Reading Holiness

Celebrating 200 years of American Holiness literature

The Holiness Movement was birthed and nurtured by literature, beginning with the writings of early Methodists like Wesley and Fletcher, as reflected in the career of the seminal Holiness work published in 1824 by Timothy Merritt, who distilled excerpts from these two, and other, writers into The Christian's Manual: A Treatise on Christian Perfection. Under its influence, numerous readers experienced entire sanctification, including Phoebe Palmer, the commonly acknowledged "mother of the Holiness Movement." Her own literary career formed the apex of writings that fueled the nineteenth-century Holiness Revival, shaping denominations, schools, and mission works far beyond the auspices of traditional Methodist contexts. Merritt's work played such a germinal role in this revival that several scholars consider its inception to mark the birth of the Holiness Movement. It thus proves fitting on the bicentennial of its initial publication to provide this commemorative edition of The Christian's Manual, along with prefatory essays relevant to "Reading Holiness" by Wallace Thornton, Jr.

This volume includes the full text of The Christian's Manual by Timothy Merritt. It is not a scanned facsimile of a used book. It has not been "updated" or edited into modern English, punctuation or grammar, but is accurate to the author 's own style and usage. The text has been carefully proofread for accuracy and formatted for easier reading by today's readers. Every effort has been made to prevent disordered text.