Keswick's Authentic Voice by Herbert F. Stevenson, Editor

Keswick and its Message

Most movements have roots reaching back into the era before their actual inception. So it is with the Keswick Convention. Long before the first gatherings in a tent erected in a field adjoining the grounds of St. John’s Vicarage, Keswick, in 1875, which proved to be the initiation of the renowned annual assembly, the teachings concerning the “deepening of the spiritual life” now associated with the name of Keswick had been both exemplified in the lives of Christian people of many races and generations, and set forth in books in various languages. But the most amazing phenomenon of Church history is the way in which vital doctrines have become forgotten and temporarily “lost.” It was so with the very central truth of the Christian faith, which was obscured and buried under the teachings and trappings of Rome until Martin Luther rediscovered it in the glorious phrase “justified by faith”; and likewise the equally clear presentation in Scripture of the “life more abundant” in Christ has been strangely neglected—not only in mediaeval times, but right until the middle of the last century. Yet Luther himself had gone on from justification by faith to “the fullness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ”; and in our own country a book published toward the end of the seventeenth century, by a Puritan divine, the Rev. Walter Marshall, contained all that Keswick later reminted in present day language. It is amazing that this obscure Fellow of Winchester College should have come through personal study of the Scriptures to so clear an understanding of an aspect of truth generally disregarded. His book has a cumbrous title, characteristic of those days—The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, Opened in Sundry Practical Directions Suited Especially to the Cases of those who Labor under the Guilt and Power of Indwelling Sin. This is, of course, customarily abbreviated to its first phrase—The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. Remarkable as this book is, its author had no idea of proclaiming anything new: his purpose was solely to present, simply and clearly, what the Scriptures have to say on the subject of sanctification. And his book ran through several editions. There was accordingly nothing at all original about the message of Keswick: yet it came with a freshness and vitality almost amounting to a