What Hath God Wrought (26 page)

III

Early in the morning of October 10, 1821, alone in the woods outside the little town of Adams in western New York state, Charles Grandison Finney was born again in Christ. It was a transforming experience for the twenty-nine-year-old apprentice lawyer. Upon walking back to the law firm, Finney told a would-be client, “Deacon Barney, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.” With that, the young man left the practice of law and embarked upon his famous career as an evangelist.
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Although lacking formal theological training (or even a college education), Finney obtained a license to preach from the Presbyterian regional authority. Like Abraham Lincoln and many other Americans of his generation, Finney was largely self-educated but not badly educated.

An identifiable conversion experience, accompanied by a once-and-for-all decision for Christ, was the central event in the spiritual life of Christians in the evangelical Reformed tradition into which Finney had been born. Based on New Testament accounts like the conversion of St. Paul, the tradition had been particularly important in America through the influence of the New England Puritans and their Yankee descendants. In the revivals that he conducted, Finney would play an important role in perpetuating this tradition and spreading it throughout the United States and Britain. The revivalists of Finney’s generation saw themselves as carrying on the work of such eighteenth-century evangelicals as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. They called the revivals that Edwards and Whitefield had participated in “the Great Awakening” and their own work “the Second Great Awakening.” The terms have stuck.
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Many observers, both in Finney’s time and since, have been struck by the differences between Finney and Jonathan Edwards rather than the similarities. Old School Calvinists considered Finney’s theology a betrayal of Edwardsean intellectual consistency. In at least one respect the difference between the two great evangelists was explicit. Edwards had regarded religious revivals as ultimately mysterious, the action of divine grace. By contrast Finney boldly proclaimed, “A revival of religion is not a miracle” but a human work, a “result of the right use of the constituted means.” The evangelist’s job was to employ these means effectively in the effort to save souls. A good evangelist should be as self-conscious about his methods as a good farmer about scientific agriculture, Finney declared. If all the farmers waited upon the sovereignty of God “to give them a crop only when it pleases him,” the world would starve.
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By putting evangelical preaching on a scientific basis, Finney and his co-workers hoped to transcend the cycle of revivals and declensions, creating a continuous downpour where once there had been but intermittent showers of grace. In their new theology of how revivalism should be organized, the evangelists turned themselves into early psychologists of the techniques of persuasion.

While he held settled pastorates in several places during his career, Finney’s fame rested on his role as a traveling evangelist. The “new measures” he popularized but did not invent defined the practices of modern revivalism. Upon arriving in town, he would hold prolonged revival meetings and continue them for several days. Sometimes he singled out individuals, praying for them by name to encourage their conversion. Persons who seemed promising candidates might be seated in front of the church on what was called “the anxious bench,” especially if they were prominent citizens whose conversion would encourage others. Finney benefited from a charismatic personality and an intuitive sense of his audience. He always preached extemporaneously, never from a prepared script. He used colloquial, forthright language. America enjoyed a free marketplace in religion, and through his
Lectures on Revivals of Religion
(published in 1835) Finney instructed preachers on how to market their message.
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In years to come, both political and commercial applications would be found for his principles.

