He was a notorious “hard case,” this lean and He young lawyer practicing in a sparsely settled region of upstate New York.

Just as earlier, among his youthful companions, none dared to knock his hat off because the retributive consequences of such sport were too sure, so now, among his betters, the impression was strong that nobody could change his mind.

So stubborn a case was he that, when a group of church members decided to make him the special object of their prayers, their minister told them it was a waste of breath. This young man would never become a Christian.

They prayed anyway—and their reward exceeded their most cordial expectations. Indeed, no one could have estimated all that was to come of it. The young lawyer, Charles Grandison Finney, quickly became a convert—one of those who, when he got “religion,” got it right down to his toes.

In rapid succession, he became a soul-winner, a fervent and fiery evangelist and, above all else, a revivalist—a man whose preaching was frequently accompanied by revivals over a period of 50 years.

First by ones or twos, then by dozens, hundreds and finally by thousands, unbelievers were born into the kingdom in revivals that broke out first in the village where Finney started and afterward nearly everywhere he went—often by lonely horseback through the wilderness to the villages and settlements of an emerging nation and ultimately to great cities, among them Philadelphia, New York, Boston and London.

His life and work are part of America’s vibrant evangelical heritage. Finney, born in 1792, was a first-generation citizen of his country. George Washington was still in his first term as president. The nation itself was born out of decades of revivals that had swept along the eastern seaboard from New England to Georgia from about 1734 almost to the Revolution. Historians have called this the Great Awakening. It became a strong element in the formation of the American character.

Though many godly men were instrumental in it, its leading figure was the Englishman George Whitefield, who made no fewer than seven trips to America from 1738 through 1770, dying a day after preaching his last sermon in the open air at Exeter, Massachusetts.

North America has had a continuing succession of great evangelists. The magazine now in your hands (Moody Monthly) is named for one of them, Dwight L. Moody. He arose to do his great work just as Finney faded from the scene.

Shortly before Moody died in 1899, Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, launched into citywide evangelism and continued it across the early decades of this century. Sunday’s death in 1935 left only a nine-year gap until Billy Graham embarked on the course that has made him history’s most widely heard proclaimer of the gospel.

The men of that roster were no more drawn from select sectors of society than Christ’s own disciples were. The greatest evangelists have been common men with very uncommon qualities, and their capacity to do the work of evangelists confounded the wisdom of men far more than it confirmed it.

Like Moody and Sunday after him, Finney was one of God’s rough-hewn originals. He was a good deal more like a John the Baptist than like the most polished ministerial product that Princeton or Harvard or Yale were then turning out.

Finney was a farmer’s son, raised without religion, educated only up to the age of 16, though he picked up a little more later. A relative said of him:

“When he was twenty he excelled every man and boy he met, in every [kind] of toil or sport. No man could throw him; no man could knock his hat off; no man could run faster, jump farther, leap higher or throw a ball with greater force or precision.”

All wire and gristle, he became skilled also at “rowing, swimming and sailing.” Finney acquired law by working as an apprentice to a country lawyer and by reading. He remained entirely a stranger to college until, near mid-life, he became first a professor at one and later its president.

But he did have a first-rate mind. And, happily enough, it remained unspoiled by the fanciest ministerial finishing academies of the day. Finney was about 26 when he entered law in a remote section of upstate New York in 1818. He kept his nose in law books and came across frequent Scripture quotations.

He had never owned a Bible—he said later that he was about as ignorant of religion then “as a heathen”—but he decided to buy one.

He attended church but found little help because what the minister proclaimed out of his highly developed but somewhat tortured theology did not seem to make plain good sense. Finney could not get hold of it, though he struggled with his perplexities for close to three years.

Yet slowly, as he read the Scriptures, the Word began to do its work. The young man saw that he was “by no means in a state of mind to go to heaven if I should die…. if the soul was immortal I needed a great change in my inward state [and this] was of too much importance to allow me to rest in any uncertainty on the subject.”

In the crisp fall days of 1821, he made up his mind that he would “settle the question of my soul’s salvation at once.” His pride was a stumbling block, so much so that, when he went aside to pray, he first carefully stuffed the keyhole of his door, lest a syllable escape to be overheard.

Finney recognized that he needed to break past his timid limitations to seek God wholeheartedly. Thus: “North of the village, and over a hill, lay a piece of woods…. Instead of going to the office, I turned and bent my course toward the woods, feeling that I must be alone and away from all human eyes and ears, so that I could pour out my prayer to God.”

He came under deep conviction—his sin “appeared awful, infinite” to his understanding. Confessions flew from his lips, and soon he found peace with God by the blood of the cross. There in that hollow, amid some fallen trees, he was thoroughly converted to Christ.

