todd was not alone in his initial supposition, nor was the concept tied exclusively to early Pentecostals. Earlier, C. T. Studd, Cecil and Arthur Polhill on their arrival in 1885 put their Chinese grammar books aside and prayed for the Pentecostal bestowment of the Chinese language, identifying it with the promise of Mark 16:17–18 (“They shall speak with new tongues”). Criticized, among others, by Hudson Taylor as “idle fanatics,” Studd’s retreat on the issue was to report that they finally returned to their books.[696] A similar supernatural expectation was placed on healing. A. J. Gordon, writing in 1882, predicted:

Doctrines, which have been almost universally denied, are certain to force themselves into acceptance again if they are in the Bible, and that Bible is studied. And a promise in the missionary’s commission which says: “These signs shall follow” is liable now and then to break through custom and prejudice and get itself fulfilled. Besides, that commission is certain to fall into the hands of native preachers, who are unskilled in the arts of refining and spiritualizing Scripture, and who know no better than to take God literally at His word. And who can tell what may not happen when a Christian who has not learned to doubt comes to God to claim the fulfilment of one of His promises? In such a case, we may hear of miracles quite artless and rude in their form.[697]

It was a prescient observation that continues to carry validity, especially in those parts where Christian advance is at its most rapid and least instructed.

Though divine healing in the pages of The Eleventh Hour became dampened and Pentecostal theology increasingly resisted, Bethshan, and in particular Elizabeth Baxter, played a significant part in the nascent Pentecostal movement in Britain and Ireland. The teaching on divine healing that emanated from the home through the Christian Herald opened the door to other overt manifestations of divine power. In 1902, an article by Gregory Wilkinson appeared in the periodical under the title “The Significance of Pentecost.” Its tenor was that one of the outcomes of the day of Pentecost was the display of “supernatural powers by the operation of the same Spirit.”[698] In effect, Bethshan with its message of radical healing can be seen as opening minds to other recognizably charismatic manifestations. The question as to how far such manifestations could be taken was not one that could be evaded for long. If healing, why not all the other gifts of the Spirit? An answer to that question is probed next by looking at the link between Bethshan and the Pentecostal movement in Britain in the experiences of five people.

JAMES M. POLLOCK

James M. Pollock is a name that flits through the pages of The Eleventh Hour and Confidence. He was the brother-in-law of A. A. Boddy who married his sister Mary in 1891. Brother and sister were reared in a vicarage, their father having in succession been appointed as a school principal and to a run of rural parishes in North Yorkshire. In the period 1888–89, Pollock was curate in the parish adjacent to that of Boddy who had been installed as Vicar of All Saints, Sunderland, three years previously. In 1890 it would appear Pollock was assisting Boddy in his parish work as well as becoming his travel companion. Both men valued evangelistic outreach and Keswick teaching. By 1904, Pollock was Vicar of Little Heath, Potter’s Bar, near London. An article of his appeared in The Eleventh Hour under the title “The Foundations of Divine Healing” that was the printed version of an

address given to an unidentified audience, possibly at Bethshan. He began by telling his listeners, “At one time in my life I never thought it possible that I would stand on a platform to give an address on divine healing. It is contrary to all the traditions I received from my fathers, contrary to all the teaching of my boyhood and college days, and contrary to all the associations of my past life that I occupy this position to-day. Yet, despite my prejudices, despite my associations, and my preconceived ideas, God has worked in me most graciously, and led me into a child-like faith that takes Him at His Word.”[699] The following year both men ministered in a mission hall in the heart of the linen industry district in West Belfast. Four months previous to their visit, Bethesda had advertised meetings under the banner headline “BACK TO PENTECOST!” When the pair arrived in Belfast their week-long special services were advertised as “Meetings for Promoting Practical Holiness and Divine Healing.”[700] It is most unlikely that this was the only occasion when the two men worked together outside an Anglican setting.

During Thomas Barrett’s visit to Sunderland in September 1907, James Pollock

received his Spirit baptism in its Pentecostal understanding about the same time as his sister Mary, both a few months ahead of Boddy. Barratt in his diary noted that Pollock had been seeking this experience for several months, “but the night he received his Pentecost he was filled with a marvellous power, and prophesised and spoke in tongues with more than usual intensity. He leaped for very joy and praised God with a loud voice.”[701] Within a few weeks, this gladsome event ended in a sad dénouement that was captured in an entry in Barratt’s diary: “Dear Brother Pollock has been cast into the furnace of doubt and a demon—of doubt—entered in evidently. Pastor H[arris] says he has cast out the demon and Pollock claims to be alright now, alleging that he got a demon the night he got his Pentecost.”[702] G. H. Lang, a Brethren teacher, in an anti-Pentecostal broadside, threw further light on Pollock’s plight. He heard of Pollock’s troubled state directly when he met up with him, and confirmed it later in writing. The story ran: “The small son of a neighbour was sick. Mrs. Boddy received in ‘tongues’ intimation that the child would recover and be well. She requested her brother to take this comforting news to the father. On the way the ‘power’ fell on Mr. Pollock and by ‘tongues’ and interpretation he received confirmation of the message: but on reaching the house he learned that the boy was already dead.”[703] Pollock protested to his sister that a deceiving spirit was evidently operating. Mary’s explanation smacked of evasion: “They had misunderstood the message, the true import of which was that the boy was to be well in the other world, not in this world.” Lang disclosed that “it was some years before [the evil agents] ceased to torment his spirit.”

However, a combination of contextual appraisal and recently garnered information help to explain the starkness of Pollock’s plight. Wacker observed that in the first flush of the Pentecostal revival “the supernatural realm teemed with demonic as well as angelic forces, [which] meant there were demons of witchcraft, of fortune telling, of insanity, of drunkenness, of gluttony, of idleness, and of wonder working.”[704] E. W. Kenyon (1867–1948), considered by some to be the architect of the Prosperity Gospel, went as far as to state that since the Fall every human being was “vitally unioned,” with the Devil.[705] The Leaves of Healing recorded the permanent healing of a young woman whose lungs were “cruelly dug out by the relentless demon of consumption.”[706] Dowie lambasted the press antagonistic to Zion as “vipers in whose foul dens Shameless Malice sits supreme in all her unutterable filth,” and prayed, “May God help us to turn that demon and all her brood out.”[707] Penn-Lewis was adamant that Spiritualism had unleashed “millions of evil spirits into the world through the channels of mediums and séances,” and, more bizarrely, as an unintended outcome of the 1906 Keswick Convention. She believed that the powerful preaching at Keswick that year on the Cross had “brought down the fury of the evil hosts upon all who dared to cry that the Cross meant victory over the prince of darkness, as well as over sin.”[708] It is, therefore, comprehensible that Pollock in such a prevailing atmosphere should succumb to the demon of “doubt” in an atmosphere where “idleness,” “gluttony,” and “Shameless Malice” were equally rampant. Such an interpretation rests on Barratt’s assessment that “doubt,” suggested here as an outcome of a failure to heal, was the causative factor in his mental distress. There is insufficient information to indicate other and deeper problems. While the context set out may clarify the picture, it does nothing to diminish Pollock’s misery.

While there is an imprecision in Lang’s statement that it took “some years” for Pollock to recover, The Eleventh Hour can be more authoritative on timing. In the June 1908 edition, Pollock penned his article on the use of handkerchiefs in the ministry of healing some time between March and May 1908 from the offices of Dr. Yoakum’s Pisgah Home, Los Angeles.[709] The article strongly endorsed the distribution of prayed-over handkerchiefs to people and to places where “the living messenger cannot go in person.”[710] The writer bemoaned the scepticism roused by a revival in which “the recapture of the old truth or of the old power from the oblivion or the grasp of the enemy” is often met with “suspicions and coldness instead of prayerful sympathy.” Yoakum had adopted the practice of distributing handkerchiefs, which had “forced him to look into the Word of God on this subject, and by doing which he was led to see that God can and does bless an inanimate channel for conveying his power and healing.” Exemplars of such “inanimate channels” in the Old Testament were recognized in the rod of Moses (Exod 7:19; 9:23; 17:5–6) and the brazen serpent (Num 21:4). More apposite were such passages in the New Testament as Acts 5:15 and specifically Acts 19:12 (NIV) where “the handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched [Paul] were taken to the sick.” Such biblical warrant for the practice left Pollock without any doubt that no charge of superstition, or fanaticism, or presumption could be leveled at those who were led “to revive the use of handkerchiefs in these days.”[711]

Underlining Pollock’s return to mental equipoise within a comparatively short time was the impact of what he observed directly in the healing ministry of Yoakum. He was cognizant of a recovery in health in situations where “handkerchiefs have been sent to those overcome by the drink and tobacco habits, these frequently being cases of demon possession. . . . I know also of a remarkable case of demons leaving a person after the handkerchief had been placed on the head.”[712] That his relationship with Boddy was completely restored is attested by a notice in Confidence in 1923. It reported a united mission in the chapel of the local United Methodist Free Church (UMFC) that was concurrent with the renovation of All Saints. Boddy was pleased to report that the Missioner-in-Chief was “my brother-in-law, the Rev. J. M. Pollock.” As for the impact of the mission, “there are those to-day who . . . are thankful for the new life which came to them when the Church visited the Chapel at Fulwell.”[713] It is possible by this stage that Pollock had become attached to the UMFC or, at least, was in sympathy with it. Though no longer identified with the Pentecostal movement, it would seem highly probable that he retained his early sympathies for the holiness/healing message.

MAX REICH

Max Reich played an important part in Bethshan in the first decade of the new century. Since the death of W. E. Boardman in 1886 no man had played an extended role in the ministry of the home. Details of his life are sketchy with only a few facts documented. In the July 1902 edition of Jungle Needs he testified to the healing of his wife’s eye condition. Those who wished to attend the Bethshan Missionary Home & House of Rest were advised that “for particulars write to Max I. Reich.” As well, he was a regular contributor to The Eleventh Hour, specifically in its “Correspondence Column.” His tracts, such as Breathings of the Deeper Life and The Cross our Example, were advertised as available from the Bethshan bookroom. In February 1907, the Sunderland Daily Echo ran an interview with Thomas Barratt, the Norwegian-based pastor with the Oslo City Mission. It was Barratt who introduced Pentecostalism to Britain following Boddy’s request for him to visit Sunderland. The visit took place during August/September 1907 after months of pleading.[714] When Barratt was asked by a journalist who the dark gentleman was who showed intense interest during a Sunday night service, he replied, “Oh! He was Max Reich, leader of the Bethshan Home in London. He is a Jew. He came here to get his Pentecost.”[715]

Reich had been writing on Pentecostal themes frequently in The Eleventh Hour from September 1906, almost from the inception of the movement in Los Angeles some months earlier. In response to a question on Spirit baptism, he acceded that “this is one of the burning questions of the hour, I doubt not more light will be poured on it from the upper sanctuary as we go on. Let us keep learners.”[716] Just three months before visiting Sunderland, he contributed an article on “The Baptism of the Body of Christ” that was extracted from his booklet What Shall be our Attitude to the Gift of Tongues? It carried a note of high expectancy that anticipated xenolalia, described as “the power to speak in the languages of those nations . . . as one of the greater works because He has gone to the Father.”[717] In the light of such receptivity, it is understandable that he should travel to Sunderland “to get his Pentecost,” which to all appearances he did. On one of his periodic visits to London in 1910, Boddy met up with “my friend, Mr Max Reich” at Siloam, his beautiful home at Highbury, near Bethshan. He was pleased to see how “comfortable and happy they all are, but we lamented together the ending of the meetings for healing at Bethshan.”[718]

Reich had the makings of a lay Pentecostal theologian, as Thomas Erskine of Linlathen (1788–1870) had been in the earliest days of the Irvingite period.[719] Like any competent theologian, Reich was creative in his thinking and able to envision the larger picture, albeit within the constraints of a literalist and dispensationalist hermeneutic.[720] His response to a question about the credibility of the restoration of spiritual gifts in the present era took Mark 16:17–18 as its interpretive framework. These verses, he believed, defined five arenas of divine instrumentality that extended from creation to the final victory of Christ over all the works of the devil.

The casting out of demons testifies to the future casting out of Satan and his armies into the lake of fire. The Church, by this power, asserts Jesus to be the world’s true King, and Satan to be a deposed prince.

The speaking with tongues testifies to the universality of Christ’s redemption, not being confined to one nation, and to the future restitution of a divided humanity.

The taking up of serpents testifies that in Christ’s kingdom even animals will lose their ferocity (Isa. 11: 6–8).

Drinking poison without taking harm. This testifies to the power by which Christ will completely eliminate the curse out of this earth. He will liberate Nature from her thraldom. All hurtful properties will be taken away.

The healing of the sick. The first fruits of that power by which death itself shall be destroyed by the Prince of Life.

By such means the kingdom of God will be brought to its conclusive fulfilment.

Asked by an enquirer why she had not been healed if it was in the Atonement and received by faith, Reich’s reply elevated the answer to the level of a cosmic conflict. He advanced the idea that “many a servant of God is ill because his life is a battle-ground between two worlds.” It was his belief that the territory lost to the kingdom of God and occupied by the devil will be reconquered, but not without a struggle. It is not to be wondered “that Satan throws all his weight upon the bodies of God’s elect [because] every genuine case of divine healing brings us so much nearer to the goal, when death itself shall be destroyed. . . . [Satan]wants to prevent their deliverance, and thus postpone still further his own final overthrow and the redemption of a suffering world.”[721]

It was a presentation that carried a wider sweep than other explanations for absent or delayed healing and reflected the contemporary fascination with the demonic and, arguably, Reich’s Jewish background with its apocalyptic tradition that incorporates revelations of heavenly mysteries, such as those found in the book of Daniel. Contemporary theological thinking among Pentecostal scholars, however, is much more nuanced. Warrington maintains that “the devil is much less significant to God than many believers think. Rather than cosmic dualism, Jesus is always presented in the New Testament as superior to Satan, and the one to whom the demons give obeisance.”[722] In his study, Thomas suggests that the New Testament writers did not always attribute sickness to Satan, “but worked with a more dialectical world-view: a world where God could also afflict, [and] is not only able to use suffering indirectly to accomplish his purposes, but he can also take a direct role in this activity.”[723]

ELEANOR CRISP

Donald Gee regarded Mrs Crisp as holding the foremost place among all the women who were prominent in the early Pentecostal movement in Britain. Eleanor Crisp (1856–1924), born in Devonshire, was converted soon after her family moved to London when she was eleven years of age. For many years she was the only Christian in her family. Never particularly strong, she developed rheumatism in an acute form that caused her fingers to become so swollen that she had to turn the pages of her Bible with her lips.[724] A close friend introduced her to the concept of divine healing. Her reluctance to accept the idea, believing as she did that sickness was sent as a chastisement from God, was overcome only after lengthy sifting through the New Testament to reach the conclusion that Christ had purchased healing by his atonement. At the age of thirty, she sought healing through anointing at the hands of the Rev. John Allen, minister the Trinity Congregational Church, Hackney, London, and was healed immediately.[725] It was at this church that she first began to speak in public. Through attending Mrs. Boardman’s meetings in Highbury, she began to identify with the work of Bethshan, not least in support of its holiness message. A tract of hers, Three Stumbling Blocks [to holiness] was available through Bethshan’s well-stocked book room. When Bethshan closed in 1910, she offered to continue its ministry of healing by receiving requests for prayer, a service that was publicized through the columns of the Christian Herald.[726] It was quite common to receive two hundred such letters in a week, each of which was individually prayed over. About the same time, she established a branch of the YWCA in Hackney, which rapidly grew from a membership of about half a dozen to over three hundred.[727] It was to prove an auspicious preparation for her next area of responsibility.

Her first contact with the Pentecostal movement was made with Harry and Margaret Cantel, the former Dowieite American couple, who established their Pentecostal missionary guesthouse in Islington, London, in 1909.[728] Gee described the home as “one of the best known and loved addresses in the Pentecostal movement throughout the world.”[729] By now a competent preacher, Crisp took part in a mission held by the Cantels alongside Cecil Polhill and T. H. Mundell, a London solicitor, both leading Council members of the Pentecostal Missionary Union (PMU).[730] The PMU was formed by Polhill and reflected, as a former member of the Cambridge Seven, his longstanding commitment to global mission as well as the promotion of a strong missionary thrust among early Pentecostals. His position as President recognized his missionary experience, administrative expertise, social standing and financial backing of the mission. The membership of the PMU Council over the years included such Pentecostal luminaries as A. A. Boddy, Smith Wigglesworth and Eleanor Crisp. When the PMU opened its two training homes in London, Crisp was the obvious choice for principal of the women’s home from its inception in January 1910. The home was fitted to accommodate twelve students. Under her long and strong leadership, the Women’s Training School escaped the vicissitudes that troubled the Men’s Training School, which was sited on the same road but suffered a frequently changing and weak leadership.

Crisp was a strict disciplinarian, a quality that Gee thought would have greatly benefited the men’s home. The fact that the only Pentecostal Bible Schools existed almost exclusively for the training of missionary candidates had a knock-on effect on the British Pentecostal movement. Gee opined that there was a disproportionate emphasis in the early days on foreign mission work that was to prove detrimental to the expansion of the work in the homeland. The momentum was for young alumni to work overseas, a motivation that increasingly informed the function of Bethshan. Also maintained was Bethshan’s recourse to prayer for those who sought it, many for healing as intimated in the forty letters received on average weekly. In March 1911, there were seven women in training. Four recent past students had already arrived in India and two were on their way, all moulded by Crisp on whom she had put, in Gee’s words, “her stamp, but it was a good one and it lasted.”[731] He also acknowledged that she had “the most remarkable and convincing gift of interpretation of tongues the movement has ever known.”[732] That particular gift and her preaching, both beautifully enunciated, featured on numerous convention platforms where she brought the needs, financial and otherwise, of her work to the attention of her hearers.

LYDIA WALSHAW

Lydia Walshaw (1854–1945) was similarly as respected within the Pentecostal movement as Eleanor Crisp. Attention was drawn previously to her links with Dowie and her visit to Zion City in 1896 and to the establishment of a Zion outpost in the Leeds/Bradford area. It was noted that her husband Joseph Walshaw was a solicitor and that they lived in Halifax, part of the Leeds/Bradford conurbation. What is less known is her life story up to these events. Though born in America, she held British nationality. She wrote of her lonely childhood, separated from her mother and placed in the care of an uncle and aunt from the age of seven.[733] From childhood she suffered from a weak heart that developed into a serious coronary condition. In a talk given at the London 1917 Pentecostal Convention, she spoke of her father, when in America, being a follower of Robert Ingersoll, the son of a Congregational minister, and famed for his lectures attacking Christian beliefs. In 1884, at the age of thirty and married, she was “visited by God’s gracious Spirit in conviction for sin,” though such commitment as she made at the time became increasingly hollow. She confessed, “I wanted to do good . . . taking an interest in temperance work, but I just loved my own way.” Meanwhile, her medical condition deteriorated to a state where her doctor could provide little hope for her recovery. In her distress, she committed her life to God and found great spiritual peace despite continuing “terrible times with my poor heart.”

