Henry Alline - Early Life

Early Life

Henry was born in Newport Rhode Island, the second child of eight, to William Alline and Rebeccah Clark. Here he lived and attended school until the age of twelve. By his own account he was an advanced student. His religious education began at this time, receiving instruction at school, within the church, as well as at home. At about the age of eight he appears to have had his first religious experience, although not fully aware of its nature at the time. The event placed him in a state of terror and drove him to seek out a fuller understanding of Christian theology.

After the deportation of the Acadians, Nova Scotia’s fine farmlands in the Bay of Fundy region remained empty and in an effort to repopulate the country the British government offered the recently vacated lands in grant to Protestants who wished to move to the colony. William Alline took up the offer and arrived in the fall of 1760, taking up his land grant in Falmouth, Nova Scotia. With the families move Henry’s formal education came to an end.

Life in the new land was hard and uncertain. They had left behind a vibrant town and warm comfortable home to replace it with a tent and food shortages. The new Planter townships lacked churches, schools and other infrastructure familiar in the towns they had left behind in New England. The townships remained isolated, connected to the outside world by narrow paths through the forest and ships along the coast. For the first few years, as Britain and France remained at war, threats of attack by France’s allies, the Mi’Kmaq, remained a possibility. The government in Halifax also soon began to break its promises. The Planters had initially been promised their township governance model would be allowed in the new colony but this was soon overturned for a centralized governance model based in Halifax. This created a minor crisis but was overshadowed by the need to build new homes and farms which would support the Planters’ families. Town assemblies of a sort continued until 1770 when they were finally forbidden due the sympathetic position emanating from these gatherings for the rebels in the more southerly colonies. As a young man by this time Alline is likely to have participated in the assemblies. This along with other factors would lead the Planters to question where their loyalties lay – with the British or their brethren in the Thirteen Colonies.

Alline appears to have been a product of his time over this period up to 1776. He lived and worked on the family farm and as his siblings came to maturity they moved to their own farms but he stayed on, supporting his parents, and never marrying. As the second of only two sons this was his obligation. In his Journal he reports participating in the favorite pastime of the youths of the day of frolicking, which included dancing, partying, drinking, etc. Alline admits to being one of the ringleaders of these raucous activities. Despite his leadership in the frolicks he wrestled with his participation, feeling it was perhaps a debauched life and contrary to finding a path to a more godly life. In his words he stated “... I felt guilty as ever, and sometimes could not close my eyes for hours after I had got home to my bed, on account of the guilt I had contracted the evening before. O what snares were these frolicks and young company to my soul, and had God not been more merciful to me than I was to myself, they would have proved my fatal and irrevocable ruin.”

Alline’s second religious experience came when he was about twenty. He experienced a vision where he was “surrounded by an uncommon light; it seemed like a blaze of fire; I thought it out shone the sun at noon day...”. He further went on to say “The first conception I had was that the great day of judgment was come...” The vision remained over him for some time and then “when I lifted my eyes, I saw, to my unspeakable satisfaction, that it was not what I expected: the day was not really come, therefore I had an opportunity of repentance ...” Despite his second religious experience he continued to backslide into his old ways, all the time continuing to struggle with this predicament.

Although Alline’s formal education came to an end at the age of twelve it is clear his thirst for knowledge continued. He was self-taught and when able to find texts he studied them thoroughly. His reading was extensive, having studied works by William Law, John Fletcher, Edward Young, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Pomfret, Isaac Watts, Martin Luther, John Bunyan, John Edwards, Increase & Samuel Mather, and perhaps even Jacob Boehme. His studies had brought him to a point where he “had read, studied and disputed too much, that I had acquired a great theory of religion ...”

At the age of twenty-eight he had his third religious experience; the one that would turn his life around and propel him into his evangelical ministry. Unlike the previous experiences which instilled terror within his soul this experience felt like “his redeeming love broke into my soul with repeated scriptures with such power, that my whole soul seemed to be melted down with love”. At this time he became committed to preaching the gospel.