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Specifically, the Keswick form of the Higher Life theology was formulated through the central influence of Hannah W. and Robert P. Smith at the Broadlands, Oxford, and Brighton Conventions that immediately preceded the first Keswick Convention. The first and following Broadlands Conferences were held at the invitation of the dedicated spiritualists Mr. and Mrs. Mount-Temple, and all sorts of infernal spirits, doctrinal differences, and heresies were warmly welcome. Speakers included the universalist George MacDonald, who received his prominent speaking position at the direction of his good spiritualist[1] friends[2] the Mount-Temples.[3] He became good friends with fellow universalist Hannah W. Smith.[4] Nonetheless, while Christian orthodoxy was by no means held in common by the Broadlands speakers, “[t]he ‘Seed,’ of which George Fox spoke, was rooted in them all,”[5] and those in “the Society of Friends”[6] rejoiced at the messages brought, as did the spiritualist Mount-Temples, who continued their very influential patronage of Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
At the first and
flagship 1874 Broadlands Convention Robert “Pearsall Smith was chairman and
principal speaker, though, before the week was done, it became evident that his
wife, Hannah Whitall Smith, was a herald of the evangel they carried yet more
effective than himself.”[7] Indeed, she was the chief of the Broadlands
preachers.[8] Further Conventions, led by Mr. and Mrs.
Pearsall Smith and with ever-larger crowds, were held at Oxford and Brighton[9]
to perpetuate the Higher Life teaching of Broadlands.[10] Mrs. Smith’s captivating preaching bewitched
her audiences, so that at Oxford and Brighton no hall was large enough to
accommodate the crowds that flocked to hear her.[11] The meetings reminded Hannah W. Smith and
others “of the days when George Fox,” the founder of the Quakers, saw countless
numbers “convinced . . . during . . . his meetings,” or of the “wonderful
Yearly Meetings” that took place in the days of the prominent Quakers
“Elisabeth Fry and Joseph John Gurney.”[12] Following these Conventions, meetings
specifically in the English town of Keswick, from which the new doctrine preached
by the Smiths came to obtain its name, were proposed in 1875. An Anglican minister,[13]
“Canon T. D. Harford Battersby . . . [who] . . . was part of an old and
well-to-do west-country Quaker family that had moved into evangelical
Anglicanism in the early 19th century,”[14]
and “a friend of his, Mr. Robert Wilson, a Quaker who also was specially
blessed [at the earlier Higher Life meetings led by the Smiths] . . . decided
to hold a Convention at Keswick, where similar teaching should be given.” The “chief Brighton speakers,” of whom the
most important were certainly “Mr. and Mrs. Pearsall Smith, [were] to take part
in it.”[15]
Thus, Quakers
were so far from being convicted of sin and of their need to turn from their
false religion and false gospel to Christ for the new birth, and instead so
happy with the Higher Life theology of Keswick, that one of them could become
co-founder[16]
of the meetings at Keswick, be the “the heart and soul” of the Keswick mission fund,[17] be lauded by many Keswick writers and speakers,[18]
and even be termed “the father of the Convention.”[19] Since the Quakers Hannah and Robert Smith
formulated and spread the Keswick theology at the preparatory Broadlands,
Oxford, and Brighton Conventions,[20]
such acceptance of Quakerism was entirely expected. As one Quaker periodical noted, extolling the
teaching of the Brighton Convention:
[T]his wonderful
gathering . . . [taught the] truth [of the Higher Life and] the renewed
[post-conversion] baptism of the Holy Spirit . . . [which had been] revived in
a time of darkness by the early Friends[.] . . . It has been often said that
the Friends have always upheld this cardinal truth[.] . . . This is undoubtedly
true, and many of the early Friends walked in the light of it, as testified by
the writings of Fox, Penn, Barclay, Penington, and others[.] . . . Hannah W.
Smith . . . felt that she had an especial message to the Friends in this
country, and from [her] lucid setting forth of this truth many of us have
derived deep and lasting benefit. . . . Perfection lies in this [Higher Life
system]. . . . [T]housands . . . every day flocked to hear the Bible readings
of Hannah W. Smith, eagerly accepting her clear and winning settings forth of
the life of faith . . . [at] the Friends’ Meeting House . . . to a crowded
assembly, those of our own body were proclaiming in triumphant strains the
glory and richness of this full salvation[.][21]
Quakers were unequivocally
welcomed at Keswick as true Christians.[22] Thus, “[a]t the outset the management of the Convention was
entirely in the hands of the two conveners, Canon Harford-Battersby and Mr.
