The Nineteenth Century: Irving, Wesley, and the Seers¶

The nineteenth century is where this history changes gear. Before it, reports are scattered through chronicles and vitae; after it, they come with newspapers, committees, medical men and organisations with minutes. The gifts become a public question, argued in print, and the argument produces a movement.

It also produces the reaction. The century that saw the first organised restoration of tongues and healing saw the cessationist position harden into a school — not the pastoral caution of the Reformers, but a thesis defended against revival, against Rome, and against the credulity of the age.

The claim¶

The nineteenth century is when the restoration of the gifts becomes public and organised, and when the cessationist reaction hardens into a settled position. The two developments belong together. Every new claim of healing raised the stakes of the argument, and every scandal confirmed the sceptics. By 1900 the question was no longer academic; it had congregations, income, and enemies.

Wesley and the Methodists: an expectation, not a doctrine¶

John Wesley died in 1791, but the movement he left set the tone. He was not a Pentecostal before his time: he did not campaign for the gift of tongues, and he was careful about anything that smelled of enthusiasm. But his Journal records healings and deliverances across the revival, he prayed for the sick as a matter of course, and he published a medical handbook, Primitive Physick (1747), because he believed God healed through means as well as without them.

What the Methodists carried into the century was therefore not a doctrine of the gift of healing but an expectation: that God answers prayer for the sick, now, and that the church should ask. That expectation ran into the Holiness movement, where Phoebe Palmer's Tuesday meetings in New York taught entire consecration, and from there into the camp meetings where healing was sought as a distinct blessing.

Irving and 1830¶

Edward Irving was a Scottish Presbyterian minister of extraordinary gifts and no judgement about how to use them. He preached in London at Regent Square to crowds that included lawyers and aristocrats, and he became convinced that the church had lost the gifts Paul commanded it to desire.

In 1830 reports reached him from the west of Scotland. A young woman in Port Glasgow, Margaret MacDonald, reportedly fell into trances and spoke in words she did not understand, and healings were reported among the fishing families of the Clyde. Accounts were written down and carried to London, and by 1831 the same phenomena were appearing in Irving's own congregation: utterances, interpretations, prophecies.

The result was chaos and then discipline. In 1832 the trustees of Regent Square barred him from the pulpit; in 1833 the London presbytery deposed him — on doctrine, over his teaching about the humanity of Christ, though the tongues made him notorious. He died in 1834, and the Catholic Apostolic Church was organised largely by others, with twelve "apostles" called from 1832 in an order Irving never held.

Irving's importance is not that he was right about everything. It is that he made the question public and organised, in a city that read newspapers. After him, a church could not treat the gifts as a medieval curiosity.

The faith-cure movement¶

The American wing grew out of the Holiness revival. Charles Cullis, a Boston physician, held conventions for divine healing from the 1870s, and "faith cure" homes multiplied in the 1880s and 1890s — places where the sick were prayed for, often alongside ordinary care. A. B. Simpson, whose Christian Alliance of 1887 became the Christian and Missionary Alliance, taught healing as part of the atonement. Carrie Judd Montgomery, healed in 1879, published The Prayer of Faith (1880) and became one of the movement's most widely read writers.

Its most spectacular figure was John Alexander Dowie, a Scots-Australian who came to America in 1888, built a healing ministry in Chicago, and founded Zion City, Illinois, in 1901. His authoritarianism and financial collapse are part of the story, and honest history tells them. But the movement he represented had made healing a public claim with institutions, publications and a clientele — the infrastructure Pentecostalism would inherit.

A century of seers¶

The gifts returned in a century crowded with rival revelations. Mormonism was founded in 1830; modern spiritualism dates from the Hydesville rappings of 1848; Christian Science and Theosophy both appeared in 1875; Catholic visionaries, Irvingite prophets, and the revival seers of Wales and Ulster all claimed sight into another world.

That crowding is why the argument about miracles was so heated, and why sceptics generalised so easily: a claim of healing could be filed with table-rapping and mesmerism, and often was. The believer's reply is the one this casebook keeps making — a counterfeit implies a currency. But the historian should admit that the era made discernment both more urgent and more difficult.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that organised, public, documented claims of healing and tongues predate Azusa Street by seventy years; that the restoration was a nineteenth-century development, not a twentieth-century invention; and that the cessationist reaction hardened in the same period, as a position defended rather than a tradition assumed.

It does not prove: that Irving's prophets were true, or that Dowie healed anyone. It proves that the question had moved from the margin to the centre of public argument — which is where Azusa Street found it.