PREFACE
The writer developed an interest in the American holiness movement as a result of his early background in the United Methodist Church and his subsequent conversion (at age seventeen) in a holiness church. As a result, the author first traced briefly the roots of this movement from the day of Pentecost when the disciples of Christ first received the Holy Spirit to the emergence of the eighteenth-century Anglican priest and founder of the modern day holiness movement, John Wesley. It followed that Wesley adapted many terms used previously to facilitate the development of his teachings concerning the workings of God in the human soul or heart.
Original sin, according to Wesleyan doctrine, constituted the depravity or corruption of the human nature inherited by the descendants of Adam because of his disobedience to God. Repentance consisted of genuine sorrow for actual transgressions. Conversion or justification embodied the forgiveness of these actual or overt sins which an individual knowingly committed. Through faith in the merits of Christ a person could be regenerated or experience a new birth of the soul whereby all his sins would be forgiven. Entire sanctification, Christian perfection, heart purity or holiness were equated with a second religious experience in which the believer through faith in the blood sacrifice of Christ consecrated himself to the whole will of God. Whereby, he received the indwelling Holy Spirit.
Sad to say, most historians have failed to recognize the importance of these religious experiences and the movement they engendered as an expression of social development in nineteenth-century America. This work in part seeks to reverse this trend by examining the religious periodic literature of that day where contemporary accounts portrayed the impact of holiness teachings on such widely divergent American Institutions as the frontier camp meeting system and the highly volatile moral issue of Negro Slavery.
Even during the Civil War the doctrine of holiness was not without witnesses. After the carnage of human life ended in 1865, the advocates of Christian holiness were again on the forward edge of American westward expansionism. It was at this point during the later half of the nineteenth-century that these Wesleyan proponents successfully used the camp meetings to broaden their sphere of influence. Literally thousands of people embraced a second religious experience they characterized as "perfect love". Progressively, this movement fostered holiness literature and the establishment of independent holiness associations. By the 1880's and 1890's the leaders of these quasi-ecclesiastical bodies became progressively reactionary to the social and intellectual issues of abusive clerical politics, lack of temperance, attendance at improper amusements, worldly dress, along with the Darwin theory of evolution, and Biblical criticism. They felt the very moral fiber of the church was threatened. The way in which these activists engaged these issues led ultimately to the formation of separate churches dedicated to the preservation of moral as well as spiritual holiness.