Robert Wilson.”[23] The Quaker “Robert Wilson [was] one of the two
founders of the Convention and its chairman from 1891 to 1900.”[24] Speakers
were for some years only selected at “the personal invitation of the
conveners,” Wilson and Battersby, although in later times the “the Trustees of the Convention”
began to make the selections.[25]
William Wilson, Robert Wilson’s son, continued his father’s work when Robert
became Keswick chairman,[26]
Robert being the “successor” of Harford-Battersby after the latter man’s
retirement.[27] The succession was the more natural because
Wilson was Harford-Battersby’s “principal parish worker,” regularly attending
the Canon’s Anglican assembly Sunday evenings after attending the Friends’
Meeting in the morning.[28] Indeed,
Robert Wilson was not only co-founder of Keswick and chairman of the Convention
for nearly a decade but was also the author of the Keswick motto “All One in
Christ Jesus.”[29] Truly, “without Mr. [Robert]
Wilson’s support and brave backing, there would have been no . . . Keswick
story . . . at all.”[30]
Consequently,
the Anglican with a Quaker background, Harford-Battersby, and his chief parish
worker, the unrepentant Quaker Robert Wilson, together founded the Keswick
convention and “invited . . . leading
speakers [such as] Mr. and Mrs. Pearsall Smith.
Mr. Pearsall Smith promised to preside.”[31] “Robert . . . [was] invited . . . to preside
and . . . Hannah Pearsall Smith . . . to give daily Bible Readings,” that is,
to preach,[32]
as well as to run the ladies’ meetings.[33] Indeed, Keswick was to be “arranged around
the Pearsall Smiths.”[34] However, when Mr. Smith hastily withdrew
because of a doctrine and practice the Brighton Convention Committee[35]
was hesitant to explain, the Keswick movement almost collapsed. Robert had been teaching that the baptism of
the Holy Ghost was accompanied by physical sexual thrills because of the
esoteric union of Christ with His people as Bridegroom and Bride, as described
in the Song of Solomon. Public confesson
and repudiation of Robert Smith’s abominable teaching would indeed have cast a
dark shadow over Keswick, since it was an indisputable fact that even without
Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s presence “a continuity of teaching [was] maintained . . .
the same as that given at the Oxford Conference,”[36]
where the great spiritual secret of erotic Baptism was publicly proclaimed. In that day of Victorian propriety very few
would have wanted to propagate and preach a theology of sanctification invented
by such persons. The Keswick Committee
consequently deemed it best to conceal the reasons for the withdrawal of Mr.
and Mrs. Smith. In this manner the
Higher Life could be proclaimed while the embarrassing shadow of the unholiness
of its originators remained cloaked in obscurity.
See here for this entire study.
[1] Lord and Lady
Mount Temple determined that MacDonald should “have an hour all to himself” to
address the Holiness Conference participants. (Circular letter, Broadlands, & December 30-31, The Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life,
Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter); cf. pg. 33, Transforming
Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past,
Present, and Future, Price & Randall.
MacDonald was perfectly aware of the spirititualism of the
Mount-Temples. For example, he wrote to
his wife about how he witnessed a medium at Broadlands winning a convert to
spiritualism by employing her supernatural powers (pg. 26, Ruskin, Lady Mount-Temple and the Spiritualists: An Episode in Broadlands History. Van Akin Burd. London:
Brentham Press, 1982).
[2] Cf.
pg. 27, The Life that is Life
Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands
Conferences, Edna V. Jackson.
London: James Nisbet & Co,
1910.
[3] E. g., Mrs. Smith recorded the events of another
conference at Broadlands in 1887 where George MacDonald taught (pg. 98, A Religious Rebel: The Letters of “H. W. S,” ed. Logan
Pearsall Smith, reprinting a Letter to Her Friends of August 1887).
