Justified True Belief

(●) The son of freed slaves whose mission on a Los Angeles side street set off the Pentecostal movement. + In the spring of 1906 a Black preacher with one good eye, no denomination behind him and no money to speak of rented a tumbledown building on a Los Angeles side street for eight dollars a month. He put planks across empty nail kegs for benches. For about three years the meetings inside did not really stop, and preachers came from Chicago and Memphis and North Carolina, and from across the ocean, to sit on those planks. William J. Seymour is on a Christian apologetics site for a plain reason: few people since the Reformation have changed the shape of the world church as much. The Pew Research Center’s global count in 2011 put Pentecostals and charismatics together at about 584 million people, better than a quarter of all the Christians alive. The two words in that sentence are worth separating, since they get used interchangeably and mean different things. Pentecostals belong to the denominations the movement created for itself, the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ and their many cousins. Charismatics mostly stayed where they already were, Catholic or Anglican or Lutheran or Baptist, and brought the same expectation of the Spirit’s gifts in with them, and Pew puts the independent congregations that grew networks of their own on that side of the line as well. Most of those streams trace back, by one line of descent or another, to the meetings Seymour led. If you have ever seen a congregation raise their hands while they sing, or heard a pastor pray for the sick and expect something to happen, you have seen the long shadow of a room that most respectable people in 1906 crossed the street to avoid. Here is the fact about him worth remembering. He learned the doctrine he would spend his life preaching while sitting in a hallway, because the laws of Texas would not let a Black man sit in the classroom.

(●) 1870 AD: He was born in the Louisiana sugar country to parents who had been slaves five years before. + William Joseph Seymour was born on 2 May 1870 in Centerville, Louisiana, a village on the Bayou Teche in the cane-growing parishes west of New Orleans. His father Simon and his mother Phillis had both been born into slavery and were freed at the end of the Civil War, five years before the boy arrived. He was baptized as an infant at the Catholic parish in nearby Franklin, and grew up among Baptists as well; the family, like most freedmen’s families in the parish, took its religion where it could find it. The world he was born into closed almost as soon as it had opened. Reconstruction, the brief period when federal troops protected Black voting and officeholding in the defeated South, was collapsing through his childhood, and by the time he was seven it was finished. Schooling for Black children in the sugar parishes was thin to nonexistent. He learned to read anyway, mostly out of the Bible, and the self-taught quality of his prose stayed with him for life: plain, repetitive, soaked in Scripture, with the cadence of a man who has read one book many times rather than many books once.

(●) 1895 AD: He went north for work, found the holiness people, and lost the sight of his left eye to smallpox. + Like a great many young Black men of his generation he left the South to find wages. By 1895 he was in Indianapolis waiting tables at a hotel, and it was there, in a revival at Simpson Chapel, a Black Methodist Episcopal congregation, that he came to a settled faith of his own. Around the turn of the century he moved on to Cincinnati, and there he found the people who would give him his theology. They called themselves the Evening Light Saints, a nickname from Zechariah 14:7, and they belonged to the Church of God movement that had begun in Anderson, Indiana. They were holiness people, which means they taught that after a person is forgiven God does a second and deeper work, cleansing the heart of the old pull toward sin, and that this second work can be asked for and received. Forgiveness settles the debt, they would say; the second work goes after the appetite that ran it up. To that they added divine healing, the near return of Christ, and something rarer: they would not organize as a denomination and they would not keep a color line, because in the last light before the end, they said, the church would be one. Somewhere around 1901 smallpox nearly killed him. He came through it scarred, and blind in the left eye. By his own later account he had been refusing a call to preach, and he took the disease as the answer to his refusal. He stopped refusing. The Evening Light Saints gave him credentials, and the man who walked out of that sickroom was a minister with a disfigured face who, from then on, was easy for respectable people to underestimate.

