CHAPTER TWO
Resisting Resignation
The Rise of Religious Healing in the Late Nineteenth Century
Jennie Smith heard Lucy Drake narrate her “experience in being healed” at a gathering held near Smith’s home in Ohio in May of 1872. Drake, who was traveling across the country with William and Mary Boardman helping to promote “The Higher Christian Life,” had shared her testimony in numerous settings since her cure in January 1870 and had encouraged many individuals to trust the Lord for healing. Although another six years would pass before Smith would write to Charles Cullis and ask him to join in the prayer meeting that led to her own dramatic restoration, hearing Drake’s story piqued Smith’s curiosity and strengthened her “hopes of recovery,” despite the fact that her physicians were increasingly pessimistic about her prospects. If Drake, who “was at one time a great sufferer” and whose case, Smith concluded, had been “more hopeless” than her own, was now a healthy and active missionary, perhaps patient endurance of protracted pain was not the only possible option for invalids like herself.1
Over the course of the late nineteenth century, thousands of ailing women and men came to doubt that the devotional ethic of passive resignation was the requisite way for Christians to cope with bodily suffering. In their narratives of illness and recovery, countless numbers of these individuals described how their encounter with the teachings and practices of divine healing led them to question many of the doctrinal tenets that linked resigned acceptance of physical affliction with spiritual holiness. Focusing on these testimonials as well as on several of faith cure’s foundational texts written by leaders such as Charles Cullis, A. J. Gordon, R. K. Carter and A. B. Simpson, this chapter explores the theological and cultural transitions that helped set the stage for the emergence of divine healing in the 1870s. Examining the development of faith cure within the broader context of religious and social change in the late nineteenth century reveals that divine healing was part of a much more extensive effort to revise the ways Christians interpreted and dealt with illness and somatic distress. Participants in evangelical faith cure, like many other Protestants in this period, were rethinking the ideal of sanctified suffering in light of changing views about the causes of disease, growing discontent with “orthodox” medicine and heroic forms of therapy, and, perhaps most importantly, increasing dissatisfaction with certain features of Reformed theology. Although anti-Calvinism is often associated primarily with the emergence of Protestant liberalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the history of divine healing shows that challenges to “orthodox” conceptions of God’s character, human nature, and sacred history also provided many evangelicals with resources for remaking the meaning and practice of pain.
“The Lord That Healeth Thee”: Resisting the Doctrine of Afflictive Providence
In the winter of 1872, one of Charles Cullis’s patients came to him seeking relief from a chronic knee ailment. Numerous physicians had examined the leg, and one had even performed surgery, but none had been able to effect a cure. Rather than prescribing medical treatment for what appeared to be a hopeless case, Cullis asked his patient, who was also a “minister of the Gospel,” whether he could trust God to restore his handicapped limb. The man replied that although he did not doubt God’s ability to heal him, he wondered whether it was God’s will to do so. “I was not sure,” the minister later recalled, “that it would be for my good or His glory to have it done.”2
The conviction that ongoing illness brought glory to God and benefit to the afflicted was an obstacle that Cullis encountered frequently when he encouraged sick persons to pray for healing. “Many persons, followers of the Lord Jesus, think and say that their sickness has been sent for some good—that they ought to be willing to bear it, and say, ‘Thy will be done,’” Cullis observed in his 1879 text, Faith Cures; or Answers to Prayer in the Healing of the Sick. Indeed, many of the testimonies included in this anthology and its two sequels—More Faith Cures (1881) and Other Faith Cures (1885)—indicate that belief in God’s afflictive providence presented a major stumbling block to faith in divine healing. “My wife believed God could cure her, if it was His will … but she was under the impression that it was the Lord’s will for her to suffer,” one narrator wrote. Another author concluded that his chronic headache was his “thorn in the flesh,” and that it was not God’s will that he “should be cured of it.” S. A. Hanscome, who suffered from spinal disease, rheumatism, and a painful tumor on her breast, wrote that she tried to bear her affliction “as cheerfully as possible.” Although she did not “doubt the Lord’s power to heal diseases,” she believed that “to expect healing in this way was simply presumptuous.”3
Cullis rebutted these protests with the observation that “while these persons think they are patiently bearing the Lord’s will, they are using all the means in their power to be rid of their diseases, and do not hesitate to employ physician after physician, and to spend ‘their all,’ if need be, to recover their health.” If Christians really believed that God sent sickness as a blessing that ought to be accepted and endured with thanksgiving, Cullis reasoned, they would and should not seek relief from their suffering. By pursuing health through all sorts of medical therapies, individuals like S. A. Hanscome, Jennie Smith, and even Mary Rankin—that paragon of passive resignation—were, in practice, working against the divine sovereignty that they claimed to acknowledge. This discrepancy between behavior and belief, in Cullis’s view, revealed that the devotional ethic of patient endurance and the doctrine of God’s afflictive providence that sustained this ideal were deeply problematic for the many people who professed to affirm them.4
In order to address this inconsistency, Cullis struck at what he took to be the root of the problem: an erroneous understanding of God’s will regarding bodily illness and health. To those who hesitated to pray for healing because they believed God had ordained their affliction, Cullis replied, in no uncertain terms, that “it was not the Lord’s will” that they should suffer. On the contrary, God’s will was “to fulfill His promise, ‘the prayer of faith shall save the sick,’” and the appropriate response to illness, therefore, was not acquiescent submission but believing prayer. “If we are truly desirous that His will shall be done in us,” Cullis proclaimed, “let us claim all He promises, and look with confidence to Him ‘who healeth all our diseases.’”5
As Cullis and his growing cadre of compatriots continued to preach against afflictive providence and passive endurance, they encouraged many individuals to revise their understandings of sickness and to question their previous means of coping with it. Looking back on years of chronic illness, countless visits to doctors, several hospital stays, a surgical operation, and the many “stimulants” and “tonics” she imbibed, Katherine Brodie marveled at the incongruity between her theology and her conduct. “Sickness I always thought God’s will, to which I must submit, little thinking how those medicine bottles mocked my ideas of submission,” she wrote. Mrs. Belle Lewis told a similar story about her battle with pneumonia. “I thought I was resigned to be sick, if it was His will,” she remarked. “Still I did not give up trying to be well.” Through their encounters with emissaries of faith healing, invalids like these two women concluded that God ordained rejoicing rather than suffering, health instead of sickness. To submit to God’s sovereignty, from this perspective, was “to believe and trust the Lord” to make them well.6
The conviction that “God willeth the health of his people and not their hurt,” as the Reverend A. J. Gordon put it, became a foundational principle of evangelical divine healing. In his pivotal text, The Ministry of Healing, or, Miracles of Cure in All Ages, which represented one of the earliest attempts to systematize the theology of the fledgling faith cure movement, Gordon noted that “while very few enjoy being sick, very many are afraid seriously to claim healing, lest it should seem like rebellion against a sacred ordinance, or a revolt from a hallowed medicine which God is mercifully putting to their lips for their spiritual recovery.” Like Cullis, Gordon challenged the notion that “God often allows his servants to be sick for their good” and suggested that Christians ought not to “willingly accept sickness … as their portion, instead of seeking for health” by offering the prayer of faith.7
R. K. Carter, another of Cullis’s converts, also argued against the doctrine of afflictive providence and the corresponding ethic of passive endurance. “To know God’s will, read His word,” he proclaimed. “Now God gives just one specific direction in His word to the sick, and that is a direction to get well.” In this view, invalids who remained resigned to their afflictions were actually rebelling against God. Such “supposed humility,” Carter asserted, was really “evidence of obstinacy.” “Truly the only real way to glorify God in sickness is to give Him a chance to manifest his power in destroying it, as one of the works of the devil,” he insisted. “He who is thanking God for the equanimity with which he bears his sufferings, had better ask for grace to open his eyes wide enough to see the finger of Jesus beckoning him on to a more complete self-surrender and simple faith.”8
A. B. Simpson, who also became one of faith cure’s most forceful apologists, made a similar point in his many works on divine healing. Writing in Word, Work and World, the journal he founded shortly after his own recovery from heart trouble and nervous prostration, Simpson countered several common objections to “the gospel of healing.” Chief among these protests, he contended, was the belief that “glory … redounds to God from our submission to His will in sickness and the happy results of sanctified affection.” Repeating Cullis’s charge that few who claimed to espouse this position “really accept their sickness and lie passive under it,” Simpson went on to argue that the ideal of patient forbearance rested on a mistaken reading of scripture regarding “God’s dealings with his dear children.” According to his interpretation of biblical passages such as 1 Thessalonians 5, a Christian’s “normal state” was one of “soundness both of body, soul, and spirit.” Furthermore, God’s “own prayer for [His children] is, that they may be in health and prosper.” Given this theological framework, Simpson wrote elsewhere, “it becomes an impertinence and a presumption to doubt His gracious will to redeem and restore our bodies as well as our souls. And the presumption grows into a wonderful mockery when we cover our unbelief under the name of a virtuous resignation.”9