“I walked quietly toward the village, and so perfectly quiet was my mind that it seemed as if all nature listened. It was on the 10th of October and a very pleasant day. I had gone into the woods immediately after an early breakfast; and when I returned I found it was dinner time. Yet I had been wholly unconscious of the time that had passed….”

If the minister who had sized him up as unconvertible thought that his problems with Finney were over when this happened, he soon knew otherwise.

The young man was a tougher egg to crack—so as to be blended into doctrine of the day—than he had been before he became a Christian.

Finney, whose lawyerly mind insisted on logic, clarity and consistency, found the minister’s theology a thicket of riddles. The man could not accurately define the high terms he so frequently used, yet he was insistent that Finney swallow them whole.

It seemed to Finney that, like a creature nibbling away on its own tail, the man’s views were curiously self-canceling—such as the idea that while all men are commanded to repent, they are morally incapable of doing so. They must wait passively for an influx of divine grace, wholly mysterious in its bestowal, if they are to be saved.

Finney saw that making salvation involuntary on man’s part because it came by election cut the nerve of evangelism and annulled the invitations of the Bible. This conflict with his teacher was a severe trial to Finney. He spent hours on his knees reading the Bible, “beseeching the Lord to teach me his own mind on these points.”

He came away with sharply clear understandings of such essential truths as grace, atonement, repentance, regeneration, justification and sanctification. He felt that these could all be defined and explained to the satisfaction of anyone with a reasonable mind.

Later the minister openly confessed that, all the while he was endeavoring to teach Finney, Finney was teaching him the great gospel truths.

Apart from the disciples of the Lord, who left their fishing tackle or tax table at an instant, there has rarely been a quicker transition from vocation to calling than Finney’s.

“My whole mind was taken up with Jesus and His salvation,” he later wrote, and no employment seemed to him “so exalted as that of holding up Christ to a dying world.”

The lawyer “soon sallied forth from the office to converse with those I should meet about their souls,” and people immediately began to be saved. In this manner, Finney left off the law and walked straight into a lifelong gospel ministry.

With doctrinal mystification cleared away, he went out to persuade men, and a mighty persuader he was in the scattered hamlets and settlements that he visited, as often preaching in barns, groves and schoolhouses as in churches.

Ministers often objected to the way he went about it. Many of them finally tolerated him or eagerly welcomed him because, lament his methods as they did, they could not argue with his results.

The people flocked to hear him wherever he went, and large numbers were awakened to faith in the crisis of conversion. It seemed that Finney’s arrival at a place was enough to increase the roll call of the elect there spectacularly.

Believers today may profitably “ponder anew what the Almighty can do” as seen in the revivals that occurred in Finney’s nearly 10 years as an itinerant evangelist.

If anyone thinks that a “revival” is what ensues after a sign has been posted outside a church announcing, “REVIVAL HERE—June 22 to July 5—All welcome,” he hasn’t much knowledge of what a revival really is.

Revivals do not arrive or fit into time brackets at men’s bidding, though believers may have an intercessory role in praying them into being.

A revival is a time of God’s sway with men and women, when holiness is exalted and sin is revealed, rebuked and routed. Amazing numbers of people heed the cry, “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light!”

Things that appear nearly impossible at other times—in the way of turning men out of rebellion or intellectual haughtiness to a blood-bought salvation—melt into compliant realities in the glorious heights of a revival.

It may have seemed to some that Finney carried revival in his satchel, but he knew better. He recognized revival as a delicate spiritual mechanism, wholly dependent upon the moving of the Lord if his own effort was to have its crown of joy and beauty. And he knew times when that did not happen.

Yet the central and remarkable fact of Finney’s ministry is that, as evangelist, as pastor and as professor of theology, he was enabled to lift all three offices to the level of revival.

Why? And how? The answer to the first question is wrapped up, almost certainly beyond unraveling, in the mystery of chosenness.

God loved that strong young lawyer and drew him to Christ, called him directly into the ministry and equipped him to win souls whether singly in personal work or by the hundreds in preaching.

Like Moody, Finney at times wept openly as he preached, his heart going out to the lost with his words.

If Finney was a chosen vessel, he was also a clean vessel, one given to keeping daily accounts with God, diligent in confessing sins of any sort to the Lord and obtaining forgiveness and cleansing. He wrote that, if he neglected this, the power to win souls left him until he prayed. Finney had none of the whiff of Samson about him. Chosen, called and equipped, he never compromised.

Finney had none of the whiff of Samson about him. Chosen called, equipped, he never compromised.

He was also an empowered vessel. In common with Moody, Finney had an experience of enduement by the Holy Spirit that he insisted upon as essential to all that flowed from his ministry.

