OF

CALIFORNIA

THE

Congregational Quarterly.

WHOLE NO. LXXIII. JANUARY, 1877. VOL. XIX, No. 1.

CHARLES GRANDISON FINNEY.1

THE readers of the Quarterly who have already had the privilege of perusing the fascinating "Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, written by Himself," will not wish to have the same story repeated at second-hand, much less will they care to have it condensed. In these Memoirs, however, we have not an autobiography of Mr. Finney, but rather, as he modestly states it, an account of the revivals of religion with which his name

1 Mr. Finney was the son of Sylvester and Rebecca Finney, and was born in Warren, Conn., 1792, Aug. 29. His early life was spent in Oneida and Jefferson Counties, N. Y. He attended an academy in Connecticut, 1815-18. Studied law at Adams, N. Y., till 1821, and practised there. Studied theology with Rev. George W. Gale, of Adams. Ordained by St. Lawrence Presbytery, 1824. Preached as evangelist in Middle and Eastern States until installed, Second Free Presbyterian Church, New York City, 1833. October, after being dismissed, he was installed Broadway Tabernacle Church, 1834. Theological Professor, Oberlin, 1835, June, and retained connection with the college till death. Was president from 1851 to 1866, Professor Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, 1851-58, and pastor First Congregational Church, 1835-72. Labored also as evangelist during the winter months, till 1860; also in Great Britain, eighteen months, 1849-50, and again, 1859-60. He published "Lectures on Revivals,” “Lectures to Professing Christians," ," "Sermons on Important Subjects," "Guide to the Saviour,” “Lectures on Systematic Theology," and "Finney on Masonry." Married, 1st, 1824, October, Lydia R., daughter of Nathaniel and Jerusha Andrews, of Whitestown, N. Y. She died 1847, December, leaving five children. He married, 2d, 1848, November, Elizabeth Ford Atkinson, of Akron, O. She died, Syracuse, N. Y., 1861, December, and he married, 3d, 1865, September, Mrs. Rebecca (Allen) Rayl. He died in Oberlin, of a heart affection, 1875, Aug. 16, aged 82 years, 11 months, and 17 days.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by CHRISTOPHER CUSHING, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

and labors had been connected. As might be expected, we find in it comparatively little that will aid the reader in gaining a complete idea of Mr. Finney's many-sided character. To promote revivals was his absorbing life-work, and no single portrait could more truly represent him than that which he has himself unconsciously drawn. But while he was an evangelist, and in that capacity was, as one has termed him, a "fiery John the Baptist," he was also a pastor, a college president and theological teacher, an author, a citizen widely acquainted with and constantly interested in civil affairs, an economist, skilful in the management of business, a legal adviser, a neighbor, in the sense in which our Lord applied the term to the good Samaritan, a personal friend to thousands, and especially their spiritual counsellor, and withal a faithful and tender husband and father. His biographer (if he shall ever have one) will describe him in all these and other relations, and there will be little ground left for the prejudice that has so often pronounced him to be only a narrow, intense, and bigoted religionist. Meantime a brief sketch. of his life and character, based upon some measure of personal acquaintance with him and the community upon which he has left his deepest impress, may be of some service to his memory.

I. Apparently Mr. Finney owed little to ancestry or early education. His parents were irreligious; and when, in 1794, they removed from Litchfield County, Conn., to the then wild, unevangelized region of North-western New York, they were apparently taking their boy, at the tender age of two years, out of the reach of all possible Christian influences. A prayerless home, in the midst of a godless frontier community, is seemingly as unfit a place as could well be chosen for the training of one who is destined for the Christian ministry. But Mr. Finney was, by nature, unusually susceptible to moral and religious impressions; and this susceptibility must have been fostered to some extent by the Puritan notions which came with the family from their New England home. His mother's disapproval of the recklessness of the people about them, though not very outspoken or positive, was one of his earliest recollections.

t

Froude says that "whatever exists at this moment in England and Scotland of conscientious fear of doing evil, is the remnant of the convictions which were branded by the Calvinists into the people's hearts." The Calvinistic pulpits of New England, during the last and the preceding century, produced a like effect upon the American people. There may have been, relatively to the population, fewer professors of religion in New England a hundred years ago than to-day, but there was, in the popular conscience, a profounder fear of divine justice. The Puritan idea of law and penalty went with the New England emigrants to their frontier settlements, even when the ministry and the church were left behind.

