Charles Finney Collection: Finney-Charles-A Chronology Writings: MEMORIAL ADDRESS TO FINNEY CONT

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Charles Finney Collection: Finney-Charles-A Chronology Writings: MEMORIAL ADDRESS TO FINNEY CONT



TOPIC: Finney-Charles-A Chronology Writings (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: MEMORIAL ADDRESS TO FINNEY CONT

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Then a strange thing happened. Christ said to His apostles: "They shall put you out of the synagogues." John xvi, 2. This was spoken of the Jews; but the Presbyterians took it upon themselves to fulfil the prophecy in the nineteenth century. As the news of these revivals spread, a powerful opposition was awakened. It seemed as though the thing most to be dreaded by all orthodox Presbyterians, was a sudden increase in church membership. Dr. Morgan has recorded that even he "was shocked with the rapidity with which converts were admitted to the churches." Dr. Lyman Beecher of Boston, Dr. N. W. Taylor of New Haven, and Dr. Asahel Nettleton, having no personal knowledge of the facts and misled by some very sensational reports of the meetings, began writing letters to the brethren, in New York State and elsewhere, warning them against Mr. Finney and his "new measures," advising them not to invite him to their pulpits, or to countenance his revivals. These letters were received, among others, by pastors with whom he had been working at Rome, Utica, Clinton, Auburn, and Troy, and were shown to him. The objectors were shining lights in the church, all of them successful revivalists of high repute. To a man of Mr. Finney's sensitiveness, this concerted movement to suppress him was a profound shock. For a time all seemed dark before him, and it seemed certain that he must give up preaching and go back to the practice of the law. He tried to think of all occasions for offense he had given, he wept and prayed, and the cello, long neglected, was again brought into requisition. At last he received the assurance that he need not give up, that if he would persevere, the way would be made plain before him, and opposition would cease. Mr. Finney's friends and coadjutors set to work in earnest and under the leadership of Dr. Beman, of Troy, secured a conference at New Lebanon, in July, 1827, to which Dr. Beecher, Dr. Nettleton, Dr. Taylor, Dr. Hawes of Hartford, President Humphreys of Amherst College, Justin Edwards of Andover, and other New England clergymen came, to talk matters over with the clergy of Auburn, Rome, --Utica, Clinton, and Troy. The conference lasted nine days. When the facts were presented, their minds were disabused, their prejudices largely dissipated, and all but Dr. Nettleton professed to be satisfied with the explanations made. On his way home from this conference, Dr. Beecher is reported to have said,

"We crossed the mountains expecting to meet a company of boys, but we found them to be full grown men."

Mr. Finney, himself, had very little to say, but the depth of his feeling, and the warmth of his gratitude to the men who stood by him in this extremity, may be judged from the fact that his oldest son, born three years later, was named Charles Beman after Dr. Beman of Troy, and his second son, the donor of this Chapel--born five years later--was named Frederic Norton after Dr. Norton of Clinton.

Although the New Lebanon Conference had tended thus to clear the atmosphere, the New York City pastors were still so prejudiced that none of them would invite Mr. Finney to his pulpit. Many of the laymen were anxious to hear him, and Anson G. Phelps determined that he should be heard in New York City. He hired a vacant church that could be had for three months, and sent for him, agreeing to pay all the expenses of carrying on the meetings. When the three months were out, Mr. Phelps purchased a Universalist Church in Prince Street near Broadway, and services were carried on there for several months. As there was no organized church, converts were instructed to unite with the church they had been accustomed to attend, or the one nearest to where they lived, and thus, as a result of his preaching, every Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and Baptist Church in New York City reported accessions of from fifty to two hundred in 1830. They were received into churches which were opposed to revivals, and constituted a helpless minority, and Mr. Phelps, the Tappans and others, who were by this time interested, decided that they ought to be gathered into churches of their own, where their new zeal could have a chance to show itself and induce further growth. so the first Free Presbyterian Church was organized and put under the charge of Rev. Joel Parker, of Rochester, New York, and it prospered so greatly that a Second Free Presbyterian Church was organized and, in 1832, the Chatham Street Theatre was purchased and converted into a chapel on condition that Mr. Finney would become its pastor. In the meantime he had been having powerful revival meetings at Rochester, Auburn, Buffalo, Providence, and Boston. He commenced in April, 1832, and worked right through the summer, although New York City had a terrible visitation of the cholera and, he could count five hearses at a time drawn up at doors on the street where he lived. Finally, in the fall, he was stricken with the disease and could not preach again until the following spring. Then, although still weak, he began his labors with such power that five hundred members were added in a few weeks, and another and another colony was sent off to form new churches. In February, 1835, Lewis Tappan wrote to the English Commissioners who came to study the State of Religion in America, that as a result of this movement four churches had been organized in as many years, with a total membership of fifteen hundred and eighty-seven; that steps were being taken to organize two more, and that fifty-one young men belonging to these churches were studying for the ministry, and, he added:

"More than half the persons who are hopefully converted in these congregations unite with other churches, owing to various circumstances."

