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From America’s Great Revivals, Bethany House Publishers, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Originally published in CHRISTIAN LIFE Magazine.
The nineteenth century was the golden
age for evangelical Christianity in America. It
began with the far-reaching Revival of 1800.
Though there was a waning of religious fervor
in the early 1820s, by the 1830s revivals
had become part and parcel of American life.
A period of spiritual drought in the 1840s
was ended by the remarkable Revival of
1857-58. After the Civil War, the revival spirit
again came to the front.
During the nineteenth century, evangelists
carried revival brands from generation to generation—
men like Peter Cartwright, Asahel
Nettleton, Lyman Beecher, James Caughey,
and Jacob Knapp. But overshadowing all others
were two men: Charles G. Finney and
Dwight L. Moody.
“Heathen” Studies Law
Charles G. Finney spent his boyhood in the
frontier country of New York. He was, as he
admitted later, “almost as destitute of religion
as a heathen.” Yet, when he went to
Adams, New York, to study law, he linked
up with a Presbyterian church and listened
attentively to the sermons of the minister, the
Rev. George W. Gale. He even directed the
choir. But he was not a Christian.
It was in 1821 that Finney was dramatically
converted. He got interested in the Bible
through references to the Mosaic laws in his
legal books. He bought a Bible and through
reading it became intellectually convinced of
the truth of Christianity. But the question remained —
should he become a Christian?
One autumn morning he was on his way
to his office when he was stopped in his
tracks by an inward voice which seemed to
say, “Will you accept it now, today?” Instead
of going to his office he went off into the
woods. Reaching a spot where he thought
no one would see him, he knelt down.
He tried to pray but could not. He was
just about to give up when he heard a rustling
and looked up in alarm to see if someone
had discovered him. Suddenly, he
realized how great was his pride. Remembering
the words of Scripture, “Then shall ye
seek me and find me, when ye shall search
for me with all your heart,” he cried out,
“Lord, I take Thee at Thy Word.”
Finney left the woods in a lighthearted
mood. He didn’t quite understand what had
happened to him.
That evening in the back of his law office
he was overcome with a sense of unutterable
ecstasy. He later wrote: “The Holy Spirit
descended upon me in a manner that
seemed to go through me, body and soul. I
could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity,
going through and through me. Indeed
it seemed to come in waves and waves
of liquid love; for I could not express it in
any other way. It seemed like the very breath
of God. I can recollect distinctly that it
seemed to fan me, like immense wings.”
Finney dropped his law studies the next
day and went about the town telling what
the Lord had done for him. A revival began
immediately.
After studying theology with his pastor,
Finney was commissioned by a women’s
missionary society to preach in western New
York. Beginning with Evans Mills, town after
town experienced revival.
While preaching at Evans Mills, Finney
took time out to be married. After “a day or
two” he left his wife in Whitestown to go
back to Evans Mills, intending to return in a
week with a rig to carry their household effects.
As it turned out, he was gone six
months, for he found little revivals popping
all around Evans Mills. He felt he could not
take the time that winter to get his wife.
Early in the spring, however, he set out in
horse and cutter for Whitestown. On the
way he had to stop to have his horse shod;
the people of the town pounced on him and
begged him to preach. He did so, and a revival
started. Someone else had to be sent to
fetch Finney’s wife.
Wherever he went people turned out en
masse. He preached out of doors, in barns
and in schoolhouses. Men left their plows in
the fields to come to the meetinghouse in
work clothes. Invariably Finney’s sermons
were followed immediately by confession,
repentance, tears, and many conversions.
“Promoting” Revivals
Finney didn’t believe in sitting supinely waiting
for God to send a revival. He set out to
promote revivals; he believed God wanted
him to do this.
In one town he found the meetinghouse
locked up. He persuaded a woman to let him
use her parlor for a meeting at which he
preached to thirteen people. Next, he got permission
to use the schoolhouse on Sunday.
In the meantime, he walked around the
village and was horrified at the cursing and
swearing. The atmosphere, he said, “seemed
to me to be poison.” On Sunday, however,
the schoolhouse was full. Finney berated the
townspeople for their profanity. He told
them they seemed “to howl blasphemy
about the streets like hell-hounds.” At first
angered, the people soon began to confess
their sins. The man who had locked the
meetinghouse gave in and gave Finney the
key. A revival was underway.
A spirit of prayer marked every Finney
revival. Converts prayed all night for others.