(●) 1905 AD: In Houston he took down the doctrine of his life through an open classroom door. + He came to Houston in 1903, looking for relatives scattered by slavery and its aftermath, and fell in with a small Black holiness congregation pastored by a woman named Lucy Farrow. In 1905 Farrow took a position as governess to the children of a white holiness evangelist, Charles Fox Parham, and went with the family to Kansas. Seymour minded her pulpit while she was away. She came back with a story. In Parham’s Bible school in Topeka, on the first days of January 1901, students who had been searching the book of Acts for what marked the first Christians had begun to speak in languages they had never learned. Speaking in tongues is the name that stuck to it, and the students took it to be the same thing Luke reports of the disciples on the day of Pentecost. Parham drew the conclusion that would define the movement: this was the Bible evidence that a believer had been baptized with the Holy Spirit, by which he and the holiness preachers meant a distinct experience some time after conversion, a filling that hands a Christian power for the work rather than pardon for the past. Farrow said it had happened to her. Seymour, by every account, was skeptical first and convinced afterward. When Parham opened a short Bible school in Houston in December 1905, Seymour asked to attend. Texas law and Texas custom did not permit a Black student in a white classroom, so he sat in the hall outside the door and listened through it, an arrangement Parham later described as a concession he had made. Picture the thing plainly: a man in his mid-thirties, blind in one eye, sitting on a chair in a corridor with a notebook, taking down the doctrine that would carry his name around the world. He accepted it that winter. He would not experience it himself for another four months.

(●) 1906 AD: The Los Angeles mission that invited him padlocked its door against him, so the meeting moved to a front room on Bonnie Brae Street, where in April the thing he had been preaching finally happened. + A woman named Neely Terry had heard him preach in Houston, and her small holiness mission on Santa Fe Avenue in Los Angeles, pastored by Julia Hutchins, sent for him. He arrived on 22 February 1906. Within a few sermons he had told them that speaking in tongues is the Bible evidence of the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and the awkwardness of that was not lost on anybody: if it was true, nobody in the room had the baptism, and that included the man in the pulpit who had just said so. The door was locked against him. Seymour told the story himself, without heat, in the first issue of his newspaper: "It was the divine call that brought me from Houston, Texas, to Los Angeles... and I came to take charge of a mission on Santa Fe Street, and one night they locked the door against me." J. M. Roberts, who led the Southern California Holiness Association, came down with a group of holiness preachers to settle the doctrine and put the young man right. What happened instead is one of those details a legend would not invent: Roberts listened, said he wanted the thing himself, and asked Seymour to let him know when he received it. Turned out of the mission, Seymour stayed with the Asberry family at 214 North Bonnie Brae Street and prayed in their front room with a handful of people, most of them Black domestic workers and their friends. On 9 April 1906, in the middle of a fast, a man named Edward Lee spoke in tongues. That evening on Bonnie Brae seven more did, among them Jennie Evans Moore, who, the household said afterward, got up and played the piano though she had never been taught. Seymour himself received the experience on 12 April, after praying through the night. Word ran through the city’s Black neighborhoods and then out of them; the crowds filled the house, then the yard, and one evening the front porch collapsed under the weight of people.

