Finney preached three evenings a week and three times on Sunday. His eyes were irresistible, deeply set and piercing blue; when they fixed on you, it was hard to look away. Hour after hour, day after day, his “clear, shrill” voice pierced the congregation. He spoke without notes, stared into the crowded aisles, and made his case. “It did not sound like preaching,” recalled one congregant, “but like a lawyer arguing a case before court and jury … . The discourse was a chain of logic brightened by the felicity of illustrations and enforced by urgent appeals from a voice of great compass and melody.” To sway sinners, whom he knew to be particularly anxious about their souls, he reserved an area in front of the pulpit and made certain that ushers led them to these seats. These “anxious inquirers” sat in what was known as the “anxious seat,” and Finney expected them “then and there to give up their hearts.” Considering the social and psychological pressures being applied, it is not surprising that more often than not those at the front publicly renounced their ungodly ways. By the time he left Rochester, some eight hundred residents had converted and joined the churches.6
Finney’s work at Rochester culminated in a Protracted Meeting that lasted five days and blazed from morning to night, while all business in the city was brought to a stop. At the conclusion, Finney was exhausted. Physicians diagnosed him with consumption and advised him to rest. They told him he would not live long. Decades later, Finney chuckled at how the “doctors did not understand my case.” He kept going, and after leaving Rochester, he led a revival in Auburn and then participated in a Protracted Meeting in Providence. The evangelist had his eyes set on Boston, a city crowded with Calvinists (orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists) and Arminians (liberal Unitarians and Universalists), the city where Lyman Beecher held sway. For years, Beecher had challenged Finney’s beliefs and methods, claiming that they violated the strictures of Calvinist doctrine: innate depravity, predestination, limited atonement. Although the two had thrashed out their differences at meetings in New Lebanon, New York, in 1827 and Philadelphia in 1828, tensions and suspicions remained. Beecher tried to be diplomatic, telling Finney, “Boston was not the best place of entrance for you into New England,” but Finney knew that Beecher had “solemnly pledged himself to use his influence to oppose me.” The Union Church Committee of Boston decided to send a minister to Rhode Island to hear Finney preach, “to spy out the land and bring back a report.” But after hearing several sermons, Benjamin Wisner, from Boston’s Old South Church, converted to Finney’s side and embraced the minister. “I came here a heresy-hunter,” he confessed, “but here is my hand, and my heart is with you.”7
Finney arrived in Boston the first week of September and began preaching at the Park Street Church, where Beecher’s son, Edward, was pastor. Toward the end of October, Finney delivered a new sermon, “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.” The year and the text were one: Ezekiel 18:31—“Make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” The sermon encapsulated Finney’s beliefs, displayed his oratorical gifts, and initiated a protracted debate over its meaning. Dispensing with the Calvinist idea of man’s helplessness, Finney proclaimed, “All Holiness … must be voluntary.” How could it be, he inquired, “that God requires us to make a new heart, on pain of eternal death, when at the same time he knows we have no power to obey; and that if ever the work is done, he must himself do the very thing he requires of us.” It made no sense that the sinner was expected to be “entirely passive” in his own salvation, as if waiting for “a surgical operation or an electric shock.” Changing one’s heart was no different from changing one’s mind. The heart was “something over which we have control; something voluntary; something for which we are to blame and which we are bound to alter.” Conversion was the requirement to change our “moral character; our moral disposition; in other words, to change the abiding preference of our minds.” The “actual turning, or change, is the sinner’s own act,” and not “the gift and work of God.” God induces one to turn, but still it must be “your own voluntary act” and it must come now—“another moment’s delay and it may be too late forever.”