A. J. Gordon. Frontispiece to Adoniram Judson Gordon: A Biography (1896). Courtesy of Harvard College Library.
Passive endurance, in this view, was really a veiled form of cowardly skepticism rather than a saintly standard. Although Simpson was careful to qualify this judgment, stating that he did not “question the deep and fervent piety, and spiritual advancement of many an invalid,” he did imply that the inability of these long-suffering individuals to “trust God for healing” represented a shortcoming on their part. This lack of faith, Simpson suggested, resulted from a misguided view of God’s character that emphasized judgment, discipline, and punishment. Instead of cowering in doubt and fear before a stern, chastening sovereign, sick persons needed to appeal to God’s tenderness and “to claim His gracious deliverance.” To restore his ailing children to health, Simpson argued, was “ever ‘the good pleasure of his goodness,’”—the “good perfect and acceptable will” of a gentle, compassionate Father.10
A. B. Simpson. Courtesy of the Christian and Missionary Alliance National Archives.
As Simpson’s comments suggest, an effort to reform the way Protestants conceived of God’s nature was central to the enterprise of challenging belief in afflictive providence and revising the devotional ethic of passive resignation. In their testimonies of healing, numerous individuals recounted how they found the faith to pray for healing only after they came to see God more as a loving parent than as an austere judge. For more than seventeen years, one woman recalled, “I did not ask Him to restore my health, but for grace to sustain, for patience to endure, desiring to lie passive in His hands, willing to bear whatever He saw fit to lay upon me, not realizing that the loving, sympathizing Father longed to take away the burden of pain, and all that He required of me was simple trust in Him.” Another invalid described her experience in similar terms: “I felt, or thought I did, entirely resigned, and only prayed for patience to endure all that the dear Lord had for me of suffering. I felt that God was doing all things right, but I wanted to feel that He was personally near me, and to realize, as I did not, that He sympathized with me in my pain.” For both of these women, relief came once they gained “a clearer sense of God’s presence and love”—a sense that gave them the confidence to ask “to be restored to health.”11
Participants in the divine healing movement were neither the first nor the only Protestants to question whether a merciful, compassionate Father would send or sanction bodily affliction in order to reprove, regulate, or even sanctify his beloved children. Throughout the nineteenth century, a growing tendency to emphasize God’s benevolence made it easier for individuals from both liberal and evangelical backgrounds to abandon the notion that physical pain was a providential blessing to be accepted with gratitude and endured with equanimity. Challenges to Calvinist orthodoxy during the early nineteenth century, for example, prompted “Christian physiologists” such as Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister with many connections within the evangelical community, and William Alcott, the cousin of Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and the leader of the “Physical Education” movement, to reject explicitly the belief that illness was “the result of God’s punishment or a test by God to sanctify the virtuous still further.” In his study of Grahamism, Physical Education, and a host of other forms of what he has called “hygienic religion,” historian James Whorton has observed that “as God came to be regarded more as a loving father than a wrathful sovereign,” fewer Protestants could countenance the tendency to attribute disease to “an unpredictable act of Providence.” Within this context, reformers like Alcott “repeatedly stigmatized resignation as … a state of mind unworthy of a Christian.” The widespread appeal of health reform among antebellum Protestants of all sorts suggests that many individuals were eager to cast off “orthodox” interpretations of suffering and to adopt alternative strategies for coping with sickness that assumed the primacy of God’s goodness, mercy, and love.12
Belief in a benevolent deity, and particularly in God’s parental character, also inspired a large cohort of Protestants to participate in Spiritualism, a movement that assailed orthodox Calvinist assumptions about the relationship between spiritual health and somatic distress with strident ardor. Spiritualists viewed God as a sympathizing parent who permeated nature with divinity. Such a “loving Father,” as clairvoyant physician Julia Crafts Smith put it in her autobiography, could never be accused of sending suffering to which “we must submit without a murmur.” Illness, in this view, was by no means the active will of an all-merciful God, who “is more loving than an earthly parent.” Like their contemporaries in various health reform movements, Spiritualists argued that health was “the natural condition of human beings,” and they consequently refused to see disease either as a deserved punishment or as a God-given blessing.13
By the 1870s, a host of health reform movements, including Adventism, Grahamism, hydropathy, physical education, and Spiritualism, alongside several others, had directly challenged the doctrine of God’s afflictive providence. During this decade, Mary Baker Eddy added her voice to the growing chorus of Protestant reformers who objected to the notion that God ordained bodily suffering in order to promote personal holiness. After years of wrestling with what she called the “relentless theology” of her strict Calvinist upbringing in the Congregational Church, Eddy eventually rejected the “merciless” God of her fathers in favor of a deity who was “altogether lovely.” Through her discovery of Christian Science, Eddy came to understand God as a “Father-Mother”—an appellation that indicated “His tender relationship to His spiritual creation.” Because she believed the deity to be “wholly good,” historian Stephen Gottschalk has maintained, Eddy deemed God “incapable of causing or countenancing suffering” and finally abandoned her own attempts to cope with chronic illness by treading “the orthodox Christian path of resignation.”14
From the 1870s on, many Protestants followed in Eddy’s footsteps. Numerous accounts of healing published in the Christian Science Journal, the official organ of Eddy’s nascent organization in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, expressed dissatisfaction with “orthodox” Protestant theology and echoed her teachings about the character of God, the nature of sickness, and the futility of passive endurance. Laura Nourse, a Methodist-raised convert to Adventism, attributed her eventual embrace of Christian Science to her aversion to the doctrine of afflictive providence. When one of her attendants tried to comfort the invalid Nourse with the “assurance that God had sent this suffering upon me to make me better,” she retorted: “I don’t believe it! He never did it! I have a better opinion of God that that.” Through her discovery of Christian Science, Nourse found a theology that better suited her faith in an all-loving, thoroughly munificent God.15
In an article entitled “From Trinitarianism to Christian Science,” another recent convert described orthodoxy as “a fruitless faith and a doubtful theology.” Having been taught that sickness was “a dispensation of Providence; death the gateway of Life, through which all must pass to gain a heaven,” this sufferer tried to believe that God “was chastening for a purpose; that He was compelling His children to ‘pass under the rod’; that some day when all these salutary lessons were learned, I would win a home beyond this world of chance and change.” This interpretation proved so unsatisfactory that eventually, “in the extremity of my despair,” the author recalled, “I determined to drink from the fountain of Christian Science, whose waters could not be more bitter than those already drunk from the ancestral well.” Finding refreshment in this faith, the new disciple wrote, “I left forever the old paths, to walk in the new, wherein was the solution of life’s mystery.”16
Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, and health reformers agreed that the orthodox road of passive resignation was a dead-end. Drawing on the logic of liberal theology, the many Protestants who participated in these movements resisted the notion that patient endurance of pain and illness characterized the route to holiness marked out by a chastising Providence. When Cullis and his cohort began to proclaim the gospel of healing through faith, they joined this ongoing and widespread attempt to revise the theological framework and devotional model inherited from Calvinist orthodoxy. Like their fellow reformers (who were often also their competitors or even their adversaries, as we shall see), proponents of faith cure worshipped a God who was more a sympathetic parent than a strict disciplinarian. And just as their counterparts reasoned that a benevolent deity would neither afflict his children with sickness nor require them to endure it indefinitely, divine healing advocates assumed that a loving Father would not prescribe long-suffering as a means of sanctification. As Cullis put it, “We rejoice to see our children well, how much more does He?”17
Physical Arminianism: Revising the Ethic of Passive Resignation
The questions that Cullis and his contemporaries raised regarding God’s character and the nature of human suffering opened up a host of other theological dilemmas. If a compassionate and sovereign God was not the author of affliction, what (or who) was the source of sickness? And if acquiescence was not the appropriate course for a suffering Christian to follow, what path was she to take? The answers that leaders of the divine healing movement posed to these queries reveal the extent to which they were indebted to other anti-Calvinist currents in nineteenth-century theology, not least of which was the increasingly ubiquitous Arminianism that was steadily transforming the character of both American and British Protestantism. Just as liberalism bequeathed to these evangelicals a gentler view of the deity that prompted them to reconsider the doctrine of afflictive providence, it also offered a more optimistic perspective on human nature that enabled them to propose alternative explanations for disease and to recommend different strategies for coping with physical suffering.