(●) 1906 AD: On 14 April the meetings moved to 312 Azusa Street, and a free newspaper carried the news around the world. + They found a building forty feet by sixty on Azusa Street, a short industrial block near the edge of downtown. It had been the city’s first African Methodist Episcopal church; since then it had been a warehouse, a lumber store and a stable, and it still smelled like one. Rent was eight dollars a month. They laid planks across empty nail kegs for seats, and upstairs, under an eight-foot ceiling, they set aside a room for prayer. The first meeting was on 14 April 1906. Frank Bartleman, a white holiness preacher who was there from the beginning and wrote the fullest eyewitness account of it, left the picture of Seymour that has lasted. "Brother Seymour generally sat behind two empty shoe boxes, one on top of the other. He usually kept his head inside the top one during the meeting, in prayer." Nobody announced a sermon in advance. Nobody had a platform. The meetings ran morning, afternoon and night, and in practice they ran together, going on for something like three years. What the newspapers could not get over was who was in the room. Los Angeles in 1906 was a segregated city, and here were Black washerwomen praying over white businessmen’s wives, Mexicans and Chinese and Armenians and Russians in the same crowded rows. Bartleman put it in the sentence that is now quoted at every anniversary: "The 'color line' was washed away in the blood." The Los Angeles Daily Times sent a reporter on the evening of 17 April and ran the piece the next morning under the headline "Weird Babel of Tongues." That morning was 18 April 1906, and before the day was out San Francisco had been shaken to the ground and the mission had been pushed off the front page. Bartleman read the coincidence as a warning to the nation and scattered tracts saying so through the city by the thousand, and the crowds at Azusa got larger. In September 1906 the mission began printing a paper, The Apostolic Faith. It was free. It carried no advertising and no price, and it went out to whoever asked: five thousand copies of the first issue, and within a year around forty thousand of each number, carried by hand and by mail into the holiness missions of two continents.

(●) 1908 AD: He married Jennie Evans Moore, and inside five years he had lost his mentor, his mailing list and half his congregation. + The first blow came early. Seymour had welcomed Charles Parham as the movement’s leader and printed his warm letter in the first issue of the paper. Parham arrived in October 1906, looked at the meetings, saw Black and white seekers at the same altar and Black hands laid on white heads, and preached against what he saw in the ugliest terms available to him. The elders asked him to leave, and he spent the rest of his life denouncing Azusa Street. By December Seymour’s paper had printed its correction, without a word of complaint about the man: "Some are asking if Dr. Chas. F. Parham is the leader of this movement. We can answer no, he is not the leader of this movement of Azusa Mission." The second blow arrived wrapped in a wedding. On 13 May 1908 Seymour married Jennie Evans Moore, one of the seven who had spoken in tongues on Bonnie Brae two years earlier and by then a preacher in her own right. Not everyone at the mission was glad about it. Some of the workers held that with the Lord’s return so near, a man in his position had no business marrying. Whatever weight that objection carried with her, Clara Lum, who did much of the editorial work on the paper, left for Portland, Oregon, to join Florence Crawford’s work, and she took the national and international mailing lists with her. Seymour went to Portland to ask for them and came home without them. The paper continued from Oregon under the same name; the Los Angeles mission never printed another issue after May 1908, and the voice that had been heard on two continents went quiet almost overnight. The last blow came in 1911. Seymour, away on a preaching trip, left the pulpit to William H. Durham, a gifted Chicago pastor who had received his own experience at Azusa Street. Durham used it to preach the "finished work," his teaching that a believer is cleansed not by a second crisis after conversion but by the finished work of Christ received at the start. It was a real theological disagreement, and it split the young movement permanently. Crowds packed in to hear Durham. Seymour came back and locked the door against him, and Durham walked a few blocks away and took most of the congregation, including most of the white members, with him.

(●) 1922 AD: He died at fifty-two, pastor of a small congregation, in a city full of churches his meetings had started. + The last decade was quiet work. He traveled and preached where he was wanted, tried to hold together the scattered missions that still looked to him, and in 1915 published the one book he ever wrote, a manual of doctrine and church order for the Azusa Street mission and the congregations under it. The mission itself had become again what it had been at the start: a modest Black congregation, in a city where by then dozens of thriving Pentecostal churches, most of them white, owed their existence to what had happened on Azusa Street and had no further use for the man who led it. On 28 September 1922 he had a heart attack at the mission and died the same day, in his wife’s arms, at fifty-two. He was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles. Jennie pastored the congregation until her own death in 1936; the mission lost the building to foreclosure in 1931, and it was pulled down that July. Nothing of it stands. He died almost unknown outside his own circles, and the histories written by the movement he started for a long time gave the credit to other men. That has changed. The centenary of the revival in 2006 brought tens of thousands of people to Los Angeles from more than thirty countries, and the careful modern histories all begin where the story actually begins, in a rented front room on Bonnie Brae Street with a man praying who had been made to sit in a hallway to learn.