When Finney was in town, it was common
for Christians whenever they met to fall on
their knees in prayer. Finney assured people
that God would answer prayer if they fulfilled
the conditions upon which He promised
to answer prayer.
Finney himself depended utterly on
prayer. He said, “Unless I had the spirit of
prayer I could do nothing. If even for a day
or an hour I lost the spirit of grace and
supplication, I found myself unable to preach
with power and efficiency, or to win souls
by personal conversation.”
During the winter of 1828-1829 Finney
was in Philadelphia. A number of lumbermen
who had come down the Delaware
River on rafts of lumber were converted.
They went back into the wilderness where
there were no schools, no churches, no ministers,
and touched off a backwoods revival
in which 5,000 people were converted.
The next year Finney conducted a revival
in Rochester, New York, during which 1,000
persons were converted. Within another year
or so 1,500 towns and cities were affected.
In 1832 Finney was called to a pastorate
in New York City and while there organized
the Broadway Tabernacle. It was only ten
years since Finney had been touched by God
and had gone out to turn towns upside
down. He ought to have been well satisfied.
Instead, Finney was troubled. His health
was beginning to break. It seemed that the revivals
were falling off. “Perhaps my work is
coming to an end,” Finney thought. He decided
to take a voyage to the Mediterranean.
On the way home he was beside himself.
He prayed night and day and paced restlessly
on deck. At length, “After a day of unspeakable
wrestling and agony in my soul,
just at night, the subject cleared up to my
mind. The Spirit led me to believe that all
would come out right and that God had yet
a work for me to do; that I might be at rest;
that the Lord would go forward with His
work, and give me strength to take any part
in it that He desired.”
God did indeed have much more for Finney
to do. Back in New York he gave a series
of lectures on revivals. These were later published
as Finney’s Lectures on Revival. Twelve
thousand copies were sold as fast as they
could be printed. They were translated into
several languages. A London publisher sold
80,000 volumes, and the lectures were instrumental
in promoting revivals in England,
Scotland, Wales, and Canada.
Soon after this, Finney accepted the professorship
of theology at Oberlin College in
Ohio, later becoming president. He continued
with evangelistic work and made two
visits to London, where as many as 1,500
persons at a time attended his inquiry meetings.
He served at Oberlin to within a few
weeks of his death in 1875.
What was the strength of Finney’s
preaching?
Other evangelists believed ministers
should not try to “get up” a revival. Preach
the Gospel, they said, and depend on the
Holy Spirit to bring about an awakening.
An Immediate Verdict
Finney appealed for an immediate verdict for
Jesus Christ. He directed his sermon to each
hearer personally. He had no patience with
preachers who preached “about other people
and sins of other people, instead of addressing
them and saying, ‘You are guilty of these sins,’
and ‘The Lord requires this of you.’”
Finney did not agree with the “Old
School” Presbyterian view that man was unable
to do anything about his salvation but
could only wait for the Holy Spirit to give him
a new heart. No, said Finney. Salvation is for
everyone, for the “whosoever.” A man has
free will to accept or to reject Christ. True, it
was the work of the Holy Spirit to convict
sinners (often through a preacher), but in the
end, the sinner had to take the step of faith.
Finney was severely criticized for certain
“new measures” he put into use in his revivals.
He prayed for sinners by name. He introduced
the “anxious seat,” a bench in the front
of the church to which people who were in
the struggle of rebirth were invited. He permitted
women to pray in public. He spoke in everyday
language. He used assistants to speak
to people about their soul’s welfare. All these
things were highly irregular.
While a pastor in New York, Finney became
convinced through studying the Bible
that “an altogether higher and more stable
form of Christian life was attainable, and
was the privilege of all Christians.”
He preached his doctrine of “entire
sanctification” at Oberlin College, although
he did not profess to have found the experience
he advocated for some years. To Finney
“perfection” meant perfect trust and consecration
which could enable a Christian to live
without “known sin.” It did not mean freedom
from troublesome physical and mental
appetites or from error and prejudice.
Unfortunately, Finney lived to see this
doctrine carried to extremes. By 1857 he was
denouncing those who “having begun in the
Spirit ... try to become perfect in the flesh.”
Charles G. Finney might be called the father
of modern evangelism. Many owe a
debt to him for his pioneering in the task of
promoting revivals. One of these was a man
whose labors began when Finney’s work
was coming to a close—the great evangelist
of the cities, Dwight L. Moody.
