ABSTRACT
The Holiness movement is the name given to a broad stream of Protestant revivalism that took shape in the nineteenth century in North America and Western Europe. Although its major institutional location was within the Methodist churches, the movement eventually came to include members from virtually every other Protestant denominations. Holiness teachings drew from a complex array of Wesleyan, Puritan, Pietistic, and AfricanAmerican sources. Central to the movement was a religious form of experience that was variously called “sanctification,” “the second blessing,” “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” or simply the “higher Christian life.” Although millennialism was not a major theme of the Holiness movement until the end of the nineteenth century, the Holiness emphasis upon personal spiritual sanctification was parallel and supportive of the wider nineteenthcentury Protestant millennial quest for social and national redemption.