It was through her nurse that she became acquainted with faith healing. The nurse borrowed from a former patient a copy of Carrie Judd’s classic The Prayer of Faith. Lydia was so weak that she could only read a few lines at a time, but with the continued support of her husband, they together trusted in God for healing. On 19 March 1885, she rose from her bed and walked round the room and in less than three weeks she could walk a mile. She called seven of her Christian friends to join her for prayer and praise, an activity she had hitherto never experienced because, as she admitted, “My life had been so very worldly.” It proved to be the start of her leadership of a company of missionary intercessors under the name of “Emmaus” that continued to meet at her home until 1924. At a Pentecostal convention in 1917, she announced that she kept in touch with seventy-three missionary societies, and that Emmaus had contributed £500 in the previous year to foreign missions.

The Walshaws’ involvement in healing brought them within the ambit of Bethshan and then Dowie’s Zion movement. It was Joseph Walshaw who submitted an article published in 1891 in Thy Healer that brought news of the reconstruction of the eyeballs and recovery of sight of George Everson in Grimsby. Everson suffered from suppurating eyeballs. On a particular occasion, when he was returning home with a friend, on the evidence of both men, the diseased eyeballs dropped to the ground. Hundreds had placed their fingers into the empty sockets to confirm the loss. The morning after a Salvation Army healer had prayed for him, Everson could see perfectly and “the empty eye sockets were now quite warm with the new eye-balls.”[734] The article was reprinted ten years later in Jungle Need.[735] Joseph Walshaw reported that after he read of the healing in a local newspaper he met with Everson, and set about verifying the case with the diligence of a practicing solicitor: “I made inquiries among those who had known him, both in Grimsby and other places, and found the case to be attested beyond doubt.” The article enclosed the testament of W. M. Dawson, a Grimsby accountant that included the sentence, “As I was present at the meeting at Boardman Hall, I had no doubt about the matter.” Subsequently, Everson travelled to London to allow Schofield, a prominent Christian Harley Street consultant, to examine his eyes. He reported that “I found he had a pair of bright blue eyes, and that he could see well, but on careful examination found the pupils were fixed, and had been diseased.” For a second opinion, he arranged for Everson to visit Jonathan Hutchinson, “the greatest authority on such cases,” but Everson failed to keep the appointment. Soon after, Everson died of “rapid consumption.” The only judgement Schofield could reach on the healing was that the case “requires solution.”

That W. E. Boardman should be remembered in the name of a mission hall is a measure of his influence, mostly gained through his ministry at Bethshan. With this background, it is not difficult to understand Lydia’s eagerness to travel to Zion City in 1896 to become involved in the Zion movement locally. When Carrie Judd Montgomery visited Britain in 1909, Halifax and Sunderland for the Whitsun Convention were among the must-see locations to visit. In Triumphs of Faith she reported that at the Sunderland Convention, “Mrs Walshaw has received the Holy Spirit in Pentecostal fullness and speaks in new tongues,” implying that the two events were linked.[736] When she visited Halifax, about 150 people were crowded into the mission hall where Carrie was greatly impressed by the “remarkable missionary movement going on in this little band.” She was moved when introduced to “Egypt,” “India,” “China,” among the noms-de-plumes of the young women who represented a particular missionary field. Each was responsible for collating all the information that related to their nominated country. When presenting their reports, they were encouraged not to read them out but to address their listeners directly.[737] Frank Bartleman, the first historian of the Azusa Street revival, was another visitor from America in 1910. The travelogue of his world tour provides an account of key sites in global Pentecostalism. Such was the reputation of the Walshaws that their mission hall was on his itinerary: “From Cardiff . . . went north to Halifax, England, where I stopped to hold some meetings, with Sister Lydia Walshaw. Spoke three times in the little mission with great blessing. The saints were much strengthened. . . . I spoke at Bradford one night, a town close by Halifax, at Bro. Smith Wigglesworth’s mission. Visited his home there.”[738]

With characteristic verve, Lydia was soon sharing the same platform at Pentecostal conventions with Eleanor Crisp. Though they matched each other in age and by dressing alike in navy blue “holiness” bonnets, their ministries were quite different. Lydia was more down-to-earth, with a reputation for excelling in homely illustrations taken from the kitchen and home to underline the point she wished to make. Gee considered that one of her minor, though valuable, contributions to the Pentecostal movement was to keep its testimony “real, when some of the men speakers were in danger of becoming super-spiritual.” He told the story of their being on the platform at a convention in London. The speakers were, in his words, “a collection of dry reverends.” Lydia shifted her seat to sit beside him and whispered her reason—“to keep each other warm.”[739] Pentecostal spirituality was restive about anything that smacked of coolness or coldness. It set great store by the trope of “fire.” In the words of Mary Boddy, “Many do not understand that the Baptism of the Holy Ghost is a baptism of fire.”[740] A London vicar was so enthused by an Elim Easter service in the Royal Albert Hall, that he considered it gave lie “to the devil’s rumor that is damping down the fire of religious enthusiasm in so many hearts.”[741]

RICHARD HOWTON

Some twenty-four miles south of Halifax lies the historic cotton mill town of Glossop, nestling in a valley on the north-western edge of the Peak District. It was here that a divine healing work, inspired by and modeled on Bethshan, was established in 1884 by Richard Howton (1855–1928). Howton differs from the four considered above in that he did not identify with the Pentecostal movement. Opinions differ as to the extent of his

opposition. Henry Mogridge, who helped form a pioneer Pentecostal work in Lytham Saint Anne’s, Lancashire, placed him with the other Holiness leader, Reader Harris, as having “published and circulated a scathing and defamatory tract” against the new movement.[742] From a wider perspective, Hector Waylin, his biographer, was of the opinion that “Pastor Howton never seriously condemned the Pentecostal movement in a wholesale manner.”[743] What is certain was his commitment to divine healing, the subject of his major publication.[744] His position was that of the radical healers in accepting that divine healing is “a part of the atonement.” He took the declining A. B. Simpson’s view that the seeker should be in living union with Christ: “God works from within to without.”[745] He, however, was not averse to the use of medical help, believing that “the Lord deals with people as they are; healing is life, and it depends on the capacity to receive life. Hence all are not led the same way.” Though he acknowledged that Christian Science could obtain results as long as its practitioners operated by their unsuspecting call on psychological “laws,” it, like Spiritualism, reduces Christ to the status of a teacher of spiritual truth or a mere medium. Both ignore Christ’s work of redemption. Howton stands out among healers in that, unlike many others, he came to it without the need to experience healing himself.

The eldest of eight children, Richard Howton was born in a village near Sheffield, the son of a land-steward of a large estate. As a robust youth he was known as “the Derbyshire giant.” In standing over six feet high and weighing nineteen stone, it is not surprising that he took up prize-fighting. With a good singing voice and extrovert temperament, he became a popular entertainer in the local pub. He was converted at the age of twenty-three while attending a small Methodist meeting held above a carpenter’s shop. Within weeks he was preaching for the Primitive Methodists. Encouraged by ministers and motivated by his own ambition to improve himself, he enrolled at the “North London Missionary College.” When he left the College, he worked in Nuneaton with Michael Paget Baxter, the husband of Elizabeth Baxter, possibly in the work of the Blue Ribbon Army.[746] However, Baxter’s proclivity for prophetic studies had little appeal to him. It was when he was sitting under a tree reading the book of Acts that he became convinced that the healings therein described should be continued into the present.

On his way home, he met a young woman who was disfigured by a very large tumor on the side of her face. She had attended his services, and, after reading to her from James 5:14, he inquired if she had any oil at home. Replying that she thought there was a little sewing-machine oil somewhere, they headed for her house. “I suppose,” said Howton, “that will do, and I shall have to be the elders.”[747] Some five hours later, the large tumor was reduced to a small swelling, and within four days it disappeared. Not long after, the young woman was married. Soon, various visions and revelations were pressed upon him. In one such, a flag was displayed with the word VICTORY written upon it in red letters with the instruction to wave this flag over everyone he prayed for.

Howton’s links with Bethshan were direct. An account of a healing in which he was involved appeared in The Eleventh Hour in December 1908. It was based on an address given by him at Bethshan “some time ago.”[748] He testified to the healing of a woman in Cheltenham who suffered from a spinal disorder, and had only been out of her bedroom once in eleven years. After he had prayed for her, she was able to follow him gingerly down the stairs to enjoy “a good tea and stay till nine o’clock. Since then she has travelled hundreds of miles by train.” By then, Howton had established a work in Glossop, a textile industrial town with a population of 20,000. He started by preaching outdoors and in a room rented from the Liberal party. During the first ten months, 133 people claimed healing, many of them using crutches. Such was his confidence in divine power to heal that he smashed the crutches to pieces, an action that with riper experience he regretted. As his fame spread, visitors from all social classes were drawn to Glossop seeking prayer. One such was the sister of a cabinet minister. In 1888, a permanent base was found for the growing congregation in its Gospel Union Mission Church. It had a seating capacity for 800, including galleries. In time a baptistery was built that enabled him to baptize about a thousand believers during his time as pastor, a few of them members of the nobility and some clerics.

The next exacting venture was to build “Bethrapha” (House of Healing), a deliberate attempt to follow in the steps of Bethshan. A substantial house, it was opened in 1904 with the Howtons resident and in overall charge. In response to a critic, he explained that “Bethrapha is not a hospital, just a home of rest for tired workers, and a place where people receive spiritual help and bodily health simply by faith in the power of the risen Christ.”[749] Tuesday afternoons served the same purpose as the Wednesday afternoons at Bethshan as times for teaching and prayer for divine healing from many who sent letters and telegrams from distant lands. Advice was hung on bedroom walls for visitors not to discuss their own maladies, or their past failures. Howton’s jovial temperament facilitated the conscious effort to maintain a genial atmosphere that was seen as essential to the curative process. Bethrapha was run on very similar lines to Bethshan, to which was augmented the forcefulness of Dowie and the geniality of Blumhardt.

In 1931, three years after Howton’s death, George Jeffreys conducted a successful mission in the church in Glossop. The Elim Evangel was pleased to announce in the same year that “George Jeffreys takes over famous Church and Healing Home.”[750] The article placed the event in its historical context in stating that “here indeed Elim finds a real link with the saints of the past, men and women who held the torch of truth in days that are gone by—Rev. and Mrs Michael Baxter, Pastor Richard Howton and others.”[751] One of the chief guests at the opening of the church and the Bethrapha home was Richard Howden’s widow. The article described the Howtons as “the spiritual children of the late Mrs Michael Baxter,” adding that Mrs Howton frequently referred to Elizabeth Baxter as “my spiritual mother.” It was a statement that was applicable to many others.

614. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 24.

615. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 3.

616. Owen, The Place of Disenchantment, 248.

617. Ibid., 17, 20.

618. The occult refers to mystical or magical powers, practices, or phenomena that can be communicated only to the initiated. Initiates found much of their source material in late-Victorian scholarship that opened up new areas of interest, notably folklore, anthropology, Egyptology, comparative religion, Oriental philosophies with their “adepts,” “mahatmas,” and “gurus.”

619. The Order drew inspiration from early modern Rosicrucianism, Egyptian, Hermetic philosophy and Freemason-type ritualism.

620. H. Blavatsky: “The Power to Heal,” in The Theosophist, April 1883.

621. Olcott is still honored in Sri Lanka for initiating the renaissance of popular Buddhism in the island. The son of an American Presbyterian businessman, he trained as a lawyer and reached the rank of Colonel in the Federal Army during the Civil War.

622. “A Miracle Worker of To-Day,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 1884, 6. Ernest Lohmann (1860–1936), leader of the German Orient Mission and an authority on Middle East missiology wrote of Theosophy as a caricature of experiential Christianity in producing in similitude “divine manifestations called forth by the working of the Holy Spirit upon the spirit of man. They also produce revelations and prophecies, speaking and singing with tongues, healing and miracles.” (Lewis, War on the Saints, 320.)

623. Pall Mall Gazette, April 1884, 6.

624. One commentator commented: “Olcott was fundamentally a product of his liberal Protestant upbringing and even in his reform efforts in Asia, his notion of proper religious practice was informed by his religious roots.” (Kinnard, “The White Buddhist,” 669f.)

625. Garrard, Mrs Penn-Lewis, 229. Penn-Lewis was a speaker at the Ladies’ meeting at Keswick and a founder of the related Llandrindod Convention in Wales. Her periodical, The Overcomer, built up a readership of 10,000.

626. Erskine, Memoirs of Edward Earl of Sandwich, 1–2.

627. Ibid., 270.

628. Sandwich, My Experiences in Spiritual Healing, 14.

629. Ibid., 8, 11.

630. Ibid., 9.

631. Ibid., 10.

632. Erskine, Memoirs, 268.

633. Anon., Spiritual Healing, 7.

634. Erskine, Memoirs, 274.

635. Anon, Spiritual Healing, 48.

636. Erskine, Memoirs, 274.

637. The Exposition was organized with the ostensible purpose to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, though it was widely seen in the city as an opportunity to celebrate its recovery from the 1906 earthquake.

638. In one of his Letters he is purported to have revealed, “Medicine interested me when I was on earth more than half a century ago, in a little Western town in America.” (Herbine, Meeting of the Spheres, 250.)

639. Another contact was the Irish poet, W. B. Yeats, for whom she conducted a séance on the 19 June 1915.

640. Erskine, Memoirs, vi.

641. Ibid., 275–76.

642. Herbine, Meeting of the Spheres, 244.

643. Ibid., 245.

644. Ibid., 248, 250, 257, 262, 266.

645. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 249.

646. Oppenheim, The Other World, 67.

647. Wilson, Ghosts or Gospels, 63–64.

648. Ibid., 3.

649. Ibid., 3, 4.

650. Mews, “Revival of Spiritual Healing,” 323.

651. Besant was well placed to understand evangelical teaching. As a girl she was privately tutored by Ellen Marryat, the evangelical sister of Captain Marryat, author of boys’ adventure stories. In 1867 she married, and later divorced, the Rev. Frank Besant, an impecunious Anglican clergyman whose evangelicalism was described as “serious.”

652. Owen, The Place of Disenchantment, 255.

653. Gordon: Evangelical Spirituality, 204.

654. Harris, Private Lives, 172.

655. Randall, Pathway of Power, 9, 11.

656. Randall, Evangelical Experience, 19.

657. Randall, Pathway of Power, 10.

658. Price & Randall, Transforming Keswick, 245.

659. Pierson, Forward Movements, 49 (italics in original).

660. Price & Randall, Transforming Keswick, 172. Some of the defining features of the Revival were to continue in Pentecostal settings—prolonged singing; little structured preaching with sermons stirring the heart more than appealing to the mind; praying in concert; exclamatory, joyful outbursts; agonizing conviction of sin; much talk of Spirit baptism; dramatic claims to unmediated Spirit guidance, and testimonies to the outworking power of the Spirit.

661. Usher, “Cecil Henry Polhill.” This article suggests that Polhill contributed, in today’s monetary equivalence, around $40 million/£20 million to the Pentecostal cause. He helped to clear the mortgage debt of the Azusa Street mission and largely funded Confidence magazine.

662. Cecil H. Polhill was one of the Cambridge Seven, a group of young men who volunteered themselves as missionaries with the China Inland Mission in 1885. In 1903 he inherited the family estate and became the squire of Howbury Hall. Polhill was unique among early Pentecostals in having high social status and inherited wealth.

663. Pollock, The Keswick Story, 90.

664. Grubb, What God Hath Wrought, 52.

665. Ibid., 373. The letter appeared in The Christian, 23 January 1891.

666. The Eleventh Hour, 1905, 160.

667. Born a slave in Maryland, her father purchased the family’s freedom. She had been introduced to the holiness message through her attendance at Phoebe Palmer’s Tuesday meeting and for a while she aligned herself with the Methodist Episcopal Church before engaging in an independent and international ministry.

668. Smith, An Autobiography, 97.

669. Ibid., 484–88.

670. Ibid., 493, 101.

671. See n. 36, xxx.

672. The Apostolic Faith, February–March 1907, 1. In the event, nothing startling disturbed the Convention that year, which was noted for its sense of spiritual unity. The future Archbishop of Melbourne rejoiced that “the clash of creeds and strife of sects [yielded to] the tranquillising motto ‘All one in Christ Jesus!”’ (Pollock, The Keswick Story, 130).

673. Chan, Pentecostal Theology, 57.

674. Randall: Evangelical Experiences, 208. The phrase was found in the Elim Evangel, 6 December 1926, 297–98.

675. Confidence, August 1908, 14. Here “experimental” connotes an experience on the lines of a brother from Jersey who visited Sunderland after spending three days at Keswick and who witnessed to receiving “a mighty deliverance, a vision of Jesus and his own nothingness, and the overwhelming Baptism of the Holy Ghost with the Sign of Tongues” (13).

676. Gee, Wind and Flame, 45. George Jeffreys, despite his reservations—“From one Christian Convention to another we went, always longing for an experience that would satisfy, and in each we were asked to receive in same way”—continued to visit the Convention in the years after his split from the Elim Church in 1939. In so doing, he reflected the commonly held view among Pentecostals that while Keswick’s message was always profitable, it was fundamentally incomplete. (Jeffreys, The Miraculous Foursquare Gospel, 46).

677. The Eleventh Hour and Jungle Need ran from 1903–10, and was the successor to Jungle Need and Home Help (1897–1902). The latter in turn followed Thy Healer (1884–96).

678. Confidence, January 1909, 23. Boddy, in introducing the article, commented on Sisson’s visit to the recent Whitsuntide Convention at Sunderland when she “was much used of God in teaching, and was very loyal to the Pentecostal Baptism.”

679. The Eleventh Hour, January-February 1905, 262.

680. Gee, Wind and Flame, 6. When Boddy heard of the Revival he travelled to south Wales and was present “at some of the most spiritual of the wonderful gatherings of the Welsh Revival and was in the pulpit with Evan Roberts.” (Robinson, Charismatic Anglican, 37.) On his return to Sunderland he commenced a series of revival meetings and initiated a prayer meeting in the All Saints’ Vestry, where “a little circle of earnest young men met night after night in prayer for further revival—for a great outpouring of the Holy Spirit.” (39).

681. The international reverberations of the Welsh Revival are documented in Gibbard, Wings of the Dove.

682. The Eleventh Hour, March 1907, 96. In a letter preserved in the Calvinistic Methodist archives, Pengwern Jones wrote that on entering a prayer meeting, attended by 3,000 people in the famine-struck hill country, he heard a believer speaking in tongues, but with no interpreter. “The gift has not been common in this Revival,” he noted, “I have only heard two or three different persons who have been thus gifted.” (Gibbard, Wings of the Dove, 128: letter dated 10 February 1907).

683. The Eleventh Hour, September 1907, 208, 209.

684. Warfield, Perfectionism, 333. The date should be 1906.

685. The Eleventh Hour, April 1907, 92.

686. Ibid., September 1907, 215.

687. Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician, 137.

688. “Jottings from some American Religious Papers,” The Eleventh Hour, February 1908, 46. The quoted article is to be found in The Apostolic Faith, December 1906, 1, column 2.

689. The Eleventh Hour, February 1908, 48.

690. The Eleventh Hour, May 1907, 120, Los Angeles.

691. Ibid., October 1907, 239.

692. Ibid., February 1908, 48.

693. Ibid., June 1908, 144.

694. The Eleventh Hour, March 1908, 65–66.

695. Ibid., March 1908, 66.

696. McGee: “Radical Strategy,” 77.

697. Gordon, The Ministry of Healing, 197.

698. The Eleventh Hour, 1902, 197.

699 Ibid., 1904, 260.

700. Bethesda may have established contact with Boddy through the Pentecostal League founded by Reader Harris. They may have read some of Boddy’s pamphlets in the Roker Tracts series, one of which was called Health in Christ. The Boddys began their active engagement in a healing ministry from around 1900.