Cullis’s biography, and especially his background in homeopathic medicine and his connections with the Holiness movement, illumines the ways Arminian sensibilities about human nature could help to recast ideas about health and affliction. As a young man, Cullis was frail and sickly. His only “recollections of childhood,” he recalled, were “of being carried up and down stairs, in the arms of one and another, and doctored and cared for as a sick child.” During his school days, Cullis was “too miserable in health to enjoy play, much less study,” and eventually “broke down completely.” At the age of sixteen, he became a merchant in a dry goods store in Boston, a position he held for three years, until his health “gave way again.” When rest failed to revive him, a physician suggested that he consider the study of medicine and offered to fund his education. Cullis received his degree from the University of Vermont at the age of twenty-four, and returned to Boston to practice homeopathic medicine.18
By the early 1860s, homeopathy had become a popular alternative among American physicians and patients who had grown disillusioned with the painful and expensive therapies offered by the allopaths—a term originally invented by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of the nineteenth-century homeopathy movement, to distinguish his system from that of “regular,” or “orthodox” medicine. Despite persistent and often vehement persecution by the American Medical Association, organized by “regular” doctors in 1847 in an attempt to establish their professional authority over and against “irregular” practitioners, homeopaths like Cullis built up “large and profitable” practices in major cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Their success was grounded, in part, on the appeal of homeopathy’s two major principles: the law of similars (the notion that a substance that produced symptoms of a particular ailment in a healthy individual could cure a person suffering from that same disease), and the law of infinitesimals (the conviction that the smaller the dosage, the more potent a drug’s effect). Both of these tenets, in practice, greatly reduced reliance on heroic remedies such as blood-letting and blistering as well as the prescription of toxic medicines like calomel and arsenic in deleterious, if not deadly, quantities.19
In their critique of allopathy, and especially the heavy use of noxious drugs to treat illness, homeopaths joined proponents of Grahamism, Thomsonianism, and hydropathy in promoting bodily purity as a key factor in the prevention and cure of disease. While each of these movements offered a slightly different method of purification (Grahamism, for example, urged vegetarianism and sexual restraint; whereas Thomsonians recommended herbal remedies, and hydropaths extolled the cleansing properties of water), all shared the conviction that regular physicians contradicted the healing powers of nature by polluting the body with large quantities of poison. The best way to maintain or restore health, in this view, was to keep oneself uncontaminated by drugs and other debilitating substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and fatty foods, and thereby to live in accordance with the God-given laws of nature. Evincing a confidence in the inherent goodness of the natural order typical of Enlightenment science and philosophy, these alternative systems attributed illness and infirmity to the flouting of immutable physiological laws. “Pain is but the result of violated Nature,” one homeopathic physician intoned, “hence it is of vast importance that we should all understand those laws which govern our own constitutions, and how to obey them in order to enjoy all the blessings designed by nature to flow from their obedience, as well as to escape the penalties attached to their infraction.”20
Charles Cullis. Frontispiece to W. H. Daniels, Dr. Cullis and His Work: Twenty Years of Blessing in Answer to Prayer (1885). Courtesy of Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University.
Implicit in this understanding of how to avoid illness and achieve health was a crucial assumption about human nature that set homeopaths and health reformers apart from those who taught that disease was an affliction of divine providence to which one must remain meekly resigned. If pain and sickness were the products of human error, and purity and health were the results of human effort, then invalids were both responsible for their own infirmity and capable of overcoming it. This “physical Arminianism,” as James Whorton first called it, resonated with several key trends in mid-nineteenth-century American culture. First, the spirit of optimism that characterized the Jacksonian era encouraged Americans to engage in all sorts of reform campaigns premised on the supposition that the betterment of both individual and society could be achieved through personal endeavor. A corresponding emphasis on the importance of self-determination as the hallmark of a healthy democratic society fueled the anti-elitism that marked the early national period and led many people to reject the authority of medical experts in favor of sectarian reformers like Samuel Thomson, who declared that every man ought to act as his own physician. Enlightenment faith in reason, particularly as it was translated to the American public through the Scottish Common Sense philosophy, suggested that all persons were capable of apprehending the laws of morality and nature, including the physiological ordinances that were built into the order of creation. Finally, the more sanguine anthropology that characterized the humanistic theology of nineteenth-century Unitarians and Universalists as well as the revivalist preachers who advocated “new measures” during the Second Great Awakening undermined the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity and the consequent assumption that human beings were powerless to affect their spiritual destinies, let alone their physical health. In Whorton’s view, it was this “liberalized theology,” more than any other factor, that fostered “physical Arminianism, a belief that bodily salvation might be open to all who struggled to win it, and that disease and death were not an ineradicable part of the earthly passage.” Just as human beings could and should work actively toward spiritual regeneration, so too, they possessed both the ability and the duty to seek physiological renewal. Passive submission to pain and illness, from this perspective, represented a failure to fulfill one’s religious obligations rather than the appropriate posture of a true Christian.21
As a homeopathic practitioner and an active participant in the Holiness movement that grew out of antebellum revivalism, Cullis was familiar with Arminianism of both the physical and spiritual sorts. Although born and raised an Episcopalian, Cullis came into close contact with Holiness leaders through his “faith work” among Boston’s indigent consumptives. In the summer of 1862, Cullis himself prayed for entire sanctification through the “keeping power of Christ,” to which he attributed both his experience of “full assurance” of salvation and his ongoing ability to remain pure in his inner life and his actions. Although he maintained his membership in the Episcopal Church until 1873, Cullis opened a chapel in connection with the Consumptives Home in the spring of 1868 and began to hold Tuesday afternoon prayer and “consecration” meetings “for the advancement of believers in the knowledge and experience of holiness” in his own parlor in 1869. Like Phoebe Palmer’s famous “Tuesday Meetings for the Promotion of Holiness,” after which his gatherings presumably were patterned, Cullis’s meetings quickly drew packed audiences. By March 1872, the meetings had become so crowded that Cullis and his colleagues determined to build a chapel for the express purpose of accommodating the Tuesday afternoon congregation. The Beacon-Hill Church, which could seat between six and seven hundred attendees, opened in April of 1875 and began holding regular Sunday services in addition to the Tuesday afternoon meetings in the fall of the same year. Cullis himself took charge of these services intermittently, while also preaching from time to time at the Consumptives’ Home chapel. In addition to overseeing these two independent Holiness churches, Cullis began conducting annual faith conventions “for consecration and the advancement of the spiritual life of believers” in the summer of 1874, first at Framingham, Massachusetts; then at the Methodist National Holiness campgrounds in Old Orchard, Maine; and finally, at Intervale Park, New Hampshire. He also published a monthly paper, Times of Refreshing, designed “to present Jesus as a full and perfect savior,” and founded a tract repository that printed cheap editions of works by Holiness and Higher Life authors such as William Boardman, Hannah Whitall Smith, Theodore Monad, Asa Mahan, and Thomas Upham. Through all of these activities, Cullis cemented his status as a key leader of the late-nineteenth-century Holiness revival and an influential advocate of sanctified living through the act of personal consecration.22
Cullis’s confidence in the “second blessing” of entire sanctification represented neither a belief in absolute perfection nor an utter rejection of divine sovereignty in favor of human free agency. This theology did, however, promote a more positive attitude toward human nature, and especially toward the capacity of human beings to overcome sin. Combined with his background in homeopathic medicine, Cullis’s embrace of perfectionist theology helps explain why he found the devotional ethic of passive resignation increasingly problematic, and it puts his espousal of faith healing in broader cultural and theological perspective.23