The moral fibre in Mr. Finney's early character must be traced to this, or else to his natural constitution, rather than to any religious training that he received, either at home or in the church. He says that when he began to study law, at the age of twenty-five, he was "almost as ignorant of religion as a heathen." Up to that time he had never sat statedly under the preaching of an educated ministry, although he had spent four years as student and school-teacher in New Jersey and Connecticut. In his old age he used often to refer to the paucity of his early opportunities, regretting especially that from a child he had not “known the Holy Scriptures." But it is a remarkable fact, which he has not thought worthy of notice, that in spite of his lack of religious advantages, he never became reckless or vicious. As a young man, he was spirited and, no doubt, sometimes rough and hilarious; but, considering his associations, he was exceptionally conscientious and high-minded. This must have been due mainly to the strong hold which moral ideas always had upon him. He "shewed the work of the law written in his heart." He was thus naturally adapted to legal studies; and these studies, specially as he pursued them, were eminently fitted to quicken his natural discernment of moral truth. He says:

"In studying elementary law, I found the old authors frequently quoting the Scriptures, and referring especially to the Mosaic Institutes as authority for many of the great principles of common law. This excited my curiosity so much that I went and purchased a Bible, the first I had ever owned; and whenever I found a reference to it by the law authors,

I turned to the passage and consulted it in its connection. This soon led to my taking a new interest in the Bible, and I read and meditated upon it much more than I had ever done before in my life." 1

This interesting leaf from his history shows not only how thorough he was inclined to be as a student, and thus explains his intellectual power, but it also brings to light the process of providential training by which he was made ready for the remarkable experience which accompanied his conversion. The study of law was to him at the same time the study of the divine government. His naturally quick sense of right and wrong was deepened by meditation upon the righteousness of God. When under the guidance of the Spirit "he came to himself," there was something in himself to come to.

Late in life President Finney often recalled the wonderful freshness with which during these years the truths of the Bible came to his mind. There was, he thought, some compensation in this for his lack of earlier familiarity with it. It was a new book to him, and for this reason all the more suggestive and stimulating; besides, he was untrammelled by traditional interpretations. He had the privilege in one point of view it certainly was a privilege of finding out for himself what the Bible taught concerning sin and redemption. Unquestionable as are the advantages of early religious culture in the midst of a Christian community, it is not unlikely that it is well for the world that Mr. Finney was trained as he was. What he would have been if he had been brought up in Connecticut by pious parents, and by them had been sent to Yale College, no one can tell; but however distinguished he might have been, he would probably not have been fitted for the particular work for which God so evidently girded him. For a special mission there is need of special training.

2. Christian biography contains nothing that is more remarkable than the story which Mr. Finney has given of his own conversion. He had been for some time convinced of the truth of the Bible, and had given it special study; he had frequently attended the prayer-meetings of the church, and had speculated not a little upon the genuineness of the prayers to which he listened; he had disputed with the minister, whose

1 Autobiography, p. 7.

preaching, being of the old-school type, did not, in his independent judgment, harmonize with reason or the Scriptures. He was not a blasphemer or persecutor; but he was, at least, a merciless critic of the disciples of Christ. All the while the Holy Spirit was bringing the truth, with which he was becoming so familiar, home to his heart. Conviction seized him, and, as if he were an arrested criminal, he was brought face to face with his Judge. His fierce struggle with his pride; his efforts to pray; his temporary abandonment of business that he might concentrate his whole mind upon the great question of his salvation; the inward voice that stopped him on the street, and the sudden illumination which made the way of salvation so simple and so clear; his retirement to the seclusion of a wood, and the revelation then made of the pride and obstinacy of his wicked heart; his humiliation and confession, and the desperate grasp with which he laid hold of the promises of God; the peace that followed his conscious justification; the subsequent vision of the Saviour and the wonderful baptism of the Spirit, which seemed to him "like wave upon wave of liquid love," all these and other similar experiences Mr. Finney describes with a particularity almost too minute. The impression may be left on some minds that the principal evidence of his regeneration lay in the wonderful sensations that accompanied it rather than in the changed character which was produced by it. It would not be strange if many should enviously wish. that they might be converted in a way similarly brilliant and miraculous, although, through lack of the same deep, emotional nature which characterized Mr. Finney, they are, perhaps, as incapable of such an experience as is anthracite of sudden combustion.

Mr. Finney, as his "Memoirs" show, was deeply impressed by the remarkable experiences which attended his conversion and the subsequent crises of his religious life. He, no doubt, regarded them rightly as evident tokens of the Spirit's presence and power. But for his active, rational instinct and his well-trained, metaphysical judgment he might have become visionary. As it was, he was far enough from adopting anything like fanatical views of the nature of religion. To be a Christian, in his view, is to love God; and the love of God is