701. Wakefield, Alexander Boddy, 89.

702. Robinson, “The Charismatic Anglican,” 63.

703. Lang, Earlier Years, 50.

704. Wacker, Heaven Below, 91–92.

705. Jacobsen, Thinking in the Spirit, 329.

706. LH, 21 June 1902, 281.

707. LH, 25 October 1902, 11.

708. The Christian, 13, 20 February 1908.

709. The dating can be precise because a letter is quoted from a person healed and dated 28 March 1908.

710. The Eleventh Hour, June 1908, 142.

711. Ibid., June 1908, 143.

712. Ibid., June 1908, 144. For an interesting survey of the continuing place of prayer cloths in Pentecostal circles, see the interview with R. Marie Griffith, involved in the “Material History of American Religion Project.” The project is based at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. Her investigation examines the origin, theology, practice, gender, and methodological issues in the use of prayer handkerchiefs in Pentecostal devotion. (Griffith, “Prayer Cloths,” Online.)

713. Confidence, January-March 1923, 66.

714 The contribution of Thomas Ball Barratt (1862–1940) to the development of the Pentecostal movement in Europe is incalculable. He has been described as “the apostle of the Pentecostal Movement in Europe.” He was born in Cornwall and, at the age of five, his father accepted the position of manager of a sulphur mine In Norway. Educated in England, he also studied music under Edvard Grieg. Barratt first heard about the Pentecostal message while staying at the CMA home in New York. While there, he learned of the revival at Azusa Street from The Apostolic Faith.

715. Sunderland Daily Echo, 4 October, 1907.

716. The Eleventh Hour, November 1906, 262–63.

717. Ibid., July 1907, 149. The biblical reference is to John 14:12.

718. Confidence, February 1910, 30.

719. Thomas Erskine was an influential Scottish lay theologian. Around 1830, he encountered Edward Irving and adopted his views on the gifts of the Spirit for a period c.1830–34. His writings challenged the dominant Calvinistic culture of Scotland.

720. The Eleventh Hour, January 1908, 21.

721. Ibid., December 1906, 286.

722. Warrington, Pentecostal Theology, 294.

723. Thomas, Devil, Disease and Deliverance, 300–301.

724. Confidence, October 1916, 167–68.

725. The Rev. John Allen held weekly Holiness and Healing weekly services concurrent with those of nearby Bethshan from its earliest days.

726. A number of factors contributed to the closure of Bethshan. In 1910, Elizabeth Baxter, aged 73 and recently widowed, was placed in the situation where most of her Bethshan colleagues had passed on. By then, she had settled in Brighton, living next to her son and daughter-in-law and five grandchildren.

727. Confidence, January–March 1924, 115–16.

728. For the Cantels, see Robinson, Pentecostal Origins, 41–45..

729. Gee, These Men I Knew, 31. Gee received his Spirit baptism at the home in 1913.

730. For Polhill, see Robinson, Pentecostal Origins.

731. Chapman, Searching for the Source, 121, and Malcomson: Pentecostal Pioneers, 182–83.

732. Gee, These Men I Knew, 35.

733. See TF, March 1910, 53–54 for the details of this paragraph.

734. Schofield, Behind the Brass Plate, 222. Everson subsequently married and became a keen Bible student. He reported that the case was “well known all over England . . . Some of Lord Curzon’s family were much interested in the case which many well-known men went to see.”

735. Jungle Need, 1901, 78–79.

736. TF, August, 170.

737. Flames of Fire, July 1917, 1. Her advice at the 1917 London Convention was that “news given to the assembly should be little and often, up-to-date, fresh. It is a great mistake to read extracts from letters or magazines.”

738. Bartleman, Around the World by Faith. Online.

739. Gee, These Men I Knew, 85.

740. Confidence, January–March 1924, 118–19.

741. Elim Evangel, 1 May 1928, 143.

742. Redemption Tidings, June 1930, 6.

743. Waylen, Apostle of Healing, 80–81. Howton rejected the Pentecostal teaching of tongues as an evidential sign of Spirit baptism. As well, some of his experience of meetings he attended led him to conclude that “the influences at work are of a borderland rather than of a heavenly origin” ( 81).

744. Howton, Divine Healing.

745. Waylen, Apostle of Healing, 109, 98.

746 The Blue Ribbon Army/League was the brainchild of Michael Baxter, the husband of Elizabeth Baxter, and founder-owner of the Christian Herald. The Army was an evangelistic temperance organization.

747. Waylen, Apostle of Healing, 18–19.

748. The Eleventh Hour, December 1908, 87.

749. Waylen, Apostle of Healing, 36.

750. The Elim Evangel, 30 October 1930, 689.

751. There was no recognition that these three had reservations about the distinctive tenets of Pentecostal theology.

Conclusion

THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS RAISE a number of issues surrounding the Holiness to Pentecostal transition period that remain to be addressed. It was a period of rapid growth in the number of churches and denominations within the Holiness tradition. Ecclesial relationships were remodeled to reflect the sharply differing doctrinal and socio-cultural differences of the main players. The question posed here is: Did Pentecostalism rescue the radical healing message from atrophy? A related question can be put: Did Pentecostal radicalism hinder its wider acceptance within the Christian church?

This chapter focuses on the American Holiness movement because, as Dayton pointed out, Pentecostalism is “a very natural outgrowth of the currents that took shape in the late nineteenth century under the influence of the Holiness Movement.”[752] With its origins in the Methodist tradition, the postbellum Holiness movement sought to restore the faltering perfectionist element of primitive Methodism, which Wesley hailed as its “grand depositum,” in essence Methodism’s divinely inspired rationale. The movement added the concept of entire sanctification to theological vocabulary to express its striving for the cleansing of inbred sin, an experience subsequent to conversion, and rounded off by its outworking in perfect love.

It was but a short step for believers in divine healing to extend the concept of inward purity to somatic well-being. In Baer’s words, it was “a practical manifestation of purity, tangible confirmation of the goodness of God and the authenticity of their faith. The contaminants of disease, originating from sin, could not remain amid the purifying agency of the Lord.”[753] On the assumption that this is so, then one has to look to the postbellum Holiness movement to become the major carrier of the healing message, enhanced by its role as precursor of Pentecostalism. That perfectionist spirituality extended beyond Wesleyanism was exemplified by Andrew Murray, minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, when he affirmed of sanctification and healing, “The two doctrines walk abreast.”

The following discussion takes as its starting point the 1880s when the healing doctrine reached its apogee. From this point it met with stiffening opposition within the Methodist/Holiness tradition from denominational quarters, and partial retraction by some leading figures that were sympathetic to it. The chapter looks first at the stance taken by the MEC to divine healing. This is followed by an examination of the views of those members of the MEC who continued to hold to Wesleyan perfectionism through the work of the National Holiness Association (NHA), which contributed positively to the ongoing debate on divine healing.[754] At this point, attention will be directed to the decline in the impact of the healing movement and the reasons behind it. The influence of the “come-outer” independent Holiness groups in the 1890s will then be examined. Within this schismatic subset of Methodist spirituality were to be found distinctive healing ministries that have remained less well known.[755] It was to this oft-fragmenting section of the Wesleyan Holiness movement that the Pentecostal movement owed much of its beginning. It was to this stream that the Azusa Street revival owed its immediate origin. The new movement soon split over the issue of sanctification that became known as the “Finished Work Controversy.” In essence the dispute arose when those Pentecostals who came from a Reformed background objected to the Wesleyan Holiness view of entire sanctification as a second blessing, rather than regarding it as the outworking of the first blessing of initiation into the Christian life.

Mainstream Demur

Tension steadily increased between mainstream, generally liberalizing, Methodism and the Holiness movement birthed within it. It found its typical expression in an article by the editor of the Methodist Quarterly in 1878: “The holiness association, the holiness periodical, the holiness prayer-meeting, the holiness preacher, are all modern novelties. They are not Wesleyan. We believe that a living Wesley would never admit them into the Methodist system.” Another editor was riled enough to complain that “no self-constituted and irresponsible [Holiness]‘Association’ with its many objectionable features should be permitted to stand as the only, even chief, exponent of holiness.” One minister was so enraged by the doctrine of entire sanctification that he called on the police to remove from his church a member who continued to testify that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. The controversy surrounding perfectionism reached such a pitch that the bishops of the MEC (South) passed legislation at its General Conference in 1894 to limit the influence of holiness advocates. The Conference faced a situation that it feared was getting out of hand, faced as it was by the problem of numerous holiness evangelists ministering without formal recognition from, or responsibility to, the denomination. In this situation, where the MEC was confined to making vague gestures to the doctrine of entire sanctification while downgrading it as a vital experience, there was little prospect of it lending support to the radical healing position with its tie to holiness teaching.

In a chapter entitled “The Destruction of the Healing Revival by Victorian Pharisees,” DeArteaga held James Monroe Buckley (1836–1920) to be the arch enemy of divine healing within the MEC. Buckley was one of its leading spokesmen, and was described as “one of the most influential and honored clerics of American Protestantism.”[756] After serving in several pastorates in the MEC, Buckley, in 1880, was appointed editor of the Christian Advocate, recognized as the leading Methodist periodical of the time, and as one that placed itself as the spearhead of liberalizing trends within Methodism. An influential member of every General Conference of the MEC from 1872 to 1912, he also represented the American church at three World Methodist Conferences in successive decades.

Buckley’s personal story has some relevance to his views on sickness and health. His father, an MEC minister, died from tuberculosis when James was aged six. It was a disease that ravaged his father’s side of the family, and by the time of his early twenties it threatened to end his life, as it did that of his older brother who died at the age twenty-seven. By strenuous outdoor exercise, the use of a self-prescribed “inhaling tube” and marked self-discipline, Buckley pulled though. His medical history disposed him to appreciate the role of exercise and diet in sustaining a healthy body and mind. For him, healing is accomplished “by the strength of the medicine of nature.” He saw no “principle of healing” in either Faith Healing or Christian Science, though he was not against the use of suggestion, taking as his justification, “I have healed people that way myself.”

Under the editorship of Buckley, the Christian Advocate took a firm stand against faith healing as well as perfectionist tendencies within the Methodist connection. Even before his editorship, in an address delivered in 1875, he showed his colors when he openly criticized Smith Platt, an MEC colleague, whose story of healing had just been published under the self-explanatory title My 25th Year Jubilee; or, Cure by Faith After Twenty-five years of Lameness. Once installed, Buckley moved the journal from a position of neutrality to one of hostility on the topic, and showed himself severely disapproving of both the theology and claims of the radical healers: “Great damage is done to Christianity by submitting it to a test which it cannot endure.” In October 1886, in an editorial he described the entire movement as an “absurdity.” A year later, the Advocate expressed alarm at a Methodist woman who was reported to have opened “faith rooms” who, as well as healing, was administering the sacraments: “The best time to grapple [with] such things,” he advised, “is when they start. First expostulate, then persuade to withdraw; these failing, enforce the Discipline [Code].”

In his book Faith-Healing, Christian Science and Kindred Phenomena, first published in 1887, Buckley collated the articles that had appeared in the Christian Advocate as well as the widely-read Century Magazine. A glance at the Contents page of the book reveals the range of his interests in the paranormal. There are chapters on witchcraft, astrology, visions/apparitions, dreams/ somnambulism, and Christian Science. His first chapter lumped together faith healing with this mélange of subjects that were connected by “their dependence upon mental states.” His intention was to see if there was a common thread holding such diverse phenomena together. If there was such a commonality, then there would be little reason to assume the operation of a supernatural cause. With such a tendentious predisposition he could hardly fail in his quest.

He was convinced that he had uncovered sufficient attestation to satisfy himself that the claims of Christian faith healers were “effectively discredited.” He elicited three facts to refute the claims made for divine healing: First, those so engaged produced results no greater than those asserted by pagans, mesmerists and mind-curers. In effect, they largely worked through the power of suggestion that was known to be particularly successful in dealing with nervous disorders; second, they could perform neither the mighty works of Christ, nor the works of the apostles; third, all their accomplishments can be brought about by the power of the human mind, which will give as high average results as their prayers and anointings. Other considerations were touched on. There was the moral argument that reliance on prayer for healing would produce an effeminate Christian who would be morally impaired by an unwillingness to face pain and suffering. Also, such healing “destroys the ascendancy of reason, and thus, like similar delusions, it is self-perpetuating; and its natural and, in some minds, irresistible tendency is to mental

derangement.” Drawing from his own experience with tuberculosis, he was convinced that a large number of healings were the result of the body’s capacity to heal itself.

Buckley was loath to allow any direct supernatural intervention in healing. He was prepared to acknowledge Dorothea Trudel for the “marvellous tales [that] have been told of the cures, some of which have been thoroughly authenticated.” The occurrence of healings at Lourdes could not be denied. He, personally, had stood by the fountain for hours observing the pilgrims drinking and filling their bottles. On the mantelpiece at the family home was placed a flask of water from the same fountain. In a likely mischief-making aside, he added, “I am bound to say no serious illness has occurred in the family during that time. Many recoveries follow its use.” Provocative in intent, the remark debased claims to divine healing, making them indicative more of folk credulity than divine agency. DeArteaga overstated the situation in claiming that over the thirty-two years of his editorship, Buckley “played a key role in turning the Methodist denomination away from healing and Pentecostalism at the time when the Methodist denomination was but a hair’s breadth from being the first mainline denomination to embrace both.” It is hard to conceive that Buckley would have retained his key position in the MEC if he had not represented the mind of his church on the issue. It was obvious that the MEC as a body was opposed to the radical healing doctrine. Those within the denomination who sought to retain Wesleyan perfectionism and divine healing found, for a time, recourse in the NHA.

NHA Retreat

Within Methodism up to the 1880s there was a limited degree of acceptance of some form of divine healing in Wesleyan holiness circles. Strong criticism was muted, while its proponents at times found it difficult to strike a balance between their key doctrine of entire sanctification and divine healing. That a degree of ambivalence to the doctrine characterized postbellum Methodism was evidenced from the earliest days of the National Camp Meeting Association (NCA). Though its first two Presidents, John Inskip and William McDonald, were acceptant of divine healing, the topic was not openly aired to prevent controversy over the issue detracting from the core holiness message of entire sanctification. Even so, many sought and received healing in camp settings. One such was A. B. Simpson, who visited the Old Orchard, Maine, beach-side camp in 1881 at which Charles Cullis was a speaker. He arrived in such poor physical and mental condition that some doctors had predicted his early death. He found healing at the camp, and four years later, when he addressed the International London Conference in 1885, he revealed that since his healing “I have not had one hour away from work and have not had one single summer vacation.”[757] Inskip claimed to have been healed by Cullis in 1871. Cullis was indeed to prove a seminal figure in promoting the healing cause within MEC circles. To his influence on Inskip and McDonald can be added that of Daniel Steele and Samuel L. Gracey. The last three named all resided in Boston and they either assisted at his Faith Training College or preached at his summer camps.[758] McDonald and Steele came to represent a moderate position on divine healing, without pressing for any formal endorsement within Methodism.

Daniel Steele (1824–1914) was one of the leading theologians in the Wesleyan Holiness movement. In a diverse career he served as acting President and Chancellor of Syracuse University and later taught theology at Boston University. Steele argued that God had not placed “an impassable gulf between the natural and the supernatural, as many Christians imagine, but rather the supernatural lies close above the natural, and often dips down into it for the purpose of securing some moral or spiritual end.” To prove that this was so, he referred to recent “miracles of healing corresponding in all points with the gifts and wonders of the apostolic age.”[759] Steele and Samuel Gracey (1835–1911), a ministerial colleague, at a colloquy of Boston Methodist clergy defended healing ministries against the charge of fanaticism that was currently circulating within the MEC and wider society.[760] Steele could speak with some authority because he had witnessed the healing of his wife at the hands of Cullis. She had suffered great pain and discomfort for four years and, at the time of speaking, had been free of her complaint for eighteen months. William McDonald (1820–1901) acted as both Vice-President and President of the NHA over twenty-four years from 1869 onwards. He served as editor of the influential holiness periodical Christian Witness, which in one issue printed a letter from a reader who had been upset that Buckley’s Christian Advocate had opposed divine healing. The reader expressed his relief that the Christian Witness did not take the line that faith-cures were unreasonable. Like Steele, McDonald regretted that not only unbelievers, but also those “who profess faith in revelation [sought] to drive the supernatural out of the world.”[761] This level of support from both men for the doctrine should be borne in mind when, as will be discussed, they became more concessive to critical opinion.

Though healing was not the most bothersome issue within the Wesleyan Holiness constituency, it nevertheless played a disruptive part, particularly where healing practices among the more radical groups were actively pursued. The set of circumstances that arose in the state of Georgia typified the problem. William Dodge was the driving force behind the Georgia Holiness Association (GHA). He was a strong advocate of divine healing. A problem arose after he had given an interview to the Atlanta Constitution in 1885 in which he detailed cases of healing. One such instance was the survival from consumption of a young woman, which gave rise to the rumor that she had received new lungs. Such publicity was a source of embarrassment to the wider MEC church. One minister, in a letter to the paper, was critical of the GHA, numbering among its several “excesses” the idea that “the Lord gives new lungs to consumptives.” Even one of Dodge’s closest colleagues warned him, and all others like him, to avoid “touching in any way the Faith Healing Question.” He was reproached for “publishing views which none of us hold.”[762] A potent factor behind the disquiet about such claims to miraculous healing was the need to pre-empt Methodism becoming associated with metaphysical alternatives such as Christian Science. One outcome of the division of opinion over divine healing within the wider NHA movement was its decision, reached in 1897, to deny official backing to divine healing and premillennialism, leaving the matter to personal conscience. Both suppressed doctrines were to become core items in early Pentecostalism.

