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Hiram Mattison was fighting mad. Some of the holiness people in the Methodist Episcopal church had pulled a fast one. Early in 1867 the New York Preachers' Meeting had hosted a series of speeches on the question, "What are the best methods for promoting the experience of perfect love?" The discussion had been, in the words of one participant, "lengthy and pungent."' Mattison, a seminary professor and long-time opponent of the holiness movement, had weighed in with his professional theological polemics against the movement's doctrine and methods of promotion. He had expected that all the speeches would be published in a single volume. But the proponents of perfect love surreptitiously had withdrawn their manuscripts from the Methodist book room and had them published and copyrighted on their own. The original plan to publish a two-sided debate had been thus defeated, and the advocates of perfect love had scooped their opposition. What a move for people who professed to have attained Christian perfection, said Mattison. It must have paid well, he added, for three editions had been issued in just a few weeks.2
What really angered Mattison, however, was the suggestion by George W. Woodruff-author of the introduction to the one-sided holiness pamphletthat Mattison had played the spoiler in the discussion. The question had no sooner been opened, said he, than Mattison, "a veteran critic on the subject of Christian Perfection," had given the whole affair "a controversial aspect." The friends of the experience of perfect love had then been obliged to take up "the unwelcome gauntlet." The reader of Woodruff's remarks might suppose, fumed Mattison, that he "had thrown a firebrand into a peaceable company of Methodist preachers met for a kind of experience meeting, and completely subverted the whole design of the love feast." Mattison spilled considerable ink correcting what he felt were Woodruff s misrepresentations.3
The experience meetings and love feasts to which Mattison alluded were gatherings of Christians to share testimony to religious experience. Because Woodruff and his friends believed that such testimony was the best way to promote perfect love, they really had expected that the discussion eventually would come around to something like a love feast. Mattison's address really had seemed like a firebrand to them. Mattison, however, thought he...