The overlapping contexts of the nineteenth-century Holiness and health reform movements provide crucial background for excavating the origins and development of divine healing because so many of the movement’s seminal figures were influenced by these two powerful cultural currents. Many of the ministers who supported faith healing, including John Inskip, William Boardman, and Asa Mahan, were also prominent leaders of various Holiness endeavors and activities. In addition to these renowned clergymen, lesser-known pastors, such as John E. Cookman, minister of the Twenty-Street Methodist Church in New York City, and Smith H. Platt, author of numerous works on Christian holiness and minister of the DeKalb Street Methodist Church in Brooklyn, New York, applied the more optimistic anthropology associated with perfectionist teachings to the problem of somatic suffering. If human beings could hope to attain sanctity of heart and freedom from sin this side of heaven, Holiness advocates reasoned, surely they could also expect to experience physical purity and bodily health in this life. As A. J. Gordon maintained in The Ministry of Healing, corporeal fitness represented “the first fruits of redemption” promised to the believer in Christ. Rather than regarding the body as a “house of clay” that “was never intended to be repaired or beautified by the renewing Spirit,” Gordon argued, Christians ought to claim the scriptural promises of deliverance “from sickness as well as from sin; from pain, the penalty of transgression, as well as from transgression itself.” R. K. Carter drew similar conclusions about the relationship between spiritual holiness and physical heartiness. “Is it going too far to imagine that a perfect body presented perfectly to God, and able to run His errands of mercy in all directions, is more ‘acceptable’ to Him than a poor, dilapidated, sickly weakling, whose every moment is necessarily absorbed with health?” he asked.24
While leaders like Carter and Gordon employed apologetic treatises and essays to articulate the implications of perfectionist theology for physical existence, lay persons within the Holiness movement who embraced “the gospel of healing” relied on word-of-mouth and personal testimonials in order to spread the good news. Holiness prayer meetings, summer conventions, and periodicals were key forums for the propagation of this message. After encountering Lucy Drake in the spring of 1872, for example, Jennie Smith attended several Holiness camp meetings where she met individuals who were deeply “exercised about the healing of [her] body.” In August of 1877, Smith traveled to the Methodist campgrounds at Ocean Grove, where she renewed her acquaintance with Drake, attended services led by John Inskip, and most likely met Mary Mossman, a fervent advocate of divine healing who led a prayer meeting for Smith’s recovery the following March. After her healing, Smith continued to frequent Ocean Grove and other Holiness conventions, where she gave public testimony of her experience to a widening circle of prominent acquaintances, including Daniel Steele, Robert Pearsall Smith, Hannah Whitall Smith, and Walter and Sarah Lankford Palmer.25
Although faith healing never became the principal focus of the New York Tuesday Meeting held at the Palmers’ home, this gathering did become an important venue for sharing testimonies of healing and for informal conversations about the scriptural promises of physical restoration. During her first visit to the meeting at the Palmer residence in the summer of 1883, for example, invalid Katherine Brodie was approached by “seven strangers” who expressed their sympathy for her condition and asked if she “had ever heard of ‘Faith Healing.’” The Palmers also helped promulgate the message of divine healing by publishing accounts of miraculous cures in The Guide to Holiness, one of the Holiness movement’s leading periodicals once Phoebe and Walter Palmer acquired it in 1864. As belief in faith cure proliferated, healing testimonials appeared in other popular Holiness newspapers and magazines as well as in more recently established journals such as A. B. Simpson’s Word, Work and World. Some stories, like Jennie Smith’s, made their way into secular publications (her testimony first appeared in the Dayton Democrat) or edited anthologies of healing narratives compiled by leaders such as Mix, Cullis, and Simpson.26
Many of these accounts reveal how deeply the growth and development of the divine healing movement was indebted to various health reform teachings and establishments. First, these testimonies show that many invalids turned to “irregular” physicians, including homeopathic doctors and health reform practitioners of sundry sorts in their quests for relief from physical suffering. Visits to sanitariums such as the famous “Our Home on the Hillside,” a hydropathic establishment at Dansville, New York, were often part of a sick person’s search for health. Jennie Smith, to take just one example, traveled to a water-cure near Columbus, Ohio, consulted several eclectic physicians who employed alternative therapies such as electricity, and finally checked in to the Women’s Homeopathic Hospital in Philadelphia, where she remained until she experienced divine healing through prayer. Through their contacts with a diverse range of health reformers and alternative physicians, invalids like Smith encountered and often absorbed the views of illness and health that these sectarian practitioners imparted. Not only did their more hopeful assumptions about human nature and the physical body help to unsettle the old ethic of passive resignation that kept invalids confined to their cots, but these more sanguine suppositions also shaped the doctrines and practices of the emerging faith healing movement in significant ways.27
Like their health reform predecessors, for example, many advocates of divine healing believed that maintaining bodily purity through conformity to the God-given laws of nature was crucial to preserving and regaining health. Sickness, in this view, was the consequence of sin and could be avoided or overcome through faithful obedience to divine decree. At a faith-healing meeting held at the Beacon Hill Church in February of 1883, for example, Lucretia Cullis, Charles’s second wife, “spoke earnestly about our duty with regard to the laws of health, and especially in the manner of diet,” one attendee reported. “We cannot expect God to heal us, and keep us well,” she avowed, “if we live in a manner contrary to the laws of our being.” Other devotees of divine healing agreed. “Many a chronic disease has been brought on by persistent, careless violations of a known law,” R. K. Carter asserted. “It is almost incredible how many ‘good Christians’ are persistent, habitual gluttons, stuffing their stomachs with unhealthy foods at all sorts of hours.” In his written testimony of healing, Thomas Whitehall of Philadelphia also encouraged his readers to attend to the treatment of their bodies. “As we are taught that sickness is the result of sin,” he averred, “let us prayerfully set to work to find out what are the divine laws which govern these wonderful bodies of ours, and let us be fervent about it.” Expanding on this exhortation in an article published in the faith-healing journal Triumphs of Faith, Edward Ryder asserted that “a true faith will honor God in the keeping of His laws,” including those that pertained to “the by no means unimportant matters of diet, rest, physical protection.” Ryder went on to report that he had “much improved the tone of [his] health by resolutely abstaining from certain articles … such as coffee, cake, and rich desserts … which tend either unduly to stimulate or to clog the ‘river-courses of life’ which ought to remain pure and open.”28
Just as proponents of divine healing like Ryder echoed the physical Arminianism of Sylvester Graham and other advocates of temperance and dietary restraint by insisting on the importance of undertaking “a succession of faithful efforts to keep all God’s laws” in order to “build up health and strength,” they also mirrored their health reform counterparts in eschewing toxic drugs and other allopathic remedies. Sounding strikingly similar to both hydropathic physicians such as W. T. Vail, who equated the therapeutic practices of regular doctors with “Satan’s system of poisoning,” and to homeopathic practitioners who complained that “the filthy touch of Allopathy” contaminated people through the prescription of “deleterious poisons” like calomel and opium, many advocates of faith cure also decried the dangerous effects of chemical therapeutics and encouraged their followers to forgo these supposed remedies. “You don’t need the physics nor powders, nor plasters, nor the other dreadful things to which the physicians are subjecting this beautiful body,” one leader proclaimed. “Let us beware of these things, and take God for our doctor.”29
Although this message seemed shocking and fanatical to some members of the medical and clerical establishments, as we will see, the notion that drugs such as mercury and antimony defiled the body and ought to be avoided was certainly not a novel idea within the cultural context of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, in their testimonies of healing, some individuals indicated that they had renounced such remedies prior to embracing the teachings of faith cure, finding that the drugs and therapies their doctors had prescribed were ineffective at best and often exacerbated their discomfort without alleviating their ailments. “Medicine usually aggravated my disease,” Helen Dawlly wrote in her narrative of healing, “till I finally abandoned it altogether.” For those who had experimented with various health reform regimens or spent time at a water-cure, the practice of relinquishing chemical therapies was a routine part of the pursuit of both physical and spiritual wholeness. During her thirteen-month sojourn at the Home on the Hillside, for example, a city missionary from Chicago who was later cured through Cullis’s prayers abstained from the homeopathic remedies prescribed by her physician, “rest, not medicine, being the ‘cure’ method” at the sanitarium.30
