20
Phoebe Palmer
Trials to Triumphs
She sat still in the dim nursery, her son wrapped in a blanket in her arms. She didn’t sing a lullaby or rock the infant. She didn’t smooth the delicate wisps of hair or stroke his soft cheek. She simply stared straight ahead in quiet shock. Her seven-week-old infant was dead, her second child to die in two years. She was childless once again.
“I will not attempt to describe the pressure of the last crushing trial,” she wrote a few weeks later. “Surely I needed it, or it would not have been given. . . . After my loved ones were snatched away, I saw that I had concentrated my time and attentions far too exclusively, to the neglect of the religious activities demanded. Though painfully learned, yet I trust the lesson has been fully apprehended. From henceforth, Jesus must and shall have the uppermost seat in my heart.”1 Phoebe Palmer truly believed that the death of her children (five years later she would lose a third child in a tragic nursery fire) was the result of her inattention to God, and she responded by zealously throwing herself into her personal pursuit of Jesus.
A Proneness to Reason
Although she was raised by devout Methodist parents, faith as defined by the Methodist Church did not come easily to Phoebe. According to Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, two points were particularly critical in the church’s orthodoxy: first, complete assurance of one’s salvation, and second, what was called Christian perfection. Wesley believed that the true Christian should experience a discernible conversion moment as tangible assurance of one’s salvation. This conversion experience and assurance of salvation would subsequently lead to a level of spirituality in which one was able to live without habitual sin, in a state governed by pure love. Wesley termed this sinless state “Christian Perfection,” but he also referred to it by a number of different expressions, including perfect love, entire sanctification, full salvation, and perfect holiness, after which the holiness movement was named.
Phoebe was deeply troubled by the fact that she had not experienced an authentic conversion moment. Methodist conversion was typically defined as an emotional experience, and Phoebe was a logical, rational woman rather than an emotional one. She yearned to feel God in her heart and soul as others did, and as they implied she should, but she simply didn’t. While she was sincerely devoted to God, she felt like an utter failure because she didn’t seem to be as outwardly or inwardly moved by his love as others were. She longed to live in the ancient biblical days, when one’s relationship with God seemed more objective and pragmatic. “Had I lived in that day, how gladly I would have parted with everything . . . and have purchased the best possible offering,” she wrote, referring to the Old Testament practice of animal sacrifice. “All I would have to do, would be to lay it upon the altar and know that it was accepted.”2
Without the assurance of salvation Phoebe was stymied, spinning her spiritual wheels and unable to proceed on to the next steps toward Christian perfection. She wrote about herself in the third person in her book, The Way of Holiness, saying, “Not unfrequently, she felt like weeping because she could not weep.”3
Finally Phoebe experienced a spiritual breakthrough under the guidance of her sister, Sarah, with whom Phoebe and her husband, Walter, lived in New York City. After wrestling for several years with both her inability to pinpoint a specific conversion moment and her “proneness to reason,” as she put it, Phoebe embraced what she called “the act of believing” as adequate assurance of her salvation. “I now see that the error of my religious life has been a desire for signs and wonders,” she wrote. “Like Naaman, I have wanted some great thing, unwilling to rely unwaveringly on the still small voice of the Spirit, speaking through the naked Word.”4 Phoebe concluded that belief itself, plain and simple, was grounds for assurance. She decided to rely on the Bible, which she believed to be the Word of God to man, as well as on faith, which she defined as “taking God at his word and relying unwaveringly upon his truth.”5
Out of the Ordinary Sphere
Sarah also introduced Phoebe to the concept of the Tuesday Meetings. Initially Sarah led these weekly women’s prayer meetings in their home, but when she and her husband moved, Phoebe reluctantly took the reins. The meetings quickly grew from a women’s prayer group and Bible study to a coed vehicle for promoting and studying the principles of holiness—that is, sanctification—an integral part of Methodism.
The Tuesday Meetings were unusual for several reasons. Not only did they attract members of both genders, they were also nondenominational. By the mid-1860s, Baptists, Congregationalists, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Quakers joined the Methodists in the meetings. Phoebe maintained that Christian perfection was a leading doctrine of the Bible rather than a doctrine particular to any denomination. All were welcome to attend, so long as they were there as a witness to holiness, as a sincere seeker of holiness, or as a genuinely interested observer and at least open to the teaching.
