Memoirs

CHAPTER 23 LABORS IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1832 AND ONWARD Mr. Lewis Tappan, with other Christian brethren, leased the Chatham Street Theater and fitted it up for a church and as a suitable place to accommodate the various charitable societies in holding their anniversaries. They called me, and I accepted the pastorate of the Second Free Presbyterian Church. I left Boston in April 1832 and commenced labors in that theater at that time. The Spirit of the Lord was immediately poured out upon us, and we had an extensive revival that spring and summer. About mid-summer the cholera appeared in New York for the first time. The panic became great, and a great many Christian people fled into the country. The cholera was very severe in the city that summer, more so than it has ever been since, and it was especially fatal in the part of the city where I resided. I recollect counting from the door of our house five hearses drawn up at the same time at different doors within sight. I remained in New York until quite the latter part of summer, not being willing to leave the city while the mortality was so great. But I found that the influence was undermining my health, and in the latter part of the summer I went into the country for two or three weeks. On my return I was installed as pastor of the church. During the installation services I was taken ill, and soon after I got home it was plain that I was seized with the cholera. The gentleman at the next door was seized about the same time, and before morning he was dead. The means used for my recovery gave my system a terrible shock from which it took me long to recover. However, toward spring I was able to preach again. I invited two ministerial brethren to help me in holding a series of meetings. We preached in turn for two or three weeks, but very little was accomplished. I saw that it was not the way to promote a revival there, and I drew the meeting in that form to a close. On the next Sabbath I made appointments to preach every evening during the week, and the revival immediately commenced and became very powerful. I continued to preach for twenty evenings in succession beside preaching on the Sabbath. My health was not yet vigorous, and after preaching twenty evenings I suspended that form of my labors. The converts known to us numbered five hundred, and our church became so large that very soon a colony was sent off to form another church, and a suitable building was erected for that purpose on the corner of Madison and Catherine Streets. The work continued to go forward in a very interesting manner. We held meetings of inquiry once or twice a week, and sometimes oftener, and found that every week a goodly number of conversions was reported. The church were a praying, working people. They were thoroughly united, were well trained in regard to the labors for the conversion of sinners, and were a most devoted and efficient church of Christ. They would go out into the highways and hedges and bring people to hear preaching whenever they were called upon to do so. Both men and women would undertake this work. When we wished to give notice of any extra meetings, little slips of paper on which was printed an invitation to attend the services would be carried from house to house in every direction by the members of the church, especially in that part of the city in which Chatham Street Chapel, as we called it, was located. By the distribution of these slips and by oral invitations, the house could be filled any evening of the week. Our ladies were not afraid to go and gather in all classes from the neighborhood roundabout. It was something new to have religious services in that theater instead of such scenes as had formerly been enacted there. There were three rooms connected with the front part of the theater, long large rooms which were fitted up for prayer meetings and for a lecture room. These rooms had been used for very different purposes while the main building was occupied as a theater, but when fitted up for our purpose they were exceedingly convenient. There were three tiers of galleries, and those rooms were connected with the galleries respectively one above the other. I instructed my church members to scatter themselves over the whole house and to keep their eyes open in regard to any that were seriously affected under preaching, and if possible to detain them after preaching for conversation and prayer. They were true to their teaching and were on the lookout at every meeting to see with whom the Word of God was taking effect, and they had faith enough to dismiss their fears and to speak to any whom they saw to be affected by the Word. In this way the conversion of a great many souls was secured. They would invite them into these rooms, and there we could converse and pray with them, and thus gather up the results of every sermon. A case which I this moment recollect will illustrate the manner in which the members would work. The firm of Naylor and Company, who were at that time the great cutlery manufacturers in Sheffield, England, had a house in New York, and a partner by the name of H. Mr. H. was a worldly man, had traveled a great deal, and had resided in several of the principal cities of Europe. One of the clerks of that establishment had come to our meetings and been converted, and felt very anxious for the conversion of Mr. H. The young man for some time hesitated about asking him to attend our meetings, but he finally ventured to do so, and in compliance with his earnest entreaty Mr. H. came one evening to meeting. As it happened he sat near the broad aisle over against where Mr. Tappan sat. Mr. Tappan saw that during the sermon he manifested a good deal of emotion, and seemed uneasy at times as if he were on the point of going out. Mr. H. afterwards acknowledged to me that he