Charles Finney 
(1792-1875)
“It is most evident that you must have a deep sympathy with heaven, its society, and its employments;—else you cannot by any means have a Christian hope. The Christian hope, is the hope of being like Christ; and for this, you must understand his character—must see its excellence, and the possibility of being like him; this will impel you to labor to be transformed into his likeness.”
—Charles Finney
More Online Resources
Complete Works of Charles Finney
Lectures on Revivals of Religion by Charles Finney
Charles Finney: No sacrifice too great
The future American revivalist Charles Finney as a young man was such a skeptic concerning Christianity that his Presbyterian pastor doubted if he could ever be saved. However, God was at work.
Finney said later, “A little consideration convinced me that I was by no means in a state of mind to go to heaven if I should die. It seemed to me that there must be something in religion that was of infinite importance; and it was soon settled with me, that if the soul was immortal I needed a great change in my inward state to be prepared for happiness in heaven.”
Finney was studying the law by reading William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, the custom in that day. He found so many references to the Bible that he bought one—his first. Suddenly, he saw that he was not in a right inner relationship with God. His heart was evil and filled with pride. Under deep conviction, he escaped from the law office to the woods, where God showed him his sins, and he “fastened upon [these convictions] with the grasp of a drowning man.”
Once he was saved, Finney’s first major meetings as an evangelist were held at Evans Mills, New York. Although people enjoyed his sermons, two or three weeks passed with no one moved to accept Christ as Savior. In fact, no one was even familiar with that experience. Listeners became so agitated that he was in danger of being mobbed. He wrote in his Memoirs that he realized the situation called for extraordinary measures.
“But for that evening and the next day they were full of wrath. Deacon McC and myself agreed upon the spot, to spend the next day in fasting and prayer separately in the morning, and together in the afternoon. I learned in the course of the day that the people were threatening me—to ride me on a rail, to tar and feather me, and to give me a ‘walking paper,’ as they said. Some of them cursed me; and said that I had put them under oath, and made them swear that they would not serve God; that I had drawn them into a solemn and public pledge to reject Christ and His Gospel.
"This was no more than I expected. In the afternoon Deacon McC and I went into a grove together, and spent the whole afternoon in prayer. Just at evening the Lord gave us great enlargement, and promise of victory. Both of us felt assured that we had prevailed with God; and that, that night, the power of God would be revealed among the people.
“As the time came for meeting, we left the woods and went to the village. The people were already thronging to the place of worship; and those that had not already gone, seeing us go through the villages turned out of their stores and places of business, or threw down their ball clubs where they were playing upon the green, and packed the house to its utmost capacity. . . .
“The Spirit of God came upon me with such power, that it was like opening a battery upon them. For more than an hour, and perhaps for an hour and a half, the Word of God came through me to them in a manner that I could see was carrying all before it. It was a fire and a hammer breaking the rock; and as the sword that was piercing to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit. I saw that a general conviction was spreading over the whole congregation. Many of them could not hold up their heads.”
After that crusade, Finney went on to bring about the conversion of half a million people and change the course of American and world history through his influence on society, including the abolition of slavery.