Finney’s innovations in promoting revivals provoked controversy, even among Christians who shared his objectives. Although he hoped for the cooperation of the settled clergy in the areas he visited, they sometimes regarded him as an interloper and a threat. He couched his message in terms of making a personal decision for Christ, not in terms of waiting for the grace of God. “Instead of telling sinners to use the means of grace and pray for a new heart, we called on them to make themselves a new heart,” he explained.
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Christians loyal to the theology of the Reformation believed such an appeal left too little role for divine initiative. Some of them reproached Finney for excessive emotionalism, as other revivalists have been reproached before and since. But the feature of Finney’s revivals most criticized in his own day was the role played by women. Not only did women organize the religious and benevolent activities that surrounded and followed the revivals, they participated in the actual meetings, sometimes speaking and praying in public. Defending himself against critics of women’s public participation, Finney declared, “I had no agency in introducing the practice,” when it first appeared in Utica.
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This rings true: The Christian women of western New York took the initiative, and Finney accepted it. His wife, Lydia Finney (from Whitestown near Utica), encouraged the women to organize and assert themselves. In the western New York town of Seneca Falls the women’s suffrage movement would be born in 1848.
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Finney’s early clerical critics included Lyman Beecher. Beecher, however, wanted to forge an ecumenical evangelicalism that could unite evangelicals to combat the influence of Unitarianism on the one hand and Roman Catholicism on the other. Accordingly, Beecher arranged for Finney and his supporters to meet with more conservative evangelicals at a conference in New Lebanon, New York, for a week in July 1827. Both sides wanted to encourage revivals. The Finneyites agreed not to call their colleagues “cold,” “unconverted,” or “dead”; the other side consented not to call the Finneyites “heretics,” “enthusiasts,” or “mad.” On the rights of women to religious participation they had to agree to disagree. Later, Beecher invited Finney to preach at his Park Street Church in Boston as a gesture of conciliation and cooperation.
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Finney’s career took him to many places, including Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Providence, as well as Boston, west to Ohio, and across the Atlantic to England and Wales.
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He preached in the notorious, crime-ridden Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan, where he had a theater converted for his use. But he will always be primarily associated with the area of western New York state where he enjoyed his greatest revival triumphs, particularly in young Rochester. This is the area that became known as “the burned-over district,” because the fires of religious zeal swept across it.
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The region owed its growing population and prosperity to the Erie Canal. Its people were mostly Yankee migrants from New England. Among this potentially responsive audience, Finney felt “most at home,” according to his biographer, “with young and middle-aged business and professional people, upwardly mobile master craftsmen, and women from the better families”—that is, with the middle classes responding to the opportunities presented by the new canal. They included residents of the surrounding countryside as well as those of the town itself. These people seized opportunities for bettering themselves socially and personally as well as commercially.
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Like Beecher, Finney saw social implications in the Christian message. He preached against the evils of alcohol and tobacco. He ran greater risks by his active opposition to slavery. Although New York had begun a process of gradual emancipation, some persons remained in bondage there until 1827. When Finney was preaching at Chatham Street Chapel (the remodeled Manhattan theater), he refused the sacrament of communion to slaveholders on the grounds that they were unrepentant sinners. In October 1833, he offered the chapel to a meeting of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Their demands for immediate, uncompensated abolition met a hostile reception in New York, a city heavily dependent on the cotton trade. When a mob stormed the building, the leaders of the society barely escaped—among them the evangelical businessmen Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Finney’s chief financial backers in New York City. A series of disorders followed, all deriving from the church’s support for the antislavery cause. After the Broadway Tabernacle was built for Finney’s use to replace the theater-turned-chapel, arsonists burned it down. Finney’s undaunted New York supporters raised more money and rebuilt it; the auditorium could seat three thousand people.
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In 1835, Finney went to Ohio to teach theology at the exciting newly founded Oberlin College. Oberlin had been created by one of the major student rebellions in American history. Seventy-five radical antislavery students left Lane Seminary in Cincinnati en masse, protesting racist practices by the seminary trustees. Led by Theodore Dwight Weld, a Finney convert, the former Lane students cooperated with the philanthropic Arthur Tappan to found Oberlin and invited Finney to come teach there. Ironically, Lane’s president was the antislavery Lyman Beecher, who had admitted a former slave as a Lane student. Beecher had been out of town when the campus crisis came to a head. Explosive rumors circulated among the Cincinnati townspeople that Lane students were associating with free blacks as social equals. Fearing attacks on the school by white supremacist mobs, the trustees acted in Beecher’s absence to regulate social contact between the races and discourage discussion of antislavery. When Beecher got back, he found it all he could do to keep Lane from disintegrating completely.
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Finney taught at Oberlin College for the rest of his life, using it as a base from which to travel on revival tours. He also held revival meetings in the town of Oberlin, speaking to overflow crowds in a huge tent that flew a banner inscribed “Holiness to the Lord.” Finney was both a theology professor and minister of the local First Church, for many years the largest building west of the Appalachians. In 1851, he would become president of the college. During Finney’s years there, Oberlin defined the cutting edge of social and religious innovation. At a time when women could find little higher education open to them, it was the first coeducational college in the world. It trained Christian missionaries and antislavery activists of both sexes. Its early graduates included Antoinette Brown, Lucy Stone, and other early crusaders for women’s rights. The college was racially desegregated on more than a token basis; indeed, before he accepted his professorship Finney stipulated that “we should be allowed to receive colored people on the same conditions that we did white people.”
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Oberlin became a safe haven on the underground railroad for slaves escaping to freedom in Canada. Finney’s impact on history derives not only from his own efforts but also from the work of those he converted and trained. For some of them, the reforms that for him were ancillary to Christianity would become primary goals.

Meanwhile, Finney’s theological views evolved further away from the Reformation creeds. In 1836, he left the Presbyterians and affiliated with Congregationalism, a more decentralized denomination that left him theologically freer. More and more he emphasized the freedom of the will and the doctrine of sanctification, that is, the duty of Christians after their conversion experience to improve their conduct and purify their lives. He called the process “Christian perfection.”
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Many shook their heads at this apparent presumptuousness. Still, Finney’s great disciple Theodore Dwight Weld could well ask, “When shall we look on his like again?”
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For widespread influence, personal integrity, social conscience, and spiritual power, few American evangelists of a later age could equal Charles G. Finney.

IV

The revivalism of Beecher and Finney was interdenominational and ecumenical in purpose. The revivalism of the early Methodists, by contrast, focused on building a particular denomination. In fulfilling their mission, the Methodist circuit riders achieved unparalleled collective success. These men, generally artisans, shopkeepers, or small farmers by background, volunteered to ride through the remote backcountry, bringing the message of the gospel to otherwise isolated settlers. Although practically none of them possessed formal theological training, they would preach sermons and offer pastoral counseling, refute freethinkers and heretics in debate, and convert sinners and Indians. Lacking much benefit of education themselves, they nevertheless encouraged literacy and schooling for others and would give away Bibles and sell other uplifting books for the profit of their movement. In the early days they usually observed celibacy, for the Methodist leadership believed single men more suited to the endless travel and hardship of life on the circuit. (The circuit riders sometimes resembled Catholic priests in other ways too, addressed as “Father” and clothed in black.)
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Peter Cartwright, one of the most renowned of the Methodist itinerants in Tennessee and Illinois, described their life in his
Autobiography: