The phenomenon of speaking in tongues was manifested at All Saints’ Parish Church, Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, during the autumn of 1907. This outbreak rapidly became the object of criticism and opposition from a variety of sources, but one of the most vehement, if unexpected, emanated from an organization known as the Pentecostal League of Prayer. This non-denominational body had been established by Reader Harris Q. C. in 1891, and integral to its aims was the promotion of ‘Holiness’ teaching which advocated an experience of sanctification distinct from, and subsequent to, conversion. A network of branches had been established across England, and the Revd Alexander A. Boddy, vicar of All Saints’, had been actively involved in its Sunderland branch prior to 1907. Harris, who was in Sunderland at the time of this new departure in All Saints’, objected to the identification of the ‘gift of tongues’ with what he perceived to be genuine Pentecostal experience. One of the principal ironies of the situation is that his opposition was promulgated in the Pentecostal League’s periodical Tongues of Fire. It is contested that this local controversy represents not only a curious chapter in the history of Protestant polemics against the miraculous, but that it embodied broader ramifications than might first appear, not least in the impetus generated toward the establishment of distinctive Pentecostal identity and orthodoxy.