John Wesley taught that a believer could, in this life, be brought to a state he called Christian perfection or entire sanctification, not sinless in the sense of never erring, but cleansed of the settled inclination to sin and filled instead with perfect love of God and neighbor. Wesley treated this as a real, obtainable goal of the Christian life, though he was cautious about claiming the experience himself and never reduced it to a single formula for how or when it arrived.
A century later, Phoebe Palmer, a laywoman in New York City, gave Wesley's teaching a sharper, more immediate shape. From 1835 she hosted what became known as the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness, drawing clergy and laity of multiple denominations who sought entire sanctification as a definite, datable experience rather than a gradual lifelong process, laid on what she called the altar of consecration and claimed by faith in a single decisive moment. Palmer's altar theology, as it came to be called, spread through her writing and speaking well beyond her own meeting, and it fed directly into the camp meeting revivalism that carried the Holiness message across the American frontier through the second half of the nineteenth century, giving Wesley's careful, unhurried doctrine of gradual growth in grace a distinctly American, instantaneous, second-blessing shape.