Finney offered the Niagara Falls parable and several other stories to illustrate his point. “Tell stories,” Finney advised in his Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), “it is the only way to preach.” Here was one key to Finney’s success: his democratic style. He rejected the formality and obscurity of the educated ministry, and his preaching was theatrical, conversational, and practical. He defended his approach with an anecdote. The bishop of London once asked the actor David Garrick why actors, playing fictional roles, moved audiences to tears, whereas ministers, representing sober realities, were ignored. Garrick replied: “It is because we represent fiction as a reality and you represent reality as a fiction.” Finney made reality palpable and forced congregants to participate in the drama of salvation. He talked in terms well understood by his audience, using analogies to professional ambitions, commercial arrangements, and domestic relations, going so far as to mention “improper intimacy with other women.” The spirit of God was necessary to promote conversion, he reasoned, in the same way that the power of the state was necessary to compel debtors to pay their obligations. The sinner should see himself as a member of a jury who weighs the arguments of the lawyer “and makes up his mind as upon oath and for his life, and gives a verdict upon the spot.”8
As Finney spoke, one man sat scribbling. Asa Rand, Congregationalist minister and editor of The Volunteer, a monthly publication devoted to traditional theology, copied down an abstract of the sermon. He published it, along with critical commentary, and issued his thoughts separately as a pamphlet titled The New Divinity Tried. Rand rejected the theological innovations of the previous decade (variously called New Divinity, New School, or New Haven theology) and remained true to eighteenth-century Calvinist strictures holding that salvation was a gift of divine agency and that regeneration was a physical, not moral, transformation. Rand’s summary read like an indictment. Finney preached “that a moral character, is to be ascribed to voluntary exercises alone, and a nature cannot be either holy or unholy;—that the heart, when considered in relation to God, is nothing but the governing purpose of man;—that the depravity or moral ruin of man has not abridged his power of choosing right with the same ease that he chooses wrong;—and that conversion is effected only by moral suasion, or the influence of motives.”
Simply put, Finney ascribed too much power to the individual and not enough to God. Rand challenged Finney’s parable, arguing, “If the Spirit only cries to the sinner stop, and does not stop him, he will go on to destruction. If the Spirit only warns, alarms and persuades, the awakened sinner is gone forever.” Conversion and salvation, Rand restated, did not flow from the decision of the sinner and did not come instantaneously, “on the spot.” Regeneration was not a career choice, not “like a man resolving to be a lawyer or a merchant, or changing his purpose about his worldly affairs as people do every day;—changes which might require no sacrifices, no regrets, no self-denial, no surmounting of inward obstacles.” Change came not through choice but entirely through the inaudible, invisible, imperceptible “special agency of the Spirit of God.”9
Rand objected not only to Finney’s doctrines, but also to the measures he employed. Along with other orthodox ministers, he denounced the anxious seat as likely to produce “a selfish or spurious conversion.” Ministers fretted deeply that, “at a time when true conversions are multiplied with such unprecedented rapidity, it is difficult for Christians to detect those which are false.” How to tell the truly penitent from the false had always been a dilemma in Christian theology, but never more so than during a revival that invited sinners to reveal themselves and gave them a platform to enact their conversion. Rather than drawing out genuinely troubled sinners, the anxious seat would likely be filled by “the forward, the sanguine, the rash, the self-confident, and the self-righteous,” not “the modest, the humble, the broke
n-hearted.” In the hands of Finney, religion had been turned into a “business of self-examination,” in which “conversion is simply an act of will,” based almost exclusively upon a “self-determining power.” Like “the morning cloud and the early dew,” such a faith, Rand predicted, would soon dissipate.10
Rand misjudged. The essence of Finney’s religious belief—indi—vidual action—flooded the American firmament. To be sure, he faced persistent opposition. The orthodox continued to hunt heretics, eventually trying even Lyman Beecher and his son for wandering away from strict religious tenets. In 1836, Finney withdrew from the Presbyterian Church altogether. Denunciation of revivals also rained down from the other side of the religious spectrum, not from Calvinists who denied free will but from the increasing power of Arminians who reveled in it. In Boston especially this meant the Unitarians, who controlled Harvard, as well as the Universalists. These liberal denominations differed from all Calvinists in their view of doctrinal matters. But, like the orthodox, they decried revivals for the measures employed to win