was several times on the point of leaving because he was so affected by the sermon, but he remained till the blessing was pronounced. Mr. Tappan kept his eye on him, and as soon as the blessing was pronounced introduced himself as Mr. Tappan, a partner of Arthur Tappan and Company, a firm well known to everybody in New York. I have heard Mr. H. himself relate the facts with great emotion. He said that Mr. Tappan stepped up to him and took him gently by the button of his coat, and spoke very kindly to him, and asked him if he would not remain for prayer and conversation. He tried to excuse himself and get away, but Mr. Tappan was so gentlemanly and so kind that he could not well get away from him. He was importunate, and as Mr. H. expressed it, he held fast to my button so that, said he, an ounce weight at my button was the means of saving my soul. The people retired, and Mr. H., among others, was persuaded to remain. According to our custom we had a thorough conversation, and Mr. H. was either then, or very soon after, hopefully converted. When I first went to Chatham Street Chapel I informed the brethren that I did not wish to fill up the house with Christians from other churches, as my object was to gather from the world. I wanted to secure the conversion of the ungodly to the utmost possible extent. We therefore gave ourselves to the labor for that class of persons, and by the blessing of God, with good success. Conversions were multiplied so much that our church would soon become so large that we would send off a colony, and when I left New York I think we had seven free churches whose members were laboring with all their might to secure the salvation of souls. They were supported mostly by collections that were taken up from Sabbath to Sabbath. If at any time there was a deficiency in the treasury, there were a number of brethren of property who would at once supply the deficiency from their own purses, so that we never had the least difficulty in meeting the pecuniary demands. A more harmonious, prayerful, and efficient people I never knew than were the members of those free churches. They were not among the rich, although there were several men of property belonging to them. In general they were gathered from the middle and lower classes of people. This was what we aimed to accomplish, to preach the gospel especially to the poor. When I first went to New York, I had made up my mind on the question of slavery, and was exceedingly anxious to arouse public attention to the subject. I did not, however, turn aside to make it a hobby or divert the attention of the people from the work of converting souls. Nevertheless, in my prayers and preaching, I so often alluded to slavery and denounced it that a considerable excitement came to exist among the people. While I was laboring at Chatham Street Chapel, some events occurred connected with the presbytery that led to the formation of a congregational church, and to my becoming its pastor. A member came to us from one of the old churches, and we were soon informed that before he came he had committed an offense for which he needed to be disciplined. I supposed that since he had been recommended to us as a member of another church in good standing, and since the offense had been committed before he left that church, that it belonged to them to discipline him. The question was brought before the Third Presbytery of New York, to which I then belonged, and they decided that he was under our jurisdiction, and that it belonged to us to take the case in hand and discipline him. We did so. But soon another case occurred in which a woman came from one of the churches and united with us, and we found that she had been guilty of an offense before she came to us which called for discipline. In accordance with the ruling of the presbytery in the other case, we went forward and excommunicated her. She appealed from the decision of the session to the presbytery, and they decided that the offense was not committed under our jurisdiction, and ruled in a manner directly opposite to their former ruling. I expostulated and told them that I did not know how to act, that the two cases were precisely similar, and that their rulings in the two cases were entirely inconsistent and opposed to each other. Dr. Cox replied that they would not be governed by their own precedent, or by any other precedent, and talked so warmly and pressed the case so hard that the presbytery went with him. Soon after this the question came up of building the tabernacle in Broadway. The men that built it, and the leading members who formed the church there, built it with the understanding that I should be its pastor, and they formed a congregational church. I then took my dismission from the presbytery and became pastor of that congregational church. But I should have said that in January 1834 I was obliged to leave on account of my health and take a sea voyage. I went up the Mediterranean, therefore in a small brig, in the midst of winter. We had a very stormy passage, my stateroom was small, and I was on the whole very uncomfortable, and the voyage did not much improve my health. I spent some six weeks at Malta, and also in Sicily. I was gone about six months. On my return I found that there was a great excitement in New York. The members of my church, together with other abolitionists in New York, had held a meeting on the 4th of July, and had had an address on the subject of slaveholding. A mob was stirred up, and this was the beginning of that series of mobs that spread in many directions, whenever and wherever there was an anti-slavery gathering, or a voice lifted up against the abominable institution of slavery. However, I went forward in my labors in Chatham Street. The work of God immediately revived and went forward with great interest, numbers being converted at almost