OBERLIX PERFECTIONISM 
 
 V 
 
 ARTICLE OXK 
 
 B. B. WARFIELD 
 
 Reprinted from 
 The Princeton Theological Review, Vol. XIX, No. i, January, 19; 
 
 408 
 
FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 
 REV. LOUIS FITZGERALD BENSON. D. D 
 
 BEQUEATHED BY HIM TO 
 
 THE LIBRARY OF 
 
 PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 
The Princeton 
 Theological Review 
 
 JANUARY, 1921 
 
 OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 
 I. The Men and the Beginnings. 
 
 Oberlin College 1 had its origin in what seemed a wild 
 dream that formed itself in 1832 in the mind of John J. 
 Shipherd, home-missionary pastor of the little Presbyterian 
 church in the village of Elyria, Ohio. As the scheme floated 
 before his imagination, it was perhaps not very dissimilar to 
 one of those communistic enterprises which were springing 
 up throughout the country in the wake of the excitement 
 aroused by Robert Owen. To that extent Shipherd may be 
 accounted a brother spirit to John H. Noyes. But he had 
 not the courage of conviction, to call it by no harsher name, 
 which drove Xoyes on in his reckless course. When he 
 came to draw up the Oberlin "Covenant," he faltered. He 
 provided only that "we will hold and manage our estates 
 personally, but pledge as perfect a community of interest as 
 though we held a community of property." By so narrow 
 a margin Oberlin appears to have escaped becoming a decent 
 Oneida Community : or rather, we should say, by so narrow 
 a margin Oberlin appears to have escaped the early end 
 which has befallen all communistic enterprises which wish 
 to be decent; for communism and decency cannot exist to- 
 gether. 2 
 
 Apart from this one point, the persistency of Shipherd's 
 
 1 Compare : J. H. Fairchild, Oberlin, Its Origin, Progress and Re- 
 sults, 1871, and Oberlin, the Colony and the College, 1883; W. G. 
 Ballantyne, Oberlin Jubilee, 1S33-1883, 1884; D. L. Leonard, The Story 
 of Oberlin, 1898. 
 
 2 Cf. D. L. Leonard, The Story of Oberlin, 1898, pp. 87 ff. for some 
 account of Shipherd's communistic leaning. 
 
2 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 purpose and the energy of his will were incapable of falter- 
 ing. By the end of 1833, he had some nine square miles of 
 virgin forest in hand; the beginnings of a colony already 
 settled on it, pledged to high thinking and hard living (not 
 only no alcohol or tobacco, but also no coffee, no tea, no 
 condiments); a large boarding-school building erected; 
 efficient teachers at work in it, and a body of pupils, which 
 numbered forty-four by the end of the session, gathered at 
 their feet. There was of course only an "Academy" at first. 
 But Shipherd's plan embraced also from the beginning a 
 "College" and a "Theological Seminary" ; and already early 
 in 1834, there was a Board of Trustees in being, operating 
 under a charter, couched in broad terms, which spoke of an 
 "Oberlin Collegiate Institute." And by the autumn of that 
 year there was a freshman class ready to enter at the open- 
 ing of the next session (in the spring) "the collegiate de- 
 partment" of this Institute. Summer was term-time at 
 Oberlin, winter vacation. Late in November, accordingly, 
 Shipherd started out, armed with a commission from the 
 Board of Trustees to obtain the means to make the step 
 forward now become necessary. What he sought was 
 money and a President. But like Saul, seeking the asses, 
 he found much that he was not looking for. He found a 
 whole Theological Seminary, — President, professors, pupils 
 and endowment — all complete; and he brought it all back 
 with him to Oberlin in the spring of 1835. 
 
 Shipherd always contended that he was supernaturally 
 guided in this quest. And Asa Mahan, the President whom 
 he found, fully agreed with him. Up to the end of his long 
 life, Mahan constantly insisted that he was supernaturally 
 called to the Presidency of Oberlin College, not in the pro- 
 vidential sense in which this phrase is ordinarily employed, 
 but with as immediate a supernaturalism as that with which 
 Saul or David was designated king over Israel. 3 Shipherd, 
 having money and a President to find, naturally should have 
 gone east where money and Presidents were to be found. 
 
 3 Cf. Asa Mahan. Autobiography, 1881, p. 190. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 3 
 
 But he discovered himself going south instead. "An irre- 
 sistible impression" drove him without any clear intelligence 
 justifying his action, in the wrong direction. So he reached 
 Cincinnati instead of New York, and found — Mahan ; who, 
 everybody in Cincinnati told him, was the very person he 
 was seeking. He thought so too; and with the more con- 
 fidence that he could see now that he had been divinely 
 guided to him. Mahan had a whole Theological Seminary 
 ready for removal to Oberlin. There had been an aboli- 
 tionist organization among the students of Lane Theological 
 Seminary, which the Trustees of that Institution had en- 
 deavored to suppress. The result was that the students had 
 withdrawn from the Seminary, practically in a body; and, 
 housed near by, were endeavoring to continue their theo- 
 logical education independently, with only the aid of John 
 Morgan, who had been tutor in the preparatory department 
 at Lane and had withdrawn with the students. Mahan had 
 been the single member of the Board of Trustees who had 
 taken the students' part; and he now proposed that they, 
 with Morgan, should go with him to Oberlin, thus com- 
 pleting at a stroke the three-storied structure proposed for 
 that institution. 
 
 Excited by these bewildering occurrences, Shipherd, tak- 
 ing Mahan with him, proceeded east to complete his mission. 
 He now, however, no longer sought money and a President, 
 but money and a Professor of Theology. The office was 
 offered on the way to Theodore G. Weld, the young aboli- 
 tionist agitator, who had had much to do with the students' 
 revolt at Lane and who was their idol. He pointed them 
 rather to Charles G. Finney; and to Finney, then pastor 
 of the Broadway Tabernacle Congregationalist Church, 
 New York, accordingly they went. They found him de- 
 pressed in body and spirit, with a feeling that the bow of 
 his strength was broken and his evangelistic days were 
 over; 4 and quite ready to listen to their proposal if only the 
 
 * Preface to his Sermons on Important Subjects (1834) 1836, p. iv : 
 "My health has been such as to render it probable that I shall never 
 
4 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 necessary financial provision could be made. This was man- 
 aged with the help of his friend, Arthur Tappan, who was 
 always ready to multiply good works. One condition, how- 
 ever, was made by all — Tappan and Finney and Mahan and 
 the Lane students alike. There was to be no color line 
 drawn at Oberlin. The whole enterprise was near to wreck- 
 ing on this condition. It was only with the greatest diffi- 
 culty and in the end by a majority of only one vote, and 
 that on an ambiguously worded resolution, that the Trustees 
 were brought to comply with it. It was however thus com- 
 plied with; and so Shipherd was able to bring his Theo- 
 logical Seminary to Oberlin in the spring of 1835. 
 
 The end of woes, however, was not yet. The New York 
 backers of the enterprise failed ; and it found itself plunged 
 into the greatest financial straits. The students who had 
 come from Lane proved a little difficult — some of them 
 perhaps quite impossible — as from their antecedents it was 
 to be anticipated they would. 5 His colleagues found Mahan 
 himself something more than a little difficult. 6 Finney 
 
 be able to labor as an evangelist again." Preface to his Lectures on 
 Revivals of Religion (1835), 2 d ed. 1835, p. iii : "I am now a Pastor, 
 and have not sufficient health to labor as an Evangelist." 
 
 6 When Asa Mahan, Autobiography, p. 231, speaks of the lugubrious 
 tone of their Christianity, some discount may properly be made on 
 account of his natural zeal against a "miserable-sinner Christianity." 
 Though they were "from among the brightest converts" of the great 
 revivals, he says, "their common experience was represented in the 
 words: 'Where is the blessedness I knew, when first I saw the Lord?'" 
 Speaking of their tone of mind while still at Lane (pp. 239 ff.), he 
 says : "Several of the most talented among them" refused to go to 
 church saying they could "derive no benefit from the discourses of Dr. 
 Beecher or any other pastor in the city." "They understood the whole 
 subject." They did go to chapel, "and there listened to one of the 
 feeblest preachers I ever knew," and openly said that feeble as they 
 were, his sermons were as useful to them as any others in the city could 
 be. "Of those young men," he remarks, "every one, so far as I could 
 learn, afterwards made shipwreck of the faith. Only one or two of 
 them entered the ministry at all, and they soon left it, under the in- 
 fluence of some of the absurdities that then obtained." 
 
 6 D. L. Leonard, The Story of Oberlin, 1898, p. 40: "Certain faults 
 and infirmities of his wrought not a little damage." Again, p. 211 f. : 
 "His spirit was radical, positive and aggressive, and while he made 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 5 
 
 bristled with eccentricities. 7 Fads were exaggerated into 
 fanaticisms, foibles into gospels. There were some who, 
 worn out with the wrangle, left — "in a very unhappy 
 frame," as the historian says. 8 Most stayed on, and rasped 
 along. Meanwhile Finney and Mahan, with the valuable 
 assistance of John Morgan and Henry Cowles — who com- 
 pleted the theological faculty — were preaching, with the 
 greatest power and effect, the duty, the privilege, the possi- 
 bility of a holy walk. The circumstances in which they 
 found themselves imposed this particular topic upon them 
 as, in a very distinct sense, their peculiar message; and 
 they delivered it with great elaboration and persistency. 
 As they pressed on in their more and more intensified ex- 
 hortations, it came about that they were preaching just the 
 duty and attainability of a life of perfect holiness, though 
 they themselves had not faced the fact. 
 
 It required to be forced on their recognition by pressure 
 from without. This came in the summer and autumn of 
 1836 as the second year of the Theological Seminary was 
 drawing to a close. Under the exhortations of their pre- 
 ceptors the students perceived that precisely what was re- 
 quired of them was perfection. They put the question ; and 
 at length — though not until the ensuing winter — received 
 the affirmative answer. We are assisting here at the birth 
 of Oberlin Perfectionism. Once born, it proved a very 
 vigorous and very exacting child. Its exposition and de- 
 many warm friends and admirers, others not a few were stirred to 
 disfavor and antagonism. . . Certain serious defects attended his 
 career, which in particular his associates in the faculty found it in- 
 creasingly difficult to endure. After long forebearance and as a last 
 resort it was determined to draw up a paper setting forth the facts in 
 the case, to be signed by all and presented to the Trustees." 
 
 7 For example, Leonard, as cited, p. 35 : "With the advent of Mr. 
 Finney it began to be taught that a strict Graham diet was the only 
 one either hygienic or truly Christian, while meat and all condiments 
 were to be eschewed." Compare pp. 209 ff. 
 
 8 Leonard, as cited, pp. 35, 261, 442. J. P. Cowles is alluded to, whose 
 views, we are told, "were at some points so opposed to those of his 
 associates, and who felt constrained to speak and act just as he felt, 
 that his resignation was requested." He left Oberlin in 1839. 
 
O THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 fence absorbed a very large part of the energies of the 
 staff of theological instructors. It was Mahan who took 
 the lead and made himself first and last its chief expounder. 
 Finney, however, was first on the field. Spending the 
 winter of 1836- 1837 in New York, as was his custom dur- 
 ing his early years at Oberlin, and preaching there a series 
 of Lectures to Professing Christians — his new engross- 
 ment — he preached two of them on "Christian Perfection," 
 the first public proclamation of Oberlin Perfectionism. A 
 semi-monthly newspaper — The Oberlin Evangelist — the 
 first number of which appeared on the first of January, 
 1839, was established under the editorship of Henry 
 Cowles, for the main purpose of propagating the new 
 doctrine. In it there were at once printed certain articles 
 on the all-absorbing topic, out of which books by Finney, 
 Mahan and Cowles were soon gathered together. 9 Wher- 
 ever Oberlin was heard of, it was Oberlin Perfectionism 
 which was heard of first. 10 
 
 The Oberlin Professors, we see, did not bring perfection- 
 ism to Oberlin. They brought an ultraistic temper 11 and 
 the "New Divinity." And the "New Divinity," here too, 
 as it had previously done in Central and Western New 
 York, begot perfectionism out of its own loins. Oberlin 
 was only an extension of Western New York into the wilds 
 of Northern Ohio, and it repeated in its religious history, 
 as it reproduced in its mental quality, the characteristic 
 
 9 An address of Mahan's published in the first number, was utilized 
 as the core of a small book by him, called Christian Perfection (early 
 in 1839), which at once became the chief vehicle of the doctrine. 
 