[4] The friendship between Mrs. Smith and Mr. MacDonald
continued for many years; for example, in 1893 he was her guest at her home,
and she wrote of him: “George MacDonald
. . . is the dearest old man, so gentle and yet so strong, and with such a
marvellous insight into spiritual things. . . . [H]e has done a beautiful work
in the world” (pg. 120, A Religious
Rebel: The Letters of “H. W. S,” ed.
Logan Pearsall Smith; from Letter to Her Friends, September 11, 1893). Hannah recommended George MacDonald’s book Diary of an Old Soul to her daughter
Mary, affirming that it “will help you” (Letter to Mary, January 27, 1883,
reproduced in the entry for December 9 of The
Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life, Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter). Mrs. Smith likewise wrote of her great
“unity” with “George MacDonald,” saying that they “got very close,” and affirmed:
“It has been a sort of dream of my life to . . . sit at the feet of
[him],” as she was able to do at the Holiness Conferences at Broadlands. MacDonald
was a welcome presence and speaker at English Holiness Conferences, for if
Hannah W. Smith’s universalism was no barrier to her, neither was his
universalism a barrier to him—indeed, to Mrs. Mount-Temple, universalism was a
reason to receive promotion and influence (Circular letter, Broadlands, &
December 30-31, The Christian’s Secret of
a Holy Life, Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter).
[5] Pg. 62, Evan Harry
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
[6] Pg. 64, Evan Harry
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
[7] Pg. 64, Evan Harry
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
[8] Note,
e. g., that a list of Broadlands Conference speakers and attendees places the
Smiths first, following only the hosts, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple (pg. 34-35, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910. Cf. pgs. 186-187, where in the list of
participants in the last Conference of 1888, she is prominent again, the first
woman in the list after the Mount-Temples.).
“Amongst the speakers [the Broadlands historian] think[s] first of Mrs.
Pearsall Smith[.] . . . ‘The angel of the churches,’ Lady Mount-Temple used to
call her” (pgs. 48-49, Ibid).
[9] “The most popular sessions of the Brighton
Convention were those in which Hannah [W. Smith] preached her practical secrets
of the happy Christian life to audiences of 5,000 or more, mostly clergymen who
were theologically opposed [correctly, 1 Timothy 2:9-15; 1 Corinthians
14:34-37] to the preaching ministry of women” (“Smith, Hannah W. & Smith,
Robert Pearsall,” Biographical Dictionary
of Evangelicals, ed. Timothy Larsen).
[10] Approximately eight thousand attended the Brighton
Convention from around twenty-three countries (pg. 23, So Great Salvation, Barabas).
[11] Pg.
124, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910.
[12] Letter to Father and Mother, June 9, 1875, reproduced in
the entry for July 26 of The Christian’s
Secret of a Holy Life, Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter. Compare the articles on Elisabeth Fry and
Joseph John Gurney in The Biographical
Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Larsen.
[13] Barabas, who fails to mention that the Anglican minister
in question, T. D. Harford-Battersby, had a Quaker background, does record that
Harford-Battersby had made the theological rounds from apostate
Anglo-Catholicism, to modernistic and evolutionary Anglican broad-churchism, to
more evangelical Anglican low-churchism that was “strongly influenced by
English Methodism” (pgs. 15, 24-25, So
Great Salvation, Barabas). One hopes
that Mr. Harford-Battersby did not merely adopt better theology than the
Anglo-Catholic and modernistic heresies that he had formerly followed, but if
he was himself personally born again after turning to Anglican low-churchism
Barabas makes no mention of such an event.
Indeed, Harford-Battersby’s two hundred and thirty page biography only
states that he “he drew by degrees, but steadily, towards a calm and firm
settlement in what are known as evangelical beliefs” (pg. x, Memoir of T. D. Harford-Battersby,
Harford), “[b]eginning as a Tractarian,
[but] little by little be[ing] led to Evangelical views” (pg. 75, Evan
Harry Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie). Not a single sentence of the
biography of Battersby mentions a new birth experience associated with his
rejection of high-Anglican or Tractarian heresies.
It
is not at all a good sign that the only record of anything like a conversion to
Christ in Harford-Battersby’s biography is his own testimony that he first
began to repent and believe when he received confirmation. He wrote:
I had little of Christian
principle. I was altogether a thoughtless, vile creature. I . . . was plunged .