"Could suitable ministers be procured it would be no difficult thing for the membership of the Free Churches to organize many new churches every year."

In the fall of 1833 Mr. Finney's friends decided to build for him a large church with a seating capacity of twenty-five hundred and a total capacity of four thousand. He designed the structure himself. It was exactly one hundred feet square, with plain brick walls, located fifty feet from Broadway in the centre of a built-up block, so that not a dollar should be wasted on external ornament. He cared more for acoustics than aesthetics. It had a deep gallery all around and a spacious platform about one-third of the way from the back to the front. Every listener was within eighty feet of the speaker. It was, when finished, the most perfect auditorium in New York City. As one of his successors said, "it was one in which the speaker could speak and the hearers hear, without effort." It cost $66,500. Under the rear gallery were arranged rooms for the pastor's study, and a large class-room where it was expected that he would give instruction to the young men who were preparing for the ministry. Services were held in it for the first time in April, 1835. Mr. Finney now had just what he wanted, a ___ ___ from which to lift the whole new world. It was not merely that New York was the largest city on the Continent and capable in itself of furnishing large and ever changing audiences--but it was the landing place of nearly all European emigrants--English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh, German, Scandinavian; it was the place to which merchants, planters, and manufacturers went from all parts of the country, to trade and lay in their stocks of goods and supplies. They had to go to this great mart of commerce several times a year, because "commercial travellers" were then unknown. Where on earth could a man hope to exercise a greater influence? If he regarded fame--where could he find a better opportunity to achieve it? If he wished to prepare young men for the ministry, the class-room was ready, and fifty-one of his own converts were eager to begin their studies.

Now occurred what I must regard as the most extraordinary incident in this extraordinary life. Father Shipherd, having secured about the most undesirable tract of land to be found in Northern Ohio and founded a school in which labor and learning were to go hand in hand, having cleared about twenty acres, erected Oberlin Hall (a two-story frame building about thirty-five by forty feet), a saw mill and a few shanties, and having gotten together about a hundred students--only four of whom were far enough advanced to be called freshmen--went to New York City and asked Mr. Finney to leave his church and the great field opening before him and come out to Oberlin to be a Professor of Theology. Was there ever a more absurd proposition?

About the same time, a country clergyman in New England was invited to come out and become one of the professors. He declined the appointment, saying that a friend whose judgment he was bound to respect, had urged the greatest caution, since Oberlin was only an experiment, and further, "it was the offspring of a projector, who is a son of a projector whose projects have always failed." That was what might be called "the common sense answer" to such a proposition. But Mr. Shipherd had one of the elements of a successful projector, the nerve to ask for what he wanted. The New England clergyman had comparatively little to lose. Mr. Finney was asked to throw away the finest opportunity that any preacher of his day and generation ever had--not merely an opportunity to preach to large crowds and become famous--but an opportunity to do untold good. What other clergymen would have done, under like circumstances, may be judged from Dr. Cuyler's attitude--after the future of Oberlin was secure beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Finney, being eighty years old and unable longer to preach regularly, was trying. to find a man to fill the First Church pulpit. He wrote to Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler, pleading with him to come.

"I think there is no more important field of ministerial labor in the world. 1 know that you have a great congregation in Brooklyn and are mightily prospered in your labors, but your flock does not contain a thousand students pursuing the higher branches of education from year to year. Surely your field in Brooklyn is not more important than mine was at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York, nor can your people be more attached to you than mine were to me."

Dr. Cuyler writes, "the kind overture was promptly declined," and does not seem to think his decision requires any explanation, or apology. There were favorable considerations presented to him, that could not be presented to Mr. Finney. And yet, Mr. Finney left the Broadway Tabernacle, just one month after it was completed, and came to Oberlin. Dr. Charles E. Jefferson said, on the sixtieth Anniversary of the Broadway Tabernacle:

"What might have been the future under Mr. Finney's continued leadership we shall never know, for at the end of the first year, two visitors arrived from the West who carried him to Ohio, to become the head of a little school just organized at Oberlin."