In addition to habituating invalids to the custom of giving up medicine, health reform establishments also became important sites for circulating the news of divine healing. While staying at the Dansville Home during the summer of 1882, the Reverend Spencer R. Wells, on furlough from his post as an American Board missionary in India, “heard much” about “persons being restored to health in answer to the prayer of faith” and decided to give divine healing a try. “A day was set aside for prayer,” and Wells was restored to health. The next day, he shared his testimony of “entire cure” at the regular prayer meeting. As a result, another patient put her faith in Jesus to “restore both body and soul.” Libbie Osborn had a similar experience at the water-cure near the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania. “I had only been at the ‘cure’ a few months,” she recalled, “before the subject of ‘divine healing’ was brought before my mind by some tracts and books which a lady lent me.” Although she “was at once filled with a great longing for healing directly from Christ,” Osborn worried that she ought to “go on bearing sickness” in order to remain “submissive to God’s will.” She continued to agonize until another woman at the hygienic institute gave her “new light on the subject of ‘Divine Healing’” that eventually helped her to overcome her doubts. After returning home to Delaware County, Ohio, Osborn wrote a letter “containing an account of her wonderful healing” to Agnes Ormsbee of Montepelier, Vermont, a friend she had made while residing at the water-cure. “That this dear girl with whom I had parted in Pennsylvania was restored to health,” Orsmsbee wrote, “led me also to seek strength from Christ.”31
Rather than opposing the spread of divine healing among their inmates, physicians at hygienic establishments often encouraged their patients to pray for physical restoration. Osborn’s doctor at the water-cure, for example, “had encouraged [her] getting well on the grounds that God answers prayer.” When an invalid suffering from repeated bouts of spinal fever sought advice from Dr. Henry Foster, who ran the Clifton Springs Water Cure in Oneida County, New York, Foster replied: “You are far beyond the reach of human aid; but there is the Great Physician. Have you ever thought of going directly to Him for healing?” As Foster’s comments suggest, medical professionals sometimes turned to divine healing as a last resort. When they could do nothing more to restore their patients to health or even to ease their suffering, physicians such as Foster and Cullis evoked the healing power of God.32
By advocating faith cure, these practitioners acknowledged the limitations of their own therapeutic systems. Despite their confidence in the curative properties of pure water or the remedial benefit of infinitesimal doses, or perhaps most significantly, the ability of individuals to overcome illness by obeying the divinely ordained laws of health, experts like Cullis and Foster ultimately conceded that in certain cases neither the healing power of nature nor the exertions of the human will were adequate to alleviate illness and pain. For some invalids, physical Arminianism proved both insufficiently effective and too strenuous a strategy for contending with suffering. Before she espoused faith healing, for example, Libbie Osborn grew increasingly frustrated that her dogged efforts were failing to produce the promised salubrious results. “I was taking treatment and faithfully endeavoring to carry out all the doctor’s directions,” Osborn recounted, but after nearly seven months at the hydropathic Home, “I was secretly almost in despair … I knew I could only stay a few months longer, and that it would be impossible to continue that line of living in my home, and up to this time I could see very little if any change in my old stubborn diseases.” Osborne’s friend Agnes Orsmsbee also noted that her condition “continued to grow worse” despite her firm adherence to “hygienic measures” and “all the care of the skilled physicians” at the water-cure. After a few months she returned home “very much reduced in strength, and with disease little, if any, abated.”33
Instead of abandoning these seemingly “incurable” invalids to their fate, as many doctors were wont to do, physicians like Cullis and Foster prescribed prayer as the one remaining remedy. As Cullis put it in the preface to Faith Cures: Or, Answers to Prayer in the Healing of the Sick, “‘Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity’… . When the ‘profession’ pronounces a case hopeless, the promise of God remains as a testimony to the truth of His Word.” Or, as another proponent of divine healing proclaimed, “Where only a miracle can save, then are we to expect a miracle.”34
“The Present Exercise of God’s Power”: Miracles, Millennialism, and Missions
While many invalids eagerly abandoned their earthly remedies and applied to the Great Physician for healing without hesitation, others found the notion that God would restore them to health in response to faithful prayer harder to accept. For individuals raised within the Calvinist tradition, in particular, the idea that God actively intervened in the everyday events of individual lives jarred discordantly with one of the key teachings of Reformed theology: that Jesus had performed miracles such as healing the sick in order to demonstrate his divinity, and that once the Christian church had been established, miraculous signs were no longer necessary. The age of miracles had ceased with the apostles, in this view, and although it was still permissible to pray for relief from suffering, Christians should expect God to heal them through natural agencies, or “secondary causes,” rather than through a supernatural act of divine power.35
In their testimonies of healing, numerous individuals indicated that the cessationist view of miracles proved a major hindrance to their embrace of faith cure. “When I first heard of the prayer of faith,” F. P. Church wrote to Cullis, “I was like many others; I thought the day of miracles was over, and at first gave it very little attention.” S. H. Wasgatt became “interested in the ‘Prayer Cure’” after more than thirteen years of invalidism, but struggled to “accept Jesus as [her] Physician” because she “had been taught from childhood that the days of miracles were past, and that Christ only healed the sick when He was here upon earth to attest His divine mission.” George F. Donaldson of Long Pine, Nebraska, reported a similar experience. “I had read occasionally of ‘faith cures,’ but had no confidence in them as the direct manifestation of Divine power, not because I doubted God’s ability,” he declared, “but my whole education had led me to believe that ‘the age of miracles is past.’” For Alford H. McClellan, a shopkeeper in Reed City, Michigan, stories of miraculous healing were “so different” from what his “‘Scotch Presbyterian’ training” led him “to think possible” that he did not believe he “could receive a similar blessing.”36
When sufferers like these did begin to wonder whether the teachings of their youth were misguided, their friends, families, ministers, and even their own consciences often reproved them for their apostasy. While a student at Auburn Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution in New York City, Lansing Van Shoonhoven “was led to consider the possibility of a Faith Cure” for chronic synovitis of the knee, but his friends, he reported, “ridiculed the idea of throwing away my medicines and trusting the Lord to cure me without natural means.” After one woman, who described herself as “a conservative in many things, timid about ventures in religious and moral movements; not readily yielding to innovations,” dared to question why she should not say, “Jesus … heals me now,” she immediately wrote to her rector seeking his opinion of miraculous healing. When he failed to address her question directly, she began to worry that she was “not sound in doctrine” and resigned herself to “her couch of suffering.” Other pastors were more aggressive in their efforts to stifle heterodox ideas among members of their flock. When Mrs. Thomas H. Davy told her minister that she had asked God to heal her “just now” in a moment of intense agony, he replied: “The days of miracles are past, Mrs. D., and I think, after your sufferings, there can be no possible hope of your recovery.”37
Comments like these incensed advocates of faith cure such as Cullis, who “could not see why, with such explicit and unmistakable promises” of bodily healing put forth in scripture, he or anyone else “should limit the present exercise of God’s power.” Like many other evangelicals in the late nineteenth century, and particularly those who took part in the Holiness and Higher Life movements, Cullis was convinced that the Holy Spirit worked in the souls and bodies of believers to influence the course of events in dynamic and supernatural ways. Recovering “the theology and presence of the Holy Spirit,” historian Grant Wacker has asserted, was a prominent preoccupation among nineteenth-century Protestants of both Wesleyan and Reformed persuasions, and arguably the “central impulse of the higher life movement” that inspired so many exponents of divine healing. From this theological perspective, the idea that history was divided into two separate phases—the apostolic epoch and the post-biblical era—and that God worked miracles only during the previous period was patently unscriptural and dangerously impudent. “‘Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you,’” Cullis wondered, “that the Lord should bestow upon His church in this day the same ‘spirit of faith with power,’ with which the first communities of Christians were endowed?” Other proponents of faith cure raised similar questions. “Those who oppose the healing of the sick in answer to ‘the prayer of faith,’ do so on the assumption that ‘the age of miracles is past,’ and was confined to the Apostolic age,” observed the Reverend A. P. Moore, a minister from Alexander, New York, who had been healed of consumption through Cullis’s ministry. “But where in the Bible are we taught this?” In an article titled “For Us, or For the Apostles?” another writer put the question this way: “Who may presume to limit to Apostles the things promised to follow ‘them that believe,’ or doubt the working of Him who declared, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?’”38