What He Taught

(T1) The baptism with the Holy Spirit is a gift of power on a cleansed life, and speaking in tongues is its Bible evidence. + Think of a man who has been pardoned of a crime, and then cured of the habit that led to it, and then handed the tools and the authority to go and do a job. Seymour taught that the Christian life comes in those three movements, and that most of the churches around him had stopped after the second. He used the standard holiness vocabulary and was careful with it. Justification is God forgiving a sinner and counting him righteous. Sanctification is the second work, God cleansing the heart of what Seymour called "original and Adamic sin," the inherited bent toward evil that forgiveness alone does not remove. The baptism with the Holy Spirit is neither of those. It is not a third cleansing; it is a gift of power laid on a life already cleansed, for the one purpose of witness, which is exactly what Jesus promises in Acts 1:8. And the sign that it has happened, Seymour insisted, is the sign that marked it on the day of Pentecost: "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance." (Acts 2:4) That last step, the sign, is where Christians divide, and the two sides have names. Cessationists hold that the miraculous gifts, tongues among them, belonged to the founding generation of the church and ended with it. Continuationists hold that the gifts continue and are given as the Spirit wills. Even inside that second camp, though, most Christians outside the classical Pentecostal denominations have never accepted that tongues is the one necessary evidence, and they point to Paul’s plain question, "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians 12:30), which expects the answer no. Seymour never dropped the doctrine. What he did, as the years went on, was put less and less weight on it, until he was saying that it was the smaller half of what he had to teach (T2). The manual he published in 1915 puts the weight of the evidence elsewhere, on love and on the Spirit’s work of teaching, and historians still argue over how far that amounted to a change of mind.

(Q) "The Baptism with the Holy Ghost is a gift of power upon the sanctified life; so when we get it we have the same evidence as the Disciples received on the Day of Pentecost, in speaking in new tongues." + Source: The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (Los Angeles, September 1906), page 2, from the statement of what the movement stands for, printed in the paper Seymour edited. The statement runs through repentance, justification, sanctification, the baptism and divine healing in order, each with its chain of Scripture references, and it is the closest thing the Azusa Street mission ever produced to a creed. The original prints "(Acts 2:3,4)" inside the sentence at the point where the evidence is named.

(T2) Love is the real evidence, and power without it is a counterfeit. + By 1907 there were people in the meetings keeping score. Who had spoken and who had not; who had the deeper gift; which visiting preacher had the greater anointing. Seymour watched a movement built on the Spirit start behaving like a league table, and he began to hammer, issue after issue, on the one test he thought settled the matter. His argument is Paul’s and he made no attempt to improve on it. "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal." (1 Corinthians 13:1) Seymour put the test in the language of a pastor who knew his congregation, writing to the baptized saints in the summer of 1907: "Tongues are one of the signs that go with every baptized person, but it is not the real evidence of the baptism in the every day life. Your life must measure with the fruits of the Spirit. If you get angry, or speak evil, or backbite, I care not how many tongues you may have, you have not the baptism with the Holy Spirit." There is one more thing worth noticing, and it is about timing. The line he is best remembered for, that Pentecostal power summed up is just more of God’s love, does not come from the first flush of 1906 when everything was going his way. He wrote it in May 1908, in the last issue his mission ever printed, with Parham denouncing him in public and the paper itself about to fall silent. A man in that position writing that the whole point of Pentecostal power is more love is either fooling himself or telling the truth at some cost. Those who knew him thought the second, and Bartleman, who had no reason to flatter him, wrote that in the early meetings they would not allow an unkind word said even against their opposers.

(Q) "The Pentecostal power, when you sum it all up, is just more of God’s love. If it does not bring more love, it is simply a counterfeit." + Source: The Apostolic Faith 2, no. 13 (Los Angeles, May 1908), page 3. The lines sit directly beneath an article signed with Seymour’s initials, in the final issue printed at Azusa Street. They go on: "Pentecost means to live right in the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, which is the standard... It brings us all into one common family."

(T3) God turns no one away for the color of his skin, so neither may his church. + In 1906 a Black man in Los Angeles could not eat in most restaurants downtown, join most trade unions, or buy a house in most of the city. In the room on Azusa Street a Black laundress would lay her hands on a white woman’s head and pray for her, and the white woman would thank her for it. That is the fact that made the papers, and the police, and eventually Charles Parham, so uncomfortable; it was stranger to Los Angeles than the tongues were. Seymour did not argue the point from social theory. He argued it from Peter’s roof in Joppa and the house of a Roman officer, where the apostle, a Jew who had been raised to keep his distance from Gentiles, watched the Spirit fall on a room full of them and said, "Truly I understand that God shows no partiality" (Acts 10:34). He argued it from Joel’s promise that the Spirit would be poured out on sons and daughters, on old and young, and on male and female servants (Acts 2:17-18), a promise that runs straight through the social ranks it names. And he argued it from Paul: in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free (Galatians 3:28). What made this a teaching rather than a mood is that Seymour applied it to the one thing churches guard most jealously, which is who gets to lead. The paper reported, evenly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, that the work had begun among the colored people and that God made no difference in nationality. Anyone the Spirit could use was used, and the tests applied were the ones Scripture applies. It did not last, and part of why it did not last is a fault in his own record, the color bar he wrote into his own constitution nine years later. But for a few years, in the most segregated decade of American life, it was real, and everyone who walked into that building knew it.

(Q) "No instrument that God can use is rejected on account of color or dress or lack of education. This is why God has so built up the work." + Source: The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 3 (Los Angeles, November 1906), page 1. The sentence comes in a paragraph describing an ordinary evening at the mission: a Mexican or a German who cannot speak English stands up and testifies in his own language, and the congregation says amen anyway.

(T4) One salvation is preached in four parts: forgiveness, cleansing, healing, and power. + Seymour had a habit of counting on his fingers. In the first issue of his paper he laid out what he called the precious atonement, meaning everything won by the death of Christ, in four numbered points: first forgiveness, second sanctification, third healing of the body, fourth the baptism with the Holy Spirit. The pattern was not his invention, since the holiness preachers before him had a fourfold gospel of their own, but he set it out in his own order, and in his hands it became the skeleton of Pentecostal preaching. Its shape is still visible in the name of at least one large denomination that counts its gospel in four. The third point is the one that needs care. Seymour taught that bodily healing is part of what the cross purchased, reading Isaiah’s "with his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5) through Matthew’s application of the same prophecy to the sick Jesus healed in Capernaum (Matthew 8:16-17). Christians who agree that God heals have divided ever since over whether that makes healing something a believer may claim, and the plain evidence of the New Testament cuts both ways: Paul heals the sick and also leaves Trophimus ill at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20). Whatever a reader makes of the doctrine, Seymour never preached it as a man with an untroubled body. He prayed for the sick with a face scarred by smallpox and one blind eye, and there is no record of him ever explaining that away. The other half of the teaching was about money, and he was fierce about it. The meetings took no collections. The paper was free and carried no price. A dozen or so workers gave the mission their whole time and lived on what came in unasked, an arrangement the paper called the faith line: "We believe in the faith line for Christian workers, and no collections are taken." Seymour’s reasoning was short: the truth belongs to God, who handed it over to be told and not sold.