In 1856 a stocky young man from
Northfield, Massachusetts, arrived in Chicago
seeking to make a fortune of $100,000.
Soon he was well on his way to his goal as a
successful shoe salesman. But something
happened to change the direction of his life.
After working hard all week as a traveling
salesman, Moody (who had been converted
at the age of seventeen by his own Sunday
school teacher) was superintending a Sunday
school he had built up from a class of boys.
One day a fellow teacher came to him.
He was deathly ill. He told Moody he was
going home to die, but he was troubled because
he had never led any of the girls in his
class to Christ.
Moody consented to go with the teacher to
visit each girl. For the first time Moody prayed
for the salvation of a person, and his prayers
were answered. One by one the girls were
converted. Moody called the girls of the class
together for a prayer meeting on the night
before the teacher was to leave. The touching
prayers of the girls greatly affected Moody.
God Kindles a Fire
He said later: “God kindled a fire in my soul
that has never gone out. The height of my
ambition had been to be a successful merchant,
and if I had known that meeting was
going to take that ambition out of me, I might
not have gone.”
Shortly thereafter Moody gave up his job
to devote himself fully to the Lord’s work.
When a speaker failed to show up at a Sunday
school convention, he undertook his first
public exhortation; over sixty were converted.
He was active in YMCA work. During
the Civil War, he did chaplain work at
Camp Douglas, just south of Chicago. He
carried on his regular Sunday school work.
And he started Sunday evening services.
In 1867 he went to England to hear the
great preacher Spurgeon. There he met
young Henry Moorehouse, “The Boy
Preacher,” who returned to America with
him and gave a series of sermons at Moody’s
church on God’s love.
For six straight nights the young man
preached on the same verse: John 3:16. He
went through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation
to prove that in all ages God loved
the world.
Moody’s reaction: “I never knew up to
that time that God loved us so much. This
heart of mine began to thaw out; I could not
keep back the tears. It was like news from a
far country; I just drank it in.”
Moody’s preaching changed. “I used to
preach that God was behind the sinner with
a double-edged sword ready to hew him
down. I have got done with that. I preach
now that God is behind him with love, and
he is running away from the God of love.”
Henceforward Moody was to be an expositor
of Scripture.
Moody realized how inadequate he was
in education and experience for the task of
preaching. Yet by 1865 he was pastor of his
own church on Illinois Street.
Two women used to sit in his meetings in
the front row. He could see by the expressions
on their faces that they were praying.
At the close of the services they would
say to him: “We have been praying for you.”
“Why don’t you pray for the people?”
Moody would ask.
“Because you need the power of the
Spirit,” they said.
Moody Seeks Power
Moody said years after: “I need the power?
Why, I thought I had power. I had the largest
congregations in Chicago and there were
many conversions. I was in a sense satisfied.”
The women kept right on praying, and
Moody was filled with a great heart hunger.
While Moody was in this agitated condition,
the great Chicago Fire laid the city in
ashes, destroying his church and his home. Afterward
he went to New York to raise money for a new church.
While there he had the crowning spiritual experience of
his life.
Moody only said this about it: “My heart was not in
the work of begging. I could not appeal. I was crying all
the time that God would fill me with His Spirit. Well, one
day in the city of New York — oh, what a day! — I cannot
describe it, I seldom refer to it; it is almost too sacred
an experience to name. Paul had an experience of
which he never spoke for fourteen years. I can only say
that God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience
of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His
hand. I went to preaching again. The sermons were not
different; I did not present any new truths, and yet hundreds
were converted.”
Moody was unprepared for the result of his rededication.
He went to England in June of 1872, not intending
to do any evangelistic work. However, the pastor of
a North London church persuaded him to preach on a
Sunday. To Moody, the morning service seemed dead
and cold. But at the evening service a hush came upon
the people. Moody couldn’t understand it. When he
asked all who would like to become Christians to rise
that he might pray for them, it seemed as if the whole
audience was standing.
Moody said to himself: “These people don’t understand
me. They don’t know what I mean.” To make
sure, he asked them to go to the inquiry room.
Everyone who had stood filed into the inquiry room.
Again Moody asked them to rise if they really wanted to
become Christians. They all got up again. Not knowing
what to do, Moody told all who really were in earnest
to meet with the pastor the next night.