According to these authors, the pledge of the Holy Spirit’s continuous presence with believers implied that the promises of healing found in the epistle of James and other passages of scripture remained valid for Christians in all ages. Indeed, a brief survey of sacred history, suggested apologists such as A. J. Gordon, revealed that miraculous healings had not ceased once the church had been established, but have “appeared more less numerously in every period.” Although he admitted that “the apostolic age … was a particularly favored one” for the demonstration of the Holy Spirit’s operations, Gordon cited numerous examples of supernatural healing drawn from the annals of the post-biblical era. Church Fathers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and Clement all testified to the ongoing occurrence of miraculous healings during the second and third centuries. While “the simpler and purer forms of supernatural manifestation” waned during the Middle Ages as a result of the Church’s growing worldliness and corruption, an upsurge of miracles, including experiences of healing, always accompanied movements of spiritual renewal. Ironically, then, the period following the Protestant Reformation witnessed an outpouring of divine power in response to faithful prayer for physical restoration. Culling testimonies from the chronicles of numerous movements, including the confessions of the Waldensians; the writings of the Moravian leader Count Zinzendorf; “that book of religious adventure and heroic faith, ‘The Scots Worthies’” which recounts the experiences of the Scotch Covenanters; the stories of the French Huguenots; the journal of George Fox; and various Baptist and Methodist texts, Gordon concluded that “modern times” were no less full of “miraculous interventions” for bodily healing than any previous epoch, including the biblical era.39
At the same time, however, Gordon acknowledged that the contemporary period posed a greater challenge to faith in divine healing than any other historical moment. Like the medieval church, nineteenth-century Protestantism was plagued by a spirit of “adaptation” to the surrounding culture. The twin currents of “rationalism and worldliness,” Gordon argued, had contributed to “the swelling unbelief of our age,” and had caused the church to drift “into an unseemly cautiousness toward the miraculous.” Even “true hearted and sincere” Christians, he lamented, were “in danger of being frightened out of their faith in the supernatural” as the result of a growing skepticism regarding the reality of biblical miracles and the stubborn tendency of “traditionalist” theologians to inveigh against modern instances of divine intervention. “How deeply we need the demonstration of the Spirit in these days!” Gordon proclaimed.40
While he implied that conformity to current ideologies and acquiescence to worldly comforts hindered the ability of his fellow Christians to recognize and accept the present activities of the Holy Spirit, Gordon also suggested that miraculous healings stood as a bulwark against the corrosive tides of contemporary culture. The “gracious deliverance” of a consumptive from the “edge of the grave” or the instantaneous cure of an opium addict whose habit had “baffled for years every device of the physician”—these kinds of exhibitions of divine power proved that the Holy Spirit was ever at work in the world, and thus helped to shore up the faltering faith of wavering Christians against the “indignant clamor of skeptics” and the “stern frowning of theologians.”41
Many proponents of faith cure shared Gordon’s confidence that modern displays of supernatural healing could help contemporary Christians defend against the pernicious influences of “this present evil age.” First, recent reports of physical restoration offered evidence of God’s existence in contrast to the pervasive naturalism that characterized much of scientific inquiry in the late nineteenth century. “Who can tell but God may have chosen these very manifestations of His power upon human bodies, in this material age,” one writer queried, “to answer the unbelief of science, and speak more loudly than all our learned lectures for His eternal power and Godhead?” Against the growing sway of Darwinian determinism, miraculous cures testified to the reality of a personal, transcendent, yet ever-present deity, who overrode the seemingly inviolable laws of evolutionary progress in response to petitionary prayer. And they did so, their defenders argued, in keeping with the “scientific method” of “rigid induction.” In this view, accounts of divine healing represented verifiable data of the kind demanded by the most rigorous empiricist. Whereas spiritual experiences such as conversion or sanctification could be “deceptive and difficult to interpret,” A. J. Gordon maintained, physical cures provided tangible, observable proof of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing and supernatural activity. “This is a kind of testimony,” Gordon asserted, “which is not easily ruled out of court.”42
Drawing upon this “evidentialist apologetic,” as historian Rick Ostrander has named it, proponents of faith cure also contended that contemporary demonstrations of divine healing undermined the claims of rationalists who denied the authenticity of scriptural miracles. As the onslaught of higher criticism made the healing ministry of Jesus seem increasingly incredible, leaders of the faith cure movement countered that modern manifestations of supernatural power bolstered the authority of the Bible. Reversing the cessationist argument, which eighteenth-century theologians had employed to repel skeptical assaults on biblical miracles from Enlightenment philosophers like Hume, advocates of divine healing asserted that if God exhibited his ability to override the natural order in the present, it was certainly reasonable to conclude that Jesus had done so in the past. In this view, current miracles of healing refuted the unbelief of the philosophes, the barbs of biblical criticism, and what A. B. Simpson dubbed the “spirit of … cold traditional theological rationalism” that characterized liberal Unitarians, Calvinist Presbyterians, and other Protestants who maintained that God ceased to work in a supernatural manner after the apostolic era. Theologians who insisted that God healed only through “causes, effects, means, second causes, and the order of nature,” Simpson contended, constructed “a little fence” around God and refused to allow God “to step out of the enclosure for a moment, or the poor sufferer even to reach Him through the bars.” According to this framework, God became “a prisoner in His own world,” and “His poor children” could not “get at Him except through the official red tape of the old economy of nature and law.” Recent instances of miraculous healing shattered this stifling system, Simpson asserted, by proving that God’s Holy Spirit could not be confined by the rules of cause and effect or the dictates of human logic. “Blessed be His Holy Name,” Simpson exclaimed, “the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead has burst the iron bars of mere natural law, and given us a living Lord.”43
Simpson’s comments about the risen Christ reveal the importance that advocates of divine healing attached to the figure of Jesus. Just as they worked tirelessly to reclaim the centrality of the Holy Spirit for the modern world, champions of faith cure insisted that the doctrine of the resurrection offered contemporary believers assurance of Christ’s authority over disease and death, a power that he promised to impart to all who sought it. “Jesus is Victor” became a rallying cry for early European proponents of faith healing through the work of German pastor Johann Blumhardt, whose healing ministry became well known in the United States after R. K. Carter published his biography in 1883. By focusing on Jesus’ triumph over the grave, rather than on “a crucifix” or “a dying Christ merely,” apologists like Blumhardt and Simpson proclaimed, Christians could gain access to “the power of His resurrection”—the greatest miracle of all—in their own souls and bodies.44
“The Resurrection of Christ,” Simpson preached on Easter Sunday of 1883, “is the ground of physical healing, and the spring of our true bodily life… . a pledge to us of all the resources of Infinite power and love.” This living Christ, Simpson suggested, continued to intervene in the world in a supernatural manner, making his presence manifest in the spiritual lives and “mortal flesh” of faithful believers. “Jesus Christ is the Same, Yesterday, To-day, and Forever,” Simpson reminded readers of his journal in an article defending modern miracles of healing. If this historical Jesus had performed supernatural acts, Simpson reasoned, surely the resurrected Christ continued to make himself known in this manner. Countering the notion that miracles served only to testify to Jesus’ divinity, Simpson insisted that Christ had healed the sick in order to reveal “His boundless love.” To argue that Jesus’ sympathy for the afflicted had ceased at the end of the apostolic era, Simpson implied, was to deny that Christ’s “heart is still the same”—a claim that no true Christian ought to countenance. Simpson closed his article with a hymn stanza that depicted Jesus as the “Kinsman, Friend and Elder Brother” who had wept for the sufferings of his disciples, and as the “Living One” who had the power to make their pains cease.45