Steele and McDonald were more subdued and balanced in their criticism. Steele maintained that during the Irvingite period in Britain, there was considerable evidence that several persons, mostly women, were endowed with the gift of tongues, and some remarkable cases of instantaneous healing were attested in the period between 1828 and 1848. He acknowledged that “all Christians believe in praying for the sick, and in praying with faith in humble submission to the divine will.” There was recognition that for some sufferers a time can come when they receive a special revelation that it is God’s will for them to be healed.[763] To deny such a happening was tantamount to taking Hume’s infidel position on miracles.[764] McDonald was prepared to go further. The first sentence of his final chapter reads, “We firmly believe in faith healing.”[765] In the introductory chapter, he conceded that the gift of healing “may be bestowed upon some persons in every age of the church; that some have been healed . . . in every period of church history in answer to prayer.”[766]

Russell Kelso Carter (1849–1928) differed from Steele and McDonald in a number of ways though, like them, he retained a continuist, as opposed to a cessationist, view of the ministry of healing. He grew up in a strong Presbyterian environment, was converted at the age of fifteen and eventually graduated from the Pennsylvania Military Academy. He

advanced to become professor of chemistry, mathematics, and civil engineering at the Army War College. In 1872, five years before leaving the college, he developed a heart problem which led him to seek and receive healing through Cullis. Around the time of his healing in 1879, he had also come into the experience of entire sanctification through attending Methodist meetings. At that point he left the Presbyterian Church for the MEC and within a year of his healing he wrote a pamphlet “Miracles of Healing” that expanded into a larger work The Atonement for Sin and Sickness (1884), selling 2,000 copies. In 1887, as a rejoinder to Buckley’s article in The Christian Century, he presented an

extensive defense of faith healing in the same issue of the periodical. A revised and much enlarged edition of the 1884 book appeared four years later. It had a print run of around 8,000 copies, and came with the promise that it answered “every objection presented from any and every standpoint” to the doctrine.[767]

Of all the writers on the subject, Carter stood out as one of the strongest advocates of the centrality of the atonement for the doctrine of divine healing. So, in all these ways—his Reformed upbringing, his military and scientific background, together with his energetic defense and promotion of the doctrine—he stood apart from Steele and McDonald, for whom the subject was more peripheral. Though he was licensed to preach within the MEC from 1887, he maintained links with the CMA, and kept personal contact with all the leading Reformed proponents of the doctrine, a list that included Carrie Judd Montgomery, Cullis, Dowie, and Simpson. From 1888 his health began to decline, and led him to request prayer for healing at different times at the hands of the three men. No detectable change in his condition ensued. By the 1890s he was forced to reassess his whole position on the doctrine. For him, the “nine-days” of faith healing promise, which he dated to 1881–85, had “long ago subsided.”[768] Each element in the radical healing triad was either opposed or modified in his Faith Healing Reviewed after 20 Years (1897). It added to the sustained attack on aspects of the doctrine from within the Holiness movement. It is to the reaction of Carter, Steele and McDonald to the radical triad of atonement-faith-means that the study turns.

Theological Challenges to the Radical Position

THE BIBLICAL FOUNDATION: ATONEMENT

Carter was of the opinion expressed in Faith Healing Reviewed that criticism of the radical healing movement failed to deal adequately with the biblical justification put forward by its advocates. Neither Steele nor McDonald, he declared, provided “anything like an answer to the exhaustive line of Biblical argument” taken by the proponents of the doctrine. He accused Buckley of tackling only the “phenomena” of healing to the neglect of examining the biblical case made by its advocates. By largely concentrating on explaining away healings on purely scientific lines, its critics “never come within the pale of the real argument used by all devout advocates of faith healing,” namely the consecutive teaching of both Testaments on the subject.[769] In his chapter 3 (“Testing the Foundations”), he challenged the interpretation the radicals placed on such seminal texts as Exodus 15:26 and Deuteronomy 7:15.[770] He took a dim view of those who “sneered” at faith healing, yet were not prepared to challenge use of the Old Testament texts dear to the radicals.[771]

Without using the term “covenant,” his argument on the Old Testament readings was to press the conditional “if,” on which the promise of health without exception hinges. In his reading, the statutes that were to be kept contained “a most admirable system of sanitary and dietary laws” that was only applicable so long as the Israelites remained in the land of promise. That land was among the most wholesome in the inhabited earth with “climatic conditions as near perfect as the earth has seen since the deluge.” If the land is occupied and the laws kept, then who could gainsay the conclusion that “no people will enjoy as good health as the Israelites ever did.”[772] In sum, the method God used to fulfil his promise of health was “to throw the practical responsibility upon them as reasoning beings . . . to keep themselves by keeping his commandments.”[773] To the objection that the Christian does not live under the strictures of the Old Testament, Carter responded that the real laws of health are the same as they were three thousand years ago because they are the expression of the facts of nature about us: “Live in the Nile delta and you may pick up ‘the burning ague [malaria]’ of Moses’ day: dwell on the mountains of Israel and you will be cured of the ague more effectively than by quinine”—so runs his overstretched hypothesis. However, the Old Testament verse most critical to the topic is Isaiah 53: 5 (“with his stripes we are healed”). This verse was to be taken literally because its restatement in Matthew 8:16–17 is set in the immediate context of Christ healing “all that were sick.” The interpretation of this text goes to the heart of the controversy.

As one who took the inerrant view of Scripture, Carter expressed no doubt that the Matthew passage is to be interpreted literally, in that Christ’s atoning death does pertain to both sin and sickness: “He is foolish indeed who attempts to find refuge in a vague brushing aside of the words of the Holy Spirit.”[774] The problem is one of timing; healing is assured, but when? For him, and many others, the problem lay with the radical view that because both sin and sickness were dealt with on the cross, therefore both were on the same footing. This was the stance he had taken in his earlier book when he wrote: “The Atonement has provided for the body all that has been provided for the soul.”[775] Some twenty years later he argued:

The whole trouble with all the above argument . . . is that it loses sight of God’s times and seasons and dispensations in the effort to secure at once all the provisions of the ‘will.’ Jesus surely did bear our diseases just as He bore our sins. So did He bear our temptations, being ‘in all points tempted like as we are.’ And some day God intends that the full, complete benefits of all this ‘bearing’ shall be enjoyed by us. . . . There is no more ground to claim that because ‘Jesus bore our sicknesses’ therefore we do not ever have to be sick, than there is to conclude that because Jesus ‘bore our sorrows,’ therefore we never need suffer grief, unless we can produce specific Scriptures which teach this special point.

Harking back to his Old Testament take on the laws of health being the same as they were three thousand years, he commented that Jesus “never hinted at a change in those laws of health, while he did enunciate new laws in the spiritual realm.”[776] His summation of his present position was that “healing by faith in this age is a matter of special favor from God, and is always peculiarly under the guidance and leading of the Holy Spirit.”[777]

McDonald tackled a belief taking hold in some Holiness circles—“not held by many, but persistently advocated by some”—that entire sanctification includes entire freedom from all physical infirmities, taking as a proof text 3 John 2 (KJV) where the writer greets Gaius with the desire that he “mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” McDonald countered this suggestion by employing a reduction ad absurdum: “If sickness is the direct effect of sin, and both are from Satan, then every unsaved man should be sick, and every fully saved man should be perfectly well. . . . It would seem from this that the man who has the healthy body is partially sanctified, whatever may be the state of his soul, and he who has a pure heart, [if] he happens to have rheumatism, as the result of exposure in the Lord’s work, it is evidence that, to that extent, the devil is in him and he is only partially sanctified.”[778] Such an idea would mean that Paul who went so far as to glory in his bodily weaknesses would thereby glory in being partially sanctified. McDonald proceeded to answer the claim that there is a parallel between sin and sickness in that both are dealt with in the same way by faith in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. The parallels then are examined as to (1) their origin, (2) their relations to divine law, and

(3) the conditions of their cure. He rebutted each assumed parallel by demonstrating where it breaks down.

1. On origin: Whereas sin came to the world by a personal transgression of the divine law, sickness comes in a manner that is contingent, indiscriminate and random. Also, the question can be raised as to why sin is always active while sickness is variable in its timing and severity for the individual.

2. On relation to divine law: If sin and sickness sustain the same relation to the divine law, then it follows that it is as wrong to be sick as it is to sin. The Bible teaches that sin is the transgression of the law, but it nowhere affirms that to be sick is a transgression of the law: “It does not seem that heaven refuses to receive the sick from earth, but the unrepentant sinner—never.”

3. On the supposition that the cure of sin and sickness are the same: Radicals maintain that God heals bodily sickness precisely as He heals soul sickness. Such a belief faces the difficulty that while soul sickness is dealt with by faith alone, sickness may be healed by medicine or by faith: “Nobody can share honors with the Lord Jesus in saving a soul. [By contrast], it will be admitted that neither pills nor powders, Poland water nor any other medical prescription, ever saved a man from sin. But these remedies have healed sick people.”[779] As well, people have been healed who were unaware that anyone was praying for them, such as small children or unconscious patients. Conversion, however, involves conscious decision.

Steele was in a position to acknowledge that the best scholarship rejects the idea of atonement inclusive of sickness as derived from Isaiah 53:4. The RV margin, “Surely he hath borne our sickness,” for him, should be treated as “the figurative way of saying he healed them under circumstances which awakened a painful sympathy. . . . To the heart of Jesus all our woes and pains were present, and they pierced him through with many sorrows.” For Christ to have borne our sickness is a measure of the depth of his sympathies for ailing humankind. Though the Isaiah text presents a prefiguration of the atonement, healing is not included therein. What it does provide is evidence “of his Messianic character and of his sonship to God.” [780]

THE AGENCY OF FAITH

Faith was central to the healing ministry of Jesus. Early in his ministry and in his home town, Mark recorded that he could “there do no mighty work, save that he laid hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them. And he marvelled because of their unbelief” (Mark 6:6, KJV). The letter of James carries the promise that “the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well” (Jas 5:15, NIV). It was natural that its practice was progressively dubbed “faith-cure” or “faith healing” before “divine healing” became the most acceptable term. In more liberal parlance the term “spiritual healing” was more favored.[781] Steele drew attention to one implication of the atonement doctrine, viz., that it followed that the sick could trust for healing with the same confidence as the penitent for salvation. This implies that the grace of faith attainable by all is the only requirement needed for healing. Such a belief infers that the sick can be considered as “unbelievers” or disobedient believers and, as such, responsible for the prolongation of their sickness.

His solution to the problem of the role of faith in healing is one that became generally accepted apart from those radicals who were unyielding on the subject. McDonald was in such agreement that he reproduced almost verbatim Steele’s thoughts on this subject. The difficulties, Steele submitted, disappear when a distinction between the “grace of faith” and the “gift of faith “is acknowledged: “All Christians believe in praying for the sick, and in praying with faith in humble submission to the divine will. This is the only petition which the true child of God can present, unless he is supernaturally endowed with the assurance that the healing in answer to prayer is his will, or, in other words, unless the Holy Spirit inspires in him the gift of mountain-removing faith, defined by Wesley as the inwrought assurance that God in answer to prayer will grant this or that petition.” He recognized that faith and the gifts of healing are in juxtaposition in St. Paul’s catalogue of charisms (1 Cor 12:9).

Steele proceeded to lay out with greater nicety the differences between the grace and the gift of faith. A few contrasts can be sampled. Whereas the grace of faith, otherwise essential for saving faith, is “morally obligatory upon every soul having knowledge of Christ,” the gift of faith is not required of any one, but is sovereignly bestowed by the Holy Spirit. Saving faith is grounded on the Bible, while the charism of faith rests on the revelation of the Holy Spirit made immediately to the human spirit. The grace of faith, when it is exercised in prayer, is exploratory in petitioning “if it be thy will.” With the gift of faith there is the assurance beforehand that it is God’s will to answer the prayer positively: “It is an unconditional grasping, not of the written promise, but of God himself.” Whereas the grace of faith is as indispensable to spiritual life as breathing is to natural life, charismatic faith is occasional, and not permanent. For example, Paul, on surviving shipwreck, exercised the gift in Malta when “he placed his hand on him and healed him,” (Acts 28:8, NIV)—“him” being the father of Publius, the chief official of the island. Earlier in his travels, however, he disclosed, “I left Trophimus sick in Miletus” (2 Tim 4:20).[782] Finally, the grace of faith is requisite to the highest spiritual life while, following Matthew 7:22, even those who perform many miracles can be dismissed on the day of judgement.

Steele’s citation of charismatic gifting to solve the problem of faith raised the whole issue as to where to draw the line in the nine charismata. Because the gifts are sovereignly bestowed by the Spirit “severally as he will” (1 Cor 12: 11), there can be, for Steele, “no more culpability for the absence of the gift of faith than there is for the gifts of tongues or of miracles.” This statement raises the wider question: If the charism of faith is acceptable, as a present gift can any of the others be denied? That Steele unwittingly opened the possibility of a widening charismaticism helps to demonstrate the extent to which healing has to be considered as a major harbinger of the Pentecostal option. It is on this issue of an acceptance of all the gifts that Pentecostal and Holiness believers were to separate. Steele indicated that he had no appetite for anything that had overtones of the Pentecostalism about to appear over the horizon: “I have been pastor of fifteen churches, and I thank God that none of them was so disorderly and so trying to my patience as the church of Corinth, where the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit were fully bestowed, must have been to St. Paul. . . . Hence I have never offered a prayer for the restoration of the charisms, or extraordinary gifts. Following the apostle to the Gentiles as a guide, I have found the more excellent way, the way of love, and I am supremely blest.”

Carter’s Faith Healing Reviewed, written at least more than five years after Steele and McDonald’s titles, agreed with them on the prayer of faith: “We may be driven of our own desire to be free from suffering, or drawn by a mistaken notion of the purpose of God. In such cases the ‘prayer of faith’ simply cannot be offered. It is purely will power to attempt to ‘act faith’ and make believe we are healed. It is all a mistake. God holds the ‘prayer of faith’ in His own keeping, and when he ‘inworks’ it, the result, the positive result, certainly comes. . . . No Christian should allow the adversary to whip him because he is not healed, when he is conscious of a perfect acquiescence in the will of God.”[783] Carter came to support this view through a variety of testing circumstances from 1888 until Faith Healing Reviewed appeared some nine years later. It was a gestation period long enough for his doubts to be confirmed, and for pressure from “many thoughtful friends” to win him over to publishing them.

His health began to deteriorate to the point of physical and mental exhaustion from around 1888, for which he sought the prayers of Cullis, Simpson, and Dowie. It is probable that it was his contact with Dowie in 1890 that finally induced his change of mind. He recorded the occasion in the third person: “When the time for the prayer came, both men concentrated every faculty of mind and heart on the one point—that of faith in the promise as we both understood it. . . . Both were as honest as the sunlight, and as sincere as possible. The writer felt that a crisis had been reached, and called upon God with all his soul, at the same time endeavoring to ‘take hold by faith’ with his full strength.”[784] Dowie assured him that he felt the power of God go through him, and the answer must come. With no change in his condition, Carter began to have doubt about the genuineness of Dowie’s claim to healing power, putting it down to “the instinctive effort of the theory-controlled mind to ward off a sense of failure.” The simplest conclusion he could reach was that “Mr Dowie did NOT pray the ‘prayer of faith.’ Neither did Dr Cullis, Mr Simpson, or any other whoever prayed for my complete strength to be given. If they had, beyond any controversy, I would have been healed for ‘the prayer of faith SHALL SAVE the sick.’ That is all there is to it.”[785] Not according to Dowie in his telling of the episode. After the prayer and with no sign of healing, he quizzed Carter about sin in his life. Carter confessed to not living with his wife who, he said, was insane. Pressed further, in Dowie’s words, Carter “quibbled and hedged, and wriggled like an eel in water hiding in stone after stone,” before confessing that he had set his affections on a minister’s daughter. Never slow to offend, Dowie exclaimed, “You dirty dog! How can you expect healing?”[786]

Russell Kelso Carter

Many people in the divine healing movement saw Carter’s later book as a renunciation of their deeply held beliefs, failing to understand that he had modified rather than repudiated his views. Dowie was not a man to let him off lightly. He denounced him in the pages of Leaves of Healing, suggesting it was sin in his personal life that had blocked his healing. He was not short of ammunition as Carter went through a turbulent period in the mid-1890s. In the summer of 1892, he moved to California, ostensibly for health reasons, leaving his family back in Maryland. For a year he conducted some meetings there for the CMA until he filed for divorce, seemingly as the prelude to remarrying a woman other than the minister’s daughter. The scandal lost him many friends and severed his links with the CMA. Carter’s fall, in Dowie’s eyes, was compounded when he received a letter from him in which he confessed to seeking medical help in Philadelphia. Next came news that he was the manager of a branch agency for the sale and distribution of a couple of quack patent medical devices trading under the name Electropoise and Oxydonor Victory. These machines were so bogus that the US Postal service took the manufacturers successfully to court for mail fraud.

THE ISSUE OF MEDICAL MEANS

The severest test faced by the healers was the premature death of sufferers who declined to receive medical assistance that, in all probability, would have spared their life. Such failure was the heaviest stick with which to berate the proponents of the radical healing message. The atonement and faith as theological abstractions were not as easy to discredit as failure to experience healing after prolonged periods of prayer. One of the most publicized cases was the death of Charlie Miller, a twenty-one-year-old fledgling missionary in Africa. McDonald devoted a large part of a chapter to the story under the title “The Evils of Modern Faith Healing.”[787] For him, there was no more striking example of “misplaced faith in the dogma of physical healing” than this particular incident, one of any number of similar cases that could be named. In a letter addressed to McDonald from MEC Bishop William Taylor, the bishop outlined the events surrounding the young man’s death from typhoid. The youthful Miller had declined to take the medication proffered by his doctor that would have spared his life. His response was determined: “Well then, I’ll die, for I won’t take any medicine.” Resistant to pressure to change his mind, he lingered in utter prostration of body and delirium of mind during the last fortnight of his life.

Wilson deeply mourned the tragic loss of such a promising young missionary. With a degree of barely disguised bitterness, he wrote, “If God sees that the opening of Africa to the great salvation in Jesus requires physical miracles, we can easily have them. And gather around us multitudes of mystery-mongers, stupid gazers, and the loaf-and-fish disciples; and then what?” The problem, for him, lay with Charlie accepting as infallible “the extreme views of certain good men who claim to be expositors of faith healing.”[788] Carter, for his part, saw the young man’s death as “a solemn lesson to all who held the extreme theory,” and rued the possibility that his early book on the subject had “perhaps helped Miller to take the position he did.”[789] His own failure to receive healing after six months at the hands of Dowie was the decisive factor in his change of mind. The matter was clinched when he accepted the advice of a physician friend to try a medicinal remedy for his state of “nervous prostration.” Within a week or so, he was able to declare, “The remedy for the neurasthenia had been found, and the result was work and usefulness” to greater measure than at any similar time in his experience.[790]

That Carter had not lost faith in the possibility of thaumaturgic healing was expressed in his regret that an MEC church in Virginia had refused to ordain a candidate for the ministry, partly because he believed in and practiced healing. This was despite the fact that he also accepted the use of medicines. To refuse to follow the guidance of James 5, in Carter’s mind, could lead some simple believers “to swing rather to an extreme.” He was dismayed to read in the press that only two ministers attending a large and influential ministerial gathering in a city were prepared to put themselves on record as believing “in the full inspiration of the Scriptures.” His response was that “it is no wonder that the ‘symbolic and sacramental act [of] anointing with oil in the name of the Lord’ is sneered at and classed as ‘superstition.’”[791] It was a matter of some satisfaction to him that A. B. Simpson had moderated his views on the subject to the point that they both “practically occupied the same position” on the use of medicine.

The death of CMA missionaries overseas, proportionally higher than in mainstream denominations, was a major factor in its change of policy in the late 1890s. Most of the missionaries had taken to the use of medicine, including “quinine and other remedies freely, and all have been instructed to observe most carefully the rules of the climate for rest and clothing.”[792] It was all a marked change on Simpson’s part from his ideas in 1883 when he denied any value to medical missionary work and only those candidates who knew “Christ’s healing power” and had “direct faith in the Great Physician” were accepted for missionary service.[793] Even Dowie, for whom the wearing of spectacles was inexcusable, throwing scorn on them as “eye-crutches,” changed his mind. Carter was surprised to hear that his implacable antagonist was wearing the one-time “obnoxious eye-crutches” before he had reached the age of fifty.[794]

By the end of the century it became clear that opposition to divine healing within a large section of American Methodism was sufficient to confine the doctrine and its practice to a numerically small, but resolute, fraction of its constituency. The discussion has shown that the MEC mainstream was generally cool towards it, as it sought to tame its embedded NHA movement by the decision in 1894 to clip Holiness wings by giving each local minister new powers.[795] Such new regulation largely affected Holiness people of lower socio-economic status. Middle-class aspiration within the MEC sat uneasily on anything that smacked of outmoded theology, emotional excess and supernatural intrusion. Within the more receptive NHA, there was majority objection to the promotion of the healing message within its ranks. The outcome was finally sealed by the decision taken in 1897 NOT to endorse the doctrines of divine healing and premillennialism. At the same time, those who were sympathetic to the message, like Steele, McDonald, and Carter, were highly critical of the radicals’ take on each of the components of the atonement-faith-means triad. There is little evidence to suggest that their moderate views advanced the practice of divine healing. Rather, it was more likely to subdue it. Steele asserted that the gift of faith necessary for healing was occasional, sovereignly bestowed and directly targeted. Even Simpson, the most theologically radical of the pioneers, considered divine healing “supplemental” and “subordinate” in the preaching and practice of the faith. The outcome was marginalization of the healing message that saw it largely devolve down to the come-outers who broke any ties they had with formal Methodism, and initiate a plethora of sectarian fellowships. Their contribution to the practice of divine healing will be resumed later.