At the law office one evening not long after his conversion, Finney wrote, “As I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was such a thing for me … the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul….

“No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart…. These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after another, until I recollect I cried out, ‘I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’ I said, ‘Lord, I cannot bear any more.’ ”

Later, Finney referred to this “baptism” as the Spirit’s filling.

On his part, Moody earnestly prayed for such an empowerment. As recounted in the authorized biography of Moody by his son William, the evangelist said:

“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. I would not now be placed back where I was before that blessed experience if you should give me all the world—it would be as the small dust of the balance.”

Near the close of his long life, Finney wrote that failing to obtain “this enduement of power from on high … is, I think, the great mistake of the church, and of the ministry.”

“I have often been surprised and pained that to this day so little stress is laid upon this qualification for preaching Christ to a sinful world,” he wrote in his memoirs.

He also found that much of the intellectual training imparted in the most vaunted seminaries was like fitting David out “in Saul’s armor,” far more a hindrance to gospel effectiveness than an aid to it.

High-blown sermons filled with erudite allusions, he said, “degenerate into literary essays” and lack convicting power. He warned young candidates for the ministry: An ounce of unction would do them more good than a ton of erudition.

On the evangelistic trail, his mode of preaching was always spontaneous and extemporaneous. Through the first 12 years he wrote not a word or a note. He used homely things, familiar to the people, for his illustrations and plain, direct, simple language. His mode of preparation was to keep his mind “always pondering the truths of the gospel, and the best ways of using them.”

“I go among the people and learn their wants,” he wrote. “I take a subject that I think will meet their present necessities. I think intensely on it, and pray much over the subject … and get my mind full of it, and then go and pour it out to the people.”

Finney found that “whole platoons of thoughts, words and illustrations came to me as fast as I could deliver them” and that “such sermons always tell with great power upon the people.”

Preaching at a village where the people had never had religious services, Finney saw that “all at once an awful solemnity seemed to settle down upon them; the congregation began to fall from their seats in every direction, and cried for mercy. If I had had a sword in each hand, I could not have cut them off their seats as fast as they fell.”

Finney stopped speaking and went to kneel beside one after another of the convicted hearers, leading them to Christ.

The Bible and experience taught him that if a man will “preach the gospel with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven,” then “out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” He was the mortal enemy of static religion, merely formal religion, habitual religion, cold religion.

The key to nearly every action he took was its practical workability in terms of bringing souls to Christ. He was never crude, but if the chickens or peacocks of regular religious procedure had to fly and scatter, let them fly!

Finney was never crude, but if the peacocks of regular religious procedure had to fly and scatter, let them fly!

The man had no entourage, no equipment but the Bible and a suitcase and his clothes; no staff, no secretary, no salary or budget, rarely any advance knowledge of where he next would go. Often he stayed for weeks or months at a place until the work was thoroughly accomplished.

His weapons were prayer and intercession, “frequent days of private fasting,” and a mind continually steeped in the Word.

As much as Finney was used to light the fires of revival, the course that such revivals took did not depend upon him as much as an evangelistic campaign depends upon the evangelist.

Think of a revival as an epidemic—an epidemic of righteousness—that breaks out and spreads rapidly in many directions, with many unusual and unanticipated results. However much the preaching point was the energizing center, it was but the hub of a wheel fanning out in a wide arc of gospel power and blessings.

In one village the bar of a “low tavern” became an awful center of resistance to the revival. The tavern owner was a “most profane, ungodly, abusive man” who went “railing about the streets … and would take particular pains to swear and blaspheme whenever he saw a Christian.” The bar became a gathering spot for opposers, who filled it with blasphemy and cursing. It was hell’s own hole in that village.

Its owner was suddenly brought under conviction and “proceeded to make one of the most heart-broken confessions” that Finney had heard from sinners. He “abolished all the revelry and profanity” of his tavern and held a prayer meeting in it for the revival almost every night.

Charles Finney was born in a young nation that had not as yet pushed far to the west to conquer and settle the vast wilderness and plains. Later he would go to Ohio, after revivals in New York City, to be professor and then president at Oberlin College, from which position he continued to move out on revival missions.

By then he had already left a bountiful legacy of “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost” to dwellers in a wilderness that was to become a mighty nation.

He never ceased to preach even in old age. It was recorded that his “last day on earth was a quiet Sabbath, which he enjoyed in the midst of his family, walking out with his wife at sunset, to listen to the music at the opening of the evening service in the church.”

He died on August 16, 1875. His gravestone bears his hope for the people of his country: “God be with us, as He was with our fathers, let Him neither leave us nor forsake us.”

To which we would add, “Lord, magnify Thy mercy. Revive us again.”