ABSTRACT
The grandest single drama of American religious history is the rise of the Methodist Movement, its gradual loss of fervor, and the eruption from it of dozens of small sects that together constitute the Holiness Movement. People could meet in nonchurch settings, whether at public rallies or in small private groups like Wesley’s Holy Club at Oxford, and conduct many of the activities of a religious service without defining themselves as a schism and often while maintaining membership in good standing of a conventional church. The Baptists offered strenuous competition, and the Southern Baptist denomination escaped the over-intellectualization that was affecting Methodist clergy. But new and especially dangerous competition came from small schismatic movements that broke directly away from the Methodist Episcopal Church beginning in some numbers in the 1870s, many of them dedicated to holiness.