or quite every meeting. I continued to labor thus in Chatham Street, and the church continued to flourish, and to extend its influence and its labors in every direction until the tabernacle in Broadway was completed. The plan of the interior of that house was my own. I had observed the defects of churches in regard to sound, and was sure that I could give the plan of a church in which I could speak easily to a much larger congregation than any house would hold that I had ever seen. An architect was consulted, and I gave him my plan. But he objected to it, that it would not appear well, and feared that it would injure his reputation to build a church with such an interior as that. I told him that if he would not build it on that plan, he was not the man to superintend its construction at all. It was finally built in accordance with my ideas, and it was a most commodious and comfortable place to speak in. In this connection I must relate the origin of the New York Evangelist. When I first went to the City of New York, and before I went there, the New York Observer, in the hands of Mr. Morse, had gone into the controversy originating in Mr. Nettleton's opposition to the revivals in Central New York. The Observer had sustained Mr. Nettleton's course, and refused to publish anything on the other side. The writings of Mr. Nettleton and his friends Mr. Morse would publish in the Observer, but if any reply was made by any of the friends of those revivals, he would not publish it. In this state of things, our friends had no organ through which they could communicate with the public to correct misapprehensions. Judge Jonas Platt of the Supreme Court was then living in New York, and was a friend of mine. His son and daughter had been hopefully converted in the revival at Utica. A considerable effort was made by the friends of those revivals to get a hearing on the question in debate, but all in vain. Judge Platt found one day, pasted on the inside of the cover of one of his old law books, a letter written by one of the pastors in New York against Whitefield at the time he was in this country. That letter of the New York pastor struck Judge Platt as so strongly resembling the opposition made by Mr. Nettleton that he sent it to the New York Observer and wished it to be published as a literary curiosity, it having been written nearly a hundred years before. Mr. Morse refused to publish it, assigning as a reason that the people would regard it as applying to the opposition of Mr. Nettleton. At length, some of the friends of the revivals in New York assembled and talked the matter over of establishing a new paper that should deal fairly with those questions. They finally commenced the enterprise. I assisted them in getting out the first number, in which I invited ministers and laymen to consider and discuss several questions in theology, and also questions relating to the best means of promoting revivals of religion. The first editor of the paper was a Mr. Saxton, a young man who had formerly labored a good deal with Mr. Nettleton, but who strongly disapproved of the course he had been taking in opposing what he then called the Western revivals. This young man continued in the editorial chair about a year, and discussed with considerable ability many of the questions that had been proposed for discussion. The paper changed editors two or three times, perhaps in the course of as many years, and finally Reverend Joshua Levitt was called and accepted the editorial chair. He, as everybody knows, was an able editor. The paper soon went into extensive circulation, and proved itself a medium through which the friends of revivals, as they then existed, could communicate their thoughts to the public. I have spoken of the building of the Tabernacle, and of the excitement in New York on the subject of slavery. When the Tabernacle was in the process of completion, its walls being up and the roof on, a story was said in circulation that it was going to be an amalgamation church, in which colored and white people were to be compelled to sit promiscuously over the house. Such was the state of the public mind in New York at that time, that this report caused great excitement, and somebody set the building on fire. The firemen were in such a state of mind that they refused to put it out, and left the interior and roof to be consumed. However, the gentlemen who had undertaken to build it went forward and completed it. As the excitement increased on the subject of slavery, Mr. Leavitt espoused the cause of the slave, and advocated it in the New York Evangelist. I watched the discussion with a good deal of attention and anxiety, and when I was about to leave on the sea voyage to which I had referred, I admonished Mr. Leavitt to be careful and not go too fast in the discussion of the anti-slavery question, lest he should destroy his paper. On my homeward passage, my mind became exceedingly exercised on the question of revivals. I feared that they would decline throughout the country. I feared that the opposition that had been made to them had grieved the Holy Spirit. My own health, it appeared to me, had nearly or quite broken down, and I knew of no other evangelist that would take the field and aid pastors in revival work. This view of the subject distressed me so much that one day I found myself unable to rest. My soul was in an utter agony. I spent almost the entire day in prayer in my stateroom, or walking the deck in intense agony in view of the state of things. In fact, I felt crushed with the burden that was on my soul. There was no one on board to whom I could open my mind or say a word. It was the spirit of prayer that was upon me, that which I had often experienced in kind, but perhaps never before to such a degree for so long a time. I besought the Lord to go on with His work and to provide Himself with such instrumentalities as were necessary. It was a long summer day in the early part of July. 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. But I had not the least idea what the course of His providence would be. On arriving at New York, I found, as I have said, the mob excitement on the subject of slavery very intense. I remained but a day or two in New York, and went into the country, to the place where my family were spending the summer. On my return to New York in the fall, Mr. Levitt came to me and said, Brother Finney, I have ruined the evangelist. I have not been as prudent as you cautioned me to be, and I have gone so far ahead of public intelligence and feeling on the subject that my subscription list is rapidly failing, and we shall not be able to continue its publication beyond the first of January unless you can do something to bring the paper back to public favor again. I told him my health was such that I did not know what I could do, but I would make it a subject of prayer. He said if I could write a series of articles on revivals, he had no doubt it would restore the paper immediately to public favor. After considering it a day or two, I proposed to preach a course of lectures to my people on revivals of religion, which he might report for his paper. He caught at this at once, says he, that is the very thing, and in the next number of his paper he advertised the course of lectures. This had the effect he desired, and soon after told me that the subscription list was very rapidly increasing, and stretching out his long arms he said, I have as many new subscribers every day as would fill my arms with papers to supply them each a single number. He had told me before that his subscription list had fallen off at the rate of sixty a day, but now he said it was increasing more rapidly than it ever had decreased. I began the course of lectures immediately and continued them through the winter, preaching one each week. Mr. Levitt could not write shorthand, but would sit and take notes, abridging what he wrote, in such a way that he could understand it himself, and then the next day he would sit down and fill out his notes and send them to the press. I did not see what he had reported until I saw it published in his paper. I did not myself write the lectures, of course, they were wholly extemporaneous. I did not make up my mind from time to time what the next lecture should be until I saw his report of my last. Then I could see what was the next question that would naturally need discussion. Brother Levitt's reports were meager as it respects the matter contained in the lectures. The lectures averaged, if I remember right, not less than an hour and three quarters in their delivery, but all that he could catch and report could be read probably in thirty minutes. These lectures were afterward published in a book and called Finney's Lectures on Revivals. Twelve thousand copies of them were sold as fast as they could be printed, and here, for the glory of Christ, I would say that they have been reprinted in England and France. They were translated into Welsh, and on the continent were translated into French and, I believe, into German, and were very extensively circulated throughout Europe and the colonies of Great Britain. They were, I presume, to be found wherever the English language is spoken. After they had been printed in Welsh, the Congregational Ministers of the Principality of Wales, at one of their public meetings, appointed a committee to inform me of the great revival that had resulted from the translation of those lectures into the Welsh language. This they did by letter. One publisher in London informed me that his father had published eighty thousand volumes of them. These revival lectures, meager as was the report of them, and feeble as they were in themselves, have been instrumental, as I have learned, in promoting revivals in England and Scotland and Wales, on the continent in various places, in Canada east and west, in Nova Scotia and in some of the islands of the sea. In England and Scotland I have often been refreshed by meetings with ministers and laymen in great numbers that have been converted, directly or indirectly, through the instrumentality of those lectures. I recollect the last time that I was abroad, one evening, three very prominent ministers of the gospel introduced themselves to me after the sermon and said that when they were in college they got hold of my revival lectures, which had resulted in their becoming ministers. I found persons in England, in all the different denominations, who had not only read those revival lectures but had been greatly blessed in reading them. When they were first published in the New York Evangelist, the reading of them resulted in revivals of religion in multitudes of places throughout this country. But this was not of man's wisdom. Let the reader remember that long day of agony and prayer at sea that God would do something to forward the work of revivals and enable me, if he desired to do it, to take such a course as to help forward the work. I felt certain then that my prayers would be answered, and I have regarded all that I have since been able to accomplish as, in very important sense, an answer to the prayers of that day. The spirit of prayer came upon me as a sovereign grace, bestowed upon me without the least merit and despite of all my sinfulness. He expressed my soul in prayer until I was enabled to prevail, and through infinite riches of grace in Christ Jesus I have been many years witnessing the wonderful results of that day of wrestling with God. In answer to that day's agony, he has continued to give me the spirit of prayer. Soon after I returned to New York, I commenced my labors in the tabernacle. The spirit of the Lord was poured out upon us, and we had a precious revival as long