Moody left London, but on Tuesday he received an
urgent message to return to the church. In the Monday
evening meeting there had been more inquirers than on
Sunday! Moody went back and held meetings for ten
days. As a result 400 people were taken into the church.
He found out later that the way had been prepared
by a bedridden woman who had been praying for revival
in the church. She had read about Moody in the
newspaper and asked God to send him to her church.
Moody believed that it was this revival that carried him
back to England the next year with a singing partner,
Ira D. Sankey.
They took England and the British Isles by storm.
When they returned to America, a revival started in
Brooklyn. Five thousand people filled the building three
times a day. In Philadelphia 13,000 heard them in each
meeting. For ten weeks they held forth in New York
City while 500 ushers tried to handle long lines of
people trying to get into the Hippodrome.
Like Finney, Moody was a man of prayer; and he believed
prayer was necessary to revival.
At one of his Hippodrome meetings in New York,
Moody said, “Now, won’t a thousand of you Christians
go into the Fourth Avenue Hall and pray for this meeting
and let those outside have your seats?” Only a few left.
“Not half enough,” Moody said. “I want a great
many more to go out. I see many of you here every
night, and if I knew your names I’d call you out.”
Moody was often disturbed because Christians occupied
seats he thought sinners should fill.
Prisoner Converted
Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Denver, San
Francisco — everywhere Moody went throngs gathered
to hear him and thousands were converted. In St. Louis
a notorious prisoner was converted through reading
one of Moody’s sermons in a newspaper.
When Moody died in 1899, he left behind lasting
monuments — a girls’ school in Northfield, a boys’ school
at Mount Hermon, and his Bible institute in Chicago. But
even more important, he left a spiritual monument in an
estimated one million souls won to the kingdom of God.
Other evangelists followed Moody — Reuben Torrey,
Wilbur Chapman, B. Fay Mills, Sam Jones, George
Stuart, W. E. Biederwolf, and Billy Sunday.
How would you compare Finney and Moody?
Finney was better educated, perhaps intellectually superior,
certainly more influential in the field of theology.
Moody never pretended to be a great preacher. He told
a newspaperman, “I am the most overestimated man in
this country. For some reason the people look upon me
as a great man, but I am only a lay preacher, and have
little learning.”
Still, they both spoke in the everyday language of the
common man. They spoke so that the least educated
could understand the Gospel. They both avoided controversies
and discouraged sectarianism. They both depended
upon prayer. Most important, they were both
consumed with a love for Christ and a zeal to bring men
and women to a knowledge of Him.
In every age revivals have been scorned, derided,
condemned. The revival spirit of the nineteenth century
was blamed for causing controversies and divisions
among Christians, of fostering confusion and disorder in
worship, of being responsible for doctrinal heresies.
These criticisms cannot be answered by denying
them — for there is an element of truth in each one. Yet
they can be countered with facts — agreed to by historians.
The revival spirit of the century made Christian liberty,
Christian equality, and Christian fraternity the
passion of the land. Slavery, poverty, and greed were
attacked as never before. Home and foreign mission efforts,
Christian philanthropy, moral reform became the
concern of almost every converted soul.
Though it was true that the nineteenth century saw
schisms in churches and the multiplication of sects, it
also saw a tremendous growth in the church as a
whole. At the beginning of the century one in sixteen
persons in the United States was a church member; at
its close one out of every four belonged to evangelical
Protestant churches.
Too Much Emotion?
Undoubtedly the chief criticism leveled at revivals is that
they overemphasize the emotional and underestimate
the rational element in religious experience.
True, Christians were emotional about religion in the
nineteenth century; they were called the “sentimental
years.” But in the twentieth century the pendulum swung
the other way. Critics — in the church as well as without —
embalmed revivalism, buried it and sat on its gravestone.
Emotion was all but squeezed out of religion in the denominations
that once vigorously promoted revivals.
But emotion had not been squeezed out of mankind.
Men found an outlet in wars, crime, adulation of popular
entertainers, in the pursuit of material success and in
the pleasures of the senses.
The pendulum is swinging back. Once again many
are seeing that religion must be personal and individual
or it is not true religion at all. The words Jonathan
Edwards wrote in defense of the Great Awakening
more than two centuries ago are just as true today:
“True religion is a powerful thing…a ferment, a vigorous
engagedness of the heart.”
Revivals have accomplished what God placed His
Church into the world to accomplish — they have
brought countless numbers of men and women into a
personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That is justification
enough.
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