 10 Asa Mahan, Autobiography, p. 261 : "The college early became, 
 principally through its President and Professor of Theology, the visible 
 representative of the doctrine of the Higher Life." 
 
 11 What was understood at the time by the phrase "religious ultra- 
 ism," then very current, may be conveniently read in an admirable 
 printed sermon of W. B. Sprague's bearing that title (Albany, 1835). 
 Cf. also D. R. Goodwin, "On Religious Ultraism," in The Literary and 
 Theological Review, vol. Ill, 1836, pp. 56-66, completed by "Radical 
 Opinions," same journal, pp. 253-265. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 7 
 
 features of its stock. John Morgan 12 and Henry Cowles, 13 
 were not Western New York men. But they had both 
 fallen under influences of the same general character, the 
 one in contact with Lyman Beecher at Cincinnati, the other 
 under the instruction of N. W. Taylor at Yale; and had 
 received the same stamp. The situation was dominated in 
 any case, however, by Finney and Mahan, both Western 
 New York men, both "New Divinity" men, and both men 
 of aggressive spirit and radical temper. Their previous 
 lives, though springing out of the same soil, had run on 
 very different lines, and it is rather remarkable to see them 
 converge at Oberlin in a common end. 
 
 The details of Finney's early life which are current seem 
 to rest altogether on his own recollections. He does not 
 profess that these were complete, and there is some reason 
 to suspect that they were not always altogether accurate. 
 The main facts which he gives us 14 are that he was born in 
 Warren, Litchfield Co., Connecticut, August 29, 1792; that 
 two years afterwards the family removed to Brothertown, 
 Oneida Co., New York; whence, however, while Finney 
 was still so young a child that he retained no recollection 
 of it, they were compelled, by the settlement of certain tribes 
 of Indians there, to move to Hanover (subsequently re- 
 named Kirkland), then a part of the large township of 
 Paris, in the same county. There the boy grew up and went 
 to school, until he was about sixteen years of age (Finney 
 says he does not remember the exact date), when the family 
 moved again, — to Henderson, Jefferson Co., New York, a 
 
 12 Born at Cork, Ireland, 1802; graduated at Williams College, 1826; 
 taught at New York : Preparatory School Teacher at Lane. Cf . Calvin 
 Durfee, Williams Biographical Annals, 1871, p. 429. 
 
 13 Born at Norfolk, Connecticut, 1803 ; graduated at Yale College, 
 1826, and Divinity School, 1829; pastor for seven years in Northern 
 Ohio. Cf. D. L. Leonard, The Story of Oberlin, pp. 279 ff. ; The New 
 Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia, and Applcton's Cyclopaedia of American 
 Biography, sub nom. 
 
 14 Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney, written by Himself, 1876, 
 pp. 4 ff. ; P. H. Fowler, Historical Sketch of Presbyterianism within the 
 Bounds of the Synod of Central New York, 1877, p. 258. 
 
8 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 hamlet a little south of Sackett's Harbor. At this new home 
 he taught school for something like four years. Then, 
 when he was "about twenty years old," or "soon after he 
 was twenty years of age," he went back to his ancestral 
 home, Warren, Connecticut, and spent some four years 
 there and in New Jersey, in study and teaching. Returning 
 thence to his parents, he soon afterward entered the law- 
 office of Benjamin Wright at Adams, New York, and began 
 the study of law. This, he says, was in 1818. 
 
 It is a little difficult to form a vivid picture of the actual 
 life of the boy within this framework. It was a raw frontier 
 life; and there seem to have been few cultural and no 
 religious ameliorations afforded him by his home associa- 
 tions. There may be some reason to believe that his father, 
 like Lyman Beecher's, pursued the trade of a blacksmith; 15 
 and it is certain that the household, like that in which 
 Beecher was bred, was without church connections. 16 In- 
 deed, Finney not only represents the household as without 
 religion, but broadens out the representation until the im- 
 pression is conveyed that no "religious privileges were ac- 
 cessible to him in the community." This is a, perhaps not 
 unnatural, exaggeration. Looking back upon his youth, 
 barren of religious impressions, he transferred to his sur- 
 roundings much that belonged only to himself, and thus 
 transmuted his fault into his misfortune. Even in the 
 frontier districts in which he lived not only Christian people 
 but Christian churches could be found by those who de- 
 sired to be associated with them; and not only unlettered 
 itinerants and absurd exhorters but also learned ministers 
 and faithful pastors could be met with by those who sought 
 
 16 David W. Bartlett, in the sketch of Finney in his Modern Agitators, 
 or Pen-Portraits of Living American Reformers, 1855, p. 152, says 
 that as a boy Finney "found considerable time to wield the sledge at his 
 father's anvil," taking thus "his first lesson in moulding the hot iron 
 to a desired shape." His authority for the statement is not given. 
 
 10 Memoirs, p. 4: "My parents were neither of them professors of 
 religion, and I believe among our neighbors there were very few 
 religious people." Compare Lyman Beecher's Autobiography, edited 
 by Charles Beecher, vol. I, p. 78. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 9 
 
 them out. The particular region in which Finney's boy- 
 hood was spent was indeed peculiarly well supplied with 
 opportunities for religious culture. Clinton was but a short 
 two-miles away, and Clinton was already a center of re- 
 ligious influence. There seems also to have been an or- 
 ganized religious society in his own hamlet with so excellent 
 a minister as P. V. Bogue at the head of it. 17 The difficulty 
 with Finney's early religious training was not that he lacked 
 opportunity but that he lacked desire for it. 
 
 Things naturally were different when the family left this 
 favored region (about 1808) and made a new home for 
 itself in the backwoods of Jefferson County. There was 
 
 17 See the "Journal of the Rev. John Taylor, on a Mission through 
 the Mohawk and Black River Country, in the year 1802," printed 
 in E. B. O'Callaghan, The Documentary History of the State of New 
 York, vol. II, 1850, p. 1 1 12. "Most of the churches in this part of the 
 world are on the presbyterian plan. The church at Clinton, is, how- 
 ever, congregational. Mr. Norton has a church containing 240 mem- 
 bers and this people is considered to be the most harmonious, regular, 
 and pious of any in the northern part of the State of New York. In 
 this town, or rather parish, is an academy, which is in a flourishing 
 state. A Mr. Porter, an excellent character, and a preacher, is pre- 
 centor. They have one usher, and about 60 scholars. This institution 
 promises fair to be of great service to this part of the country. Piety 
 is very much encouraged in it and some young gentlemen have become 
 preachers who have received education in it. There are in the town a 
 few Universalists, and one small Baptist church, but not a sufficient 
 number to have any influence. In the Society of Paris, of which 
 Clinton is a part, Mr. Steele is pastor; he is said to be a good and 
 reputable man — he has a respectable congregation. In Hanover, a so- 
 ciety of Paris, Mr. Bogue is Pastor." Cf. Fowler, as cited, p. 180. 
 The church at Clinton was organized in 1791 by Jonathan Edwards the 
 younger; Asahel Strong Norton was installed pastor of it in 1793 
 "and remained there for forty years, upheld by grace and the support 
 of an unwavering faithfulness, an unerring judgment, an unspoiled 
 character, and a blameless life" (Fowler, p. 90). For a biographical 
 sketch of Bogue see Fowler, pp. 464, f. After a successful ministry 
 at Winchester, Conn, (from 1791), he was employed in New York 
 by the Missionary Society of Connecticut (from 1798), "and then 
 accepted a call to Hanover, (now Kirkland) Oneida County, where he 
 was equally successful for a number of years, and after that took 
 charge of a church at Vernon Center." This appears to extend 
 Bogue's pastorate at Kirkland through most of Finney's residence 
 there. 
 
IO THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 practically no settled ministry at that time in this region; 18 
 and the young school-teacher passed some four years here 
 without easy access to the stated means of grace. Return- 
 ing thence to civilization and religious privileges he was 
 able to sit, however, Sabbath after Sabbath, in the choir- 
 gallery of good Peter Starr's church at Warren, Connecti- 
 cut, unmoved to any spiritual response by his pastor's faith- 
 ful preaching. 19 Meanwhile changes were taking place in 
 Jefferson County. A revival had swept through that region 
 in 1815. 20 Settled churches were being established. A 
 Presbyterian church at Sackett's Harbor which in 1816 
 had called to its pastorate Edward Finley Snowden, a man 
 of the highest quality, was formally organized in the early 
 months of 181 7. 21 A Congregationalist Church, soon to 
 become Presbyterian, was organized at Adams. 22 When 
 Finney returned to his father's house in 181 6, or somewhat 
 later, it was no longer to a community in which the stated 
 means of grace were inaccessible, and no longer to a house- 
 hold to which the grace of God was a stranger. A brother 
 
 18 Fowler, as cited, p. 180: "That region also suffered long for the 
 want of means of grace. A minister who visited it in 1816, relates : 
 'To the north as far as the St. Lawrence and east to Champlain, there 
 are probably not six gospel ministers' — an extent of country including 
 the quarter of the State of New York. . . . And a little later, a mis- 
 sionary writes, 'we could not hear of any minister in the St. Lawrence 
 country, and there are very few on the Black River.' " 
 
 19 Memoirs, pp. 6f.: G. Frederick Wright, Charles Grandison 
 Finney, 1891, p. 4. 
 
 20 Fowler, p. 180. 
 
 21 For biographical notice of Snowden, see Fowler, pp. 647 f., and 
 J. F. Hageman, History of Princeton and its Institutions, 1879, vol. ii, 
 p. 94 fT. Cf. W. B. Spraguc. Annals, vol. iii, p. 341. He was dismissed 
 by the Presbytery of Oneida, to take charge of the church at Sackett's 
 Harbor in 1816 but the formal organization of the church did not take 
 place until Feb. 17, 1817. 
 
 22 In the Minutes of the Presbyterian General Asssmbly for 1819 
 these two churches stand side by side in the Presbytery of St. Law- 
 rence : Sackett's Harbour, Samuel F. Snowden, and Adams North 
 Congregational Church, Edward W. Rosseter. We quote from the 
 Minutes of 1819, since there are no statistical tables in those of the 
 immediately preceding years. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM II 
 
 had given himself to God during his absence. 23 If he him- 
 self still knew nothing of the grace of God, that could only 
 be because he did not wish to know anything of it. We 
 are glad to be told that he was not in any sense vicious: 24 
 he was, however, in every sense godless. It was not that 
 he had no contact with religion. If he had not a praying 
 mother, he had a praying sweetheart who did not cease to 
 bear him on her heart before God ; 25 and it is obvious from 
 his own narrative that he was repeatedly more or less af- 
 fected by the religious appeal. If he did not know God it 
 was because he refused to have God in his knowledge. He 
 was not ignorant of Christianity; he was, as a contemporary 
 puts it "a great opposer of the Church before his conver- 
 sion." 26 Or, as the historian phrases it, "he was without 
 godliness and with the spirit of a sceptic and scoffer." 27 
 
 When Finney, yielding to the persuasions of his invalid 
 mother who wished him to remain near her, gave up his 
 
 23 In his Lectures on Systematic Theoolgy, Ed. of 1851, p. 429, Fin- 
 ney relates this incident: "I well recollect, when far from home, and 
 while an impenitent sinner, I received a letter from my youngest 
 brother, informing me that he was converted to God. He, if he was 
 converted, was, as I supposed, the first and only member of the 
 family who then had a hope of salvation. I was at the time, and 
 both before and after, one of the most careless of sinners, and yet 
 on receiving this intelligence, I actually wept for joy and gratitude that 
 one of so prayerless a family was likely to be saved." 
 
 24 Hiram Mead, The Congregational Quarterly, January 1877, p. 3: 
 "It is a remarkable fact, which he has not thought worthy of notice, 
 that in spite of his lack of religious advantages, he never became reck- 
 less or vicious. As a young man, he was spirited, and, no doubt, 
 sometimes rough and hilarious; but, considering his associations, he 
 was exceptionally conscientious and high-minded." 
 
