Experimental Theology in America: Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and Their Readers

7 From Experimental Religion to Experimental Holiness: Contexts of Thomas Upham’s Reinterpretation of Madame Guyon, 1840–1860

129 o From Experimental religion to Experimental Holiness Contexts of Thomas Upham’s Reinterpretation of Madame Guyon, 1840–1860 Chapter 7 in the late 1830s, two new periodicals appeared that represented the unique blend of pietism, revivalism, and Christian perfectionism that gave birth to the holiness movements of nineteenth-century America.1 The Oberlin Evangelist began publication in 1837; this was the vehicle for the theology of a second conversion leading to Christian perfection as preached by the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, who had become a professor of theology at oberlin College in 1835. The Guide to Christian Perfection (later, Guide to Holiness) was inaugurated in 1839 by Timothy Merritt (1775–1845), a Methodist minister of the new England Conference who had served in Boston and in lowell, Massachusetts, had done other editorial work, and had also been an officer of the Methodist anti-slavery society when it had convened in lowell.2 The oberlin paper was the voice of the new Calvinist wing of revivalism and perfectionism; the Guide was the purveyor of Wesleyan holiness , emphasizing revivals and a notion that sanctification was a state of Christian perfection attainable in this life. The uniqueness of Timothy Merritt’s new publication was its emphasis on “experimental and practical piety.” Although the magazine featured excerpts from Wesley, John Fletcher, and notable proponents of Christian perfection, it also regularly published reports on “religious experience”— biographical and autobiographical accounts, letters, and articles on the experience of sanctification. An 1854 article, written in a popular style on “Experimental Holiness,” epitomizes this applied theology. The author contrasts “argumentative sermons” with the power of testimonies in 130 Experimental Theology in America reaching people: “learned theories could never move a sceptic’s heart, or kindle in human breasts that deep sense of conscious guilt, and that panting for salvation which the living, experimental testimony of the child of God produces.” The author does not wish “to under value argument, reasoning, or entreaty.” no, it should be “interwoven” with experimental testimony that is the “cementing element” in reaching sinners and in “making holiness the savor of ‘life unto life’ to very many imperfect believers .” When it began, the Guide had a monthly circulation of 3,000, by the beginning of the Civil War, a circulation of 15,300 in the United states and abroad, and by 1870, a circulation of 37,000, showing something of the appeal of holiness revivalism.3 The Guide is of particular interest in establishing the ongoing legacy of the figures of Madame Guyon and Fénelon. Thomas Cogswell Upham, their key interpreter to the holiness movement, began to publish in the Guide in 1840 after he himself had come to claim the experience of sanctification. Until this point in our narrative, i have relied on the language of the religions of the heart—of piety and of Pietism—to describe the tradition and broad community of believers in which the readership of the Quietists was placed. But the language of experimental theology, because Upham placed the Quietists in the camp of experimental holiness, is at this point more useful in understanding why adherents of Wesleyan perfectionism in America could claim Madame Guyon and Fénelon as one of their own. some examples of the language of experimental religion and of the experimental knowledge of God are important in understanding where the “holiness people” fit in the history of Christian piety and the epistemological issues related to it. “The Inward and Experimental Knowledge of God in the Soul” When the first English translation of Madame Guyon’s A Short and Easy Method of Prayer appeared in 1704, a preface for the English reader was affixed that set forth an explanation of the importance of “internal prayer.” The author of the preface defended the type of prayer practiced and promoted by Madame Guyon in terms of its theology and its effect. in fact, the “effect” or experiential result of such prayer was synonymous with its “doctrine.” For want of the right Understanding of Internal Prayer, Men have generally conceived very preposterous notions of it, and of the Doctrine which chiefly recommends it; tho’ in Effect this last is nothing else but the inward and Experimental Knowledge of God in the soul, the Practical Doctrine of Mortification and the new Birth, the real Participation of the Divine nature, and an entire Conformity to the spirit From Experimental Religion to Experimental Holiness 131 and life...