The Secret Place of Charles Finney

Charles Grandison Finney was born on August 29, 1792 in Warren, Connecticut, and grew up on the New York frontier where rough roads, hard winters, and sparse churches formed his early world. As a young adult he apprenticed in the law at Adams, New York. The courtroom trained his mind to reason, to press a case, and to demand decision. Yet while he studied statutes by day, he heard hymns on the evening air and began to read the Bible with growing conviction. The questions that stirred juries began to stir his own heart. What will you do with the claims of Christ. What verdict will you return.

In the autumn of 1821 conviction ripened into surrender. One morning he went into a grove of trees outside Adams to pray. There he promised God that he would give his heart to Christ. Later that day he entered his law office and knelt by a chair, and the presence of God overwhelmed him. He would later write that waves of love seemed to flow over him, that his heart felt broken and healed in the same moment, and that prayer rose from him as naturally as breath. The next morning he told his law partner that he had received a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ and could no longer plead the cases of men. From that day the path of the counselor became the path of a revival preacher.

After brief study for the ministry he was licensed to preach in the Presbyterian Church. He carried the same directness that had served him at the bar into the pulpit and the parlor, and the effect was immediate. In village after village through the mid Hudson and Mohawk valleys people wept, confessed their sins publicly, and turned to Christ. In the winter of 1830 to 1831 a remarkable work swept Rochester, New York. Merchants closed their shops for mid day prayer. The courts quieted. Taverns emptied. Churches filled. Finney's sermons were plain and urgent. He did not speak to crowds as if they were spectators. He addressed them as a jury called to render a verdict before God.

He challenged the customs of his day with what came to be called new measures. He called anxious sinners to sit on a front bench for special prayer. He invited women to pray aloud in mixed gatherings. He pressed believers to make public restitution and to pray by name for friends who resisted the gospel. Nothing was theatrical. Everything aimed at conscience. He asked people to treat the meeting house as a mercy seat. He set aside evenings for inquiry and gave himself to personal counsel with the broken and the bold alike. The results were deep and wide, and in every town the hidden force behind the public harvest was the same. It was prayer.

From the mid 1830s Finney accepted a call to teach at the newly founded Oberlin College in northern Ohio, a school that united faith and reform. He lectured on revival, on practical holiness, and on the duties of the church toward the poor and the enslaved. Oberlin welcomed students of color and women at a time when such welcome was rare. Revival and righteousness in public life walked together. Finney did not retreat from evangelism when he took a professorship. He gave the college to seasons of prayer and he traveled for campaigns during terms away, but the center of his life remained the same secret place that had opened to him in Adams. Prayer before preaching. Prayer after preaching. Prayer that refused to let go until God answered.

He wrote of revival in a way that shocked some readers. He insisted that a revival of religion is not a miracle in the sense of the suspension of natural law, but the result of the right use of the means God has appointed, above all earnest prayer and faithful preaching that presses the claims of Christ upon the conscience. He did not deny the sovereign work of God. He insisted that God had promised to meet His people in the place of obedient prayer, and that the church had no right to sit in resignation while a community perished without hope. The frontier lawyer had become the advocate of holy expectation.