 25 G. F. Wright, as cited, p. 37, tells us that Finney's sweetheart, 
 (her home was at Whitestown, only a few miles from Kirkland) 
 "had been deeply interested in praying for Finney's conversion in the 
 days of his impenitence." 
 
 26 E. H. Snowden in the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, 
 May 1838, p. 236. Snowden (son of S. F. Snowden, mentioned above) 
 had been a pastor at Brownsville where he says both Finney and 
 Burchard had labored — disastrously to the church. Cf. Finney's 
 Memoirs, p. 11 iff. 
 
 27 D. L. Leonard, Story of Oberlin, p. 128. 
 
I-' THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 purpose of further pursuing his literary education, and 
 entered the law-office of Benjamin Wright (afterwards 
 Wright and Ward well) at Adams, in 1818 (he was then 
 twenty-six years old), he seemed to have come to his own. 
 He was peculiarly endowed for the work of an advocate, 
 and we are not surprised to learn that he loved his pro- 
 fession and was successful in its practice from the very 
 first. An indelible impression was left upon his mind by 
 his legal studies, and his habits of thought and modes of 
 public speech were fixed for life during the four short 
 years of his practice at the bar. He was not to be left, 
 however, to the peaceful prosecution of his chosen profes- 
 sion. He was already suffering under a certain amount of 
 religious uneasiness; and the circumstances of his life in 
 Adams did not permit him to escape from the daily appeal 
 of religion to him. Religion had always been within his 
 reach — the difference was only comparative. "Up to this 
 time," 28 he says, " I had never enjoyed what might be called 
 religious privileges" : "I had never lived in a praying com- 
 munity except during the period when I was attending the 
 high school in New England" : "At Adams, for the first 
 time, I sat statedly, for a length of time, under an educated 
 ministry :" "I had never, until this time, lived where I could 
 attend a stated prayermeeting." The qualifications, which 
 have been thrown up to attention by italicizing them, de j 
 serve the most marked emphasis. It is only by regarding 
 them that we obtain a view of the true state of the case. 
 What happened to Finney at Adams was that he was no 
 longer permitted to neglect religion. The young pastor 
 of the Presbyterian church there, George W. Gale, was a 
 man of force and a pastor of parts. He never permitted 
 this fine young lawyer, who was scoffing at religion, but 
 was clearly not easy in his mind about it, to escape beyond 
 its influence. He made him leader of the choir and so 
 secured his constant attendance at the church. He was In 
 the habit, Finney naively says, "of dropping in at our office 
 frequently and seemed anxious to know what impression 
 
 28 Memoirs, pp. 6 ff. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 1 3 
 
 his sermons had made on my mind," — apparently not 
 dreaming that that was not vanity on Gale's part, but good 
 pastoral work. Finney found himself going not merely to 
 church but to prayer-meeting. He says in his old age that 
 he does not recollect having ever attended a prayer-meeting 
 before: and now he wished to do so, partly from curiosity, 
 and partly from an uneasiness of mind on the subject 
 which he could not well define. 29 He got a Bible, the first 
 he had ever owned; and took to reading it, at first under 
 cover of interest in Biblical law, but soon with deeper con- 
 cern. He did not easily yield; he was a harsh critic of his 
 pastor's sermons and of the prayers of Christians. But 
 Gale's zeal did not flag; and we may be sure he saw clearly 
 enough the signs of the coming end. 
 
 Precisely how the end came, we are not quite sure. Fin- 
 ney tells us that he "was brought face to face with the ques- 
 tion whether he would accept Christ." 30 On a Sabbath even- 
 ing in the autumn of 1821, he says, "I made up my mind 
 that I would settle the question of my soul's salvation at 
 once." 31 So closely is his account confined to his own sub- 
 jective experiences that the reader is tempted to suppose that 
 there were no objective occurrences by which they were 
 brought about. In point of fact Finney's conversion took 
 place in a great revival ; and it was currently supposed that 
 his final step was the result of the exhortations of Jedediah 
 Burchard. 32 Ever since his return to the West he had been 
 
 29 Tract on Prevailing Prayer. 
 
 30 Memoirs, p. 11. 
 
 31 P. 12. 
 
 32 For example, Joseph I. Foot (Literary and Theological Review, 
 March, 1828, p. 70) when speaking of the fanatical teaching of John 
 Truair, continues : "Over the field where Truair had recently sown 
 the seeds, the Rev. J. Burchard soon passed, whose subsequent labors 
 in the vicinity are said to have brought forth the Rev. C. G. Finney:' 
 A more favorable opinion of Truair is expressed by Fowler, as cited, 
 pp. 644 ff., and as favorable an account of Burchard as could be given 
 may be found in the same work, pp. 278 ff. Burchard was at the time 
 still a layman, resident at Sackett's Harbor, and zealously holding lay 
 services there and at Adams. 
 
14 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 living in the presence of revival conditions. The revival 
 of 1815 already mentioned as sweeping over this region, 
 had been followed by others without intermission. Sixty- 
 five converts were added to the little church at Adams in 
 1 819, at the opening of Gale's ministry there. Seventy 
 were added to the church at Sackett's Harbor in 1820. In 
 1 82 1 the whole region was stirred to its depths; from eight 
 hundred to a thousand converts were reported from Jeffer- 
 son County — no fewer than seventy or eighty from Fin- 
 ney's home hamlet, Henderson. In Adams itself one of the 
 churches received forty-four new members and the other 
 sixty or seventy. 33 It was in these stirring scenes that 
 Finney's conversion took place. He gives us a very detailed 
 account of his experiences in it. 34 The most notable feature 
 of these experiences is their supernaturalism; a supernatur- 
 alism not wholly in keeping with his strenuous subsequent 
 insistance on the "make yourself a new heart" of the "New 
 Divinity"; there is imbedded in them a most poignant ex- 
 perience of express inability. 35 The account of them, 
 written in his old age, is more or less adjusted to his sub- 
 sequent modes of thought, 38 and closes with a couple of odd 
 paragraphs in which he "improves" his conversion by rep- 
 
 83 Fowler, as cited, p. 190, drawing the details from The Utica 
 Christian Repository, of the time. The general fact is safeguarded by 
 the report of the Presbytery of St. Lawrence itself, which mentions 
 revivals as occurring at Watertown, Sackett's Harbor, Adams, first 
 and second, Lorraine, and Rodman. 
 
 34 Memoirs, chapter 2. 
 
 3r > Lyman H. Atwater, The Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton 
 Review, Oct. 1876, p. 706 remarks on this, while G. F. Wright, p. 9 
 seeks to explain it away. 
 
 36 G. F. Wright, as cited, p. 6, speaking of interpreting Finney's con- 
 version says: "The difficulty of such an interpretation is also some- 
 what increased by the fact that, in the Memoirs by himself, Finney has 
 accompanied his narrative by numerous doctrinal disquisitions, in 
 which those familiar with the controversies of the time readily detect 
 the results of subsequent years of reflection interjecting their later 
 theology in the narrative of early experience." "It is extremely im- 
 probable," he declares, "that the theological system defended in his 
 later life burst upon his mind at the outset in such complete form as 
 his own narrative would imply." 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 1 5 
 
 resenting it as impressing then and there indelibly on his 
 mind his later doctrines of justification in foro conscientiae 
 rather than in foro Dei, and of its issue in sinlessness. "I 
 could not feel a sense of guilt or condemnation, by any 
 effort that I could make; my sins were gone; and I do not 
 think I felt any more sense of guilt than if I had never 
 sinned. ... I felt myself justified by faith; and, so far 
 as I could see, I was in a state in which I did not sin. In- 
 stead of feeling that I was sinning all the time, my heart 
 was so full of love that it overflowed — I could not feel 
 that I was sinning against God, nor could I recover the 
 least sense of guilt for my past sins." 37 He adds : "Of this 
 experience I said nothing that I recollect, at the time, to 
 anybody; that is, of this experience of justification." 
 
 Finney emerged from his conversion a new man: the 
 "sceptic and scoffer" had become the believer and zealous 
 propagandist. His devotion to the legal profession fell 
 away at once with his old man ; he assumed immediately the 
 new profession of bringing men to Christ. A judicial case 
 on which he was engaged came up for trial the morning 
 after his conversion. "I have a retainer from the Lord 
 Jesus Christ to plead His cause and I cannot plead yours," 
 he said to his astonished client. And at once he went out 
 on the streets to compel them to come in. It is not possible 
 to obtain a connected view of his activities during the two 
 years between the outstanding dates of his conversion in the 
 autumn of 1821 and his licensure by the Presbytery of 
 St. Lawrence on Dec. 30, 1823. His biographer says that 
 "about as much mystery hangs over the first year and a 
 half of Finney's life subsequent to his conversion as that 
 which shrouds the corresponding period of the apostle 
 Paul's renewed life." 38 The comparison, to be sure, is not 
 very apt ; but it is true that although we know many details 
 of Finney's activities during this period and its general 
 character is clear, our knowledge of it remains confused. 
 
 37 Memoirs, p. 23; cf. 18. 
 
 38 G. F. Wright, as cited, p. 19. 
 
1 6 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 The account Finney gives of himself after his conversion 
 loses itself in unordered details; and his dates give us no 
 guidance, being all wrong. He makes it perfectly plain, 
 however, that he at once gave himself to active Christian 
 work, which centered in the church at Adams, but reached 
 out also at least to his old home at Henderson ; there he had 
 the happiness of bringing his parents to Christ. From 
 another account, 89 we learn that he "actively engaged in 
 the same schoolhouse labors" which were being carried on 
 by Jedediah Burchard, as a layworker, from his center at 
 Sackett's Harbor. 
 
 In the midst of these activities, he was taken under the 
 care of Presbytery of St. Lawrence with a view to the 
 gospel ministry, at a meeting held at Adams, June 25, 1823, 
 and was "directed to pursue his studies under the direction 
 of Rev. Messrs. Gale and Boardman." 40 It would not have 
 been easy to find better men for this service. 41 They were 
 both men of sufficient learning, great force of character, 
 and skill in dealing with men. The whole work apparently, 
 however, fell into the hands of Gale, who was also Finney's 
 pastor, 42 and with whom he was already in consultation. 
 There was no mental sympathy between the two young 
 men — Gale was now in his thirty-fourth year and Finney 
 in his th irty- first : each was conscious of native power, and 
 was tenacious of his opinions; and the so-called instruction 
 appears to have degenerated into a constant wrangle. 
 Finney brought to Gale the unordered Pelagianism of the 
 man in the street, strengthened and sharpened by the habits 
 
 39 Fowler, as cited, p. 190. 
 
 *° Fowler, p. 258; G. F. Wright, p. 20. 
 
 41 There are biographical sketches of both in Alfred Nevin's Encyclo- 
 paedia of the Presbyterian Church, 1834, sub nomm., and in Fowler, 
 as cited, pp. 100, 467 and 552 respectively. For Gale see also Martha 
 F. Webster, Seventy-five Significant Years; The Story of Knox 
 College, 1837-1912, 19 12, pp. 1 ff. 
 
 ** Memoirs, p. 46: "They appointed my pastor to superintend my 
 studies." On p. 140 accordingly he calls Gale simply, "my theological 
 teacher," and on p. 153, with meticulous care, explains that Gale had 
 "by direction of the Presbytery attended somewhat to my theological 
 studies." 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM \J 
 
 of thought picked up in the law-courts; and he used Gale 
 merely as an anvil on which to beat his own views into 
 shape. His attitude at first was one of mere denial ; he 
 rejected with decision, not to say violence, the evangelical 
 system which Gale sought to inculcate. The positive con- 
 struction naturally came more slowly. "My views took on 
 a positive type but slowly. At first I found myself unable 
 to receive his peculiar views; and then gradually formed 
 views of my own in opposition to them, which appeared to 
 me to be unequivocally taught in the Bible." 43 We do not 
 know when his views were fully formed. When they were, 
 they had run into the mold of the "New Divinity" in the 
 special form in which it was being taught at the moment in 
 New Haven. There are some who think this result purely 
 accidental : Finney, a great original thinker, reproduced 
 for himself without any connection with him whatever, 
 what N. W. Taylor was teaching with such revolutionary 
 effect in New Haven. 44 So far as the fundamental principle 
 and general substance of his thought are concerned no doubt 
 this is the true account to give of its origin. Pelagianism, 
 unfortunately, does not wait to be imported from New 
 Haven, and does not require inculcating — it is the instinctive 
 thought of the natural man. But Finney's thought ran not 
 merely into the general mold of Pelagianism, but into the 
 special mold of the particular mode of stating Pelagianism 
 which had been worked out by N. W. Taylor. The his- 
 torian of New England Theology feels compelled therefore 
 to say that "independent as it was, and vigorously as its 
 author had impressed upon it the marks of his own pro- 
 nounced individuality," Finney's theology "may be dis- 
 missed in the one word 'Taylorism.' " 45 There were "vari- 
 
 43 Memoirs, p. 54. 
 
 44 For example, A. T. Swing, The Bibliotheca Sacra, July 1900. 465: 
 "What in New England had been gradually evolved from Old Calvinism 
 through two generations of theological reformers was substantially 
 wrought out independently of them by President Finney's rational re- 
 volt (Memoirs, pp. 7, 42-60), which was so closely connected with his 
 conversion as to be practically inseparable from it." 
 
 45 Frank H. Foster, A Genetic History of New England Theology, 
 1907, p. 467. 
 
1 8 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 ous underground currents," he says, 46 which "set from New 
 Haven westward, and some of them bore theological ideas 
 into the region where Finney was." We do not need, how- 
 ever, to raise question as to the channels of communication 
 by which Taylorism was brought to Finney. Intercourse 
 between Connecticut and Western New York was constant ; 
 Finney received part of his education in Connecticut and 
 his was the common case; all the ministers of his acquain- 
 tance were trained in the east and came from the east and 
 maintained connection with the east; and Taylorism was, 
 at the moment, the vogue. What we need more particularly 
 to ask ourselves is only, how far at this early date Finney's 
 views had crystallized into distinctly Taylorite shape. Ac- 
 cording to his own representation in his Memoirs they had 
 already done so, at least in general, at the opening of his 
 ministry; and certainly we cannot trace any other type of 
 teaching in any account we have of his work. We know 
 no other Finney than the Taylorite Finney. 
 
 On the 30th of December 1823, only six months after 
 he had been taken under the care of the Presbytery, Finney 
 was licensed to preach the Gospel at a meeting of the Pres- 
 bytery of St. Lawrence held at Adams. He tells us that 
 the Presbytery dealt gently with him and avoided raising- 
 questions on which he differed from it. Having now be- 
 come a minister, he entered at once upon his ministerial 
 labors in the northern part of Jefferson County — Evans 
 Mills and Antwerp — as a missionary in the employment 
 of the Female Missionary Society of the Western District 
 of New York. As such a man naturally would be, he was 
 successful in his labors from the start. He was ordained 
 on his field, July I, 1824, at a meeting of the Presbytery 
 at Evans Mills; and seems to have contemplated settling at 
 that place in a permanent pastorate. He was drawn off, 
 however, into further evangelistic labors, and prosecuted 
 them unbrokenly in Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties 
 up to the autumn of 1825. During these two years he 
 
 48 P. 453- 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM IO, 
 
 lived the ordinary life of a frontier missionary, witnessing 
 the same kinds of incidents — some of them bizarre enough 
 — making the common experiences, but reaping more than 
 ordinarily rich a harvest. According to his representations 
 the matter of his preaching was constantly the "New Di- 
 vinity" — pressed on his hearers with the pungency of ex- 
 pression, extremity of statement, and polemical vehemence, 
 which belonged to his natural temperament. 
 
 This period was brought to a close, and the greatest 
 episode of Finney's life inaugurated, by an unforeseen 
 occurrence. He visited the Synod of Utica, of which he 
 was a member, in October 1825, 47 and on beginning his 
 return journey home was waylaid by G. W. Gale, his "theo- 
 logical teacher," as he calls him here, 48 and induced to turn 
 aside to preach at Western. Gale had been compelled by ill 
 health to resign his charge at Adams in 1823, shortly before 
 Finney left that place, and was now engaged on a farm 
 at Western in laying the foundations of what was to be an 
 eminently successful and indeed famous Manual Labor In- 
 stitution, the parent of many less successful similar ven- 
 tures. This preaching at Western broadened out into seven 
 years (1 825-1 832) of probably the most spectacular revival 
 activity the country has ever witnessed. That Finney felt 
 himself to have taken a decisive step forward in entering 
 upon this work, — to have advanced to a new stage in his 
 career — may be indicated by his transferring his presby- 
 terial membership from the presbytery of St. Lawrence 
 to that of Oneida. 49 He had turned his back on frontier 
 work: henceforth his labors lay in the towns and cities of 
 this rich and populous region, with their established churches 
 
 47 G. F. Wright, as cited, p. 46, erroneously says "October 1826." 
 Fowler, as cited, p. 202, says "the last of September, 1825." Finney 
 himself (Memoirs p. 140) says it was in October. 
 
 48 Memoirs, p. 140. 
 
 49 In the Minutes of the General Assembly, for 1825, Finney is 
 listed as a \V. C. of the Presbytery of St. Lawrence. In the Minutes 
 for 1828, he is listed as a W. C. of the Presbytery of Oneida. These 
 lists were at that time printed only every three years: there are none 
 therefore for 1826 and 1827. 
 
20 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 and organized religious activities, — and beyond. In his 
 Memoirs he marks the transition by pausing to note that 
 "at this place commenced that series of revivals, afterward 
 called The Western Revivals.' " Lyman Beecher calls 
 them by the more designative name of "the Oneida de- 
 nunciatory revivals." 50 They may have owed the feature 
 which won them this designation, and much else about them 
 that brought them into disrepute, in part at least to the cir- 
 cumstance that they were an invasion of the backwoods 
 into civilization. Here was this young man, but two years 
 a minister, but four a Christian, with no traditions of re- 
 finement behind him, and no experience of preaching save 
 as a frontier missionary, suddenly leading an assault upon 
 the churches. He was naturally extravagant in his asser- 
 tions, imperious and harsh in his bearing, relying more on 
 harrowing men's feelings than on melting them with tender 
 appeal. "Force," says the judicious observer whom we are 
 here drawing upon — "force was his factor, and 'breaking 
 down' his process." 51 And in exercising this force he did 
 not shrink from denunciations which bordered on the de- 
 famatory, or from the free use of language which can be 
 characterized no otherwise than as coarse and irreverent. 
 
 All this was no doubt to be expected in the circumstances ; 
 and it was to be expected also no doubt that Finney should 
 give himself of set purpose to stir up a commotion; and, 
 having the assistance of a band of able coadjutors, that he 
 should succeed in doing so to an incredible extent. The 
 whole region was stricken with religious excitement, and 
 nothing was permitted to stand in the way of fanning this 
 excitement into ever hotter flames. Parishes were invaded 
 without invitation, churches divided, opposing ministers 
 "broken down," or even driven from their pulpits, the 
 people everywhere set and kept on edge. Finney was under 
 no illusions as to the nature of this excitement or as to its 
 dangers. He did not confound it with a movement of grace 
 
 r, ° Autobiography, Edited by Charles Beecher, vol. ii, p. 345. 
 81 Fowler, as cited, p. 264. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 21 
 
 It was only an instrument which he used to attract popular 
 attention to the business he had in hand. It served him in 
 other words as a means of "advance publicity." "It seems 
 sometimes to be indispensable," he says, 52 that a high de- 
 gree of excitement should prevail for a time, to arrest public 
 and individual attention, and to draw people off from other 
 pursuits to attend to the concerns of their souls." This 
 function served, the excitement is so little of further value 
 that it becomes noxious; it now draws the mind off from 
 the religion to prepare the way for which it is invoked, and 
 if it were long continued, "in the high degree in which it 
 is often witnessed," it could end in nothing but insanity. 
 Nevertheless Finney permitted himself to play with this 
 fire; and it is a question whether his chief work in this 
 region consisted in much else than in kindling it. Certainly 
 the characteristic feature of these "Western Revivals" lies 
 in the immensity of the religious excitement engendered 
 by them ; and it is matter of discussion until to-day whether 
 their chief results are not summed up in this effect. That 
 many souls were born again and became ultimately the sup- 
 port and stay of the churches of the region, nobody doubts. 
 As little does anybody doubt that grave evils also resulted, 
 the effects of which have been overcome only with difficulty 
 and through the lapse of time. There is room for differ- 
 ence only in the relative estimate placed on these two op- 
 posite effects. 
 
 One reason why many were converted in these re- 
 vivals was that there were very many to be converted; and 
 the character of this large unconverted multitude accounts, 
 no doubt, in part also for their accessibility to a revival of 
 this type. The churches were in a depressed state and this 
 meant both an abnormally low condition of Christian life 
 within them, and an abnormally large mass of indifference 
 or worse without them : an abnormal reaction was to be 
 expected, and was indeed inevitable. Asa Mahan tells us, 58 
 
 52 Views of Sanctification, 1840, p. 19. 
 
 53 Autobiography, 1881, p. 221. 
 
22 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 that, observing these things, he had formed the distinct im- 
 pression, before the revival came, that they must have a 
 great and general revival of religion, or the churches would 
 soon become extinct. "My reasons for this conviction," 
 says he. "were two-fold: the general and embittered op- 
 position to religion itself, and the appalling neglect of re- 
 ligious services, on the part of the unconverted, outside the 
 churches, on the one hand ; and the utter worldliness and 
 indifference to the interests of souls and the cause of re- 
 ligion itself on the part of professors of Christianity, on 
 the other." "No one," he adds, "not personally acquainted 
 with the facts as they were can conceive how appalling these 
 two aspects of the moral and religious state of the com- 
 munity then appeared." The harvest was ripe and waiting 
 for the sickle. It must be borne in mind, also, that a very 
 large proportion of those swept into the churches by the ex- 
 citement of the revival were not really converted, as their 
 subsequent history only too clearly proved. Joseph Ives 
 Foot, writing in 1838, is constrained to say: 54 "During ten 
 years hundreds and perhaps thousands were annually re- 
 ported to be converted on all hands ; but now it is admitted, 
 that his (Finney's) real converts are comparatively few. 
 It is declared even by himself that 'the great body of them 
 are a disgrace to religion ;' as a consequence of their de- 
 fections, practical evils, great, terrible, and innumerable, 
 are in various quarters rushing in on the Church." 
 
 It is very true that Finney could not conceal the in- 
 stability of his converts from himself. Later he found a 
 reason for it. It was because he had brought them only 
 into traditional Christianity, and not into perfectionism. 
 "While I inculcated the common views," he says.'"' meaning 
 the common views as to an as yet imperfect sanctification, 
 "I was often instrumental in bringing Christians under 
 
 ' ■» Literary and Theological Review, March 1838, p. 39. For Foot 
 see W. B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. iv. 1858, pp. 
 66off. ( and the Memoir by his brother, George Foot, mentioned by 
 
 Sprague. 
 
 •■ Lectures On Systematic Theology, ed. 1851, p. 619. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 2$ 
 
 great conviction and into a state of temporary repentance 
 and faith" — it is thus that he speaks of his entire evan- 
 gelistic work up to 1836! — "but," he continues, "falling 
 short of urging them up to a point where they would be- 
 come so acquainted with Christ as to abide in Him, they 
 would soon relapse again into their former state. I seldom 
 saw, and can now understand that I had no reason to ex- 
 pect to see, under the instruction that I then gave, such a 
 state of religious principle, understanding and confirmed 
 walking with God, among Christians as I have seen since 
 the change in my views and instructions." There lies in 
 this passage an affecting acknowledgment of the failure of 
 his early evangelistic labors to produce permanent results. 
 One of the odd things connected w T ith it, however, is that 
 Finney fancies that, had he preached perfectionism, the 
 effect might have been different — meaning that the per- 
 fectionism of his converts would have protected them from 
 sinning. In point of fact, though he did not himself preach 
 perfectionism, his preaching made perfectionists, as more 
 than one witness testifies ; 56 and his preaching of perfection- 
 ism could scarcely have done more than that. Yet the re- 
 sults were as we have seen. Jedediah Burchard roundly 
 asserts that all revivals produce a crop of perfectionists, 
 having in mind of course, the type of revival known to him. 
 Finney does not go as far as that, but is willing to allow 
 that revivals — again of course revivals such as he fomented 
 — are commonly accompanied by a certain amount of what 
 he would call fanaticism. In a tract written in his old age, 
 called Hindrances to Revivals, he declares that he has sel- 
 
 56 Take for example the following words of Joseph I. Foot (Literary 
 and Theological Review, March 1838, p. 70) : "These doctrines with 
 a corresponding system of measures were driven like a hurricane 
 through the churches. . . . Hundreds and thousands . . . were led 
 to believe themselves converted, and were immediately driven into the 
 church. . . . Many of his (Finney's) spiritual progeny, under the 
 abilities of his system [that is, under his teaching of a Pelagian ability 
 of will], and the several influences which acted upon them, soon 
 manifested their fatherhood [Pelagian] and declared themselves to 
 be perfect. ..." 
 
