The Great Oneida Love-in (February 1969 | Volume: 20, Issue: 2)

The Great Oneida Love-in

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Authors: Morris Bishop

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February 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 2

Sin, the conviction of sin, the assurance of punishment for sin, pervaded pioneer America like the fever and ague, and took nearly as many victims. Taught that in Adam’s fall we had sinned all, threatened with hell-fire by revivalist preachers, tortured by the guilt of intimate offenses, earnest youths whipped themselves into madness and suicide, and died crying that they had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is unforgivable, though no one knows quite what it is.

The year 1831 was known as the Great Revival, when itinerant evangelists powerfully shook the bush and gathered in a great harvest of sinners. In September of that year John Humphrey Noyés, a twenty-yearold Dartmouth graduate and a law student in Putney, Vermont, attended such a revival. He was in a mood of metaphysical despair, aggravated by a severe cold. During the exhortings the conviction of salvation came to him. Light gleamed upon his soul. “Ere the day was done,” he wrote later, “I had concluded to devote myself to the service and ministry of God.”

Noyes was a young man of gaod family. His father was a Dartmouth graduate, a successful merchant in Putney, and a congressman. John was a bookish youth, delighting in history, romance, and poetry of a martial character, such as lives of Napoleon or of the Crusaders or Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion . He was redhaired and freckled, and thought himself too homely ever to consider marriage. But when he began preaching his face shone like an angel’s; one of his sons later averred that “there was about him an unmistakable and somewhat unexpected air of spiritual assurance.” According to his phrenological analysis, his bumps of amativeness, conibativeness, and self-esteem were large, his benevolence and philoprogenitiveness very large. His life confirmed these findings.

After his mystical experience in Putney, Noyes spent a year in the Andover Theological Seminary (Congregational). He found his teachers and companions lukewarm in piety, and devoted himself to an intensive study of the New Testament, most of which he could recite by heart. A divine direction—“I know that ye seek Jesus which was crucified. He is not here”—sent him from Andover to the Yale Theological Seminary in New Haven. There he came in contact with the doctrine of perfectionism and was allured by it.

Perfectionism asserted that men may be freed from sin and attain in this life the perfect holiness necessary to salvation. It rejected therefore the consequences of original sin and went counter to the Calvinistic dogma of total depravity. Perfectionism took shape early in the nineteenth century and found lodgment among adventurous groups in New Haven, Newark, Albany, and in villages of central New York, “the burned-over district,” where religion smote with a searing flame. Perfectionism was likely to develop into antinomianism, the contention that the faithful are “directly infused with the holy spirit” and thus free from the claims and obligations of Old Testament moral