Decline and Its Reasons

By the turn of the century there was a pervasive feeling that the healing movement was running out of steam. Dowie, never known to miss an opportunity to highlight the decline, took it as a justification of his own, hard-line position. In an address in 1898, he stirred his audience to responsive reply:

But let me say God is dealing with my enemies without my effort. For instance, now, where is [the periodical] Thy Healer in London? It is dead. Where is Bethshan [healing home]? It is closed, so far as Divine Healing is concerned. Where is Divine Healing in Dr Simpson’s so-called Christian Alliance in New York City to-day?

The Rev. Mr. Kennedy [from audience]: Only five percent left, is all they claim.

Dr. Dowie: That is all they claim, five percent, and it is an adulterated five percent, so that to-day by a strange peculiar set of circumstances that has come, if Zion does not maintain divine healing, then it is swept from the earth as an organized force.

Overstated as it may be, the quotation still carries a degree of validity.

The air of decline that hung over the late nineteenth-century healing movement was not confined to North America. Both Britain and Europe entered the same phase. The pioneer work of the elder Blumhardt had frittered away. His son Christoph, who became responsible for the work of the Bad Boll healing home, retreated from the Pietistic Lutheranism of his father, and involved himself increasingly in pursuing a social and political agenda to the detriment of its healing ministry. At Männedorf in Switzerland, where Dorothea Trudel had established her healing ministry, a major part of the work of the institution had ceased by the turn of the century as it became more a retreat centre and home for the elderly. Its inability to meet the necessary legal requirement for medical certification was a major inhibiting factor. The demand for such documentation was brought about by the greater availability of effective therapeutic treatments and the rising professionalization of medics. Despite its fading importance, the village cannot be denied its recognition as the place where the fusion of Pietist spirituality and radical healing first emerged.[796]

As these two centers weakened in influence by the 1880s, Britain became the main scene of healing activity on its side of the Atlantic. In a tribute to Elizabeth Baxter, Arthur Booth-Clibborn remarked that “the spiritual influence from Bethshan, the ‘Baxter-Boardman Home of Rest’ and its Hall was world-wide in its reach,” before adding, “It was at its zenith in the decade 1880–1890.”[797] Elizabeth Baxter’s niece, who lived with her aunt during the last decade of her life, admitted that, “the remarkable healings had ceased at Bethshan.”[798] Elizabeth Baxter reminisced that “many remarkable cases of healing took place in these early days,” with the clear implication that over time they had become less memorable. The signs of decline were in evidence as early as 1887. A CMA worker on his way to Germany visited London, and attended a meeting at Bethshan. He noted: “Miss Murray led the meeting, which was quite a full one, but conspicuous for the very few men present. It seems that the opposition to divine healing, even among evangelical workers, is becoming more pronounced in England. The feeling runs higher than in America, and it is principally women and the humble, who hear the blessed truth with ears to hear.”[799]

How can this decline in the transatlantic healing ministry be explained? Clearly, no single cause can provide a full explanation, but a number of factors are discernible:

1. The theological linchpin of the radicals’ case for healing was its hermeneutic take on the atonement. From it were derived the other two elements in the healing triad. The message conveyed was that the believer had the same direct access to healing as to saving grace. Both were received through faith alone, and without “works,” whether good deeds or medical remedy. This view came under sustained attack, sufficient for Kelso Carter to reverse his position. As he saw it, his failure to receive healing at the hands of Dowie was not due to lack of faith. Neither had he succumbed to seeking medical assistance. Therefore, the logical conclusion he drew was that either the scriptural premise on which the atonement claim rested was a misinterpretation of the relevant texts, or “nothing but sin could account for the failure to receive it.”[800] As was described, Dowie was not slow to disclose evidence that it was the latter. Learned theological opinion was strongly against the radicals’ reading of its supportive texts. The Scottish divine, A. B. Bruce, in his Miraculous Element in the Gospel (1886), contended that the radical interpretation “could commend itself only to minds prepossessed in favor of the theory, or addicted to a very prosaic method of interpretation.”[801] An article in the London Contemporary Review condemned the healing movement for its “cruel confusion of sickness with sin, and of healing with holiness,” in that the absence of healing could lead to a questioning of one’s salvation. For this, it “deserves the condemnation of all Christians, as being cruel and heartless and injurious to the most suffering of our fellowmen.”[802]

2. The failure of sufferers to find the restoration of health they sought was a major factor. Elizabeth Annabelle Needham, like Carter, was another to change her view on the doctrine. Both she and her husband were strongly supportive of its practice. Her husband had been an associate of Cullis, while she had written an approving article on the topic for A. J. Gordon’s periodical, The Watchword, in 1881. Ten years later she published Mrs Whilling’s Faith Cure, a parody of the healing movement based on her observation of sick people who, though fully committed to acting in faith, failed to find relief. Her response was biting. The faith cure, she insisted, had “twisted the heads and disturbed the hearts of hundreds of Christians; and robbed more invalids of the glory and peace of acquiescence in God’s sovereign will than any deceit of the devil ever perpetuated.”[803] Mrs Grattan (Fanny) Guinness from her base in London blamed “the notorious Dr Simpson [whose] practical counsels are misleading and dangerous,” and held him responsible for the tragic deaths of three young missionaries “by indoctrinating them with his anti-medicine beliefs.”[804]

3. The impetus behind the healing movement began to abate with the increasing adoption of the moderate position that rendered healing more the exception than the norm. Carter was relieved that the CMA was getting on “a more solid and sure foundation. It is the foundation of the sovereign will of God and obedience to all his laws as far as possible.”[805] He acknowledged that “most of the leading teachers of the more extreme view are gradually coming to see that God does as he pleases . . . and that it is best for us . . . to accept his will any way.”[806] Dowie judged this kind of talk as an application to divine healing of “the old Calvinistic doctrine” that was applied to salvation as captured in Robert Burns’ poem Holy Willie’s Prayer. This portrayed God as the one who, “Sends ane to heaven, and ten to hell/A’ for Thy glory.” It was a characteristic Dowieite swipe against any depiction of God that limited the numbers both of the saved and, by extension, the healed.[807]

4. As more moderate views began to penetrate the healing movement, energy was redirected into social reform, evangelism, and foreign mission work. An article published in the October 1885 issue of Word, Work and World indicated that evangelism and missionary effort of the CMA were of “greater importance” than the work at Berachah, its healing home in New York.[808] Simpson himself stated that divine healing held “a very important place, but it is also a very subordinate place.”[809] In Britain, the change of name of the monthly periodical from Thy Healer to the full title of Jungle Need and Home Help with which is incorporated Thy Healer was a measure of the changing emphasis within Bethshan, with more weight given to mission than healing. Elizabeth Baxter devoted much of her time to the Kirku mission that worked among the indigent hill tribes of northern India. Her faithful companion, Charlotte Murray, wrote in 1892 that “in various ways the Lord has made it clear to me that he no longer needs this house of Bethshan as a home for invalids seeking the Lord’s healing, and He would have me more free to serve Him in other ways.”[810]

5. The healing movement owed much of its theology to people who were scholarly proficient, some of whom were to die in the final decades of the century. In America, they numbered Charles Cullis who died in 1892 and A. J. Gordon in 1895, both of whom urged a more restrained view on healing. It was typical of Gordon to write that care has to be taken that the doctrine of divine healing was not presented in “an unbalanced and reckless manner. . . . We must keep distinctly in mind both Melita and Miletum: remembering that at one place Paul healed the father of Publius by his prayers [Acts 28:8] and that at the other place he left Trophimus sick [2 Tim 4:20].”[811] In England, W. E. Boardman died in 1886, and Asa Mahan in 1889. The former was missed for his acknowledged leadership, demonstrated in calling and chairing the International Conference on Divine Healing and Holiness held in London in 1885, and the latter for his intellectual powers that he used in the promotion of the holiness and healing message.

Gifted leadership helped for a period to mask the inherent weaknesses of the movement. It is significant that another International Conference was never attempted. At no time was there a coherent, agreed theological framework within which to work, nor was there the backing of a formal, structured organization to sustain a strong movement, thus leaving its future inherently unstable. Curtis summarized this fragility succinctly: “Like the larger Holiness and Higher Life movements out of which it emerged, divine healing attracted a broad range of followers from a wide variety of denominational and regional backgrounds. While this diversity generated productive ecumenical energy that helped to inspire unique avenues of ministry . . . it also spawned institutional strife within existing denominational bodies and produced theological tensions that ultimately destabilized the movement’s cohesion.”

6. The comment of the CMA visitor to Bethshan that the numbers in attendance were “principally women and the humble” points to a slump in the socio-economic status of the supporters and seekers of divine healing. Gone were the days of overflowing numbers in attendance at Bethshan that at different times included Lord Radstock, Admiral Fishbourne, social reformer Josephine Butler, and others from middle and upper class backgrounds. In south-east England the most fervent, to their critics fanatical, practitioners of divine healing were the so-called Plumstead Peculiars, found in a poorer part of London, and beyond in rural Essex. Their robust worship style, and teaching on divine healing, attracted considerable animosity. When C. M. Davies, a clergyman-turned-journalist, visited one of their meetings he found them to excel at helping each other out in their shared poverty “in truly apostolic fashion.” However, there was a sting in his account: “But they let their little ones die. They spread smallpox heedlessly among their fellow-creatures; and why? Simply because they will ride to death that one text which tells of the prayer of faith [Jas 5:14–16].” [812] It was the death of children that left them open to vilification, subjected their tenets and practices to public and legal scrutiny, and parents left to face the full rigors of the law.

In America, the new come-outer sects became established largely in the rural and smaller urban areas of the Mid-West, the South and Appalachia, rather than in the large urban complexes of Boston, New York, and Chicago, where much of the movement’s theology was honed. The urbanized East Coast had the arrival of Christian Science among its “well-established and highly competitive population of mental healers” to turn to.[813] The Holiness folk of the South, in Stephens’ words, “developed pragmatic and populist criteria for judging everything. Their egalitarianism and alternative value systems were natural outgrowths of this.”[814] The resultant dearth of intellectual leverage left the theological cupboard bare, and opened the way for the predations of Dowie.

7. Dowie roused strong reactions wherever he went and his reputation spread. He was the great publicist, but a poor ambassador for divine healing. His personality overrode his advocacy. To his loyal supporters, his pugnacity created an aura of excitement; to his opponents his radical views contained elements of the bizarre, touching on the ludicrous. His fulminations against doctors and pharmacists provoked riotous behavior by medical students in Belfast and London, up to 400 in number in the latter in 1900. When he preached in Londonderry in 1900, his sermon dealt largely with divine healing, and only prompted a reaction of “noises, groans and hisses” when he attacked tobacco smoking —“making yourself a walking stinkpot”—and cries of “Rot! Bosh!” when he condemned eating pork.[815] He acted on the principle that the best way to defend was to attack, notably with Carter, Simpson, Torrey, and Moody in his sights. In battle-cry defiance, he attacked all mainstream churches (“denominational clubs”), telling them: “Your day has gone. . . . The New Wine of the Gospel can no longer be put into the wretched old goat skins of your denominations. The people are weary of you.”[816]

8. Dowie’s aversion to medicine gave no recognition to current advances within the profession. Between them, breakthroughs in the therapeutic sciences and improved public health measures were beginning to change the complexion of medicine, fostering a growing confidence in it within the wider society. The advent of psychotherapeutic science provided a fresh source of attack. From the 1870s serious attention had been given to the role of the mind in the restoration of the body to health. In 1872, Daniel Hack Tuke published his Illustrations of the Incidence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease, a work that set out to show the power of “psychical agents” in combating ill-health. Even if allowance is made for miraculous cures at Lourdes and Bethshan, he wrote, there still remains “ample evidence of the therapeutic influences of Expectation, Faith, and the concentration of the Attention on the seat of the disease.”[817] Later, the term “suggestion” became of more familiar usage. In America, there arose a determination among many of the most prominent American psychologists, notably Joseph Jastrow, to attack such practices as spiritualism, psychical phenomena or other religious behaviors. The power of “suggestion” was his chosen weapon as this quote indicates: “Unconscious suggestion has been one of the most potent influences for the production of alleged marvels and pseudo-phenomena.” His militancy was directed against fringe religious groups, branding them as “a menace to rationality.”[818] At the time, the idea of suggestion, or mind-cure in general, called into question the whole validity of many claims to unmediated, supernatural agency—and still does.

Most of the factors behind the admission of decline in divine healing outlined had a bearing on the uptake of the ministry of healing across the social class divide. All the trends discussed above militated against support of the radical healing and holiness message by the educated middle class. Dowie held little appeal for them, but he knew his audience when he told them on one occasion that his doctrine was not “in the dry-as-dust forms of fossilized theologians, of which every honest [working?] Wesleyan man is utterly weary.”[819] In sum, the message that remained radicalized became increasingly proletarianized.

The Come-Outer Contribution

The motivation behind come-outerism was discussed at the beginning of chapter 1 and does not require further elaboration here, other than to look at some of the complexities involved in the exodus of thousands from their Methodist communions. A statistic that is revealing is that by the year 1900, of the entire Wesleyan Holiness constituency in America, 75 percent were associated with the NHA’s Regional, State & County Holiness Associations, and the remainder divided equally between largely non-Methodist Evangelistic Associations and churches. How this story played out at the individual level is well exemplified in the life of Henry Clay Morrison (1857–1942). Morrison entered the ministry of the MEC in 1878, and during the late 1880s experienced entire sanctification. In 1890, he left the pastoral ministry to become a Holiness evangelist, editor, and publisher. His popularity in the MEC (South) was enough to see him elected a delegate to five General Conferences of the church. He became one of the best-known leaders of the Holiness movement, and associated freely with various “come-outer” leaders, yet remained within the MEC. Nevertheless, his ride was not easy. He was charged with insubordination to ecclesiastical authority at least once, and faced expulsion from the MEC and its ministry a number of times, only for all charges to be overturned. Twice he withdrew from the church, only to return a short time later.

His was a classic love/hate relationship with the MEC. Speaking of his love of Methodism, he described it as “ingrained into my very being.” This did not prevent his stating, “I was in fullest sympathy with what was known as ‘The Holiness Movement’ . . . this in no way interfered with my desire to be loyal to the [Methodist] Church.” One of the greatest casualties of the liberalizing trend within the MEC, he felt, was the doctrine of Christian perfection. Near the end of his life, he reminisced: “We regretted to see disruption and come-outism of any sort, urging the need for the sanctified to remain within their church.” Morrison is an example of an advocate of radical holiness who remained within his denomination. While he dealt with evangelism, holiness and premillennialism in more than twenty books, divine healing did not feature greatly, if at all. This lack did not characterize the ministries of two other leading figures, Martin Wells Knapp (1853–1901), and his co-worker Seth Cook Rees (1854–1933).

Knapp entered the ministry of the MEC in 1876, and experienced entire sanctification in 1882. Five years later, he entered full-time evangelism before becoming the founder-editor of the Revivalist in 1888 that soon developed a nationwide readership. After the death of his young wife in 1892, he relocated his ministry to Cincinnati, which led to the opening of several rescue missions in the area. In 1893, he announced the formation of the International Prayer League, whose supporters covenanted to pray daily for revival. The League, by tacitly moving outside the confines of the MEC, in providing credentials for ministers, establishing missions and camp meetings, and opening a school, in effect was establishing a quasi-denomination. The last straw in his relationship with formal Methodism was the 1897 edict to limit the preaching of premillennialism and divine healing at NHA camp meetings. His reaction was to transmute the Prayer League into the International Holiness Union and Prayer League (IAHU).

In taking this step, Knapp was joined by Rees and C. W. Ruth (1865–1941). The IAHU, with its nationally known leadership, became the nucleus that attracted to itself other associations. In support, God’s Bible School opened its doors in 1900 to provide rudimentary training for ministers and missionaries. The IAHU was not a denomination, more an ecumenical alliance of Holiness people. In 1905 it added the word “Church” to its title, by which time Knapp had been dead for two years, a victim of typhoid. Shortly before his death, he had withdrawn from the MEC. Kostlevy considers the founding of the IAHU was highly significant in the history of the Holiness movement in that “it marked the formal separation of the radical champions of divine healing and premillennial eschatology . . . from the conservative Methodist-dominated NHA.”[820]

Seth Rees was from a Quaker background, and became a Holiness evangelist after he experienced entire sanctification in 1883. His imperious manner earned him the sobriquet “earth-quaker.” In 1897, he joined the IAHU and served as its President for the period 1897–1905. He attracted national attention for his leadership of revivals in Chicago and Boston in 1901. These were conducted under the joint auspices of the IAHU and the Metropolitan Christian Association (MCA). The MCA emerged as a holiness body in Chicago in 1894, and was known for the physicality of its worship, which earned it the sobriquet “Jumpers.” Its periodical, Burning Bush, was an expression of its ethos in its early years. One critic said of it that it deals in “the most bitter, vindictive, vituperative language to condemn churches, preachers, evangelists, and especially ‘holiness folk.’”[821] Taking its inspiration from the sensationalist yellow press of the day, it used cartoons to caricature the wealthy in the interests of the common man, and lampooned prominent evangelists, individuals and denominations that fell below its uncompromising standards.

The IAHU and MCA gave active support to divine healing, though the MCA did not immediately embrace it. Both encouraged demonstrative worship, which led to complaints from outsiders decrying the sounds of shouting, crying and jumping that brought the charge of fanaticism. Such displays, for Knapp, were to be expected from seekers of entire sanctification, on the grounds that “the Baptism of the Holy Ghost moves to vocal demonstration,” a remark to which Pentecostals would later give their full agreement.[822] Both Holiness movements had a strongly egalitarian ethos, reflecting the resentment ordinary citizens felt towards the end of the Gilded Age when they had to live through the aftermath of the economic depression referred to as the “Panic of 1893.” Knapp likened the outpouring of the Spirit to lightning bolts that fall without regard to “color, clime, creed, and social, political or ecclesiastical position.”[823] The President of the MCA, himself a wealthy man, maintained that middle-class wealth and its trappings were a sign that one was on the road to perdition.