The last seven words of Dr. Jefferson express his opinion of the move. He was not even to be the head of the "little school!"

In 1851 Dr. John Campbell of London, in bidding farewell to Mr. Finney, after nine months of continuous revival preaching, said:

"We cannot say that we are much gratified at the thought of Mr. Finney's returning to College duties and the general ministry of a rural charge. We do not consider that such is the place for the man; and we must be allowed to think that fifteen years ago a mistake was committed when he became located in the midst of academic bowers . . . He is made for the millions--his place is in the pulpit, rather than the professor's chair. He is a Heaven-born sovereign of the people. The people he loves; and the mass of the people all but idolize him."

These men probably voiced the sentiment of thousands of Mr. Finney's friends and admirers. Why did he go? I think the best answer which can be given to that question is, because he did not want to. That was the answer he gave to a friend who asked him why he went to Boston to preach, when he had remarked that the conditions were more discouraging there than in any large city which he visited. (Whenever he did what he did not want to do his labors were especially blessed.) It was so when he went to Rochester, after he and all the friends he consulted had concluded that he ought not to go there, because the outlook was so unfavorable.

In the summer of 1834, Arthur Tappan had asked him to go out to Cincinnati and prepare a class of forty young men for the ministry, and offered to pay all the expenses. These young men had left Lane Seminary in a body, when the Trustees passed a resolution suppressing the discussion of Slavery, and were still holding together at Cumminsville, a suburb of Cincinnati. It was a splendid class, their average age was twenty-six, they were men of mature judgment, well grounded in classical studies and practiced in debate. Two-thirds of them were from New York State and New England, and a majority of them were Mr. Finney's own converts. Of course, he was interested in them and anxious to accommodate Mr. Tappan; but he said he could not leave his church, and made the sensible suggestion that as soon as his class-room in the Broadway Tabernacle was ready for use they should be brought on to New York and receive instruction there. He considered the matter as settled and went on to prepare and deliver that course of "Lectures on Revivals," which had such a wide circulation and influence. Then came Father Shipherd and Rev. Asa Mahan, who put themselves into communication with the Tappans and reopened the whole question. Mr. Finney did not want to leave his church and, with remarkable foresight, stated the hazards of the new enterprise and the objections to leaving his work in the city, to embark on what Dr. Leonard rightly calls a "tremendous venture." But all his demands were met and at last the question presented itself in this form: Dr. Mahan and Professor Morgan and at least forty students of Theology will go to Oberlin if you go. The Tappans and their friends will provide salaries for eight professors and will pay $10,000 down for necessary buildings, and, in time, $80,000 more for endowment. You need not give up your church, you can spend your summers in Oberlin and your winters in New York, and the church will pay your expenses both going and coming. It is the one chance to establish a school in the West, where young men may be properly trained for the ministry and where all men may gain correct views of the great evil of slavery. Still more, Arthur Tappan privately pledged to Mr. Finney his entire income, then amounting to $100,000 a year--less what was necessary for his family--in support of the enterprise. If he refused to go, Oberlin would get nothing, the Lane Seminary students would scatter, and a great opportunity for doing good would be lost.

When so presented, Mr. Finney feared that further opposition to the Oberlin plan might be due to a selfish regard for his own comfort, or advancement, and so--he went. If he had come to a different decision, you and I would not be here to-day. Our fellow alumni, occupying stations of usefulness all over the world, would not be where they are. President Fairchild, who never used extravagant language, wrote:

"If Charles G. Finney had not lived and labored Oberlin could not have existed."

"Without them" (the anti-slavery impulse and Charles G. Finney) "Oberlin could never have done the work which has fallen to it and probably could not have existed beyond a single decade."

Mr. Finney's coming secured for Oberlin not merely the things promised, but the attention of the whole religious world. His reputation and wide acquaintance attracted hundreds--I may say thousands of students from New York, Pennsylvania, and New England long before the local field yielded its full crops. His converts and children of his converts flocked to Oberlin, and others, who knew him only by reputation, desired to have their children educated under his influence. For similar reasons England, Scotland, Wales and the West Indies contributed large numbers of students.

