Manie Payne Ferguson

Manie Payne Ferguson was an Irish-born American evangelist, social worker, mission leader, poet, and hymn writer associated with the nineteenth-century Holiness movement. Born in County Carlow, Ireland, in 1850, she married Theodore Pollock Ferguson in 1883. Theodore had served in the United Presbyterian tradition and became an itinerant Holiness evangelist. The Fergusons moved to Los Angeles during the mid-1880s and in 1886 founded the work that became the Peniel Mission, an interdenominational rescue mission devoted to evangelism, practical aid, and the proclamation of holiness.

Ferguson was not merely the spouse of a mission founder. She became a major leader of the Peniel work, especially after Theodore's death in 1920, and continued directing it until her own death in Los Angeles on June 8, 1932. The mission expanded beyond Los Angeles and developed work in other parts of the United States and overseas. Her writings preserve the theological world of that ministry: conversion, sanctification, reliance on the Holy Spirit, prayer, and practical service among people living at the social margins.

She wrote numerous poems and hymns. Hymnary catalogs more than twenty texts under her name, including Fairest of All the Earth Beside and O What Shall It Profit Thee, Brother, as well as the hymn commonly called Blessed Quietness. Her own publications included Echoes from Beulah and a biographical and devotional work about Theodore Ferguson and the Peniel Missions. Ferguson's importance to hymnody lies in the way her songs gave the American Holiness movement a vocabulary of Spirit-filled assurance, sanctification, testimony, and pastoral comfort.