The Knapps experienced healing early in their married life. Five years after his wife’s dramatic recovery from typhoid, Knapp received his healing coincident with his experience of entire sanctification. His expectation of healing was large, but trimmed by a few caveats that sided towards the moderate position on the healing triad. Healing in the atonement “will be known in its fullness only . . . at His appearing, though scintillations of it reach us here.” When the gift of faith for healing is not possessed, then “healing must be sought by other means or give way to submissive acquiescence in providential discipline.” As for medical interposition, he maintained that “God heals with means and without means, gradually, as well as in an instant.” He leaned heavily on the charismata outlined in 1 Corinthians 12, prizing it as a wonderful chapter on the church as it should always be, viz., “officered and panoplied and ammunitioned as God designs it to be until translated. Here is promised the ‘nine gifts’ which the Church may and must possess to be victorious in her warfare.” The gift of healing, he recognized, as “this long neglected, much-derided, frequently-abused gift [that] if ‘earnestly coveted’ more would be criticized less.”[824]

SUMMATION

If one were looking for where the hottest action of radical healing was at the turn of the century, it would be to those areas where come-outerism was strongest. In such settings a gestalt of experiential religiosity was being shaped that Baer termed “incipient Pentecostalism.” It was a culture that, besides divine healing, found in its strong millennial expectations the impetus to call the Christian church to urgent action to meet the challenge presented by the imminent Parousia. The Jumpers saw themselves as a purified people, gifted by the Spirit to an extent not witnessed since apostolic days. Divine healing was for them an affirmative provision of divine power and a corroborative witness to divine presence. The sense of power and openness to God was expressed in ecstatic worship. The novelist Jack London believed that MCA-type worship was inherently subversive of the social order by its insistence that all, regardless of status, race, or gender, must surrender the appearance of social control to the subjective experience of Spirit baptism.[825]

These characteristic features were transferred to and through the Pentecostal movement. To take one small example of how this took place, one need not look further than Knapp and the MCA. The leader of the Azusa Street revival, William Seymour, moved to Cincinnati in 1900 to pursue studies at Knapp’s God Bible School, which was doubly attractive to the son of a former slave for its racially inclusive policy. Rufus Sanders’ remark that the impact of his time in the city “would change Williams’ life forever” is overstated, for there were many other influences. Fox is closer to the mark in his assessment that Seymour, during his short stay, most likely imbibed his teaching in the areas of premillennialism and racial inclusion, as well as the handling of “special revelations.” The latter were communicated through visionary experiences and internal voices, topics addressed in Knapp’s book Impressions (1890).[826] Alfred G. Garr (1874–1941) was one of the first whites to speak in tongues at Azusa Street, in lore the first. He joined the MCA in 1901, and worked for it until 1906. He and his wife were among the most effective of the earliest missionaries in Asia, notably India. His contribution to doctrine was to challenge the concept of xenolalia to overcome the language barrier used on the mission field, while maintaining a strong advocacy of divine healing.

Was the doctrine and practice of the radical version of divine healing under threat? This was the question posed at the beginning. The answer must take account of scale. On the grand scale, the evidence would point to that being the case when understood, in Dowie’s phrase, as an organized force. This chapter has shown a fairly rapid whittling down of its support in the period under study. The off-putting forces dragging against it began to tell, whether it was critical biblical scholarship refuting its textual interpretations, seemingly unfulfilled answers to earnest prayer for healing, the nose-thumbing of the psycho-medical professions to claims of healing, its association with idiosyncratic behavior or oppressive moral codes. Such considerations bore little weight with people whose religious heritage was one that was Bible-believing, doctrinally attuned to perfectionism, hesitant about the capabilities of conventional medicine, and confirmed in belief by the evidence of genuine healings.

Tens of thousands in the radical Holiness tradition held tight to the doctrine, and if in relative numbers they were tiny, the transmission of the doctrine from them to the new Pentecostal movement ensured the future viability of the doctrine. That it may have weakened in Holiness hands is suggested in the histories of the Church of God (Anderson) and the Pillar of Fire churches discussed in chapter 1. In 1951, a historian of the CG (A) wrote that physical healing was not essential to the denomination, a judgement that had “proved enormously influential for the CG historians.” [827] Around 1920, there was a bitter controversy, and resulting split, in the Pentecostal Holiness Church over the issue of divine healing. The schismatic Congregational Holiness Church in Georgia accepted the atonement doctrine with its concomitant refusal of medical means—an indication that the question was still a live one.[828] The Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene dropped “Pentecostal” from its title in 1919 over “the tongues issue,” and its negative view on the healing “fanaticism” of the new Pentecostal movement that began to outstrip it in numbers of adherents. In taking the moderate position on healing, none of these churches denied divine healing, only its more radical expression.

That Pentecostalism became the main purveyor of the radical take on divine healing has profound implications for modern Christianity, both good and ill. By basing much of its distinctive theology on charismatic gifting of the church set out in 1 Corinthians 12, it has ensured a permanent place in its witness to the gifts of faith, healing, and miraculous powers. By extending the scope of the atonement to incorporate healing, the nineteenth-century radical healers added a new dimension and depth to their apologetic, irrespective of the merits of their interpretation of the texts. The linking of healing to the atonement raised mightily the expectation of healing as its message crossed the continents. The security of the practice of divine healing was guaranteed by placing it in both its pneumatological and soteriological biblical contexts. In his book The New Faces of Christianity, Philip Jenkins drew attention to global South where “healing ministries have been critical to the expansion of Christianity. . . . Healing is an integral part of the narrative of conversion.”[829] In Nepal, it is is estimated that 40–60 percent of believers were converted as a result of a miracle.[830] The radical view was a challenge to the wider church, and impelled other approaches to Christian healing ministries. The Emmanuel Movement took a psychotherapy-based, theologically-liberal, approach to healing that spread from the Emmanuel Church in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1906. The British equivalent of the therapeutic model was the Guild of Health, formed in 1905 by three young Anglican clerics. The fact that divine/spiritual healing in its diverse forms is practiced across all denominations must owe something to its modest antecedents.

It would be remiss not to assess some downside outcomes of the radical healing doctrine. A number can be briefly enumerated:

1. For the major part of the twentieth century the evangelical churches dismissed divine healing because of its associations with Pentecostalism. Some of this was an emotionally-laden response to patterns of behavior that were felt to be unbecoming to Christian worship. A sense of the uncanny attached itself to speaking in tongues. The dominance of cessationism throttled expectations, and held such phenomena at bay. It was not until the arrival of the Charismatic Renewal in the 1960s with its middle-class provenance that the doctrine was released from its classical Pentecostal hold.

2. The doctrine as handed down from its Holiness sources was in the more radical format. It did not take on board the views of the Holiness moderates such as Daniel Steele, even Martin Knapp. It has not been until recent times that Pentecostal scholars have seriously questioned elements in the radical stance on healing. The work of the British scholar Keith Warrington is representative of the reassessment of the doctrine being taken.[831] In many ways, his views are quite akin to those of the moderates in the Holiness movement studied here.

3. In some ways, the radical view has lent itself to abusive and self-seeking behavior. Some healers, working with the assurance that healing is an atonement-based right, have acted with incautious aggression. Jack Coe (1918–56), an ordained minister of the American Assemblies of God, was expelled from the denomination because of his methods and teachings. At a meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, he lined up 103 people in wheelchairs and crutches. As he walked down the line, he would lift people up from their wheelchair. If they fell, he would tell them that they did not have enough faith. Others of the same ilk would destroy medicines, break canes and crutches, and use a saw to remove body plaster casts while thousands in the tents cheered and TV viewers gulped. Rod Parsley (b. 1957) is a prominent advocate of the Prosperity Gospel, a television host and evangelist, based in Columbus, Ohio. He makes the assertion, “Let’s settle the matter once and for all, God doesn’t want you sick.” One secular critic wrote that he “barks and grimaces and struts on stage, pretending to cure sickness and constantly demanding pledges of money from working-class Ohio parishioners.” The charge of pecuniary excess does not trouble Parsley, as it epitomizes the “prosperity” side to Word of Faith teaching.

That Pentecostal healing need not have taken this direction comes out in the work of Kimberley Alexander. But that is a topic, together with others raised above, which is planned for a subsequent work.

752. Dayton, “Methodism and Pentecostalism,” 181.

753. Baer, “Perfectly Empowered Bodies,” 153.

754. The NHA was the successor of the National Campmeeting Association (NCA). As the concept of a “second blessing” spread, it was increasingly questioned in mainstream Methodism. One Methodist editor described the teaching as “an ill-sorted compound of impossible psychology, absurd exegesis, and misread experience.” (Peters, Christian Perfection, 169.) Those who wished to retain the doctrine later became the backbone of the Wesleyan Holiness movement. They retained their allegiance to mainstream Methodism while finding fellowship through camp meetings, and local and regional associations organized by the NHA. The Association was formed to revive and support the holiness tradition within the MEC.

755. Baer makes the point that “with few exceptions, historians have neglected this important feature of Wesleyan expressions of holiness at the turn of the century. . . . [They] have focused on prominent Higher Life healers like Simpson, and minimized Wesleyan healing, regarding it as a ‘side issue’ of limited significance.”(Baer, “Perfectly Empowered Bodies,” 152.) He cites, as an example of such neglect, the major text on the period by Smith, Called unto Holiness, 1962.

756. DeArteaga, Quenching the Spirit, 116.

757. Thompson, Life of A. B. Simpson, 161.

758. Baer, “Perfectly Empowered Bodies,” 160.

759. Ibid., 162–63.

760. In 1890, Gracey retired from the MEC ministry and was appointed United States Consul to China, a post he held for various periods until 1897. He received the Decoration of the Double Dragon from the Chinese government for his service in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion.

761. Ibid., 161.

762. Turley, A Wheel within a Wheel, 130–31.

763. Steele, “Faith Healing.” Online.

764. David Hume (1711–76), philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, in his famous “Essay upon Miracles” (1748) argued that reports of miracles should always be doubted, since miracles are, by definition, highly unlikely. His writings are sourced on philosophic scepticism, a view that nothing can be known with certainty.

765. McDonald, Modern Faith Healing, 64.

766. Ibid., 8.

767. Carter, Faith Healing Reviewed, 14.

768. Ibid., 1, 19. The “nine-days” reference alludes to an old proverb, “A wonder lasts nine days, and then the puppy’s eyes are open.” In other words the eyes of the public lose a sense of wonder once they are no longer left in the dark.

769. Carter, Faith Healing Reviewed, 22.

770. Exod 15:26 “if you pay attention to [God’s] commands . . . I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you.” Deut 7:15 “The Lord will keep you free from every disease” (NIV). It is important to remember when it came to finding biblical warrant for a practice in more fundamentalist circles, text swopping, bereft of context, was a major recourse. The principles of biblical interpretation, as measured against modern evangelical scholarship, were barely recognized. Carter was no exception, but he was aware of the problem. He conceded, “If I have misread the Scriptures anywhere, I devoutly pray that it be pointed out to me.” His change of view on the subject of healing was dependent upon “the operation of the Spirit through long experience, close study and much prayer.” (40)

771. Carter, Faith Healing Reviewed, 37, 38.

772. Ibid., 41.

773. Ibid., 42, 44.

774. Ibid., 68.

775. Dayton, Theological Roots, 130.

776. Carter, Faith Healing Reviewed, 71.

777. Ibid., 117.

778. McDonald, Modern Faith Healing, 42.

779. Ibid., 44–45. “Poland Water” is spring water first marketed in Poland, Maine in 1845.

780. Steele, “Faith Healing,” online.

781. In their articles in The Century Magazine that appeared in the March 1887 edition, Buckley headed his “Faith-Healing,” and Carter his “Divine Healing, or Faith-Cure.” A report produced by a composite clerical and medical committee of the Church of England in 1914 carried the title “Spiritual Healing: An Enquiry into Spiritual, Faith and Mental Healing.” The last title provides an indication of a widening range of opinion on the subject.

782. Donald Gee, among the most balanced of later Pentecostal teachers, wrote the booklet Trophimus I Left Sick to bring a greater realism among Pentecostals to the question of sickness and healing. His comment on Trophimus’ sickness draws a somewhat different scenario: “He would be bold who would suggest that Paul must have lost his power to heal the sick in the Name of the Lord Jesus: or that Paul had forfeited the gift and calling so long and conspicuously enjoyed: or that Paul was backslidden. We have no evidence at all to that effect, for, to the contrary, while stranded in Melita on the voyage to Rome, Paul had exercised the gifts of healing with great power and freedom.” His general premise, nevertheless, was much in accord with that of Steele: “We seem to have unreasonably refused any place for physical healing to be ministered to us in the will of God except by entirely supernatural and miraculous means. . . . To demand an absolute miracle every time we fall sick does seem to many of us to border upon presumption.” (Gee, “Trophimus,” online.)

783. Carter, Faith Healing Reviewed, 89, 91.

784. Ibid., 89.

785. Ibid., 90. LH, March 12, 1898. Dowie devoted most of this service to criticizing Carter.

786. Ibid., 392.

787. McDonald, Modern Faith Healing, chapter 9.

788. Ibid., 55, 56, 53, 50.

789. Carter, Faith Healing Reviewed, 126–27.

790. Ibid., 157.

791. Ibid., 130–31.

792. Ibid., 112, 114.

793. Hardesty, Faith Cure, 137.

794. Ibid., 120–21.

795. The revised Discipline banned the office of evangelist; prohibited interference either by other local or itinerant preachers; the local pastor was given authority and responsibility to see that all unauthorized preachers were kept out of his church and later out of the bounded area of his charge. In some areas it was made clear that the activities of the Holiness associations were no longer condoned. (Peters, Christian Perfection, 146–470).

796. See Robinson, Divine Healing, 83–87, for the legacy of Mannedorf.

797. Wiseman, Elizabeth Baxter, 225.

798. Ibid., 169.

799. Alliance Weekly, August 1887, 79.

800. Ibid., 121.

801. Bruce, The Miraculous Element in the Gospels, 317.

802. Schofield, Faith Healing, 114.

803. Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician, 204.

804. Nienkirchen, A. B. Simpson, 18. Grattan Guinness and his wife established in 1873 the East London Missionary Training Institute, the first of the “faith-type” training schools. The young people set sail for Sierra Leone from New York in 1890. Before sailing, they stayed at Simpson’s missionary rest home, where, she alleged, he influenced them in ways that made them confident of the biblical promises related to healing.

805. Carter, Faith Healing Reviewed, 114.

806. Ibid., 121.

807. LH, 12 March 1898, 389.

808. WWW, October 1885, 254.

809. Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician, 193–94.

810. TH, 1892, 175.

811. Gordon, The Ministry of Healing, 256b, 261.

812. Davies, Unorthodox London, 103. Nothing reveals better the intractable nature of the Peculiars’ policy on healing as that shown by one father. In 1897, his fourteen-month-old son died of pneumonia, the sixth to die in similar circumstances. At his trial for manslaughter, he protested that his failure to seek medical help had not contributed in any way to his son’s death; rather it was “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.”

813. Schoepflin, Christian Science on Trial, 88.

814. Stephens, The Fire Spreads, 98.

815. LH, 26 January, 1901, 428.

816. Dowie, “The Lies of the Ram’s Horn,” Online.

817. Tuke, Illustrations, 295.

818. White, Unsettled Minds, 67–68. Jastrow was President of the American Psychological Association in 1900. Christian Science was the “in” religious movement that was making strides in the period 1890–1906 when it grew in membership from 8,724 to 40,011 (c. 450 percent) increase.

819. LH, 12 March 1898, 389.

820. Kostlevy, Holy Jumpers, 30. In 1915, the IAHU changed its name to International Apostolic Holiness Church. It absorbed at least six other small sects to become the Pilgrim Holiness Church in 1922. By then, it was second in size to the largest of all, the Church of the Nazarene.

821. Ibid., 91.

822. Ibid., 33.

823. Ibid., 31.

824. Knapp, Lightning Bolts. Online.

825. Kostlevy, “E. L. Harvey,” 24.

826. Synan, William Seymour Pioneer, 40: Sanders, William Joseph Seymour, 52.

827. Stephens, Who Healeth All Thy Diseases, 186.

828. Campbell, The Pentecostal Holiness Church, 279. The church had its origins in the Fire-Baptized Holiness church of B. H. Irwin founded in 1895.

829. Jenkins, The New Faces, 114.

830. Noll, The New Shape, 140.

831. Warrington, Pentecostal Theology, chapter 8.

Bibliography

Albrecht, Daniel E. “Carrie Judd Montgomery: Pioneering Contributor to Three Religious Movements.” Pneuma 8.2 (1986) 101–19.

Anon. Articles of Religion XIII. Pillar of Fire. Online: http://www.belleview-college.org/at/ArticlesOfReligion

.pdf

———. “Healing Evangelists 1881–1957.” DVD. Springfield, MO: Flower Pentecostal Heritage Centre, 2006.

———. “History and Times at the Kingdom,” Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness held at the Agricultural Hall. London: Snow, 1885.

———. “History and Times at the Kingdom.” Online: http://www.fwselijah.com/perfecti.htm.

———. History of Manningham.” Online: http://cdroms.blunham.com/pdf/ManninghamEtcPages.pdf.

———. Spiritual Healing, A Report of a Clerical and Medical Committee of Inquiry into Spiritual, Faith and Mental. London: Macmillan, 1914.

———. Worldwide Religious News: “Moria to become local Mecca”, 23 February 2005, Online http://www.wwrn.org/article.php?idd=10893&sec=55&con=61.

Anderson, Allan A., and Gerald J. Pillar. “The Segregated Spirit: The Pentecostals.” In Christianity in South Africa: A Political, Social and Cultural History, edited by Richard Elphick and Rodney Davenport, 227–41. Oxford: James Currey, 1997.

Anderson, Allan A. “Prophetic Healing and the Growth of the Zion Christian Church in South Africa.” Online: http://artsweb.bham.ac.uk/aanderson/Publications/prophetic_healing_and_the_growth.htm.

———. Zion and Pentecost: The Spirituality and Experience of Pentecostal and Zionist/Apostolic Churches in South Africa. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2000.

Anderson Robert M. Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992.

Alexander, Kimberly Erwin. “Models of Pentecostal Healing in Light of Early Twentieth Century Pentecostalism.” PhD diss. Open University, UK, 2002.

———. Pentecostal Healing: Models in Theology and Practice. Blandford Forum, UK: Deo, 2006.

Baer, Jonathan R. “Perfectly Empowered Bodies: Divine Healing in Modernising America.” PhD diss., Yale University, 2002.

———. “Redeemed Bodies: The Functions of Divine Healing in Incipient Pentecostalism.” Church History 70.4 (2001) 735–71.

Balmer, Randall. Encyclopaedia of Evangelicalism. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002.

Bararacco, Claire Hoertz. Prescribing Faith: Medicine, Media, and Religion in American Culture. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007.

Barth, Karl. Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century. London: SCM, 1972.

Bartleman, Frank. “Around the World By Faith: With Six Weeks In the Holy Land.” Online: http://209.85

.229.132/search?q=cache:sQYlJ7xgPBUJ:www.ccel.org/ccel/bartleman/world/formats/world.doc+lydia+walshaw&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk.

Baxter, Mrs M. Divine Healing. Brighton, UK: The Christian Herald, n,d.

Bender, Courtney, and Ann Taves. What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in a Not So Secular Age. New York: Columba University Press, 2012.

Bending, Lucy. The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000.

Bingham, Rowland V. The Bible and the Body. London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1921.

Blavatsky, H. Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. Online: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/isis/iu-h htm.