. . into idleness and dissipation . . . justly might I have been cut off in the
midst of this course, but the Lord most graciously kept me[.] . . . [In] the
care and goodness of God to me[,] He so ordained it that confirmation should
come very soon[.] . . . Then I first learned to turn my thoughts really towards
heaven, to repent, and believe in Jesus (pg. 6, Memoir of T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford).
Harford-Battersby thus
indicates that he was a vile person, full of idleness and dissipation, but the
Lord graciously kept him alive until he received the rite of confirmation,
through which he came to repent and believe in Jesus. Belief in such a ritualistic false gospel in
his allegedly more evangelical and non-Tractarian childhood would provide an
easy explanation for his ability to adopt the Roman Catholic heresies taught by
(the later Roman Catholic Cardinal) Newman and the other high-Anglican
Tractarians at Oxford during Harford-Battersby’s college days, such as a
“visible church with sacraments and rites, which are the channels of invisible
grace, an episcopal dynasty descended from the apostles, [and] an obligatory
body of doctrine, to be found in Scripture, but only recognised there by the
aid of Church tradition” (pgs. 24-25, Memoir). “Mr. Battersby came under the spell. He
missed no opportunity of hearing, not only Newman himself, but Manning and
Pusey, and other leaders of the [Anglo-Catholic] movement. He discussed the
sermons with his friends. He wrote about them in his letters home, and thus
drew down upon himself grave warnings from his father as to the dangers of
Romanising views” (pgs. 28-29, Ibid).
Thus, one can hope against hope that Harford-Battersby
was indeed born again at some point, but there is certainly no mention of such
an event at any point in his biography. Neither in his childhood before he
adopted—which a true Christian will not do—an accursed sacramental false gospel
(Galatians 1:8-9), nor after his entry into Anglican holy orders, when he
“elected to begin ministerial work in a High Church parish” where baptismal
regeneration and other sacramental heresies were taught because of his
“admiration for Newman and the other leaders of the Oxford movement,” (pg. 52,
cf. 43ff, Ibid), is there any
evidence at all of a genuine conversion.
All that is recorded is that he gradually abandoned ritualism for
rationalism and the broad-church Anglicanism of Frederick Myers, the curate of
the town of Keswick under whom Harford-Battersby served after leaving his first
ministry, and whom he regarded as “a guide and as a prophet” (pg. 288, Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals)
although Myers was a spiritualist (pgs. 23-24, The Keswick Story, Polluck).
Under him Harford-Battersby learned not to be concerned about “trying to
find out the right theory of inspiration” (pg. 67, Memoir of T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford). He finally replaced Myers as curate after his
predecessor’s death and then gradually moved towards evangelical ideas—which
meant assent to the “truth of Protestant principles” rather than
“Anglo-Catholicism” (pg. 60, Ibid),
not personal conversion and the new birth.
Finally, after being convinced by the doctrine of Hannah W. and Robert
P. Smith, Harford-Battersby was “persuaded that the current teaching of the
Evangelical school itself was defective and one-sided, and . . . of the general
truth of the teaching upon which the holiness movement was based” (pgs.
175-176, Ibid). He then abandoned mainstream Anglican
evangelicalism for the Higher Life doctrine characteristic of the Keswick
theology, destitute of a clear testimony to a new birth, but possessed of a
clear testimony to the second blessing of the Higher Life. Such was the spiritual progress of the
Anglican Canon without whose entry into the Higher Life at the “Oxford
Convention . . . the . . . Keswick
Convention would never have had a beginning” (pg. 29, Forward Movements, Pierson).
[14] pg. 340, Review by Ian S. Rennie of Keswick: A Bibliographic Introduction to the Higher Life Movements. by
D. D. Bundy. Wilmore, Kentucky: Asbury Theological Seminary, 1975, in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological
Society 19:4 (Fall 1976) 340-343.
[15] Pg. 170, Memoir of
T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford.
[16] Pgs. 25, 168, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. Canon
Harford-Battersby, despite Wilson’s Quaker theology, considered him a “dear
brother” (pg. 195, Memoir of T. D.
Harford-Battersby, Harford), and at the Canon’s deathbed, Wilson was by his
side (pg. 219, Ibid).
