The Beauty of Holiness

Definition is a duty of prime importance in the discussion of great questions. By careful definition the pathway is blazed out, enabling both reader and writer to travel together with a better understanding of each other and with a feeling of greater satisfaction with the road traveled and with the goal toward which the road is so certainly known to lead. This necessity increases with the increase in the dignity and importance of the theme discussed. When we reach the subject of Christian Holiness careful analysis and lucid definitions and distinctions in terminology become of transcendent moment. Of all places we need definiteness, clearness and solidity in the realm of the deeper things of God.
The words entire sanctification, holiness and perfect love cannot with propriety be used interchangeably, except as to holiness and perfect love. These two terms refer to the state or condition into which men are brought by the power of God in the great second work of grace wrought in the heart of the regenerated. Entire sanctification is not a state or condition like holiness or perfect love, but is an act of God by which men are brought into the state of holiness. The one is an act of God, the other is a state of man. In entire sanctification God acts judicially, performing and certifying to a great act upon a subject upon his having met prescribed conditions. Holiness, or
perfect love, is a subject -- state -- a condition or life followed, lived, enjoyed by the subjects as the result of this wonderful act of sanctification by God the Father.
In this very distinction a potent argument is suggested against the theory of sanctification by growth. No man can grow into an act of another. Much less can a man grow into an act of God. The act of God in sanctifying rationally, logically and scripturally must precede the condition or state of holiness into which that act brings us. Consequently it is as illogical and absurd to think or talk of growing into a state of perfect love or holiness as of growing into the sanctifying act of God by which we are made holy. We are to grow in holiness or perfect love, but we cannot grow into it. We must be divinely put into the state by God's sanctifying act, and then we can and do grow and develop. and enlarge from day to day and from year to year in this blessed life. Indeed, growth anterior to entire sanctification, if it exist at all' is essentially faint, fickle, fitful and feeble, wholly unsatisfactory and marked by no substantial, steady progress. The energies and spiritual resources are practically absorbed in the work of resistance where the believer succeeds in maintaining a consistent life and an upright walk. The victory received in entire sanctification delivers from such an army of insurrectionary, traitorous foes within that the subsequent struggle is more one of vigilance than of battle, and thus the spiritual energies and resources are engaged in fruit-bearing and the growth and development inseparably connected therewith instead of constant warfare with inbred sin. The subsequent conflict or warfare of the sanctified Christian is one of restraining vigilance to "keep the body under."