Blumhofer, Edith L., and Randall Balmer, editors. Modern Christian Revivals. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Blumhofer, Edith L. “The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and the Apostolic Faith: A Study in the 1906 Pentecostal Revival.” In Charismatic Experiences in History, edited by Cecil M. Robeck, 126–46. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1985.

———. “A Pentecostal Branch Grows in Dowie’s Zion.” Heritage 6.3 (1986) 3–5.

———.“Restoration as Revival: Early American Pentecostalism.” In Modern Christian Revivals, edited by Edith Blumhofer and Randall Balmer, 153–?. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

———. Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Boardman, W. E. Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness held at the Agricultural Hall. London: Snow, 1885.

Boddy, A. A. “Dr Yoakum’s Work at Los Angeles: Appreciation and Candid Criticism.” Confidence, November, 1912, 248–51.

Booth-Clibborn, A. S. Blood against Blood. Reprint. New York: Cook, 1914.

Booth-Clibborn, William. The Baptism in the Holy Ghost. Dallas, TX: Voice of Healing, 1962.

———. “Too Much: The Filled to Overflowing Experience.” Online: http://www.peterwade.com/articles/other/toomuc00.shtml.

Bosworth, F. F. Christ the Healer. Reprint. Grand Rapids: Revell, 1973.

Bruce, A. B. The Miraculous Element in the Gospels. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1886.

Buckley, J. M. Faith-Healing, Christian Science and Kindred Phenomena. Reprint. New York: Century, 1892.

Burgess, Stanley M., and Eduard M. van der Maas, editors. The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.

Burpeau, Kemp Pendleton. God’s Showman: A Historical Study of John G. Lake and South African/American Pentecostalism. Oslo: Refleks, 2004.

Byers, Andrew L. Birth of a Reformation: The Life and Labours of Daniel S. Warner. Anderson, IN: Gospel Trumpet, 1921.

Byrum, E. E. “Experiences of a Minister.” Online: http://library.timelesstruths.org/texts/Riches_of_Grace/Experiences_of_a_Minister/.

———. “Raised from the Dead” Online: http://healingandrevival.com/ByrumRaised.pdf.

———. “Travels and Experiences in Other Lands.” Online: http://healingandrevival.com/Byrum%20Travels.pdf.

Carter, R. Kelso. Faith Healing’ Reviewed after Thirty Years. Boston: Christian Witness, 1897.

Cameron. Nigel M. de S., editor. Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993.

Campbell, Joseph E. The Pentecostal Holiness Church 1898–1948: Its Background and History. Franklin Springs, GA: PHC, 1951.

Cartwright, Desmond. The Real Wigglesworth: The Man. The Myth. The Message. Tonbridge, UK: Sovereign World, 2000.

———. “The Wigglesworth Prophecies.” Online: http://www.smithwigglesworth.com/pensketches/prophecy.html

Chan, Simon. Pentecostal Theology and the Christian Spiritual Tradition. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

Chant, Barry. Heart of Fire: The Story of Australian Pentecostalism. Fullarton, South Australia: Luke, 1973.

Chapman Diana. Searching for the Source of the River: Forgotten Women of the British Pentecostal Revival 1907–1914. London: Push, 2007

Chesnut, R. Andrew. Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Chidester, David. Christianity: A Global History. London: Penguin, 2000.

Conkin, Paul K. American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Conn, Charles W. Like a Mighty Army Moves the Church of God 1886–1955. Cleveland, TN: Church of God, 1955.

Cook, Philip L. Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth-Century Utopia. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Coulter, Dale M. “The Development of Ecclesiology in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN): A Forgotten Contribution?” Pneuma 29.1 (2007) 58–85.

Cox, Harvey. Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Creech, Joe. “Visions of Glory: The Place of the Azusa Street Revival in Pentecostal History.” Church History 15.3 (1996) 405–24.

Crichton-Browne, James. “A Very Victorian Psychiatrist, 1840–1937.” No pages. Online: http://www.malcolmingram.com/cblondon.htm.

Cunningham, Raymond J. “From Holiness to Healing: The Faith Cure in America 1872–1892.” Church History 43 (1974) 499–513.

———. “The Impact of Christian Science on the American Churches, 1880-1910.” American Historical Review 72 (1967) 885–905.

———. “Ministry of Healing: The Origins of the Psychotherapeutic Role of the American Churches.” PhD diss., John Hopkins University, 1965.

Curtis, Heather D. Faith in the Great Physician; Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900. Baltimore MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2007.

———. “The Lord for the Body: Pain and Suffering and the Practice of Divine Healing in Late Nineteenth-Century American Protestantism.” PhD diss. Harvard University, 2004.

Daniels, W. H. Dr Cullis and His Work. Boston: Willard Tract Repository, 1885.

Darwin, Charles R., letter to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860. Online: http,//www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2814.

Davies, C. Maurice: Unorthodox London or Phases of Religious Life in the Metropolis, London: Tinsley, 1875.

Dawn, Marva J. Powers, Weakness and the Tabernacling of God. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.

Dayton, Donald W. Theological Roots of Pentecostalism. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1987.

———. “Yet another Layer of the Onion, or Opening the Ecumenical Door to Let the Riffraff In.” The Ecumenical Review 40.1 (1988) 89–110.

DeArteaga, William. Quenching the Spirit: Examining Centuries of Opposition to the Moving of the Holy Spirit. Lake Mary, FL, Creation House, 1992.

Dieter, Melvin E. “Primitivism in the American Holiness Tradition.” Wesleyan Theological Journal 30.1 (1995) 78–91.

Dowie, J. A. “‘You Dirty Boy!’ A Reply to Dr Henson of the First Baptist Church, Chicago.” A Voice of Healing, March 1898, 30–31.

———. “The Lies of the Ram’s Horn.” A Voice from Zion, March 1900. Online: http://www.john

alexanderdowie.com/attachments/File/vol_4_mar_v4_lies_of_the_ram_s_horn.pdf

Eddy, Mary Baker. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Reprint. Boston, MA: First Church of Christ, Scientist, 2000.

Erskine, Mrs Steuart. Memoirs of Edward Earl of Sandwich 1839–1916. London: Murray, 1919.

Fankhauser, Craig Charles. “The Heritage of Faith: An Historical Evaluation of the Holiness Movement in America.” MA diss., Pittsburgh State University, 1983.

Faupel, D. William. The Everlasting Gospel; The Significance of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996.

———. “Theological Influences on the Teachings and Practices of John Alexander Dowie.” Pneuma 29.2 (2007) 226–53.

Finney, Charles G. The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney. Reprint. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.

Flenxer, Abraham. Medical Education in the United States and Canada. New York City. Online: http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/elibrary/Carnegie_Flexner_Report.pdf.

Frodsham, Stanley Howard. Smith Wigglesworth: Apostle of Faith. London: Assemblies of God, 1949.

Fuller, Robert C. Alternative Medicine and American Religious Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Gaiser, Frederick J. Healing in the Bible: Theological Insight for Christian Ministry. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010.

Gardiner, Gordon P. Out of Zion into All the World. Shippenburg, PA: Companion, 1990.

Garrard, Mary N. Mrs Penn-Lewis: A Memoir. London: Overcomer Bookroom, 1930.

Gee, Donald. These Men I Knew: Personal Memoirs of Pentecostal Pioneers. Nottingham, UK: Assemblies of God, 1980.

———. Trophimus I Left Sick. Online: http://www.angelfire.com/la2/prophet1/problemswithhealing.html.

———. Wind and Flame. Croydon, UK: Heath, 1967.

Gibbard, Noel. On the Wings of the Dove, Bridgend, UK: Bryntirion, 2002.

Gilliver, Peter. “Billy Sunday: A New Source for ‘Oxen of the Sun.’” Online: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/james_joyce_quarterly/v044/44.1gilliver.html

Godbey, W. B. The Sanctification of Mrs W. B. Godbey: My Better Half. Cincinnati, OH: God’s Revivalist, c.1918.

Goff, James R., and Grant Wacker, editors. Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders. Fayetteville, AR; University of Arkansas Press, 2002.

Goff, James R. Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1988.

Goddard, Henry H. “The Effects on Mind of Body as Evidenced by Faith Cures.” American Journal of Psychology 10.3 (1899) 431–502.

Gordon, A. J. The Ministry of Healing. In Healing: Three Great Classics, edited by Jonathan L Graf. Camp Hill, PA: Christian, 1992.

Gordon, James M. Evangelical Spirituality: From the Wesleys to John Stott, London: SPCK, 1991.

Gordon, Alexander. “Dowie, John Alexander (1847–1907).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Rev. H. C. G. Matthew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Online: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32885, accessed 12 Nov 2007.

Griffith, R. Marie. “Prayer Cloths.” Online: http://www.materialreligion.org/journal/handkerchief.html

Grubb, G. C. What God Hath Wrought: An Account of the Mission Tour. London: Marlborough 1891.

Hall, G. Stanley. “Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education.” No pages. Online: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Hall/Adolescence/chap17.htm

Halsey, John J. “The Genesis of a Modern Prophet.” The American Journal of Sociology 9.3 (1903) 311–28.

Hardesty, Nancy A. Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003.

Harrell, David Edwin. All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975.

Harris, Jose. Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914. London: Penguin, 1993.

Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.

———. A History of English Christianity 1929–1990. London: SCM, 1991.

Herbine, Charlotte G. Meeting of the Spheres: Letters from Doctor Coulter. New York: Brentano’s, 1919.

Herndl, Diane Price. Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Hocken, Peter. “Berlin Declaration.” In The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, edited by Stanley E. Burgess, 371. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.

———. “Pentecostal Layman.” Pneuma 20.2 (1988) 123–33.

Hollenweger, Walter J. Pentecostalism: Origins and Developments Worldwide. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1997.

———. The Pentecostals. London: SCM, 1972.

Howton, Richard. Divine Healing and Demon Possession. London: Lock, 1905.

Hywel-Davies, Jack. The Life of Smith Wigglesworth. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1987.

Jacobsen, Douglas. Thinking in the Spirit: Theologies of the Early Pentecostal Movement. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature. Reprint. London: Fontana, 1960.

Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Joyce, James: Ulysses. Online: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/ulyss11h.ht

Jones, Charles Edwin. “The Beulah Land and the Upper Room.” Society for Pentecostal Studies Papers (1992) 1–18.

Judd, Carrie F. The Prayer of Faith. 1880. Online: http://archive.org/details/prayeroffaith00montrich

Kandt, Kristen E. “In the Name of God: An American Story of Feminism, Racism and Religious Intolerance: The Story of Alma Bridwell White.” American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and Law 8.3 (2000) 753–94.

Kay, William K. Pentecostalism in Britain. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2000.

Kinnard, Jacob N. “The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott.” The Journal of Religion 77.4 (1997) 669–79.

Knapp, Martin Wells. “Lightning Bolts from Pentecostal Skies.” Online: http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyctr/books/0401-0500/HDM0413.pdf

Knox, R, A. Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950.

Kostlevy, William C. “E. L. Harvey: The Price of Discipleship.” In Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, edited by James R. Goff andf Grant Wacker, 669–79. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2002.

———, editor. Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement. Lanham MD: Scarecrow, 2001.

———. Holy Jumpers: Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kydd, Ronald A. N. Healing through the Centuries: Models for Understanding. Peabody MA: Hendrickson, 1988.

Liardon, Roberts. God’s Generals: Why They Succeeded and Why Some Fail. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2003.

Lang, G. H. The Earlier Years of the Modern Tongues Movement. Miami Springs, FL: Conley & Shoettle, 1985.

Lewis, Donald M. The Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, 1730–1860. 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Lindsay, Gordon. John Alexander Dowie: A Life Story of Trials, Tragedies and Triumphs. Dallas TX: Christ for the Nations, 1986.

Livingstone, E. A. “Christian Science.” In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, edited by E. A. Livingstone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Oxford Reference Online: Oxford University Press. 20 April 2011 http,//www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t95.e1171

Mains, George Preston, James Monroe Buckley. New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1917.

Malcomson, Keith. Pentecostal Pioneers Remembered: British & Irish Pioneers of Pentecost. Maitland, FL: Xulon, 2008.

Marrs, William Taylor. Confessions of a Neurasthenic. Philadelphia: Davis, 1908.

Martin, David. Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish. Oxford: Blackwells, 2002.

———. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Martin, Roger. R. A. Torrey: Apostle of Certainty. Murfreesboro, TN: Sword of the Lord, 1976.

Martineau, Harriet, editor. Linda H. Peterson: Autobiography. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007.

———. Life in the Sick-Room: Essays by an Invalid. Ormskirk: Broadview Literary Texts, 2003.

Maxwell, David. “Historicizing Christian Independency: The South African Pentecostal Movement c.1908–1960.” The Journal of African History 40.2 (1999) 243–64.

McDonald, William. Modern Faith Healing Scripturally Considered. Reprint. Salem, OH: Schmul, 1999.

McGee, Gary B. Miracles, Missions & American Pentecostalism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010.

———. “The Radical Strategy in Modern Mission: The Linkage of Paranormal Phenomena with Evangelism.” In The Holy Spirit and Mission Dynamics, edited by C. Douglas McConnell, 69–95. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1997.

———. “Tongues, The Bible Evidence: The Revival Legacy of Charles F. Parham.” Enrichment (1999). Online: http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/199903/068_tongues.cfm

Mencken, H. L. Prejudices: Third Series. New York: Knopf, 1922.

Menzies William W. “The Non-Wesleyan Origins of the Pentecostal Movement.” In Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, edited by Vinson Synan, 81–98. Plainfield NJ: Logos, 1975.

Mews, Stuart. “The Revival of Spiritual Healing in the Church of England 1920–26.” In The Church and Healing, edited by W. J. Shiels, 299–331. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.

Miller, Donald E., and Tetsunao Yamamori. Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.

Milne, Garnet Howard. The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Cessation of Special Revelation: The Majority Puritan Viewpoint on Whether Extra-Biblical Prophecy Is Still Possible. Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2007.

Mix, Mrs Edward. Faith Cures and Answers to Prayer. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.

Montgomery, Carrie Judd. “Under His Wings”: The Story of My Life. Oakland, CA: Triumph of Faith, 1936.

Morgan, John. “The Gift of the Holy Ghost.” Oberlin Quarterly Review, August, 1845. Online: http://www.archive.org/stream/oberlinquarterl01collgoog#page/n4/mode/2up

Mullin, Robert Bruce. Miracle and the Modern Religious Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Neal, Lynn S: “Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clarke, and the Art of Religious Intolerance.” Church History 78.2 (2009) 350–78.

Neely, Mark A., and Harold Holzer. The Lincoln Family Album. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.

Nelson, Carolyn. A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Drama and Articles of the 1890s. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000.

Nelson, Shirley. Fair, Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine. Latham, NY: British American, 1989.

Nienkirchen, Charles W. A. B. Simpson and the Pentecostal Movement. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

———. A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

———. The New Shape of World Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009.

Oliphant, Mrs M. The Life of Edward Irving, Minister of the National Scotch Church. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1862.

Opp, James. The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine & Protestant Faith/ Healing in Canada 1880–1930. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2005.

———. “The Word and the Flesh: Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Healing Narratives in North America, 1880–1910.” Social History/Historie Sociale 36.71 (2003) 205–24.

Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Physical Research in England 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Ostrader, Rick. Life of Prayer in a World of Science: Protestants, Prayer and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Penn-Lewis, Jessie. War on the Saints. Erith: Diasozo Trust, 1987.

Percy, Martin. Power and the Church: Ecclesiology in an Age of Transition. London: Cassell, 1998.

Peters, John L. Christian Perfection & American Methodism. Reprint. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985.

Pierson, Arthur T. Forward Movements in the Last Half-Century. New York: Funk & Wagnell, 1900.

———. The New Acts of the Apostles. London: James Nisbet, 1901.

Pollock, J. C. The Keswick Story. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964.

Poloma, Margaret M. “A Comparison of Christian Science and Mainline Christian Healing Ideologies and Practices.” Review of Religious Research 32.4 (1991) 337–50.

Porter, Roy, and Dorothy Porter. In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650–1850. London: Fourth Estate, 1988.

Price, Charles, and Ian Randall. Transforming Keswick. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2000.

Price, Charles. The Real Faith for Healing. Reprint. Gainsville FL; Bridg-Logos, 1997.

Prosser, Anna W. From Death to Life: An Autobiography. Chicago: Evangel, 1911.

Pullum, Stephen J. Foul Demons, Come Out! The Rhetoric of Twentieth-Century American Faith Healing. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Randall, Ian M. Evangelical Experiences: A Study in the Spirituality of English Evangelicalism, 1918–1930. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster. 1999.

Robeck, Cecil M., editor. Charismatic Experiences in History. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1985.

Robert, Dana L. Occupy Until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.

Robins, R. G. A. J. Tomlinson: Plainfolk Modernist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

———. Pentecostalism in America. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010.

Robinson, James. Divine Healing: The Formative Years 1830–1890: Theological Roots in the Transatlantic World. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011.

———. Pentecostal Origins: Early Pentecostalism in Ireland in the Context of the British Isles. Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2005.

Robinson, Martin. “The Charismatic Anglican—Historical and Contemporary: A Comparison of the Life and Work of Alexander Boddy (1854–1930) and Michael C. Harper.” MLitt diss., University of Birmingham, 1976.

Sanders, Rufus G. W. William Joseph Seymour: Black Father of the Twentieth Century Pentecostal Movement. Maitland, FL: Xulon, 2003.

Schneider A. Gregory. “A Conflict of Association: The National Camp-Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness versus the Methodist Episcopal Church.” Church History 66.2 (1997) 268–83.

Schoepflin, Rennie B. Christian Science on Trial, Religious Healing in America. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Schofield , Alfred T. Behind the Brass Plate. London: Sampson Low, 1928.

———. Faith Healing. London; Religious Tract Society, 1892.

Scott, Carolyn. The Heavenly Witch: The Story of the Maréchale. London: Hamilton, 1981.

Searle, G, R. A New England: Peace and War 1886–1891. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004.

Showalter, Elaine. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador, 1997.

Shuster, David G. “Neurasthenia and a Modernizing America.” Journal of the American Medical Association. No pages. Online: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/290/17/2327.full

Simpson, A. B. The Gospel of Healing. In Healing: Three Great Classics, edited by Jonathan L Graf. Camp Hill, PA: Christian, 1992.

———. The Lord for the Body. Reprint. Harrisburg, PA: Christian, 1959.

Smith, Amanda. An Autobiography: The Story of the Lord’s Dealings with Mrs, Amanda Smith the Coloured Evangelist. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carrol, and Charles E. Rosenberg. “The Female Animal: Medical & Biological Views of Women and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America.” In Women & Health in America: Historical Reading, edited by Judith Walzer Leavitt, 332–56. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999.

Smith, Jennie. From Baca to Beulah: From a Couch of Suffering to My Feet, to Exalt His Holy Name. Philadelphia: Garrigues, 1884.

Smith, Timothy L. Called Unto Holiness: The Story of the Nazarenes: The Formative Years. Kansas City, MO: Nazarene, 1962.

Springer, Kevin, editor. What Comes After Renewal? Basingstoke, UK: Marshall Pickering, 1987.

Stanley, Susie Cunningham. “Alma White: The Politics of Dissent.” In Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, edited by J. R. Goff and Grant Wacker, 71–83. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2002.

———. “‘Bumping’ into Modernity: Primitive/Modern Tensions in the Wesleyan/Holiness Movement.” In The Primitive Church in the Modern World, edited by Richard T. Hughes, et al., 121–38. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

———. Feminist Pillar of Fire: The Life of Alma White. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1993.

———. Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.

Steele, Daniel. “Faith Healing.” Online: http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=

article&aid=14708

Stephens, Michael S. Who Healeth All Thy Diseases: Health, Healing, and Holiness in the Church of God Reformation Movement. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008.

Stephens, Randall J. The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Stock, Jennifer. “George S. Montgomery: Businessman for the Gospel.” Heritage 9.2 (1989) 12–14.

Storms, Jeannette. “Carrie Judd Montgomery: The Little General.” In Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, edited by James R. Goff and Grant Wacker 271–88. Fayettville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2002.

Synan, Vinson, editor. Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins. Plainfield, NJ: Logos, 1975.

———. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition; Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Synan, Vinson, and Charles R. Fox. William J. Seymour: Pioneer of the Azusa Street Revival. Alachua, FL: Bridge Logos, 2012.

Strachan James. The Maréchale: The Founder of the Salvation Army in France and Switzerland. Reprint. London: Clarke, 1966.

Sutton, Matthew Avery. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Thomas, John Christopher. The Devil, Disease and Deliverance: Origins of Illness in New Testament Thought. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.

Thompson, A. E. The Life of A. B. Simpson. New York: Christian Alliance, 1920.

Tierney, David. “The Catholic Apostolic Church, a Study in Tory Millenarianism.” Historical Research 63 (1990) 289–315.

Torrey, R. A. Divine Healing. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1924.

Tozer, A. W. Wingspread: A. B. Simpson, A Study in Spiritual Attitude. Harrisburg, PA: Christian, 1943.

Tuke, Daniel. Illustrations of the Incidence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease. Vol. 2. London: Churchill, 1884.

Turley Braine K. A. Wheel Within a Wheel: Southern Methodism and the Georgia Holiness Association. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999

Usher, John M. “Cecil Henry Polhill: The Patron of the Pentecostals.” Pneuma 34.1 (2012) 37–56.

Valenze, Deborak M. Prophetic Sons and Daughters. Princeton, VA: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Van der Laan Cornelis. “Proceedings of the Leaders’ Meetings (1908–1911) and of the International Pentecostal Council (1912–1914).” Journal of the European Pentecostal Theological Association 6 (1987) 36–49.

———. Sectarian against His Will: Gerrit Roelof Polman and the Birth of Pentecostalism in the Netherlands. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow , 1991.

Wacker, Grant. Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

———. “John Alexander Dowie.” In Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders, edited by James R. Goff and Grant Wacker, 3–20. Fayetteville, AR; University of Arkansas Press, 2002.

———. “Marching to Zion: Religion in a Modern Utopian Community.” Church History 54 (1985) 496–511.

———. “Travails of a Broken Family: Radical Evangelical Responses to the Emergence of Pentecostalism in America, 1906–16.” In Pentecostal Currents in American Protestantism, edited by Edith L. Blowhole, Russell Spittle, and Grant A. Wacker, 23–49. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Wakefield, Gavin. Alexander Boddy: Pentecostal Anglican Pioneer. Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2007.

Waldvogel (m. Blumhofer), Edith Lydia. “The ‘Overcoming Life’: A Study of the Reformed Evangelical Origins of Pentecostalism.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1977.

Ware, Stephen L. Restorationism in the Holiness Movement in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Pres, 2005.

Warfield, Benjamin B. Counterfeit Miracles. Reprint. London: Banner of Truth, 1972.

———. Perfectionism. Philadelphia PA: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971.

Warner, Wayne E. “Maria B. Woodworth-Etter and the Early Pentecostal Movement: A Powerful Voice in the Vanguard of Pentecostalism.” Heritage 6.4 (1986–87) 11–14.

———. The Woman Evangelist: The Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1986.

Warrington, Keith. Pentecostal Theology: A Theology of Encounter. London: T. & T. Clark, 2008.

Waylen, Hector. An Apostle of Healing: Studies in the Life and Work of Pastor Howton. London: Stockwell, 1928.

Wesley, John. Complete Works of John Wesley, Vol. 13: Letters, Writings. 3rd ed. 1872. CD-ROM. Ages Digital Library. Albany, OR: Ages Software, 1997.

Whorton, James C. Nature Cures, The History of Alternative Medicine in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

White, Alma. Demons and Tongues. 1910. Reprint. Zarephath, NJ: Pillar of Fire, 1936.

———. Looking Back from Beulah. Zaraphath, NJ: Pillar of Fire, 1902.

———. Modern Miracles and Answers to Prayer. Zaraphath, NJ: Pillar of Fire, 1939.

White, Christopher G. Unsettled Minds: Psychology and the American Search for Spiritual Assurance 1830–1940. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009.

Wigger, John H. Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of Popular Christianity in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998

Wilson, Bryan R. Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest among Tribal and Third-World Peoples. London: Heinemann, 1973.

———. Sects and Society: The Sociology of Three Religious Groups in Britain. London: Heinemann, 1961.

Wilson, Herbert B. Ghosts or Gospels the Methods of Spiritualism in Healing Compared with Methods of Christ. Reprint. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 1922.

Wilson, Julian. Wigglesworth: The Complete Story. Milton Keynes, UK: Authentic, 2002.

Wilson. A. N. God’s Funeral. London: Murray, 1999.

Wiseman, Nathaniel. Elizabeth Baxter. London: Christian Herald, 1928.

Woodworth-Etter, Maria. The Holy Spirit: Experiencing the Power of the Spirit in Signs, Wonders and Miracles. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1998.

———. Signs and Wonders. Reprint. New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 1997.

Woolson, Abba Goold. Woman in American Society. Boston: Roberts, 1873.

Index

Adams, Minnie F., 74, 168

Alexander, Charles M., 81

Allen, Ethan O., 5

Anglican/ism, 15, 101, 129, 135, 153, 158, 161, 172, 207

Appleby, Sarah, 22

Atonement, the, 2, 26, 32, 45, 56, 64, 75–76, 82, 107, 117–18, 145–46, 189–92, 199, 207

Australia, 54–56

Azusa Street Revival, 1 16, 30, 32, 37, 45, 74, 85, 88, 106, 129, 131–32, 168–69, 170, 180, 184, 206

Barnum, Phineas, 76

Barratt, Thomas Ball, 172, 174

Bartleman, Frank, 168, 180

Bartlett, Leander, 23

Bartol, Cyril, 151

Baxter, Elizabeth, 6–9, 100, 101, 110, 126, 128, 134, 164, 169–71, 181–82, 198–99, 200

Baxter, Michael Paget, 101, 134, 181

Beard, George M., 136

Beecher, Henry Ward, 151

Bell, E. N., 43

Bergson, Henri, 155

Besant, Annie, 162

Bethshan, 6, 9, 101–2, 166–82, 171, 174, 177–78, 180, 182, 198, 201

Blavasky, Helena, 155–57

Blood, theology of the, 2, 22, 26, 48, 166, 184

Blue Ribon Army, 100, 101, 181

Blumhardt, J. C., 4, 7, 121, 182, 198

Boardman, William E., 5, 55, 83, 100, 110, 126, 128, 174, 179

Boddy A. A., 9, 43, 108, 133–34, 153, 165–66, 167, 170, 171–72, 174, 175, 177

Boddy, Mary, 107, 133, 171–72, 180

Booth, William, 81, 99,

Booth-Clibborn, Arthur/Kate, 8, 92–96, 97, 105, 108, 198

Booth-Clibborn, William/Eric, 96

Bosworth, F. F., 3, 86, 88, 117–18

Branham, William, 86, 136,

Brethren (Plymouth), 49, 99, 101, 163, 172

Brown, Marie Burgess, 86

Bruce, A. B., 199

Bryant, Daniel, 88

Buchler, Johannes, 87, 102

Buckley, J. M., 152, 185–86

Byers, J. W., 28–29, 117

Byrum, Enoch E., 30–32, 45

Calvin/istic, 1, 2 175, 200

Cantel, Harry/Margaret, 96, 97–98, 177

Carnegie, Andrew, 154

Carradine, Beverley, 31

Carter, Russell Kelso, 189–91, 192, 194–95, 196, 197, 199–200, 202

Cessationism, 1, 189, 207

Charismata, related to, 3–4, 19, 32, 39, 44–45, 63–64, 65–68, 71–73, 84, 86, 116, 163, 165, 168, 193–94, 205, 207

Christian Herald, 6, 7, 101, 134, 171–72, 181

Christian Science, 12, 42, 60, 68, 146–53, 169, 188

Christlieb, Theodore, 126

Church of Christ, Scientist, 148, 150,

Church of God (Anderson), 13, 28–32, 45, 206–7

Church of God (Cleveland), 26, 32, 45, 115

Clerical and Medical Committee, 158–59

Clough, W. C., 100, 102

CMA, 6–8, 17, 57, 61, 78, 129, 133–36, 152–53, 189, 197, 199, 200–201

Cody, W. F. /Sadie, 60–61, 131

Coe, Jack, 208

Coleridge, S. T., 76

Come-outerism/s, 5, 12, 13, 28, 45, 198, 203–5

Cooper, Sir Astley, 52

Coulter, Dr, 159–160

Cowles, Amanda, 139, 143

Cox, Harvey, 31

Crackanthorpe, Blanche, 109

Crisp, Eleanor, 176–78, 180

Cullis, Charles, 6–8, 69–70, 124, 127, 165 169, 187, 189, 194, 199, 201

Darwin/ism, 145

Demons, 20, 22, 37, 70–71. 107, 173–76

Devil. See Satan

Didge, William, 188

Dowie, Esther (dgtr), 65

Dowie, J. A., 8, 47–74, 78–80, 83, 86, 91–96, 101, 129, 136, 144, 147, 173, 178, 198, 200, 202

Eddy, Mary Baker, 146–50

The Eleventh Hour, 9, 166–71, 173–75, 182

Emmanuel Movement, 14, 161, 207

Erskine, Thomas, 175

Everson, George, 179

Exorcism, 4, 107

Faith, role of, 2, 3, 6, 23–24, 31, 46, 67–69, 82, 117–18, 139–41, 143, 147, 192–95, 195

Finished Work controversy, 39, 101, 118, 184

Finney, Charles G., 5

Fletcher, Rebecca, 152

Free Methodist Church, 5, 11, 152

Garr, Alfred G., 206

Gee, Donald, 9, 22, 95, 97, 100, 166, 176–77, 180, 193

Glassey, Jennie, 18

Gleason, Ralph, 22

Godbey, W. B., 15, 32, 41,

Gordon A. J., 6–7, 13, 25, 69, 70, 74, 78, 110, 151, 171, 201

Grubb, George, 164

Guthrie, Rev. Thomas, 53, 54

Hall, George S., 137

Handkerchiefs, use of, 43, 121, 169–70, 173–74

Harriman, Nathan, 19

Harris, Reader, 102, 180

Healing Homes, 43, 58, 65, 68, 88, 97, 108, 125, 130, 134, 139, 143, 152, 182, 198–99

Herbine, Charlotte, 159–60

Hicks, Amanda, 60

Hickson, James Moore, 158, 161–62

Hinn, Benny, 121

Hollenweger, Walter , 71, 86, 95

Horner, R. C., 14

Howland, William, 152

Howton, Richard, 180–82

Hutchinson, William Oliver, 36

Hypnosis/tic, 83, 114

Ingersoll, Robert, 73, 178

International Conference, 2, 6, 8, 9, 55, 201

Ireland, 48, 92, 97–99, 129, 172, 202

Irving, Edward, 3, 49

James 5:14; 19, 44, 67, 82, 118, 123, 128, 181, 196

James, William, 145, 146

Jeffreys, George, 182

Jones, J. Pengwern, 167

Joshua, Seth, 166–67

Joyce, James, 48

Kay, William K., 71

Kenyon, E. W., 173

Keswick Convention, 4, 9, 162–66, 171

Knapp, Martin Wells, 204–6, 208

Ku Klux Klan, 33, 42

Kuhlman, Kathryn, 121

Lake, John G., 8, 88–89

Lang, G. H., 172

Leaves of Healing, 58

Leeuwen, C. R. van, 108

Lekganyane, Egenas B. Bishop, 89

Lincoln, Abraham/ family, 146

Lowery, Asbuty, 15

Mahan, Asa, 5, 201

Mark 16:17–18; 20, 128, 134, 170, 175

Marpurg, Albert Edward, 145–46, 190, 193

Matthew 8:17; 105–6

McDonald, William, 187–88, 191–92

McPherson, Aimee Semple, 8, 42, 81–84, 121

Medical means, anti-, 3, 21, 24, 26–27, 52, 60, 65, 69–70, 98, 148–49, 196–98, 213

Medical means, modified view, 44, 46, 75–76, 107–8, 117, 197–98, 200

Mencken, H. L., 48

Metaphysical/alternative therapies, 41, 68, 125, 148–49, 155–57

Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), 9, 11–12, 112, 184–86

Metropolitan Christian Association, 204–6

Meyer, F. B., 162–63

Miller, Charlie, 196

Mills, Olive, 21–22

Mitchell, S. Weir, 138

Mix, Sarah, 5, 8, 123–24, 139, 143

Montgomery, Carrie Judd, 8, 88, 114, 118, 121–36, 143–4, 151–52, 168, 179

Montgomery, George, 129–30, 169

Moody, D. L., 4, 73, 78, 80, 112

Moria, South Africa, 89–90

Morrison, Henry Clay, 203–4

Mukti Mission, 74, 76, 133, 168

Murray, Andrew, 2, 6, 83, 87, 136, 164, 183, 199

National Holiness Association (NHA), 7, 11–12, 15, 32, 186–89

Naylor, Charles Wesley, 45

Needham,Elizabeth Annabelle, 199–200

Netherlands, 94, 104–8

Neurasthenia, 136–46

New Thought, 12

Newcomb, Arthur, 66

Newell, William R., 80

Newton, A. E., 156

Nugent, Sophia, 140

Olcott, Henry Steel, 155–57

Pardington, George, 125

Parham, Charles F., 19, 25, 66, 71, 85–86, 111

Parsley Rod, 208

Penn-Lewis, Jessie, 157, 173

Perfectionism, 4, 9, 20,

Pierson, A. T., 8, 74–78, 163

Pillar of Fire Movement, 32–33, 206

Plumstead Peculiars, 201

Polhill, Cecil, 134, 164, 170, 177

Pollock, J. M., 170, 171–74

Polman,Gerrit, 8, 94, 104–9

The Prayer of Faith, 8, 124–26, 128, 133, 136, 139, 178

Price, Catherine, 94–95

Prosser, Anna, 141–43, 152

Psychology, role of, 33, 80, 83, 109, 137, 151, 181, 184, 203

Quaker/ism, 26, 28, 92, 111, 204

Quimby, Phineas, 148

Radstock, Lord, 164, 201

Rambai, Pandita, 74, 133

Rees, Seth Cook, 204

Reich, Max, 9, 166, 174–76

Reid, Isaiah, 16

Restoration Host, 97, 106

Ritchie, Raymond, 86

Roberts, Benjamin T., 5

Roberts, Evan, 166

Roberts, Oral, 52, 86, 136

Rockefeller, John F., 60

Roux, Pieter le, 87, 89

Ruth, C. W., 204

Salvation Army, 38, 81, 92–93, 99–100, 104–5, 108, 129, 130, 179

Sanctification, entire, 4–5, 9, 12, 14, 28–29, 30, 32, 34–35, 39–41, 101, 116, 132, 164, 183–84, 186–87, 189, 191, 203–4

Sandford, Frank, 8, 16–28

Sandwich, Earl of, 157–62

Satan/ Devil, 121, 151, 173, 176

Schofield, Alfred T., 179

Seymour, William J., 37–38, 206

Shiloh, 17–25

Simpson A. B., 1, 2, 6, 8, 19, 13, 17, 19, 25, 64, 68–69, 70, 73, 76, 78, 92, 95, 112, 113, 129, 131, 135, 136, 151, 152, 169, 184, 181, 187, 189, 194, 197, 200, 202

Sisson, Elizabeth, 9, 166

Slain in the Spirit/prostration, 8, 14, 16,114, 121

Smith, Alays Pearsall, 110

Smith, Amanda, Berry, 164–65

Smith, Hannah Whitall, 17

Smith, Jennie, 144

Smith, Stanley, 120

South Africa, 8, 87–90, 93, 99, 100, 102

Spirit-baptism, 39, 73, 83–84, 103, 133

Spiritualism, 9, 37, 68, 107, 147, 159–62

Stead, W. T., 156

Steele, Daniel, 15, 187–88, 192–94

Stockmayer, Otto, 6, 7, 126, 164

Stone, Barton, 72

Studd, George/ C. T., 120, 170–71

Suffering, role of, 1, 41, 45–46, 76, 122–23, 144–45, 150, 176, 186

Suggestion, role of, 82, 147, 202–3

Taylor, Hudson, 170

Taylor, Nancy King, 31–32

Taylor, William (Bishop), 196

Theosophy, 9, 147, 154–57, 162

Therapies, alternative, 60, 82, 137–38, 143–44, 147, 149, 151, 198, 202, 207

Todd, S. C., 170

Tomlinson, Ambrose J., 25, 26–27

Tongues (glossolalia), 3, 19, 22, 25, 26, 29–30, 32, 35, 36–37, 38–40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 63, 66, 73, 74, 76, 84, 95, 107, 119, 132–35, 157, 165, 166, 168–69, 172 175, 178, 179, 181, 188, 194, 206, 207

Tongues of Fire, 19, 102

Torrey, R. A., 8, 48, 73, 77–84

Trance, experience of, 8, 19, 31, 61, 112, 114, 116, 119

Trudel, Dorothea, 4, 6, 7, 110, 186, 198

Underhill, Evelyn, 155

Vision(s), experince of, 1, 31, 24, 88, 112, 115, 181, 132, 181, 185, 188

Voliva, Glenn, 85

Walshaw, Lydia/Joseph, 100, 102, 133–34, 178–80

Warfield, B. B., 2, 147, 168

Warner, Daniel, 8, 28–30

Welsh Revival, 76, 157, 163, 166–68

Wesley, John, 4

Wesleyan Holiness Tradition, 13–16, 186–88, 203–5

White, Alma, 8, 32–45

White, Kent, 32, 35–37, 44

Wigglesworth, Polly, 99–101

Wigglesworth, Smith, 98–104, 133, 177

Wilson, Rev. Henry B., 161–62

Wimber, John, 114, 116

Woodworth-Etter, Maria, 8, 61, 68, 111–21, 136, 168–69

Woolson, Abba Goold, 137–38

Xenolalia (“missionary tongues”), 19, 40, 170, 173, 206

Yeats, W. B., 155

Yeomans, Lilian, 86, 150–51

Yoakum, Finis, 32, 42–44, 131, 169–70, 173, 74

Zion Christian Church, 89–91

Zion City, 8, 52, 62–74, 179

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition in America

Chapter 2: The Reformed-Pentecostal Transition in America

Chapter 3: The Global Legacy of Zion

Chapter 4: The Feminine Contribution

Chapter 5: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition in Britain

Conclusion

Bibliography

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition in America

Chapter 2: The Reformed-Pentecostal Transition in America

Chapter 3: The Global Legacy of Zion

Chapter 4: The Feminine Contribution

Chapter 5: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition in Britain

Conclusion

Bibliography