Introduction

There are books that arrive in the world quietly, find a modest audience, and then disappear into the long silence of forgotten shelves. And then there are books that arrive like a letter written in urgency, pressed into the hands of strangers on street corners, passed from congregation to congregation, read aloud in farmhouse kitchens and city mission halls until the pages soften and the spines crack. Byron J. Rees wrote this book in the second category, and he wrote it fast — by his own admission, in the midst of “laborious and unceasing revival work,” with no time to polish sentences or improve style, driven by a conviction that the time was short and that souls were being saved or damned with what he called “electric speed.” That urgency has not aged. It has, if anything, intensified. The world moves faster now than it did in 1898, and the hunger Rees was trying to feed — the hunger for something real beneath the surface of religious performance, for an interior life that is not merely managed but genuinely transformed — is if anything more acute in our own moment than it was in his.

This edition is offered to contemporary readers who may know nothing of the nineteenth-century Holiness movement, who may have never encountered the theological vocabulary of entire sanctification, and who may approach this slim volume with curiosity rather than conviction. That is precisely the right posture. Rees himself was not writing for the already-convinced alone. He was writing, as he says plainly in his preface, with the hope that “some seeking heart may be helped.” He was writing for the hungry, and hunger is not a condition that requires denominational membership or doctrinal fluency. It requires only honesty about one’s own interior state.

Before we go further, a word about what we know and do not know. Byron J. Rees was a figure in the late nineteenth-century American Holiness revival, associated with the Pentecostal movement in its pre-Azusa Street sense — that is, the movement centered on entire sanctification and the fullness of the Holy Spirit as taught in the Wesleyan tradition, rather than the later movement associated with speaking in tongues. He was the author of several other works, including titles on Christlikeness and what he called “full salvation,” and the introduction to this volume was written by Seth C. Rees, almost certainly a family relation, who was himself a prominent Holiness evangelist. Beyond these broad outlines, the biographical record available to us is limited, and this edition makes no attempt to fill that silence with invention. What we can say with confidence is that the voice in these pages is consistent, passionate, and unmistakably personal — the voice of someone who has not merely studied an experience but believes he has lived it, and who is desperate to communicate it to others before the moment passes.

To read this book well, it helps to understand the cultural and spiritual atmosphere in which it was written, because that atmosphere is both very different from our own and, in certain essential respects, eerily familiar. The 1890s in America were a decade of enormous intellectual ferment. Darwinian evolution had been in circulation for nearly forty years and had thoroughly unsettled the relationship between scientific inquiry and religious faith. The higher criticism of the Bible, imported largely from German universities, was working its way through American seminaries and pulpits, raising questions about the historical reliability of scripture that many ordinary churchgoers found deeply disorienting. Industrialization was reshaping the social fabric of the country, drawing populations into cities, breaking apart the rhythms of rural life that had for generations provided the backdrop for evangelical Christianity, and creating new forms of poverty and dislocation that the churches were struggling to address.

Into this environment, the Holiness movement arrived with a kind of fierce simplicity. Its central claim was not primarily intellectual or social but experiential: that the Christian life as described in the New Testament was not merely an aspiration but an actual possibility, that the interior disorder of the human soul — what the tradition called “inbred sin” or “the carnal mind” — could be genuinely addressed and not merely managed, and that this transformation was available now, by faith, to anyone willing to seek it. The movement was populist in its instincts and suspicious of what Rees calls, with barely concealed contempt, the “bugs of biology, the rocks of geology, and the stars of astronomy” being served to famishing congregations in place of spiritual nourishment. This was not anti-intellectualism in the simple sense — Rees himself writes with considerable rhetorical sophistication and quotes freely from literature and theology — but it was a protest against a particular kind of intellectual performance that had come to substitute for genuine pastoral care.

The protest resonated. Tens of thousands of people across denominational lines found in the Holiness movement something they had not been able to find in the mainline churches of their day: a direct, unmediated encounter with the possibility of interior change. Camp meetings drew enormous crowds. Holiness papers and books circulated in numbers that would be impressive even by modern standards. The publishing enterprise that Rees’s introduction describes — the “constant and growing demand for full-salvation literature” — was a real phenomenon, not a promotional fantasy. People were hungry, and they were reading.

What is striking, from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, is how much of this landscape has returned. The specific theological vocabulary is different, and the institutional structures have shifted, but the underlying dynamic — a widespread sense that official religion has become too comfortable with the intellectual fashions of the age, too willing to trade spiritual substance for cultural respectability, too quick to offer explanation where people are asking for transformation — is recognizable to anyone paying attention to contemporary religious life. The hunger Rees was addressing has not been satisfied. It has simply found new forms.

