ABSTRACT
An influence on Garrison's radical religious abolitionism was John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) whose career exemplified the perfectionist aspirations which could be generated by the intense self-scrutiny of the revivals. A college graduate who abandoned legal training for study at Andover and Yale, he became involved with a distinct group of revivalist candidates for the ministry in New Haven, concluded that Christ's Second Coming had occurred at the fall of Jerusalem and thereafter the progressive maturation of Christianity could lead to the complete abandonment of sin as, through a second conversion, Noyes and others like him became at one with Christ. In Noyes's case these heretical doctrines led to his ostracism and his formation of the perfectionist community at Oneida, New York.