Mr. Finney insisted that one of the first eight professors should be a "Professor of Sacred Music," and that the best man who could be found should be appointed to carry it to its highest perfection. He tried to get Mason, Hastings, or Bradbury, but they were not altruistic enough to give up lucrative church and chorus appointments in the East; although, at his request, both Mason and Hastings came out at various times to give the Oberlin chorus special instruction and lead the Commencement music. And it was under George N. Allen, a pupil of Lowell Mason, that classical music and the great chorus became established features of Oberlin life and student culture. There is not to-day in all this broad land, one college which can boast of such a choir and furnish such music as the Musical Union of Oberlin. It is perhaps the greatest--certainly the most quickly appreciated--of the outward signs which distinguish Oberlin from other schools.

But Mr. Finney had still to make a harder decision. In the summer of 1837 he was satisfied that he could not continue to be pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle and Professor of Theology at Oberlin. The work in New York suffered during his absence and he could not find an assistant pastor capable of keeping the church alive and active while he was away.

The attempt to fill Mr. Finney's shoes, six months in the year, might well appall any man. it was next to impossible for a man to develop an independent line of thought and action, while holding over, and hence his responsibility as an individual was weakened and the loyalty of his congregation was always a matter of doubt.

He must give up one or the other. Which should it be? While he was debating this question at Oberlin, the terrible panic Of 1837 struck the country, and nearly every merchant in New York City was forced into bankruptcy, including the Tappans and all of the subscribers to the $80,000 professorship fund. Oberlin was cut off from its source of supply and was in debt nearly $30,000 for new buildings and expenses incurred on the faith of the promised endowment. The Lane Seminary students had mostly graduated. He had done his full duty by them. Father Shipherd had gone off to found other institutions. The College enterprise was, to all appearance, a failure, and he was under no legal or moral obligation to, stay. Of course, the sensible thing to do was to go back to New York and devote himself exclusively to the interests of his church. He could find a ready support anywhere in the East. Let the College take care of itself! But he looked at the hard lot of Oberlin College and all the good people, old and young, who had come there, largely on his account, and again he chose the rough and thorny path and sent his resignation--to the Broadway Tabernacle. His cow died, and to buy another he sold his travelling trunk. He had come to stay. On Thanksgiving Day, 1837, he was at the end of his resources. He did not know where he could get funds to pay for another meal. He went to church and conducted Thanksgiving services for a congregation as hard pressed as himself; and all were lifted above the cares of this world. He says, naively, he enjoyed his own preaching that day as much as ever he did in his life, and then went home, to be met at the gate by a letter, wholly unexpected, from Josiah Chapin, of Providence, Rhode Island, enclosing a draft for $200 and a promise to pay his salary as professor as long as it might be needed.

The prejudice against Oberlin was so great, on account of its anti-slavery principles, coeducation and reception of colored students, and the effect of the panic so universal and prostrating that relief could not be expected in this country. After much prayer and consideration, Father Keep and William Dawes were sent to England to try and raise funds to tide the College over its difficulties. Had they friends or personal acquaintances in England? Not one! What interest had England in Oberlin? At that time, absolutely none! Ohio was but a spot on their maps. No Englishman had ever heard of Oberlin. How, then, could these men expect to get a dollar for the College? They had two words to conjure with--Anti-Slavery and Charles G. Finney. England had just emancipated her slaves. The moral force which brought this about had not spent itself. Mr. Finney's reputation preceded Keep and Dawes across the ocean. The "Revival Lectures," which he preached in 1834, had been reprinted in Great Britain and had an enormous circulation. One publisher alone reported a sale of eighty thousand copies. They were almost sure to find a copy of this book in the house of every minister and intelligent layman they called upon. They could say the author of this popular work, this great revivalist, was a professor and pastor at Oberlin; that he was influencing hundreds of young people every year, each of whom would in turn influence hundreds of others in all parts of the country, and that this whole cumulative influence was directed against slavery. And they could add that all this was in danger, unless they could get a little timely assistance--and they got $30,000 over and above all expenses.

Friends:--time will not permit me to speak further of this man. You are probably as well informed about his work here as Professor, President, Pastor and Guide, as I am, myself.

It is fitting that this Memorial should stand in Oberlin, on the site where he lived for forty years. It is fitting that it should take the form of a chapel, in which large numbers can be stirred to newness of life by good preaching and good music.

And as long as this Chapel stands, let men remember that this servant of God based his faith on reason, addressed himself to adults, expected adults to be converted, and was not disappointed. And as long as Oberlin stands, let her sons and daughters remember that he who was greatest among her founders accomplished most through THE SACRIFICE OF SELF.

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