24 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 dom seen a revival in which a bitter, denunciatory, fault- 
 finding spirit did not make its appearance sooner or later, 
 and that to a considerable extent. His account of this 
 phenomenon is that when the Spirit of God is poured out 
 on a people, Satan pours himself out on them too. 
 
 The phenomenon, however, will admit of another explan- 
 ation, especially when we learn that in propagating these re- 
 vivals everything was bent to the production of the excited 
 state of feeling that was aimed at, and all ordinary Chris- 
 tian duties were in abeyance — absorbed in the one duty of 
 exaltation of feeling. Thus, for example, Josephus Brock- 
 way 57 tells us that it was noted by all during the revival 
 excitement at Troy in 1826-7, that the whole charitable 
 work of the churches fell away and even the Sabbath 
 Schools were neglected: all manifestations of Christian love 
 stopped : there was nothing, he says, but "a machine put in 
 motion by violence and carried on by power." Even the 
 Bible was thrust aside. "For a long time, during the high 
 state of feeling," he writes, 58 "(when, indeed, feeling was 
 made a substitute for every Christian duty), the Bible must 
 not be introduced at all, into any social meeting, from one 
 month's end to another. And while the exhortation was 
 often reiterated, 'Come, brethren, pray now, but don't make 
 any cold prayers,' is was evidently held, although I do not 
 say it was publicly expressed, that reading of the Bible was 
 too cold a business for a Revival spirit. No time must be 
 wasted in reading or singing, but the whole uninterruptedly 
 devoted to praying with this faith and particularity, so 
 vastly important." We are witnessing here a sustained 
 effort to push excited feeling on to the breaking point. 
 
 To the breaking point, of course, it came, all over the 
 region which the revivals covered; and despite those who 
 had been brought into a sure hope of eternal life — absolutely 
 a large number, let us believe — the last stage of the region 
 as such was worse than the first. It is the calm judgment 
 
 8T A Delineation of the Characteristic Features of a Revival of 
 Religion in Troy in T826 and /V'r. i v '-7. p. 47. 
 
 M Ibid, p. 28. * 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 2$ 
 
 of a man of affairs and of letters, seeking to put on record 
 an observed social and religious phenomenon, which we 
 have in the following statement of facts by the editor of 
 the New York Commercial Advertiser:™ "Look at the 
 present condition of the churches of Western New York, 
 which have become in truth 'a people scattered and peeled.' 
 The time has not come to write the ecclesiastical history 
 of the past ten years. And yet somebody should chronicle 
 the facts now, lest in after times the truth, however cor- 
 rectly it may be preserved by tradition, should not be be- 
 lieved. . . . The writer entertains no doubt that many true 
 conversions have occurred under the system to which he is 
 referring. But as with the ground over which the lightning 
 has gone, scorching and withering every green thing, years 
 may pass away before the arid waste of the church will be 
 grown over by the living herbage." If any corroboration 
 of this testimony were needed, it would be supplied by that 
 of the workers in these revivals themselves. James Boyle 
 writes to Finney himself December 25, 1834 : 60 "Let us 
 look over the fields where you and others and myself have 
 labored as revival ministers, and what is now their moral 
 state? What was their state within three months after we 
 left them ? I have visited and revisited many of these fields, 
 and groaned in spirit to see the sad, frigid, carnal, conten- 
 tious state into which the churches had fallen — and fallen 
 very soon after our first departure from among them." 
 No more powerful testimony is borne, however, than 
 that of Asa Mahan, who tells us — to put it briefly — 
 that everyone who was concerned in these revivals suffered 
 a sad subsequent lapse: the people were left like a dead 
 coal which could not be reignited; the pastors were shorn 
 of all their spiritual power; and the evangelists — "among 
 them all," he says, "and I was personally acquainted with 
 
 69 William L. Stone, Matthias and His Impostures, 1835, pp. 314 ff. 
 The "system" to which Colonel Stone is referring is the revival system 
 in practice in Western and Central New York. For Stone, see Apple- 
 ton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, sub nom. 
 
 60 Cited in the Literary and Theological Reviezv, March 1838, p. 66. 
 
26 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 nearly every one of them, — I cannot recall a single man, 
 brother Finney and Father Xash excepted, who did not 
 after a few years lose his unction and become equally dis- 
 qualified for the office of evangelist and that of pastor." 01 
 
 Thus the great "Western Revivals" ran out into disaster. 
 Although it belongs to Finney's earlier missionary labors 
 it is a typical instance of their effects which Ebenezer 
 Hazard Snowden gives us from his own parish. "Both Mr. 
 Finney and Mr. Burchard," he says, "made special efforts 
 in Brownsville, where I was afterward settled. Mr. Wells, 
 the pastor, who was before beloved by every man, woman 
 and child, was as a result obliged to give up his charge about 
 the time Mr. Finney was there. Such a course was pur- 
 sued as exasperated a great portion of the respectable mem- 
 bers of the congregation, and they immediately set up an 
 Episcopal church which they have attended ever since.*" J 
 As a consequence of such, occurrences Finney's ministrations 
 became no longer acceptable, and his preaching no longer 
 effective in the very region in which he had once swayed 
 men like a wind among the reeds. Over and over again, 
 when he proposed to revisit one of the churches, delegations 
 were sent him or other means used, to prevent what was 
 thought of as an affliction. P. H. Fowler 63 quite uninten- 
 
 61 Autobiography, 1881, pp. 227 f. 
 
 62 Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine, May 1838, pp. 236 f. 
 — Snowden adds about Burchard: "Mr. Burchard's meeting there was 
 equally disastrous in its results. He assumed the airs of a commander 
 and would turn off about so many every day, and announce those to 
 be converted. Some of those who thus became members never entered 
 the church afterward. Some became perfectionists, and of the re- 
 mainder, many were expelled. One of the elders remarked to me, that 
 the church lost much of its vitality at that time." Snowden, born in 
 1799, brought up in Oneida Co., graduated at Hamilton College, 1818. 
 admitted to the bar at Utica, joined his father's church at Sackett's 
 Harbor about the time Finney was joining the church at the neighbor- 
 ing town of Adams: he was pastor at Brownsville in 1836-7. See the 
 Biographical Catalogue of Princeton Theological Seminary, 1909, 
 
 tub nom. p. 56; and especially the Neerological Report, presented to 
 the Alumni Association, Princeton Theological Seminary. May 7. 1895, 
 1895, pp. 294 f. 
 68 As cited, p. 964. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 2~ 
 
 tentionally supplies us with a pungent instance of the decay 
 of Finney's acceptibility as a preacher in this region, of 
 which he was himself cognizant. Finney came back in 
 1855 to Rome, the scene of one of his greatest triumphs in 
 1826. 64 Now, however, his preaching- elicited no response. 
 He has himself told us of it, 05 and attributes what seemed 
 to him the otherwise inexplicable coldness of his reception, 
 to the fault of the pastor. This Fowler declares to have 
 been very erroneous and very unjust. He himself ascribes 
 it to a change in fashions in preaching. Finney preached, 
 he says, just as he did in 1826, with the same ability, earn- 
 estness, force. But this kind of preaching was passe — and 
 "his old friends in Utica, where considerable religious in- 
 terest existed, deemed it unwise to invite him there." This 
 kind of preaching was not passe, however, in other regions. 
 It was still capable of oppressing men's souls elsewhere. 
 But not again here — even after a generation had passed by 
 these burnt children had no liking for the fire. 
 
 The offence of Finney's preaching attached both to its 
 manner and to its matter ; and it attached not to his preach- 
 ing only but to his whole manner of conducting revivals, 
 and not to his person only but to the whole bevy of assistants 
 who gathered around him in prosecuting them. 658 It be- 
 
 64 Memoirs, p. 159. 
 
 65 Memoirs, p. 434. 
 
 658 Marquis L. Worden, (in J. Hepworth Dixon's Spiritual Wives, 
 vol. ii, p. 82) tells us who some of these were : "Revivals prevailed in 
 the neighborhood and region about Manlius, and through the country, 
 in which the New Measure Evangelists, such as Luther Myrick, Ho- 
 ratio Foote, and James Boyle led the way." How Foote preached 
 we shall let Josephus Brockway (A Delineation, etc., 1827, pp. 57 f.) 
 tell us. He is speaking of his preaching in the Troy revivals, 
 1826-7. "I went to Mr. Foote, a would-be minister, who was no 
 small occasion of offence and dispute, nor ought I, perhaps, to 
 be delicate in saying, he was no improper object of contempt. He 
 preached what some called a sermon, in which he attempted to show 
 that no man could get to heaven without living a perfect life. I went 
 to him with objections to his sermon, showing them to Elder Cushman 
 as I went. One of his positions was, 'That man's hope ain't worth a 
 groat that isn't founded on obedience.' — To which I objected, that 
 man's hope is good for nothing that is not founded on the merits of 
 
28 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 longed to the movement itself and constituted its charac- 
 teristic. We have seen Lyman Beecher using the epithet 
 "denunciatory" in describing these revivals, and it may 
 provisionally serve as well as another word to intimate their 
 peculiarity. It was as if the day of judgment had come and 
 the instruments of vengeance were abroad, with whips of 
 scorpions, lashing the people into the Kingdom of God. 
 Everywhere, naturally, there was wailing and gnashing of 
 teeth. The denunciation indulged in was constant and 
 unmeasured. It was not confined to the preaching: de- 
 nunciatory praying was practiced as diligently as denun- 
 ciatory preaching. Diverted from their ostensible purpose 
 as petitions to the Almighty, prayers were employed merely 
 as means of exciting the audience. Sometimes the effect 
 aimed at can only be characterized as direct hysteria. At 
 others, usurping the place of preaching, the prayer became 
 an assault on the hearer; and that not merely with a more 
 or less general reference, but, under the protection of the 
 form of petition, with a particularizing of the precise in- 
 dividual intended and a detailed description of his faults, 
 which would scarcely have been tolerated in preaching. 
 
 Christ, and evinced by obedience. Another of his statements was, 
 'Sinners never can be saved, and whoever has preached that sinners can 
 be saved, has preached what is not true.' To which I objected that 
 Christ came to save sinners, and there was none in our world to be 
 saved, but sinners. ..." Foote's teaching is of course just Pelagian 
 Perfectionalism in its purity — and it was preached in the Troy revival 
 as part of its official presentation. Finney has the grace, it is true, 
 to be a little ashamed of it; but he will not repudiate it. "In the midst 
 of the revival," he writes in his Memoirs, (p. 204), "it became neces- 
 sary that I should leave Troy for a week or two, and visit my friends 
 at Whitesboro. While I was gone, Rev. Horatio Foote was invited by 
 Dr. Beman to preach. I do not know how often he preached ; but this 
 I recollect, that he gave great offence to the disaffected members of 
 the church. He bore down upon them with the most scorching dis- 
 courses, so I learned." He wishes to roll the responsibility of inviting 
 Foote over on Beman : but he himself endorses him. Foote appears in 
 the Minutes of the General Assembly from 1825, when he is a Licen- 
 tiate of the Presbytery of Cayuga, to 1854, when he is a stated supply 
 at Red ford and resides at Ripley, Ohio. He disappears from the 
 Minutes without ever having held a settled pastorate. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 20, 
 
 People were "prayed at" rather than "prayed for," with the 
 mind obviously set more on moving them than on moving 
 God. 66 
 
 We are observing here only one item in a system of prac- 
 tices which formed the characteristic feature of these re- 
 vivals, and which soon came to be known collectively as 
 "the new measures." 67 These "new measures" of course 
 were much spoken against; but all opposition to them was 
 sternly stamped out. There was no more highly esteemed 
 minister in this region than William Raymond Weeks, who 
 was at the time serving the Congregationalist Church at 
 Paris Hill. 68 A Pastoral Letter issued by the ministers of 
 the Oneida Association of which he was a member, warning 
 the members of the churches under its care against the new 
 practices, was composed by him; 69 and naturally also, in 
 writing to his friends in the east, he expressed with some 
 decision (for that belonged to his character) his opinion 
 of the evils he saw being thus thrust upon the people. As a 
 
 66 Asahel Xettleton (Letters of the Rev. Dr. Beecher and Rev. Mr. 
 Nettleton on the "New Measures" in conducting Revivals of Religion, 
 1828, p. 35) gives the following as the substance of what had been 
 communicated to him on this subject by men on the ground. "There 
 are various errors in the mode of conducting revivals in this region, 
 which ought to be distinctly pointed out. That on the prayer of faith. 
 The talking to God as a man talks to his neighbor is truly shocking — 
 telling the Lord a long story about A. or B., and apparently with no 
 other intent than to produce a kind of stage effect upon the individual 
 in question, or upon the audience generally. This mouthing of words, 
 these deep and hollow tones, all indicate that the person is speaking 
 into the ears of man and not of God. I say nothing of the petitions 
 often presented; but the awful irreverence of the manner!" — On the 
 "particularity" used with reference to individuals in public prayer, see 
 Brockway, as cited, p. 22 ff. 
 
 67 Sprague, Annals etc., vol. iv, pp. 473 f. : "His situation was now 
 rendered very unpleasant by the introduction of what were technically 
 called the 'new measures' in connection with revivals of religion : and 
 he therefore removed. ..." 
 
 68 Biographical notice in VY. B. Sprague, Annals, etc. vol. iv, pp. 
 473 ff. ; P. H. Fowler, as cited, pp. 673 ff., 85, 261, 274: Appleton's Cyclo- 
 paedia of American Biography, sub nom. 
 
 69 Pastoral Letter of the Ministers of the Oneida Association to the 
 Churches under their care, on the Subject of Revivals of Religion. 
 1827. 
 
30 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 result not only was he driven in the end out of his pulpit, 
 but his memory has been sedulously defamed ever since. 
 Fifty years after, Finney was still speaking with undeserved 
 contempt of him, 7 " and he and Henry Davis. 71 President at 
 the time of Hamilton College — whose crime also was "op- 
 position to the revivals" — seem to be the only ones among 
 the multitude of ministers who have worked in Central Xew 
 York discussed by P. H. Fowler in his history, whom he 
 has dealt with with obvious injustice. The Pastoral Letter 
 which was the head and front of Weeks' offending, is not 
 only a perfectly inoffensive but an eminently judicious 
 document, expressed in entirely temperate language. It 
 is absolutely free from personalities, and equally free from 
 rasping particularizing. Framed in general terms, it 
 merely enumerates the kinds of practices, which may pos- 
 sibly be met with in revivals of religion, that lovers of 
 God and their own souls would do well to avoid. It might 
 be read through without divining that it was directed 
 against any particular movement : and one would suppose 
 that its serious and quiet cautions would be accepted by all 
 as an excellent road-book for the wayfarer through a 
 troubled land. That the participants in "the Western Re- 
 vivals" were quick to declare that their own portrait was 
 depicted may cause us some surprise; and more, that their 
 resentment was occasioned not by their looking upon the 
 portrait drawn as a caricature of them, but by the painter's 
 intimation that he himself considered it ugly. We clearly 
 have, in this calm enumeration of things to be avoided in 
 revivals, a trustworthy outline sketch of how "the Western 
 Revivals" were being carried on. 
 
 The phrase "new measures" soon however, acquired a 
 sense of rather narrower compass, in which it embraced 
 only those of the new practices which might be conceived as 
 means employed to produce the effect sought. 7 " As these 
 
 7 " Memoirs, p. U4- 
 
 "Biographical notice in Sprague, as cited, p. 244ft.: Fowler, as 
 cited, pp. 505 ff. ; Applcton, as cited, sub now. 
 
 Besides the Pastoral Letter of the Oneida Association and the 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 3] 
 
 came to be more fully known, they astonished, distressed, 
 appalled the friends of revivals everywhere; and most of 
 all, as was natural, those who felt themselves to stand in 
 particularly close connection with the churches of Central 
 New York — such as the clergy of Connecticut. Asahel 
 Nettleton, the most esteemed "revival minister" of the day, 
 took the lead in an effort to abate the evil. 73 Others — 
 notably Lyman Beecher, 74 — joined themselves to him. 
 Many — Griffin, Porter, Nott, Tucker, Cornelius — visited 
 Troy where Finney was then holding revival services, that 
 thev mi°;ht observe "the new measures" for themselves. 
 They came away more shocked than before. Letters were 
 written. 75 And finally a conference was arranged — "the 
 New Lebanon Convention," held July 18-26, 1827 — in 
 which the "Eastern brethren" endeavored to bring their 
 "Western brethren" to reason. 76 The attempt was in vain; 
 
 Letters of Drs. Beecher and Nettleton, consult on "the New Measures" 
 especially: Andrew Reed and James Matheson ; A Narrative of a 
 Visit to the American Churches by the Deputation from the Congre- 
 gational Union of England and Wales, 1835, vol. II, pp. i, ff. (by 
 Reed) ; C. Hodge, Biblical Repertory and Theological Review, Oct. 
 1825, pp. 601-607; Albert B. Dod, Ibid, pp. 626-674; and J. W. Kevin, 
 The Anxious Bench, 1843. Finney tells us (Memoirs, p. 288) that he 
 made little or no use of "the Anxious Seat" until the Rochester Re- 
 vivals of 1831. G. F. Wright (pp. 100 ff.), while properly recognizing 
 its use as falling in with Finney's dogmatic scheme, errs in supposing 
 that the opposition to it turned on a notion in the minds of Finney's 
 opponents that "there was little natural connection between the means 
 used for the persuasion of men and their conversion." A simple read- 
 ing of their discussions will show that their objections turned on quite 
 other considerations. 
 
 73 See Bennet Tyler, Memoir of the Life and Character of Rev. 
 Asahel Nettleton, D.D., 1844, chapter xii, (p. 248-270), "His opposition 
 to the new measures." 
 
 74 See Autobiography, edited by his son, Charles Beecher, 1865, vol. 
 ii, ch. 12: "New Measures," pp. 89-108. 
 
 75 See especially, Letters of the Rev. Dr. Beecher and the Rev. Mr. 
 Nettleton, on the "New Measures" in conducting Revivals of Religion; 
 with a Review of a Sermon by Novanglus, 1828. 
 
 76 Finney gives an account of the Xew Lebanon Convention from 
 his point of view in the sixteenth chapter of his Memoirs (pp. 202 ff.) ; 
 G. F. Wright devotes to it a chapter in his Life of Finney (pp. 39 ff). 
 It will be found described from their point of view in the Lives of 
 Nettleton and Beecher, as referred to above. 
 
32 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 and the fundamental reason why it was in vain is not diffi- 
 cult to discern. The axe was not laid to the root of the 
 tree. The "new measures" were not arbitrary practices 
 due to nothing but a coarse and depraved taste, the correc- 
 tion of which might be easily managed and need work no 
 great change in principle. They belonged to the very es- 
 sence of the revival as conceived by its promoters. It was 
 in them that its heart expressed itself. They were in a word 
 the natural and inevitable effect of the doctrine on which 
 the revival was based. For what was new in this revival 
 was not merely the particular " "measures" by which it was 
 prosecuted — that might be a merely surface phenomenon 
 — but the particular doctrine on which it was founded, 
 of which the measures employed were only the manifesta- 
 tion. This was a Pelagian revival. That was its peculiar- 
 ity: and everything else connected with it was merely the 
 expression of this. 
 
 That it was "the new measures" rather than the Pel- 
 agianism of the "Western Revivals" which in the first in- 
 stance at least offended the Eastern brethren is no doubt 
 due in part to the general fact that it is always external 
 things which first meet the eye. The external things 
 in this instance were shocking in themselves; and their 
 rooting in a doctrinal cause was often felt but vaguely or 
 not at all. Pelagianizing modes of thought, derived from 
 the same general source from which Finney had himself 
 drunk — the "New Divinity" taught at New Haven, — were 
 moreover widely diffused among the New England clergy 
 themselves. Men of this type of thinking might be offended 
 by Finney's practices on general grounds, but could scarcely 
 be expected, for that very reason, to assign them as to their 
 cause to a doctrine common to his and their own thinking. 
 And that the more that there were as yet no adequate means 
 of ascertaining what the doctrinal basis of Finney's preach- 
 ing was. Only his actual hearers were in any real sense 
 informed of his teaching. When a little later he began to 
 publish lectures and sermons the scales fell from men's 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 33 
 
 eyes. The discerning had no difficulty then in seeing the 
 correlation between his practices and his doctrines, or in 
 clearly understanding that the phenomena of his revivals 
 which gave most offence were merely the natural conse- 
 quences of the fundamental fact that they were Pelagian 
 revivals. 
 
 Accordingly Albert B. Dod is found writing: 77 "We 
 recollect that it was matter of surprise to many, when 
 the conjunction took place between the coarse, bustling 
 fanaticism of the New Measures and the refined intellectual 
 abstractions of the Xew Divinity. It was a union between 
 Mars and Minerva, — unnatural and boding no good to the 
 church. But our readers will have observed that there is a 
 close and logical connection between Mr. Finney's theology 
 and his measures. The demand created for the one by the 
 other and the mutual assistance which they render are so 
 evident, that we will spend no time in the explanation of 
 them." And Charles Hodge : 78 'That the new measures 
 and the new divinity should have formed an intimate alliance 
 can surprise no one aware of their natural affinity. . . . 
 Xo better method could be devised to secure the adoption 
 of the new doctrines than the introduction of the new meas- 
 ures. The attempt has accordingly been made. The cold, 
 Pelagian system of the new divinity has been attached to 
 the engine of fanaticism." These writers, it will be ob- 
 served, do not assert that such practices as are summed up 
 in the "new measures" may not exist — have not existed — 
 apart from a determinate Pelagian system: what they 
 affirm is that it is in such practices that a Pelagian system 
 naturally expresses itself if it seeks to become aggressively 
 evangelistic, and that in them we may perceive the Pelagian 
 system running out into its appropriate methods. Joseph 
 Ives Foot describes Finney's revivals therefore frankly from 
 this point of view. 79 "These doctrines, with a correspond- 
 
 77 The Biblical Repertory and Theological Rerieic, October 1835, 
 p. 656. 
 
 78 Ibid, p. 614. 
 
 79 The Literary and Theological Review, March 1838, p. 70, article 
 
34 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 ing system of measures, were driven like a hurricane through 
 the churches. To resist this operation was to resist God. 
 Conscientious Christians gave place till they should see 
 what it was. Timorous ones were attached to his triumphal 
 car, while the bold and the ignorant seized the reins and the 
 whip; and hundreds and thousands under these various in- 
 fluences, were led to believe themselves converted and were 
 immediately driven into the church. These services were 
 called revivals; and thus the very name of the operations 
 of divine grace was brought under suspicion." It is from 
 the same point of view that Charles D. Pigeon writes with 
 a somewhat broader reference : 80 "We look upon the course 
 of Mr. Finney as particularly instructive. He of all others 
 has taught the New Haven theology in its greatest purity 
 and has ventured to push the principle to its legitimate re- 
 sults. Those parts of New York which have been the scene 
 of his labors are giving and will long continue to give the 
 most instructive lessons as to the nature of that system of 
 doctrine and its influence on individual character and 
 religious institutions." And it is still from the same point 
 of view that Samuel J. Baird places at the head of the very 
 instructive chapter in which he gives an account of "the 
 Western Revivals" the descriptive title of "Practical 
 Pelagianism," and brings the chapter to a close with these 
 words : 81 "Such were the fruits, widely realized in Western 
 New York, from the New Haven theology. They were its 
 legitimate and proper results. The good taste, common 
 sense and piety of many of the disciples of that school may 
 revolt from these exhibitions, and pause before adopting 
 them in their full development. But the practical system 
 of Finney, Burchard, Myrick and their compeers was de- 
 duced from the theology of New Haven, by a logic which 
 no ingenuity can evade." 
 
 It will not have escaped observation that the writers we 
 
 entitled. Influence of Pelagianism on the Theological Course of Rev. 
 C. G. Finney, developed in his Sermons and Lectures." 
 
 80 The Literary and Theological Review, March 1838, p. 70. 
 
 R1 A History <>f ///.' New School, [868, pp. 217-234 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 35 
 
 have last quoted assume that "the Western Revivals" were 
 already generally understood to have been far from suc- 
 cessful, as judged by their ultimate fruits. That indeed 
 was the case. We have already seen that Finney him- 
 self came in the end to a recognition of this unhappy fact. 
 It will cause no surprise that he should become wearied with 
 this unfruitful work. Already in 1832 he was looking back 
 upon this portion of his career as a closed page of doubtful 
 success, and was consciously seeking a new phase of 
 activity. He was yet to do a great deal of evangelistic 
 work ; but, although he threw the circle of his labors wider 
 and wider, even across the seas, he thought of himself as 
 no longer an evangelist — he had become a pastor. 82 His 
 own account of the change is as follows. 83 "I had become 
 fatigued, as I had labored about ten years as an evangelist, 
 without anything more than a few days or weeks of rest 
 during the whole period. . . . We had three children, 
 and I could not well take my family with me, while labor- 
 ing as an evangelist. My strength, too, had become a good 
 deal exhausted; and on praying and looking the matter 
 over, I concluded that I would accept the call from the 
 Second Free Church and labor, for a time at least, in New 
 York." By this action Finney became a part of a movement 
 then making in the Presbyterian churches of New York to 
 reach the people by the establishment of "free" churches, 
 that is, churches with no pew-rentals and otherwise adapted 
 to attract and hold the unchurched masses. 838 In this way 
 he gave to his pastorate a genuinely evangelistic character. 
 The church over which he was settled was a Presbyterian 
 church, and Finney had always been a Presbyterian. It was 
 in the Presbyterian Church that he was converted, licensed, 
 
 82 Memoirs, p. 94 : "I have been a pastor now for many years, ever 
 since 1832." How completely Finney felt he had broken with his 
 past we have already seen (above p. 3 and note 4). 
 
 83 Pp. 318 f. 
 
 83 ' An interesting "History of the Free Churches in the City of 
 New York," by one of the prime movers in their establishment, Louis 
 Tappan, may be read in the appendix to Reed and Matheson's Narrative 
 of a Visit to the American Churches, etc. 1835, Vol. II, 341-353. 
 
36 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 ordained ; it was under its authorization that he had pursued 
 his whole work as an evangelist, and the region in which 
 he had pursued his chief revivalistic enterprises was a dis- 
 tinctively Presbyterian region : and now he was settled as 
 pastor over a Presbyterian church. But Finney was noth- 
 ing less than a Presbyterian. The church of which he was 
 pastor — as were all the Free Presbyterian Churches — was 
 under the care of the Third Presbytery of New York, an 
 "elective-affinity" Presbytery, as little Presbyterian as any- 
 thing could be which was willing to bear the name. Still, 
 there was friction over matters of discipline and the like ; 
 and Finney felt uncomfortable in his harness. His friends 
 accordingly built a new church for him — the "Broadway 
 Tabernacle" — which they organized as a Congregationalist 
 church. Of this church he took charge in the autumn of 
 1834. He did not take his dismission from the Presbytery, 
 however, until the spring of 1836, after he had been at 
 Oberlin for a year, and was on the point of returning thither 
 for his second session. 84 What led him thus tardily to 
 sever his connection with a church with which he had so 
 little in common we can only conjecture. Perhaps the pro- 
 cess of writing his theological lectures at Oberlin quickened 
 his consciousness both as to the significance of matters of 
 faith in church relations and as to the complete dissonance 
 of his own beliefs with those of the Presbyterian Church of 
 which he was still an accredited teacher. 
 
 He had not been left without pointed reminders of the 
 falseness of the position which he occupied. So soon as his 
 Sermons on Various Subjects (1834) and Lectures on Re- 
 
 8 *The records of the Third Presbytery of New York concerning 
 Finney's case tell that, "on the 14th of February 1832 the Second Free 
 Church (Chatham Street Chapel), composed chiefly of members from 
 the First Free Church, was organized, and on the 28th of September 
 the Rev. Charles G. Finney was installed pastor. . . On the 2d of 
 March, 1836, Dr. Finney was released" (S. D. Alexander, The I'rrs- 
 bytery of New York, 1738 to 1888, 1887, p. 107). This Second Free 
 Church became a Congregationalist Church June 13, 1836, and Asa 
 Malum tellfl lis (Autobiography, pp. 227) that Finney's immediate suc- 
 cessor in the pulpit made shipwreck of his faith. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 37 
 
 rivals of Religion (1835) had been published this had be- 
 come glaring and created an open scandal. He was called 
 upon publicly to withdraw from a church in which he was so 
 patently out of place. Albert B. Dod, for example, in July 
 1835, closes his review of his Sermons with an expression 
 of thanks to him "for the substantial service he has done the 
 church" in them, "by exposing the naked deformity of the 
 Xew Divinity/' and then adds : "He can render her still an- 
 other service, and in rendering it perform only his plain duty, 
 by leaving her communion and finding one within which he 
 can preach and publish his opinions without making war 
 upon the standards in which he has solemnly professed his 
 faith." 85 In closing, in the following October, his review of 
 the Lectures on Revivals, Dod returns to the subject and in- 
 sists on Finney's duty to leave the church. "It is an instruc- 
 tive illustration of the fact that fanaticism debilitates the 
 conscience," he now says, 88 "that this man can doubt the 
 piety of any one who uses coffee, and call him a cheat who 
 sends a letter to another, on his own business, without pay- 
 ing the postage, when he remains, apparently without re- 
 morse, with the sin of broken vows upon him. In this posi- 
 tion we leave him before the public. Nor will we withdraw 
 our charges against him, until he goes out from among us, 
 for he is not of us." We know nothing, of course, of the 
 effect of such challenges on Finney's action; but it is to be 
 noted that he withdrew from the Church immediately 
 (within six months) after they were made. Perhaps it 
 should be added as illustrating the lightness with which 
 Finney regarded the obligations of his doctrinal professions, 
 that, according to his own account, he had originally in- 
 curred those obligations without informing himself of what 
 he was committing himself to. In describing his licensure, 87 
 he records: "Unexpectedly to myself they asked me if I 
 received the confession of faith of the Presbyterian church. 
 I had not examined it, — that is, the large work containing 
 
 85 Biblical Repertory and Theological Review, July 1835, p. 527. 
 *«Ib\d, October 1835, p. 674. 
 87 Memoirs, p. 51. 
 
38 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 the catechism and confession. This had made no part of 
 my study. I replied that I received it for substance of 
 doctrine, so far as I understood it. But I spoke in a way 
 that plainly implied, I think, that I did not pretend to know 
 much about it. However, I answered honestly, as I under- 
 stood it at the time." Amid the curiously interlaced quali- 
 fications and explanations of this statement, it only emerges 
 that Finney was not unaware of the character of his action. 
 Under its cover, he for a dozen years flouted the doctrines 
 he had been placed by it under obligation to propagate. 
 
 During all these dozen years Finney had been a wanderer 
 on the face of the earth, doing the work of an evangelist. 
 Even during the four years of his stay in New York, he 
 did not stay in New York. He had accepted the pastorate 
 offered to him there as a means toward securing a more 
 settled mode of existence ; and in impaired health and de- 
 pression of spirits he was obviously still longing for peace 
 and a quiet life. It was in this mood that the proposal to 
 go to Oberlin found him; and it was in this mood that he 
 accepted it. He was in the prime of life, and the event 
 shows that his amazing vigor was unimpaired. His real 
 career was indeed just opening before him; forty years re- 
 mained to him in which he was "Oberlin's central spiritual 
 force and most eminent representative." 88 The pulpit, the 
 lecture hall, the press, were now the instruments with which 
 he wrought, and with all alike he wrought with the hand of 
 a master-workman. It is possible, to be sure, to exaggerate 
 here. "In intellectual insight into the deepest realities of 
 religion, in originality of treatment and in logical power," 
 
 88 D. L. Leonard, The Story of Oberlin, 1898, p. 60, cf. p. 278 f. : 
 "Beyond comparison his was the chief personal force upon the colonial 
 tract. The pulpit was the throne from which Sunday after Sunday, 
 for more than a generation, he swayed vast audiences. . . . For forty 
 years his lectures on theology were given, and in addition, 1852-1858, 
 he filled the chair of intellectual and moral philosophy. For fifteen 
 years, 1851-1865,, he was Oberlin's executive head. . . . Through his 
 sermons, lectures and letters published in The (Oberlin) Evangelist, 
 and elsewhere, a vast influence was wielded. Some of his books sold 
 literally by the hundred thousand." 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 39 
 
 writes Albert Temple Swing, 89 "President Finney is to be 
 ranked side by side with Edwards : they are the two greatest 
 American theologians." This is only one of those pro- 
 vincial judgments which Oliver Wendell Holmes satirizes 
 when he says that every village has, somewhere on its lawns, 
 the biggest tree in the world. We must manage to see over 
 the rim of the dell within the limits of which our experiences 
 are wrought out. But certainly it must be recognized that 
 Finney was "the greatest mind and the regulating force in 
 the development of Oberlin theology." 90 He was blessed 
 with coadjutors of a high order of talent. But it was to 
 him that, above all others, Oberlin owed the measure of 
 greatness which it achieved. 
 
 The contrast between the pictures of the religious con- 
 ditions obtaining in Central and Western New York during 
 the first quarter of the nineteenth century, received from 
 the accounts which Finney and Asa Mahan respectively 
 give of their early years, is nothing less than startling. The 
 two lives ran on very closely parallel lines. Both men spent 
 their early boyhood in Oneida County — in hamlets only 
 a few miles distant from one another. The later youth of 
 both was passed in the wilder West. Yet the religious con- 
 ditions in which the two grew up are described by them 
 very differently. All the religious advantages which Finney 
 represents himself as lacking, Mahan represents himself as 
 possessing. He was born and bred in a pious household, 
 and surrounded on all sides by religious influences. His 
 father, to be sure, was not, in his son's judgment at least, 
 a thoroughly consecrated man. But his mother was a 
 deeply religious woman with an aura of devoutness hanging 
 always about her. It was a Bible-reading, praying family, 
 in which the religious books that to Finney were inaccessible 
 lay always at hand. The Church was at the door, and the 
 ministrations of the sanctuary were constantly enjoyed : 
 if there was formal preaching only an alternate Sabbaths, 
 
 89 The BibUotheca Sacra, July, 1901, p. 480 f. 
 
 90 Frank Hugh Foster, A Genetic History of the New England 
 Theology, 1907, p. 453- 
 
40 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 service was held every Sabbath; and when sermons were 
 not preached by ministers, they were read by laymen. The 
 house was the resort of itinerant ministers, and the whole 
 neighborhood was full of Christian people ready to give 
 Christian succor. One rubs his eyes and wonders if this 
 can be the same country-side in which Finney found little 
 that pretended to be religious, and nothing that pretended 
 to be religious that was not also absurd. To such an ex- 
 tent, it seems, does varying personality color the aspect of 
 surroundings, and even by a process of selection mould 
 them into harmony with itself. 
 
