Even if this seems long, it is taken from a site with much more detail at www.alliancenet.org/pub/a...inney.html
I am posting it as Charles Finney was an influence on Jed Smock and Daniel....although the article holds some surprises. This will be in several parts.
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(biographical background)
Sylvester Finney, a farmer, moved to the frontier from Connecticut with his wife Rebecca and children. The year was 1794, and the Oneida County area of New York had already distinguished itself for its odd spiritual fads. John Humphrey Noyes's perfectionistic Oneida Community had gathered followers who were intent on duplicating the Book of Acts by holding all goods--and wives, in common. Millerites, Mormons, Campbellites, Spiritualists, Swedenborgians, Shakers, Quakers, and a host of sects sharing an enthusiastic, millennial, and Gnostic orientation, found the region's spiritual soil rich for the most fantastic visions, earning the nickname, "Psychic Highway." According to Keith J. Hardman, by 1850 Spiritualism and Mesmerism, antecedents to what one today might recognize as "New Age" ideas, boasted sixty-seven periodicals, thirty-eight thousand mediums and two million followers inside and outside the church.
It was into this "Burned-over District," as it came to be called, that Charles Finney arrived with his family at age two. Handsome and charming, Finney seemed to take up anything to which he set his mind with great skill and energy. Although it is not certain that he actually had been enrolled himself, Finney began teaching elementary school. "There was nothing which anyone else knew," a student later reflected, "that Mr. Finney didn't know, and there was nothing which anyone else could do that Mr. Finney could not do--and do a great deal better."
Finney's parents were not church-goers and in his Memoirs, he could recall nothing religious from his upbringing. However, he did begin attending the services at the Congregational church in Warren, Connecticut, when he lived briefly with his uncle. Peter Starr, whose preaching Finney later recalled with great frustration, became an icon of Old School intellectualism that would inspire the evangelist's caricatures. Evidently, Starr's method of preaching was mundane, dispassionate, and lecture-like: he rarely even made eye-contact with the congregation. And his theology did not fare any better, from the young man's point of view, as Starr was an ardent Calvinist--if, indeed, ardor was at all expressed by the minister.
Disinterested in religion, Finney eventually entered the practice of law near his home, but experienced a profound change in direction while walking among the woods in 1821. As he records the event, it was a purely rational decision that suddenly made its impression upon the lawyer's mind, as the resolution to any case in the courtroom. He returned to his office the next day to inform his client that he had a retainer from the Lord to preach the Gospel.
However, things were not as easy for converts to simply decide to become a preacher as Finney assumed and the frontier was no exception. His Presbyterian pastor, George W. Gale, with Old School roots, but New School interests, encouraged him to attend seminary and go under the care of presbytery. What followed differs in the accounts of Gale and Finney. According to Finney, presbytery offered him a full scholarship to Princeton Seminary, "but Gale, whose memory played fewer tricks on him, recorded in 1853 that he 'had written to Andover, to Princeton, and to Auburn' for admission for Finney, but received 'no encouragement.'" In fact, Finney's version of the story not only included pleas on the part of the presbytery to fund such an endeavor; Finney accounts for the outcome by saying that he declared to the presbytery that, against its protestations, "I would not put myself under such an influence as they had been under; that I was confident they had been wrongly educated, and they were not ministers that met my ideal of what a minister of Christ should be." "I told them this reluctantly," he added, "but I could not honestly withhold it."
One thing of which both his friends and enemies were constantly reminding the self-confident ordinand throughout his life was that his displays of arrogance and conceit could get him into trouble. Even when Gale's generous attempts to secure a place for Finney failed, the pastor convinced presbytery to allow him to personally supervise his instruction, using his own library. Nevertheless, Finney's reminiscences of Gale's generosity included the remark that, "...so far as he was concerned as my teacher, my studies were little else than controversy." Hardman's analysis of Finney's recollections are pointed: "It is to be seriously doubted that dignified, competent clergymen of many years' experience would meekly accept the tongue-lashing of a rather arrogant, newly converted law clerk who patently knew nothing of theology and whose application for scholarship aid had just been rejected by three seminaries!"
I am posting it as Charles Finney was an influence on Jed Smock and Daniel....although the article holds some surprises. This will be in several parts.
---
(biographical background)
Sylvester Finney, a farmer, moved to the frontier from Connecticut with his wife Rebecca and children. The year was 1794, and the Oneida County area of New York had already distinguished itself for its odd spiritual fads. John Humphrey Noyes's perfectionistic Oneida Community had gathered followers who were intent on duplicating the Book of Acts by holding all goods--and wives, in common. Millerites, Mormons, Campbellites, Spiritualists, Swedenborgians, Shakers, Quakers, and a host of sects sharing an enthusiastic, millennial, and Gnostic orientation, found the region's spiritual soil rich for the most fantastic visions, earning the nickname, "Psychic Highway." According to Keith J. Hardman, by 1850 Spiritualism and Mesmerism, antecedents to what one today might recognize as "New Age" ideas, boasted sixty-seven periodicals, thirty-eight thousand mediums and two million followers inside and outside the church.
It was into this "Burned-over District," as it came to be called, that Charles Finney arrived with his family at age two. Handsome and charming, Finney seemed to take up anything to which he set his mind with great skill and energy. Although it is not certain that he actually had been enrolled himself, Finney began teaching elementary school. "There was nothing which anyone else knew," a student later reflected, "that Mr. Finney didn't know, and there was nothing which anyone else could do that Mr. Finney could not do--and do a great deal better."
Finney's parents were not church-goers and in his Memoirs, he could recall nothing religious from his upbringing. However, he did begin attending the services at the Congregational church in Warren, Connecticut, when he lived briefly with his uncle. Peter Starr, whose preaching Finney later recalled with great frustration, became an icon of Old School intellectualism that would inspire the evangelist's caricatures. Evidently, Starr's method of preaching was mundane, dispassionate, and lecture-like: he rarely even made eye-contact with the congregation. And his theology did not fare any better, from the young man's point of view, as Starr was an ardent Calvinist--if, indeed, ardor was at all expressed by the minister.
Disinterested in religion, Finney eventually entered the practice of law near his home, but experienced a profound change in direction while walking among the woods in 1821. As he records the event, it was a purely rational decision that suddenly made its impression upon the lawyer's mind, as the resolution to any case in the courtroom. He returned to his office the next day to inform his client that he had a retainer from the Lord to preach the Gospel.
However, things were not as easy for converts to simply decide to become a preacher as Finney assumed and the frontier was no exception. His Presbyterian pastor, George W. Gale, with Old School roots, but New School interests, encouraged him to attend seminary and go under the care of presbytery. What followed differs in the accounts of Gale and Finney. According to Finney, presbytery offered him a full scholarship to Princeton Seminary, "but Gale, whose memory played fewer tricks on him, recorded in 1853 that he 'had written to Andover, to Princeton, and to Auburn' for admission for Finney, but received 'no encouragement.'" In fact, Finney's version of the story not only included pleas on the part of the presbytery to fund such an endeavor; Finney accounts for the outcome by saying that he declared to the presbytery that, against its protestations, "I would not put myself under such an influence as they had been under; that I was confident they had been wrongly educated, and they were not ministers that met my ideal of what a minister of Christ should be." "I told them this reluctantly," he added, "but I could not honestly withhold it."
One thing of which both his friends and enemies were constantly reminding the self-confident ordinand throughout his life was that his displays of arrogance and conceit could get him into trouble. Even when Gale's generous attempts to secure a place for Finney failed, the pastor convinced presbytery to allow him to personally supervise his instruction, using his own library. Nevertheless, Finney's reminiscences of Gale's generosity included the remark that, "...so far as he was concerned as my teacher, my studies were little else than controversy." Hardman's analysis of Finney's recollections are pointed: "It is to be seriously doubted that dignified, competent clergymen of many years' experience would meekly accept the tongue-lashing of a rather arrogant, newly converted law clerk who patently knew nothing of theology and whose application for scholarship aid had just been rejected by three seminaries!"