(Q) "We that are the messengers of this precious atonement ought to preach all of it, justification, sanctification, healing, the baptism with the Holy Ghost, and signs following." + Source: "The Precious Atonement," signed W. J. Seymour, The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (Los Angeles, September 1906), page 2. The article is the closest thing to a systematic statement he ever published in the paper, and it is where the fourfold pattern is set out point by point. On money, in a later issue, he was just as brief: "This truth belongs to God. We have no right to tax anyone for the truth, because God has entrusted us with it to tell it." (The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 3, page 2)

(Q) "We are not fighting men or churches, but seeking to displace dead forms and creeds and wild fanaticisms with living, practical Christianity." + Source: The Apostolic Faith 1, no. 1 (Los Angeles, September 1906), page 2. The sentence closes the movement’s statement of purpose, and the next line gives the motto, "Love, Faith, Unity are our watchwords, and Victory through the Atoning Blood our battle cry." Seymour meant the first half of that sentence literally. He was turned out of one church, denounced by his own teacher and stripped of his paper, and in thirteen issues of a publication he controlled he never once answered an attacker by name.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Within a year the fire had jumped the walls, and the map of world Christianity was being redrawn. + The mechanism was simple and almost impossible to stop: a preacher would read the free paper, travel to Los Angeles, sit on a plank for a week or two, and go home and do it again. Take Gaston B. Cashwell, who came from Dunn, North Carolina in November 1906. He went home, rented a three-story tobacco warehouse, and on the last day of 1906 opened a meeting that ran a month, and a large part of the southern holiness world came out of it with him. The Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church and a body of Free Will Baptists in the region all entered the movement through that revival. A year later A. J. Tomlinson received the experience under Cashwell’s preaching at Cleveland, Tennessee, and took the Church of God in with him. Charles Harrison Mason came from Memphis in March 1907 and stayed about five weeks, which is a long while to sit on a plank across a nail keg. He carried it home to the Church of God in Christ, which became the largest historically Black Pentecostal body in America. It crossed the ocean the same way, one traveler at a time. Thomas Ball Barratt, a Cornish-born Methodist minister working in Norway, never sat on one of those planks himself. He received the experience in the autumn of 1906 in his room at a missionary guest house in New York, after corresponding with the mission, and took it home in December to Christiania, the city now called Oslo. From Norway it reached England through Alexander Boddy’s parish at Sunderland in 1907, and from there it spread across northern Europe. Missionaries went out from the mission itself to Africa, India and China, some of them badly prepared and some of them not. The institutional shape came later and elsewhere, which is the part most people get backwards. The Assemblies of God organized at Hot Springs in 1914, drawing heavily on ministers formed in this stream, a good many of whom had until then carried credentials from C. H. Mason’s Church of God in Christ. Mason came to the founding council himself, preached, and brought his choir with him. Swedish Baptists out of William Durham’s Chicago mission, itself a child of Azusa Street, went to Belém in 1910 and founded what became the largest Protestant church in Brazil. A hundred years on, the Pew Research Center’s 2011 count of Pentecostals and charismatics stood at about 584 million, better than a quarter of the world’s Christians, most of them in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

(†) The churches that were embarrassed by him ended up singing his songs. + The first reviews were brutal. The Los Angeles press treated the mission as a freak show. Holiness leaders who had spent their lives preaching sanctification wrote furious pamphlets against what they regarded as fanaticism, and more than one of them put the case in openly racist terms. For half a century afterward, Pentecostals were the people other Christians did not invite to the meeting, and the older denominations could be fairly confident that whatever was happening in the storefronts was not going to happen to them. Then it crossed the wall, and it crossed in the direction nobody had expected. In April 1960 Dennis Bennett, the Episcopal rector of a large parish in Van Nuys, California, told his congregation that he had spoken in tongues, and the story went national; suddenly this was not a storefront phenomenon but a question for the oldest denominations in the country. In February 1967 a student retreat at Duquesne University began the Catholic charismatic renewal, and in 1975 Pope Paul VI received its international congress in Rome. Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and Presbyterians all developed renewal movements of their own. The result is that the marks of that room are now everywhere, including in churches that have never heard the name Azusa Street: hands lifted in worship, choruses sung and repeated, testimony from the floor, prayer for the sick as a normal part of a service, and an expectation that God acts now and not only in the pages of a book. None of that settles the question of whether Seymour was right. Christians who hold the cessationist position (T1), that the miraculous gifts belonged to the founding generation and ended with it, have made their case at length, and it deserves an answer on its own ground rather than a headcount. What is no longer arguable is the scale of what began on 14 April 1906.