[17] Pg. 145, The
Keswick Convention: Its Message, Method,
and its Men, ed. Harford.
[18] For example, the Keswick classic The Keswick Convention: Its
Message, Method, and its Men, ed. Charles Harford, is dedicated “to the
memory of Thomas Dundas Harford-Battersby and Robert Wilson, Founders of the
Keswick Convention.” In a chapter on
Keswick men, J. Elder Cumming breathes not the slightest warning about Quaker
heresies but concludes his very laudatory description of Robert Wilson with the
following affirmation, after recounting Mr. Wilson’s death: “Truly, the end of that man was peace! Who
would not wish for such an end, if prepared for it, as he was?” (pg. 64, The Keswick Convention, ed.
Harford). Thus, although Quakers deny
justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ and other essential
aspects of the Biblical gospel, Keswick leaders wished to be in the same place
as Quakers like Mr. Wilson at death.
While one can hope that, somehow, Mr. Wilson did not actually believe in
Quakerism and its false gospel but was truly converted, wishing to be
associated in death with Quakers is not a little unwise.
[19] Pg. 110, Evan Harry
Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander
Smellie.
[20] Pg. 118, Memorials [of William Francis Cowper-Temple, Baron Mount-Temple], Georgina Cowper-Temple. London:
Printed for private circulation, 1890; pgs. 335, 371, 407, 416-420, Record of the Convention for the Promotion
of Scriptural Holiness Held at Brighton, May 29th to June 7th,
1875. Brighton: W. J. Smith, 1875.
[21] Pgs. 453-464, “Reflections on
the Brighton Convention,” The Friends’
Quarterly Examiner, 9:23-26. London: Barrett, Sons & Co, 1875. Note that pages 416-420 of the Record of the Convention for the Promotion
of Scriptural Holiness Held at Brighton, May 29th to June 7th,
1875. Brighton: W. J. Smith, 1875 consists of excerpts from this article in
the Friends’ Quarterly Examiner
extolling the teaching at Brighton.
[22] Pg. 111, The
Keswick Story: The Authorized History of
the Keswick Convention, Polluck.
[23] Pg. 13, The Keswick
Convention: Its Message, Method, and its
Men, ed. Charles Harford.
[24] Pg. 60, The Keswick
Convention, ed. Harford; cf. pg. 119, The
Keswick Story: The Authorized History of
the Keswick Convention, Polluck.
[25] Pg. 20, The Keswick
Convention, ed. Harford.
[26] Pg. 14, The Keswick
Convention, ed. Harford.
[27] Pg. 51, The Keswick
Convention, ed. Harford.
[28] Pg. 30, The Keswick
Story: The Authorized History of the
Keswick Convention, Polluck.
[29] Pg. 60, The Keswick
Convention, ed. Harford.
[30] Pg. 61, The Keswick
Convention, ed. Harford.
[31] Pg. 25, So Great
Salvation, Barabas.
[32] Pgs. 29, 149, Transforming
Keswick: The Keswick Convention, Past,
Present, and Future, Price & Randall.
[33] Pg. 197, The
Keswick Convention: Its Message, its
Method, and its Men, ed. Harford.
[34] Pg. 11, The Keswick
Story: The Authorized History of the
Keswick Convention, Polluck.
[35] The Committee included Evan Hopkins, Stevenson Blackwood,
the chairman of the Mildmay Conference, and Lord Radstock. All these were solid Broadlands men, and
Blackwood’s suggestion led to the expansion of the 1874 Broadlands Conference
at the Oxford Convention (pg. 17, The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910).
[36] Pg. 20, The Keswick
Convention, ed. Harford. Harford-Battersby
testified to the profound influence of Robert P. Smith upon him and countless
others: “Not that I would shrink from
confessing the great debt which I, and thousands more with me, owe to that
remarkable man whose name has become a by-word and a reproach in the estimation
of many whom I greatly honour” (pg. 173, Memoir
of T. D. Harford-Battersby, Harford).
Thus, “Mr. Smith . . . was at this time an honoured instrument in the
hands of God for reviving the spiritual life in the hearts of hundreds, and
even thousands, of devoted servants of Christ, both in this country [England]
and on the Continent” (pgs. 174-175, Ibid). That the teaching of Keswick was that of the
Smiths is historically indisputable.
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