This is not a systematic theology. It is not a commentary, a devotional in the conventional sense, or a work of apologetics. It is something rarer and, in some ways, more demanding: it is an extended act of spiritual persuasion, written by someone who believes he is in possession of something genuinely important and is trying, with considerable urgency and not a little rhetorical skill, to give it away.

The organizing center of the book is a single verse from the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, the prayer that Jesus offers for his disciples on the night before his crucifixion: “Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth.” Rees takes this prayer seriously as a prayer — that is, as an expression of what Jesus actually wanted for the people who followed him, what he considered most essential for their flourishing and effectiveness. The book unfolds as a sustained meditation on what it would mean for that prayer to be answered, in the life of the early disciples and in the life of any reader willing to consider the question.

The chapters are short. The prose moves quickly. Rees was writing in the midst of revival meetings, and the rhythm of the book reflects that context — it has the cadence of someone speaking to a live audience, watching faces, adjusting emphasis, circling back to a point from a new angle when he senses it has not yet landed. This is not a weakness. It is one of the book’s great strengths, and it means that the text rewards a certain kind of reading: not the slow, analytical reading you might bring to a work of systematic theology, but the attentive, open reading you might bring to a letter from someone who knows you well and is telling you something they consider urgent.

The best approach is to read it in relatively long stretches rather than a chapter at a time. The chapters build on each other, and the cumulative effect of the argument — which is less a logical argument than an experiential one, an attempt to make a certain kind of interior reality imaginable and then desirable — depends on momentum. Read it the way you might listen to a piece of music: not stopping to analyze each phrase, but allowing the whole to work on you before you begin to evaluate the parts.

You will encounter theological vocabulary that may be unfamiliar. Words like “sanctification,” “entire sanctification,” “the carnal mind,” “inbred sin,” and “the Comforter” carry specific freight in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition that they do not necessarily carry in ordinary usage. Rees is generally careful to explain what he means by these terms, and this edition has been prepared in contemporary English to make that explanation as accessible as possible. But it is worth knowing, as you read, that these are not merely abstract theological categories for Rees — they are descriptions of interior experiences that he believes are real, verifiable, and available. He is not asking you to accept a doctrine. He is asking you to consider a possibility.

It is also worth noting what Rees explicitly says he is not doing. He is not waging controversy. He is not attempting to refute opposing theological positions or to establish the superiority of one denominational tradition over another. He says this in his preface with a directness that is itself characteristic of his style: “Not controversy, not theology, but to save souls.” This is a pastoral book, not a polemical one, and it should be read in that spirit. If you find yourself wanting to argue with a particular claim, by all means note the disagreement — but do not let it stop you from continuing. The argument Rees is making is cumulative and experiential, and a single point of friction early in the book should not be allowed to close off what comes later.

Beneath the specific theological claims about sanctification and the Holiness life, there is a deeper argument running through this book that transcends its particular historical moment and speaks directly to questions that any thoughtful person is likely to be carrying. It is an argument about the nature of human interiority — about what is actually going on inside us, beneath the level of our conscious intentions and our public performances, and about whether that interior reality can be genuinely changed or whether we are simply condemned to manage it more or less skillfully until we die.

Rees takes seriously what he calls “the carnal mind” — the persistent tendency in human beings toward self-seeking, cowardice, resentment, and what he describes as a kind of deep resistance to genuine goodness. He is not being pessimistic about human nature in the abstract. He is being honest about something that most people, if they are paying attention to their own interior lives, will recognize: that there is a gap between what we want to want and what we actually want, between the person we intend to be and the person we find ourselves being under pressure, between our stated values and our actual responses when those values cost us something. This gap is not a minor inconvenience. It is, Rees argues, the central problem of the spiritual life, and it is the problem that the prayer of Jesus is addressed to.

What makes this argument interesting — and what distinguishes it from a great deal of contemporary self-help literature that covers similar territory — is that Rees does not believe the solution is primarily a matter of effort, discipline, or technique. He is not offering a program of spiritual formation in the modern sense, a set of practices that will gradually reshape the self through accumulated habit. He is offering something more radical and, in some ways, more demanding: the possibility of a genuine interior transformation that is received rather than achieved, that comes as a gift rather than as the product of sustained effort, and that addresses not merely the symptoms of the interior disorder but its root.