(†) In 1994 the white Pentecostal bodies knelt in Memphis and washed the feet of the Black ones. + The movement that began in the most integrated room in America segregated itself within a generation, and it did so by ordinary institutional steps rather than by one dramatic decision anybody could point to afterward. The Assemblies of God was almost entirely white from its first council in 1914, and in 1939 it adopted a rule against ordaining Black ministers at the national level, a rule that stood until 1962. The Church of God in Christ remained Black. The Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, organized in 1948 to speak for the movement as a whole, did not invite the Black bodies, and in the forty-six years it lasted it never had a Black member denomination. In October 1994 the leaders of those bodies met in Memphis. They dissolved the old all-white fellowship, and during the meeting Donald Evans, a white Assemblies of God pastor who was there only as a stand-in for someone else, knelt and washed the feet of Bishop Ithiel Clemmons of the Church of God in Christ and asked forgiveness on behalf of white Pentecostals. Bishop Charles Blake then asked forgiveness of Thomas Trask of the Assemblies of God for what Black Pentecostals had harbored in return. They adopted a Racial Reconciliation Manifesto and formed a new body open to all of them, and the participants and the press alike called that week the Memphis Miracle. That week did less than the headlines claimed, and more than a cynic would allow. The denominations remain largely separate, and a manifesto is not a merger. But the language used in Memphis was not the language of a diversity policy; it was repentance, and it was explicitly a return to something the participants believed their own grandparents had been handed and had thrown away. The man they had in mind had been dead seventy-two years.

(†) Where his own record is open to question: the color bar he wrote into his constitution, and the padlock he governed by. + Two things in the primary sources have to be said plainly, and both of them come from the years after he had been badly used. - The constitution. In 1915 Seymour published his manual of doctrine and church order, and the constitution printed in it lays down that the bishop of the mission shall be a colored person, and that "The bishop, vice bishop and trustees must be people of color." The reason is not hard to find. Twice a white leader had come into his mission and tried to take it: Parham in 1906 and Durham in 1911, and the second had walked out with most of the congregation. He was fencing the one thing left to him. But a rule that reserves an office by race is the rule Parham used, turned around, and it cannot be squared with what Seymour himself had preached from Peter’s sermon in Caesarea and from Galatians (T3). Understandable is not the same as right, and the cost was exactly what the rule was meant to prevent: the most integrated congregation in America became, and stayed, a small Black congregation. - The padlock. Three times a door decided a dispute. Julia Hutchins locked him out of the Santa Fe mission in 1906. He and his elders shut Parham out later that year, and in 1911 he came home and locked out Durham. The first was done to him, and the second is hard to fault; a man who has just been denounced from his own pulpit in racial terms is entitled to his building. The third is a real question. Durham was preaching a doctrine Seymour believed to be wrong, and he had the right to say so; whether the answer to a theological argument is a key is another matter, and the preacher who taught that the evidence of the Spirit is the fruit of the Spirit handled the worst week of his ministry with a lock. Set against that is something the record also shows. He had a paper with a readership on two continents and he never used it to settle a score. When he corrected the claim that Parham led the movement, he did it in four plain sentences with no accusation attached, and after December 1906 the man’s name simply does not appear in his pages again. Whatever else is true of him, he did not fight back in print, and he had every opportunity.