PETER POIRET
PETER POIRET
[It may be correctly stated that the material below does not contain an account of the
subject’s entire sanctification nor a direct testimony to the experience. It is inserted as a matter of interest and evidence that Christians from the earliest times were aware of the need of that ”holiness without which no man shall see the Lord.” And, in some cases their written insights on the subject may indeed have originated from personal experience. — DVM]
Peter Poiret, an early Protestant writer, in his Divine Economy, says: “But when he thinks
himself far advanced, and his activity at an end, and as it were quite wearied and spent in this holy employment, which is a true worship of God; then does God strike him with a light so penetrating and so lively, and with motions so internal and powerful, that all the corruption of the inward recesses of his soul, is stirred up from the very bottom. And this discovers to him on one hand so great and so perfect a purity in God, that all his past good works and righteousness seem to him but little in comparison of it; and on the other hand, the corruption that is at the bottom of his heart which he discerned not before, appears to him so heinous that not daring to do anything more, nor to use any activity so corrupt as he is, despairing of whatever may come from him, he casts himself as dead into God’s hands.
“From the time of this perfect resignation, God becomes all in man: he works in him as he
pleases and without opposition; and there grace is absolute mistress. ‘Tis God that then disposes of the liberty and faculties of man, of his desires, his understandings, and of everything: he moves and penetrates all by the motions of his love and of his divine light; but in such a manner as is at first very dreadful and mortifying to sense; because God’s motions investing the inmost recesses of the soul are expelling thence their most central and rooted corruption, which is not alone without great agonies which are extremely acute and desolating to a soul that is by nature of the greatest and tenderest perception imaginable.
“But this perfect operation of purifying grace being finished, the soul comes pure out of this
furnace, and lives thence forward in the bright element of reigning grace. She is then a new creature, and her divine faculties, now that they are repaired in their utmost recesses are governed
and acted by the Holy Ghost, who uses them as he sees convenient for God’s glory and the benefit of other souls.”
Source: “Objections to Holiness Considered” by H. A. Baldwin
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HOW THEY ENTERED CANAAN (A Collection of Holiness Experience Accounts) Compiled by Duane V. Maxey
Vol. I — Named Accounts