THE MOTHER OF THE HOLINESS MOVEMENT
From the book, "The Cure of All Ills", Revivalist record the impact of the prayer life of Phobe Palmer in the holiness movement.
In this spiral of spiritual, social, moral and political degeneracy of the decade preceding 1857, God looked for a man, but he found a women, Phoebe Palmer. She was the wife of a Holiness Methodist physician in New York.
For years she had been cloistered away in her prayer closet and study until she was so filled with the Spirit she "spoke the Word of God with Boldness,"(Acts 4:31).
She initially convened a Tuesday Meeting in her home ... and became a catalyst for a movement which changed the shape of American Protestantism.
From an affluent home, her head became waters and her eyes fountains of tears that she might weep day and night for the poor that inhabited the ghettos, the unfortunate and illegitimate.
Her theme was - the Spirit's baptism is the secret of pulpit power and the fountain of spiritual energy.
In the decade of the 1850's, Phoebe's physician husband, Dr. Walter Palmer, decided to retire from his medical practice and accompany her as an evangelistic team.
The New York Journal notated about one of her meetings, "It was an extraordinary revival," Prayer was a significant part of her services "with all classes kneeling at the altar, from little children to the city mayor."
By the close of 1857 these anointed meetings had so impacted the churches in the eastern states that many of them came to call conferences on prayer and set aside one day to pray weekly.
He went on to qoute, "Palmer might well be called the 'Mother of the Holiness Movement' which eventually gave birth to such denominations as the Church of the Nazarene, the Church of God (Anderson, Ind.), The salvation army, and also pentecostal groups like the Assemblies of God, The pentecostal Holiness and the Church of God, (Cleveland, Tenn.)