The meetings also emphasized the participation of laypersons. Although ministers attended, they did not dominate or even lead the meetings, and at least in the early days, neither did Phoebe herself. Rather, firsthand accounts of personal religious experiences and testimonies composed the greatest portion of the meetings. Any person present was encouraged to offer a testimony, read or recite a memorized Bible verse or passage, lead the group in a hymn or prayer, or request a prayer from others present. The inclusiveness and relaxed atmosphere of the meetings was particularly conducive to the active participation of women. “If recorded testimonies are to be taken as an accurate indicator of female participation, fully as many women as men would be heard from at a typical gathering,” biographer Harold Raser observes. “Proclaiming the credo ‘whether male or female, all are one in Christ Jesus,’ the Tuesday Meeting seems to have quite successfully acted this out in its own structure.”6
The egalitarian nature of the Tuesday Meetings paved the way for Phoebe to grow into her role as a preacher and leading revivalist. Technically, Phoebe agreed with critics who, based on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, claimed that women should not preach. But as the invitations for her to speak at larger and larger gatherings came rolling in, she responded willingly, believing that God had specifically called her to stand before his people and proclaim his truth. “It is the order of God,” she said, “that women may occasionally be brought out of the ordinary sphere of action and occupy in either church or state positions of high responsibility.”7
Over time, the informal Tuesday Meetings segued into larger events held not only in homes around New York, New England, Canada, and later in England but also in halls and churches. As Phoebe’s fame increased, she began to lead the Methodist camp meetings, which were originally developed on the frontier and then eventually established in permanent campgrounds in cities. During these summer camp meetings, Phoebe led and encouraged hundreds of believers at a time to declare their sanctification during the altar testimony.
Whether or not she defined herself as such, Phoebe was, in these camp meetings and in the churches and halls where she frequently spoke, a preacher in every sense of the word. She appealed to men and women alike, and her talents lay in the fact that she was an accessible, deliberate, direct, and intensely earnest speaker. Her addresses “mingled simplicity, earnestness and power,” noted one British newspaper. Another described her as “clear, pointed and scriptural” and “addressed more to the understanding than to the feelings of her audience.”8 Clearly the rational, levelheaded approach to faith that had so frustrated Phoebe earlier in her spiritual journey now proved to be one of her greatest assets.
A Fixed Heart
Beginning around 1841, Phoebe’s mission to fulfill her calling led her farther away from home and for longer and longer periods. For the first twenty years of her revivalist career, she traveled without her husband, Walter, and her children, and while this was personally difficult for her, Phoebe was resolute in what she considered the proper order of her priorities. After the death of her third child, in the midst of grief and despair, Phoebe came to understand that God intended a purpose for her suffering. “My darling is in heaven doing angel service,” she wrote in her journal. “And now I have resolved that the service, or in other words, the time I would have devoted to her, shall be spent in work for Jesus. And if diligent and self-sacrificing in carrying out my resolve, the death of this child may result in the spiritual life of many. . . . And now my whole being says, with a strength of purpose beyond anything before attained, ‘My heart is fixed, O, God, my heart is fixed!’”9
To put her work ahead of her family was nothing short of radical for this time period. But Phoebe did not waver in her commitment to God as her first priority. “By endeavoring to make all things subservient to the duties of religion, showing manifestly before my family that I seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, God honors the intention and adds needful sustainments,” she wrote in her journal in 1857.10
In addition to her vigorous preaching duties, Phoebe was also a prolific writer, a social activist in the temperance movement, and an advocate for the urban poor. During the 1840s, as she was launching her revivalist mission, Phoebe also published three books: The Way of Holiness, Entire Devotion to God, and Faith and Its Effects. In addition, she served as editor of the newspaper The Guide to Holiness, which she and Walter purchased in the 1860s. The couple built the subscription list of The Guide, as it was later called, from a floundering ten thousand to nearly forty thousand readers, and Phoebe effectively used it as a national platform from which to expound on her evangelistic travels and the holiness movement in general.
As a founding director of America’s first inner-city mission—New York City’s Five Points Mission—Phoebe was an active advocate for the urban poor. Despite resistance, she raised the necessary funds to build a chapel, schoolrooms, and a residence facility to house twenty needy families at a time, free of charge. The initiative later expanded to include a day school, the Five Points House of Industry, which employed more than five hundred people, and a number of social welfare programs. Between 1840 and 1850 she also made regular visits to women imprisoned at the infamous Tombs prison, noting in her journal that many of the women were probably hearing religious truth for the first time and listened with more attention than was generally witnessed in actual houses of worship.
Phoebe Palmer suffered the loss and grief every parent dreads—not once but, unimaginably, three times in her early years of motherhood. It’s clear from the anguished words poured into her journal that she suffered these trials deeply. Yet it’s equally clear that these profound losses spurred in her an unrelenting mission to fulfill what she understood as her calling. In some of Phoebe’s last letters and journal entries, written only months before she died, we see evidence that Phoebe remained confident in God’s goodness and grace, despite the immeasurable losses she endured. “Now, we know that all things work together for good, to them that love God,” she wrote to a friend in 1874.11 Shortly before she died, Phoebe reiterated this conviction, attributing her life’s work to Jesus and noting, “My trials have been triumphs. Every new conflict has furnished an occasion for a new victory.”12 Phoebe Palmer had paved the way to perfect holiness for thousands, a mission that helped her to triumph over personal tragedy.