Although Simpson, Gordon, and other leaders of the divine healing movement were perhaps the most strident champions of modern miracles against their scientific and theological detractors, they were not the only ones to invoke supernatural manifestations of God’s power as a means of countering the related threats of naturalism, rationalism, and traditionalism. Many of their arguments in favor of the present exercise of divine power, in fact, were reiterations of those put forward by Horace Bushnell, the Congregationalist pastor whom many later claimed as the father of American theological liberalism, in his 1858 study Nature and the Supernatural. Bushnell, like many other mid-nineteenth-century Americans, was deeply worried about the effects of modern life on the vitality of the Christian faith. Both the skepticism of philosophers who refuted the reality of biblical miracles and the materialism of contemporary scientific, economic, and political culture concerned Bushnell, and led him to challenge the Calvinist tendency to limit the purpose of miracles to attesting Jesus’ divinity and therefore to confine supernatural interventions to the apostolic age. Christ’s character, Bushnell contended, offered more than enough evidence of his divine nature and authority; his miracles, in this view, merely confirmed what had already been made apparent through his superior morality and virtue.46
Rather than relegating the miraculous to the margins, however, Bushnell suggested that the stories of supernatural happenings recorded in scripture provided incontrovertible proof of God’s vital and transcendent, yet personal and benevolent omnipotence. Jesus worked miracles of healing to show that he had the ability to overrule the natural order but also (and, in Bushnell’s view, more importantly) because he felt compassion for the sufferings of humanity. From this perspective, the notion that God ceased to relieve human misery and distress through supernatural means after the biblical era was morally and theologically offensive. Instead, Bushnell argued, God had continued to perform miracles throughout church history, and especially in those periods when faith in the supernatural had ebbed to a low point. According to this schema, the present age was particularly ripe for the demonstration of God’s miraculous power. Through “his supernatural communication,” Bushnell maintained, God offered empirical evidence of his existence and concrete confirmation of his compassion to the nineteenth-century believer who was beset by the faith-dulling forces of contemporary culture. Modern miracles provided a “an experimental knowledge of God” that was, as Bushnell put it, “strictly Baconian”: an experiential encounter with supernatural reality that would “lift the church out of the abysses of a mere second-hand religion, keeping it alive and open to the realities of God’s immediate visitation.”47
Despite the controversy that Nature and the Supernatural provoked among members of the orthodox establishment as well as among liberal theologians, Bushnell’s conviction that a dose of direct divine intervention would revive Christians from their spiritual torpor and restore the nineteenth-century church to a condition of vitality struck a chord among many of his contemporaries who shared his qualms about the influence of modern culture on the state of Christian faith. In the decades following the publication of Bushnell’s treatise, American Protestants of both evangelical and liberal persuasions became increasingly anxious about the debilitating effects of philosophical skepticism, positivist materialism, and bureaucratic capitalism. All of these forces seemed to sap Christianity of its doctrinal and spiritual vigor by undermining belief in a transcendent realm and a supernatural God. While this perceived crisis of faith was certainly not unique—indeed, Romantics, Transcendentalists, and antebellum revivalists all lamented the decline of true religion and called for its renewal through direct spiritual experience—the doubts that late-nineteenth-century Protestants expressed prompted a particularly intense craving for positive assurances of God’s personal, active power. According to one scholar, “The renewed quest for spiritual experience of an intimate deity” was the driving force that “fueled much of late-nineteenth-century religion.”48
Although Protestants in this period adopted various strategies for reinvigorating the church—some, for example, turned back to the Middle Ages in an attempt to recapture what they perceived to be a more organic, authentic expression of the Christian faith—few tactics proved as compelling as the promotion of miraculous healings. Drawing on the primitivist impulse that characterized so much of nineteenth-century Protestantism, numerous reform movements, including Mormonism, Adventism, Spiritualism, and Christian Science claimed experiences of physical restoration as part of their repertoire. While each of these movements explained instances of healing in distinct ways—Spiritualists, for example, often attributed miraculous cures to the ministrations of angels, whereas Mary Baker Eddy and her followers insisted that physical healings demonstrated the truth of “divine power” over the illusion of material reality—all suggested that these experiences of bodily transformation represented signs of a return to a purer form of religion unmarred by the accretions of dogma and creed or the corruptions of institutional politics and cultural conformity. The purpose of Christian Science, argued Eddy and her first disciples, was an effort “to reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.” By reviving the healing practices of Jesus and the apostles, Christian Scientists provided demonstrable “proof that Christian promises were to be fulfilled in the present,” as historian Stephen Gottschalk has put it, and “claimed to offer new and vital truths to a spiritually unsettled age.” Although Spiritualists were less intent on rebuilding the apostolic church in the present, many of the movement’s leaders insisted that healing mediums established a direct connection with spirit guides that not only supplied empirical verification of the spiritual realm but also dispensed with what one clairvoyant physician called “this monster, ‘The Established Church.’” Instances of physical cure through spirit communication confirmed that individuals had direct access to spiritual power, without institutional interference from a corrupt and vitiated Christianity.49
The widespread tendency to appeal to bodily healings as a means for legitimating claims to spiritual purity or Christian primitivism provoked acute consternation among evangelical Protestant advocates of faith cure, who saw themselves as the rightful heirs and only true representatives of biblical Christianity. Like those they condemned as imposters, advocates of divine healing such as A. B. Simpson asserted that experiences of physical restoration verified the reality of the supernatural realm over and against “a growing spirit of rationalism among professing Christians.” Quoting directly from Nature and the Supernatural, A. J. Gordon argued that modern miracles of healing offered believers a “way out of the dullness of second-hand faith, and the dryness of merely reasoned gospel” and a means for fulfilling their “longing for a kind of faith that shows God in living commerce with men such as he vouchsafed them in former times.” Not only did physical healings prove that an omnipotent God still intervened in the natural world in order to alleviate the sufferings of human beings, Gordon suggested, but these supernatural events also represented the reinvesting of the church with “her apostolic powers.”50
Critics of modern miracles—both Reformed theologians who continued to defend the cessationist position and liberal rationalists who insisted on the inviolability of natural law—were quick to point out the parallels between the arguments that advocates of faith cure advanced in favor of divine healing and those put forth by Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, and even Roman Catholic apologists for healings at Lourdes, France, or Knock Chapel in Ireland. Many, if not all of the cures claimed by these groups, argued detractors such as Presbyterian minister Marvin R. Vincent, pastor of the Church of the Covenant in New York City, could be attributed to the healing power of nature, “stimulated into curative efficiency by external influences, either another’s exertion of will, a plausible delusion, or causes awakening faith and hope in divine power.” In an influential essay published in the July 1883 edition of The Presbyterian Review, Vincent compared purported cases of divine healing with “the curative miracles, so called, of the Romish Church,” as well as with assorted incidences of “humbug” and “quackery,” including accounts of remarkable recoveries resulting from “the word of a skillful charlatan” and cures wrought through “the virtues of tar-water.” While these diverse panaceas might have succeeded in curing certain ailments, Vincent suggested, they did so primarily through the “operation of ordinary physical laws” without the intervention of any miraculous power.51