converts: Protracted Meetings, emotional appeals, and uneducated ministers. Revivals, they argued, were being contrived by evangelicals. Women in particular, “young, simple, inexperienced, and uninformed are the very materials suited to the purpose of the actors.” Once converted, they created a “petticoat government in religion.” Speaking at the First Universalist Church in Boston, Walter Balfour snorted that “some clergymen now, can calculate when a revival of religion is to take place, yea, can produce one any time they please. Getting up revivals, is now a thing so well understood, and the means of producing them so well known, that some religious sects, draw their plans, and proceed with such certainty to produce them, as a mason, or a carpenter does to build a house. But an astronomer, though he can calculate to a moment the time of an eclipse, has as yet discovered no measure to produce one at his pleasure.”11
The immediate concern of the Unitarians and Universalists was that, by emphasizing free will and free agency, Finney poached on liberal ground and threatened to increase the power and numbers of what, to them, remained the orthodox party. Revivals, protested one opponent, “are promoted as the last expedient for maintaining the sinking cause of orthodoxy.” Had liberal ministers been able to look past doctrinal and denominational differences, they might have recognized what they shared with the New Divinity ministers: an abiding faith in the power of the individual.12
If Finney led a rebellion against orthodox Calvinism, there also loomed in Boston an incipient rebel against liberal Arminianism—Ralph Waldo Emerson. In February, the twenty-seven-year-old Unitarian minister faced a spiritual crisis when his wife died. “My angel is gone to heaven this morning & I am alone in the world and strangely happy,” he confessed to his aunt. To read Emerson’s journals for the year is to see how he and Finney, each moving away from starkly opposed religious tenets, galloped in stride: “self makes sin”; “we were made to become better”; “because you are a free agent, God can only remove sin by the concurrence of the sinner.” Emerson shunned the denominations of the day. “In the Bible,” he reasoned, “you are not directed to be a Unitarian or a Calvinist or an Episcopalian.” Denouncing both religious and political strife, he proclaimed that “a Sect or Party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.” Emerson would emerge out of the “dim confusion” of 1831, resign his pulpit, repudiate “corpse-cold” Unitarianism, and establish himself as the premier philosopher of American individualism in what he called, for better and worse, the “age of the first-person singular.” 13
Finney and Emerson, evangelicalism and transcendentalism, worlds apart yet part and parcel of an American spirit. Reform yourself, they proclaimed, and then reform society. No idea was more important to the day than the belief that man had the power to improve society, perhaps even to perfect it, and in so doing help usher in the millennium. Institutions and behaviors that only a few years earlier had received little notice now became the objects of organized moral-reform efforts: slavery, alcohol, criminality, deviance. Organizations such as the New England Anti-Slavery Society, the American Temperance Society, the Prison Discipline Society, and the Infant School Society competed for membership and funds. Leading ministers, politicians, and social activists frequently joined more than one society, but neither Finney nor Emerson ever embraced organized social activism to the extent of their friends and followers. When they did speak out, they did not go far enough (Finney banned slaveholders from his New York congregation in 1833, but he refused to abolish segregated seating and sought to avoid “angry controversy” on the subject of slavery). Or they regretted it (Emerson delivered a speech and public letter denouncing the removal of the Cherokee from their homeland, but the experience dragged him down “like dead cats around one’s neck”). Compared with denominations, Emerson confessed that he preferred a “sect for the suppression of Intemperance or a sect for the suppression of loose behaviour to women,” but he never warmed to the idea of organized reform.14
If revivals and reforms disturbed some Northerners, they disgusted at least one Southern visitor to New York. John Quitman, who as governor of Mississippi promoted secession, observed in July from Rhinebeck, New York: “Among the masses in the Northern States, every other feeling is now swallowed up by a religious enthusiasm which is pervading the country. Wherever I have traveled in the free states, I have found preachers holding three, four, six, and eight days’ meeting, provoking revivals, and begging contributions for the Indians, the negroes, the Sunday-schools, foreign missions, home missions, the Colonization society, temperance societies, societies for the education of pious young men, distressed sisters, superannuated ministers, reclaimed penitents, church edifices, church debts, religious libraries, etc., etc.: clamorously exacting the last penny from the poor enthusiast, demanding the widow’s mite, the orphan’s pittance, and denouncing the vengeance of Heaven on those who feel unable to give … . They are not only extortionate, but absolutely insulting in their demands; and my observations lead me to believe there is vast deal of robbery and roguery under this stupendous organization of religious societies.”15