as I continued to be pastor of that church. While in New York, I had many applications from young men to take them as students in theology. I, however, had too much on my hands to undertake such work. But the brethren who built the tabernacle had this in view, and prepared a room under the choir, which we expected to use for prayer meetings, but more especially for a theological lecture room. The number of applications had been so large that I had made up my mind to deliver a course of theology lectures in that room each year, and let students, as chose, attend them gratuitously. But about this time, and before I had opened my lectures in New York, the breaking up at Lane Seminary took place, on account of the prohibition by the trustees of the discussion of the question of slavery among the students. When this occurred, Mr. Arthur Tappan proposed to me that if I would go to some point in Ohio and take rooms where I could gather those young men and give them my views in theology, and prepare them for the work of preaching throughout the West, he would be at the entire expense of the undertaking. He was very earnest in this proposal, but I did not know how to leave New York, and I did not see how I could accomplish the wishes of Mr. Tappan, although I strongly sympathized with him in regard to helping those young men. They were, most of them, converts in those great revivals in which I had taken more or less part. While this subject was under consideration, I think in January 1835, Rev. John J. Shepard of Oberlin and Rev. Asa Mahan of Cincinnati arrived in New York to persuade me to go to Oberlin as professor of theology. Mr. Mahan had been one of the trustees of Lane Seminary, the only one, I think, that had resisted the prohibition of free discussion. Mr. Shepard had founded a colony and organized a school at Oberlin, about a year before this time, and had obtained a charter broad enough for a university. Mr. Mahan had never been in Oberlin. The trees had been removed from the college square, some dwelling houses and one college building had been erected, and about a hundred pupils had been gathered in the preparatory or academic department of the institution. The proposal they laid before me was to come on and take those students that had left Lane Seminary and teach them theology. These students had themselves proposed to go to Oberlin in case I would accept the call. This proposal met the views of Arthur and Louis Tappan and many of the friends of the slave who sympathized with Mr. Tappan in his wish to have those young men instructed and brought into the ministry. We had several consultations on the subject. The brethren in New York who were interested in the question offered if I would go and spend half each year in Oberlin to endow the institution so far as the professorships were concerned, and to do it immediately. I had understood that the trustees of Lane Seminary had acted over the heads of the faculty, and in the absence of several of them had passed the obnoxious resolution that had caused the students to leave. I said therefore to Mr. Shifford that I would not go at any rate unless two points were conceded by the trustees. One was that they should never interfere with the internal regulation of the school, but should leave that entirely to the discretion of the faculty. The other was that we should be allowed to receive colored people on the same conditions that we did white people, and that there should be no discrimination made on account of color. When these conditions were forwarded to Oberlin, the trustees were called together, and after a great struggle to overcome their own prejudices and the prejudices of the community, they passed resolutions complying with the conditions proposed. This difficulty being removed, the friends in New York were called together to see what they could do about endowing the institution. In the course of an hour or two they had a subscription filled for the endowment of eight professorships, as many it was supposed as the institution would need for several years. But after this endowment fund was subscribed, I felt a great difficulty in giving up that admirable place for preaching the gospel where such crowds were gathered within the sound of my voice. I felt too assured that in this new enterprise we should have great opposition from many sources. I therefore told Arthur Tappan that my mind did not feel at rest upon the subject, that we should meet with great opposition because of our anti-slavery principles, and that we could expect to get but very scanty funds to put up our buildings and to procure all the requisite apparatus of a college, that therefore I did not see my way clear, after all, to commit myself unless something could be done that should guarantee us the funds that were indispensable. Arthur Tappan's heart was as large as all New York, and, I might say, as large as the world. But when I laid the case thus before him, he said, Brother Finney, my own income averages about $100,000 a year. Now, if you will go to Oberlin, take hold of that work, and go on, and see that the buildings are put up, and the library, and everything provided, I will pledge you my entire income, except what I need to provide for my family, till you are beyond pecuniary want. Having perfect confidence in Brother Tappan, I said, That will do. Thus far the difficulties are out of the way. But still there was a great difficulty in leaving my church in New York. I never had thought of having my labors at Oberlin interfere with my revival labors and preaching. It was therefore agreed between myself and the church that I should spend my winters in New York and my summers at Oberlin, and that the church would be at the expense of my going and coming. When this was arranged, I took my family, and arrived in Oberlin at the beginning of summer, 1835.