Methodist minister and Boston University Professor Luther T. Townsend advanced a similar argument in his 1885 treatise “Faith-Work,” “Christian Science,” and Other Cures. Drawing on “modern” theories of “disease and cure,” including experiments in “mental therapeutics,” Townsend highlighted the “striking similarity” between the supposedly “miraculous” cures associated with the divine healing movement and those “effected by saints’ relics, mesmerism, holy wells, touching for ‘king’s evil,’ by ‘metallic tractors,’ by blue glass, by Prince Hohnlohe, by Jacob the Zouave,” as well as by the “the so-called allopath, the homeopath, the isopath, the physiopath, the eclectic, the botanic, the cold-water curer, the electrician, the so termed Christian scientist.” Finding “no essential difference” among the remarkable healings ascribed to these various agents, Townsend concluded that most could be explained on purely “natural” grounds.52
Although detractors like Townsend and Vincent conceded that God was capable of performing miraculous cures, they insisted that such supernatural events were the exception rather than the rule. Reversing the schema of sacred history set out by Bushnell, Gordon, and other champions of modern miracles, Vincent argued that “the whole drift of Christian history is away from these special, evidential demonstrations.” Miracles, in his view, represented “a kind of object-teaching for a rudimentary stage of faith” that mature Christians should no longer require. Those who called for “a miraculous economy for the Church of the present,” he contended, were encouraging Christians to return to “the conditions of spiritual childhood.” From this perspective, proponents of divine healing were guilty of promoting an ignorant, superstitious and fanatical brand of religion, not a pure, primitive, and apostolic Christianity.53
Loath to have their movement regarded as spiritually regressive, let alone conflated with quackery—or, worse, with what they considered to be the erroneous, dangerous, and un-Christian teachings of Spiritualists and Christian Scientists—supporters of divine healing such as A. J. Gordon maintained that demonstrations of God’s miraculous power in the present age were necessary in order to combat the “alleged miracles of the Romish Church,” the cures purportedly wrought “through the agency of spirits,” and the healings ascribed to Christian Science—all of which derived from the agency of the devil. Although some proponents of divine healing were willing to entertain the possibility that “the wonders at Lourdes and elsewhere” were “true” miracles performed in accordance with the “devout and simple faith” of the Catholic petitioner, most evangelicals followed the example of Bushnell, who argued that a distinction should be made between Jesus’ miracles and the counterfeit claims of pagan wonder-workers and Roman Catholics. Apologists like Gordon and Simpson, for example, asserted that “the gifts of divine healing” were being revived in the contemporary church in order to reprove the “miracles of the Antichrist,” who was capable of performing “wonders of a superhuman character, only demoniacal instead of divine, wrought through the agency of evil spirits to simulate the works of the Spirit of God.” According to these authors, “lying wonders” were on the rise. “In our own time,” Gordon wrote, “we have witnessed an extraordinary forth-putting of satanic energy in the works of modern spiritualism.” Lamenting especially the “pretensions of spiritualism … to effect miraculous healing,” Gordon surmised that the church ought to confront this “outbreak of satanic empiricism” with “sweet and gracious and humble displays of the Spirit’s saving health.”54
Simpson offered a similar diagnosis of and prescription for the modern period, linking the upsurge in false miracles to an eschatological vision of church history. “The Age of Miracles is not past. The Word of God never indicated a hint of such a fact,” Simpson declared. “On the contrary, they are to be among the signs of the last day; and the very Adversary himself is to counterfeit them and send forth at last the spirits of devils working miracles, unto the kings of the earth.” Experiences of divine healing were not only valid in these end times, Simpson insisted, but they were necessary for combating the works of Satan. “The only defense against the false miracles,” he remarked, “will be the true.”55
Simpson’s conviction that signs and wonders—both demonic and divine—offered evidence that his generation was living in the last days sprang from his premillennial eschatology. According to this perspective, which was steadily replacing the postmillenialism that marked most of antebellum evangelicalism, Christ’s return to earth was imminent. Unlike their more optimistic forbears, premillennialists did not believe that the world was progressing toward a period of peace and righteousness that would culminate in Christ’s second coming. Instead, they argued that “the personal return of Christ is the only hope of the world and the church.” As one proponent put it: “Morally, the world to-day is wabbling in its orbit, madly plunging towards despair and destruction. Religiously, the professing church is rapidly approaching a state of petrifaction and putrefaction … . According to the Scriptures, this dispensation will end in dissolution and destruction.” Although many interpreters have stressed the otherworldly emphasis of premillennialist eschatology, most of its early proponents insisted that this doctrine was “a motive to Christian work.” Before Christ could come again, the church had to fulfill its mission to preach the gospel “in all the world for a witness unto all nations.” Only when this task had been accomplished would “the Lord himself appear, take up His part of the programme and carry it out to the glorious consummation.” The “speedy evangelization of the world,” therefore, became an urgent imperative.56
While not all participants in the divine healing movement embraced premillennialism, Christ’s imminent and cataclysmic return became a major theme for several key proponents, including Gordon and Simpson. For these leaders, and for the many other late-nineteenth-century evangelicals who adopted this increasingly popular perspective on the end times, miracles of healing provided a vital tool for undertaking the task of evangelism both at home and abroad. “The blessed gospel of physical healing in the name of Jesus,” Simpson proclaimed “will prove an invaluable handmaid to the cause of missions.” Just as cures accomplished through the miraculous manifestation of God’s supernatural power refuted the rationalism of modern culture and contested the counterfeit wonders of demonic forces, so they would also reveal the “living power and presence of God” to the “Confucians and the Brahmans” who touted their own sophisticated yet skeptical philosophies, and to the “heathens” who remained captivated by the machinations of “evil priests.” If the “civilized world” was a battleground in which the conflict between God and Satan was being fought out, the “pagan nations” represented the front lines of the war. In either arena, divine healing offered a formidable weapon for the Christian soldiers who sought to prepare the earth for the final apocalyptic confrontation.57
The zeal that premillennialists brought to their missionary endeavor also influenced their attitude toward sickness. Given the urgency of the enterprise, premillennialists stressed the pressing need for a host of healthy, energetic individuals who would spread the good news to all nations prior to Christ’s second coming. Time was short, false “miracle-mongers” were multiplying, skepticism was gaining ground, and the devil was on the prowl, seeking to “convert people to the creed of the prince of darkness” through “the most signal displays of superhuman power.” How then, could Christians—even those afflicted by pain and laid low by suffering—sit passively by and resign themselves to a life of ongoing invalidism? “We are in the Age of miracles, the Age of Christ, the Age which lies between two Advents, and underneath the eye of a ceaseless Divine Presence; the Age of Power, the Age which above all other ages of time should be intensely alive,” Simpson proclaimed. Surely Christians ought to claim the promises put forth in scripture, trust the Great Physician for healing, and rise up from their sickbeds to go forth and serve the Lord! “We believe there are hundreds of the children of God who to-day are prevented from taking an active part in work for the salvation of souls by sickness, which may be taken away if they would but take God at his word,” one proponent of divine healing intoned. Taking direct aim at the ideal of sanctified affliction, another supporter put it this way: “Oh, if those of His dear children who believe that they are glorifying God by their sickness and suffering, could be led to see how much more they might glorify Him, even in one year of active service for Him, than in a lifetime of suffering I believe many would reach out and accept this free and full salvation. He does so use even His humblest servants.”58
The urgency of the end times, the appeal of the primitivist apologetic, the revival of modern miracles—all of these factors suggested to evangelicals in the late nineteenth century that passive resignation was not an appropriate posture for Christians to adopt when confronted with the problem of sickness or pain. The present age called for a different devotional ethic—a model of spiritual experience that emphasized God’s beneficent power rather than the doctrine of afflictive providence, that required human beings to act their faith rather than accept their suffering, that led all of God’s children—even the “humblest servants”—out of the confines of the sickroom into the active sphere of the world.
Buy This Book in Print