Some men might have mocked and resisted (in Boston, one group posted a broadside for the formation of an “Intemperance Society”), but middle-class women in particular embraced religion and reform. Where women “were most active, revivals were most powerful,” observed one western New Yorker. Women constituted a higher percentage of converts than did men, often joining the church first and then inducing their husbands, sons, and brothers to enlist. Finney’s first convert in Rochester, he recalled, was “a lady of high standing, … a gay, worldly woman, very fond of society,” who renounced “sin, and the world and self.” “From that moment,” he observed, “she was outspoken in her religious convictions, and zealous for the conversion of her friends.” Unlike other ministers, Finney allowed women equality with men during services by permitting them to pray aloud in mixed gatherings, a practice that scandalized the orthodox. Opponents cried, “Set women to praying? Why, the next thing … will be to set them to preaching.” Finney responded with sarcasm: “What dreadful things,” he mocked. The wife of one pastor summarized one of the ways women believed evangelical religion empowered them: “To the Christian religion we owe the rank we hold in society, and we should feel our obligation … . It is that, which prevents our being treated like beasts of burden—which secures us the honorable privilege of human companionship in social life, and raises us in the domestic relations to the elevated stations of wives and mothers.”16
Bolstered by Christian encomiums, the ideal of domesticity reigned over the middle-class household. One of the best-selling volumes of the year was The Mother’s Book, by Lydia Maria Child. Capitalizing on the success of The Frugal Housewife (1829), Child’s contributions to the advice literature genre added to her growing reputation as a writer of children’s stories and sentimental fiction. “She is the first woman in the republic,” hailed William Lloyd Garrison in 1829. Ch
ild despaired over the moral condition of the nation. “If the inordinate love of wealth and parade be not checked among us,” she warned, “it will be the ruin of our country, as it has been, and will be, the ruin of thousands of individuals. What restlessness, what discontent, what bitterness, what knavery and crime, have been produced by this eager passion for money!”
The burden fell to mothers to check the appetites of husbands and children and to use their position to inculcate principles of domestic economy and moral restraint. “What a change would take place in the world if men were always governed by internal principle,” she argued. For women as well as men, all change “must begin with her heart, and religiously drive from thence all unkind and discontented feelings.” Child’s belief that “the mind of a child … is a vessel empty and pure,” to be formed and filled by environmental influences, contradicted Calvinist notions but fit comfortably with the emphasis on individual volition that reached from Finney to Emerson. Child herself moved from Congregationalism to Unitarianism. The “tone of radicalism” perceived by one reviewer—a tone evident in Child’s contempt for the idleness of the upper classes—became a clarion call when she sacrificed her literary reputation, embraced immediate abolition, and published An. Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), a work that asked readers to “try to judge the negro by the same rules you judge other men.”17
The question that echoed, like the tolling of the steeple bell, was how to judge one’s self. Henry Ware, Jr., thought he knew the answer, and he explained how in his essay On the Formation of the Christian Character. No other American work articulated the middle-class vision of self as clearly as Ware’s; it passed through at least fifteen editions. Readers, Ware reported, “speak to me of it with tears in their eyes.” The author was a Unitarian minister and professor of pastoral theology, the son of the man whose election as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard in 1805 led orthodox members to resign and establish a more conservative seminary at Andover. Ware’s work sounded again and again the themes of self-denial, self-discipline, and self-improvement. The state of society made individuals “anxious about themselves, about their characters, their condition, their prospects.” Only by “vigilant self-examination,” by replacing external, superficial, public standards for internal, spiritual, private ones, could one obtain a Christian character. This work must be “the business of … life,” because God has opened “a free highway to the kingdom of life, through which all may walk and be saved.” Religion, he claimed, “is a personal thing,” and men “should first and most seriously study its relation to their own hearts.” “Man’s own labors are essential to his salvation,” Ware insisted. Advising Christians to exert themselves immediately in prayer, meditation, and reading, he reminded them, “The work before you is wholly within your power.”18
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