HOLINESS CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY Part 6

195. Do not the formation of associations, and holding special meetings for the promotion of holiness, tend to division in the church?

No. This has been asserted over and over again, but never proved. We wish to meet this question squarely. No legitimate efforts to promote holiness tend to division among Christians. The direct opposite of this is true. Sin alienates and divides; holiness unites and binds together, and constitutes the strongest bond of union in the church of God. Any other union in the church is but a rope of sand.

Holding special meetings for the promotion of holiness and pressing it upon the attention of the church by associations, organized only for mutual co-operation in such work, will create division only where it ought to -- among dead, worldly professors, who attend theaters, parlor dances, festivals, places of amusement, and play euchre, and yet belong to the church, and desire to run it on the line of their spirit and lives. Proud, fashionable, and worldly people in the church, annoyed by those deeply devoted to God, have made this cry from the days of Wesley.

Bishop Foster well says: "We cannot doubt that in many, perhaps most instances, they have been driven to separate and class efforts, from the indifference and coldness of the body of their brethren, and in many instances of the pastors. The cure of the evil must be sought and found, not in surrendering the doctrine or experience, but in a general movement of the sacramental host to higher experience." -- Christian Purity, p. 276.

Rev. Dr. Stevens, in his History of Methodism, says: "The professors of sanctification were generally distinguished more than other Methodists as 'calm and sober-minded.' Quietness without 'quietism' became a characteristic of them as a class, and among preachers and people, they were considered by Wesley to be his most prudent, most reliable coadjutors." -- History, vol. i. p. 405.

We maintain that the fruit of these organizations and meetings, and of this doctrine and experience, after more than one hundred years of trial, has proved good. The late Bishop Thomson said in the N. Y. Advocate: "It is not saying too much to aver that they (the professors and advocates of this doctrine) form the most loving, spiritual, and effective membership in the churches to which they belong."

These very persons (connected with these associations) constitute no inconsiderable part of the attendants and workers in our prayer, class, and revival meetings. Facts are stubborn things, and William Pitt once said in the British Parliament, "One fact is worth a thousand arguments."

The facts that we present are these:

1. It cannot be shown that these associations or meetings have ever divided the church.

2. The Protestant Church has never been so much united as during the past ten years, and yet the doctrine of holiness has never received as much attention by all denominations as during that time.

3. As to the Methodist Church, she was never more united in all her connectional interests and work. She has increased more during the past ten years than during any decade of her existence -- more than double any other decade. Her total increase in ten years has been 4,024 ordained innerant ministers 4,501 local preachers, and 635,101 in her lay membership. She has built 4,974 churches, at an expense of over $51,000,000.

Her increase alone in ten years is more than double the whole Congregational Church, nearly three times the membership of the Episcopal Church, and six times that of the Reformed Dutch Church, and about equal to the whole membership of the Presbyterian Church of this country.

We do not mention these facts boastfully, but in vindication of the practical efficiency of Christian holiness as the great unifying and evangelizing power of Methodism. And yet not half as much has been accomplished, as would have been, if the church more generally had put away her sins, come up to her privilege, and there had been less fault-finding with the measures and efforts put forth to promote Christian holiness.

The ministry of the Methodist Church cannot afford to ignore this doctrine to antagonize it, to tone it down, or emasculate it. The history of Methodism is a diary of Christian holiness, cutting its way through the icy walls of a nominal Christianity and he who would rob it of its clear and specific testimony on this subject, or hinder its best efforts for advancement, is an unworthy successor of the Wesleys.