 Mahan was a few years Finney's junior, and, although 
 he found his way into the ministry at a somewhat younger 
 age than Finney, he had had a shorter — and a far less stir- 
 ring and notable — ministerial experience than Finney, when 
 they came together at Oberlin. He was born November 9, 
 1799, 91 at Vernon, Oneida County, New York, a hamlet 
 some sixteen miles west of Utica and about half that dis- 
 tance from Kirkland, Finney's boyhood home, with which it 
 had easy communication over the famous "Genesee Turn- 
 pike." 92 Here he was bred in what he calls 93 " 'the strictest 
 sect' of the Calvinistic faith," and was surrounded both in 
 his home and in the church life into which he was carried as 
 a matter of course, with constant religious influences. These 
 had no more effect upon him, however, than that he grew 
 up a boy of good habits and excellent character. When he 
 was about twelve years of age the family removed to the 
 West — to Orangeville, Wyoming County, four miles from 
 Warren and some forty miles southwest of Rochester. The 
 change of residence, however, brought no essential change 
 
 91 So Mahan himself repeatedly says (e.g. Out of Darkness into Light, 
 1874, p. 1 ; Autobiography, 1881, p. 1). On the other hand the Encyclo- 
 paedias (Applet on s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Johnson's 
 Universal Cyclopaedia, The New S chaff -Hcrzog Encyclopaedia of 
 Religious Knowledge) uniformly give the date as 1800. 
 
 92 For this turnpike and its significance see in O'Callaghan's Docu- 
 mentary History of the State of New York, vol. II, p. 1142, 1165L 
 For the state of things west of Utica in 1792, see p. 1131. 
 
 93 Out of Darkness into Light, p. 9. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 41 
 
 in the boy's inner life or his external carriage. He lived in 
 his new home, too, as a member of a religious household 
 would be expected to live, taking part in all the religious 
 activities of the community; but withal, he was still destitute 
 of religious experiences of his own. He was known, how- 
 ever, as a young man of sterling character and irreproach- 
 able conduct. And so it came about, that when his own 
 schooling was completed, he was "on account of his well- 
 known attainments and moral reputation," 94 "selected to 
 teach school in one of the most Christian, moral and in- 
 telligent districts in all the region round." Here, when he 
 had entered by a few months into his eighteenth year 
 (1816), he was led during the progress of a revival, to give 
 his heart to God. 95 His conversion, as he describes it, was 
 as distinctively supernaturalistic as Finney's: "if not 
 miraculous, yet altogether supernatural," is the somewhat 
 odd phrase with which he describes it, drawing at the same 
 time a parallel between it and that of Colonel Gardiner, un- 
 derstood by him to be the result of a miraculous interven- 
 tion. 96 He represents himself 97 as praying that he 'might 
 be kept from ever returning to that state of aliena- 
 tion from God in which his life had been spent" hitherto. 
 And, "I had no sooner pronounced these words," he says, 
 "when I was consciously encircled 'in the everlasting 
 arms.' " This was a prayer for "perseverance" and it 
 seems to be implied that it was granted and that a pledge 
 was given him of its granting, in a tangible response. 98 
 
 94 Out of Darkness into Light, p. 28. 
 
 95 P. 9. 
 
 96 Autobiography, p. 50. 
 
 97 Out of Darkness into Light, pp. 1-13. 
 
 98 On p. 28 however he seems to assign his attainment of assurance 
 of "perseverance" to a somewhat later, though apparently not greatly 
 later, date : "At length I attained to a full assurance that I was not 
 only then an accepted servant of Christ, but should have grace to con- 
 tinue such even unto the end. In this assurance I have done service 
 for Christ up to this period. Not a stain of doubt rests upon my mind 
 that I am His for eternity." On this basis he rejects the "moment by 
 moment" teaching of most Higher Life teachers and declares that ac- 
 cording to Scripture we are "to exercise present faith" both for "pres- 
 ent" and for "future sanctification." 
 
42 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 Whatever else may be said of this, it was not, any more 
 than Finney's, a conversion according to the Pelagianizing 
 prescriptions of the "New Divinity." 
 
 For some months after his conversion, Mahan tells us, 80 
 his "spiritual state was rather of a negative than positive 
 character"; by which he appears to mean that his thoughts 
 were rather on the privileges that his new relation to God 
 had brought him than on service. That, however, was soon 
 corrected; and he gave himself with diligence not only 
 to prepare himself for the ministry but to improve his 
 opportunities to bring souls to Christ. In consequence, not 
 only did he have trophies to show, in the favorable situation 
 in which he was at the time, but having removed for his 
 next winter's teaching to a very ungodly neighborhood, he 
 built up a church there of from thirty to fifty members. 99 * 
 As years passed on, however, he lost the "inward peace and 
 joy in God which his first love had induced," 100 and 
 passed into a condition which he speaks of as "twilight," 
 and in which he continued for no less than eighteen years — 
 in fact up to his discovery of "perfection" as the proper state 
 of the Christian, at Oberlin, in 1836. "Twilight" is merely 
 his name, accordingly, for the condition of the "ordinary 
 Christian." He does not think of denying that this "semi- 
 twilight of a semi-faith" is a "genuine form of Christian ex- 
 perience," as genuine a form of it as "the sunlight" itself. 101 
 In both states alike he had sin, and understood that every 
 deliberate sin committed deserved death. But the two states 
 were characterized by different "sentiments and expecta- 
 tions" with reference to sin. 102 In the one he expected to 
 sin : in the other he had no expectation of sinning. And, he 
 adds, 108 "in each, my experience fully accorded with my 
 faith" — a sentence which contradictorily to the preceding 
 
 89 P. 18. 
 ••" P. 20. 
 
 100 P. 90. 
 
 101 Autobiography, p. 261 ; cf. Out of Darkness into Light, p. 98. 
 
 ™ 2 P. 284. 
 103 P. 285. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 43 
 
 statement, seems to assert the enjoyment in the later state 
 of actual "perfection." It was "in the twilight" then 
 that he lived out his life up to his great experience at 
 Oberlin. He soon set his heart, however, on the ministry 
 and began active preparation for it. There were two years 
 of preparatory study; then four years at Hamilton College 
 from which he was graduated in 1824; and then three years 
 at Andover Seminary, from which he was graduated in 
 1827. Henry Davis was President of Hamilton College 
 during his time ; at Andover he came under the instruction 
 of Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart — from the latter of 
 whom he learned at least how to deal with the seventh 
 chapter of Romans so that it would interpose no obstacle 
 to his later theories. He paints the general conditions at 
 Andover in almost as dark colors as John Humphrey Noyes 
 does a few years later. He does not hint at any impro- 
 prieties of conduct: "There was nothing morally impure 
 about it." But he found no great spirituality: "Never 
 was I in an atmosphere less morally and spiritually vitalizing 
 than that which encircled me during those three years." 104 
 Leaving Andover, he became a candidate under the 
 charge of the Presbytery of Oneida, occupying himself 
 meanwhile in "agencies and miscellaneous ministerial 
 duties," as he puts it. 105 Soon, however, he found himself 
 back in the West, and "commenced work in the city of 
 Rochester, with the expectation of organizing a new church 
 there." 106 "Just as the organization was being effected," 
 however, he "was suddenly stricken down by an attack of 
 inflammatory rheumatism in both knees and ankles and 
 his left wrist." He was taken to his father's house 
 in Orangeville, ("where," says he, "my youth had been 
 spent") ; but even in his illness he could not be idle. He 
 found the church there in a most deplorable state. 107 He 
 
 104 Autobiography, p. 144. 
 
 105 P. 155. 
 10 «P. 167. 
 
 107 This was probably in 1828. The church at Orangeville after a 
 period of vacancy had enjoyed the service of a Stated Supply in 1826, 
 
44 THE PRINCETON* THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 caused himself to be carried to it Sunday after Sunday in a 
 chair, and preached from the chair "for about three months." 
 The result was a revival in which he had the happiness of 
 seeing his own father brought to Christ. "Among the 
 converts was my aged father. He had professed religion 
 from my childhood, but was manifestly a total stranger to 
 the grace of God." 108 When he was able to undertake reg- 
 ular work again, he became "pastor-elect of the Congre- 
 gational church at Pittsford, near Rochester," 109 and duly 
 appears in the Minutes of the General Assembly for 1830 
 as a member of the Presbytery of Rochester and pastor at 
 Pittsford. 110 His tenure of this charge was, however, very 
 brief. He had already left it in time to be reported to the 
 General Assembly of 1831 as without charge; and by Aug- 
 ust 1 83 1 he had removed to Cincinnati to take the oversight 
 of a new venture, called then the Sixth Presbyterian Church, 
 but soon afterward to become the Vine Street Congrega- 
 tionalist Church. He "commenced his labors with this 
 church," he tells us, 111 "on August 29th, 183 1 and resigned 
 May 1, 1835" — serving it therefore somewhat less than 
 four years. The church consisted at the beginning of only 
 sixteen members "who lived in the city and worshipped 
 with us" ; but towards the end of his stay with it, it was 
 largely increased : seventy-four were added on examination 
 in 1834, and in the course of eight months' time upwards 
 of a hundred. Throughout the whole period of Mahan's 
 stay with it, it worshiped in a hired hall, "and," he adds, "a 
 
 and was vacant again in 1827 and 1828, obtaining a Stated Supply in 
 1829 (General Assembly Minutes, pp. 63, 182, 284, 460). 
 
 108 Autobiography, p. 168. 
 
 109 Pittsford, Monroe Co., N. Y., eight miles southeast of Rochester. 
 
 110 His record in the Minutes runs thus: 1829 (his first appearance), 
 candidate of the Presbytery of Oneida: 1830, pastor at Pittsford, Pres- 
 bytery of Rochester; 1831, W. C. Presbytery of Rochester; 1832, S. S. 
 Sixth Church at Cincinnati; 1833, W. C. of the Presbytery of Cin- 
 cinnati (the Sixth church vacant) ; 1834, S. S. Sixth Church, to which 
 arc assigned 134 members — the only statistics of the church's member- 
 ship in the entries; 1835, Asa Mahan's name no longer appears, and 
 Herman Norton is given as pastor of the Sixth Church. 
 
 111 . iutobiography, p. 163. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 
 
 45 
 
 very plain one at that." He was never really settled over it 
 as its pastor, and even his service to it as "stated supply" 
 does not seem to have been uninterrupted. 112 
 
 These details have been recited in order that the extent 
 and nature of Mahan's ministerial experience before going 
 to Oberlin in 1835 may be estimated. From his graduation 
 at Andover in 1827 to his arrival at Oberlin some eight 
 years had elapsed, but little more than half of these had 
 been spent in the actual care of a church, and for barely a 
 single year had he sustained the office of pastor. In determ- 
 ining the value of his experiences, such work as he did at 
 Rochester in gathering together the nucleus of a church, and 
 at Orangeville in leading a revival movement, must not be 
 underestimated. Immediately on settling in Cincinnati, 
 also, he was elected a Trustee and a member of the Pruden- 
 tial Board of Lane Seminary, and this brought him into 
 active participation in the broader work of the church ; and 
 indeed thrust him at once into the focus of the most hotly 
 debated national question of the day — that which con- 
 cerned slavery. With it all it must be said, however, that 
 his ministerial experience had been exceedingly small and 
 very narrow. 
 
 Meanwhile he had not maintained intact the faith in 
 which he was bred. That was, he tells us — speaking of 
 course from the New England point of view, 113 — " 'the 
 straitest sect' of the Calvinistic faith." From the very be- 
 ginning of his personal religious life, however, this heredi- 
 tary Calvinism had begun to crumble. Of the imputation 
 of Adam's sin, 114 he declares that "subsequently to his con- 
 version, he never for a moment entertained that sentiment" : 
 and he adds 115 that he "quite early" adopted the "universal 
 atonement." 116 In a broader statement, he informs us that 
 
 112 In the Minnies of 1833 Mahan is listed as without charge and 
 the church as vacant. 
 
 113 Autobiography, p. 320. 
 
 114 P. 199. 
 
 115 P. 200. 
 
 116 In later life he distinguished between three opinions on the ex- 
 
46 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 from the commencement of his ministry he "rejected the 
 Old School and Hopkinsian theories, and adopted and be- 
 came a zealous advocate of that of divine efficiency." Per- 
 haps his drift had not gone much further than this when 
 he went to Oberlin. His going to Oberlin marks, however, 
 the beginning of a completer revolution in his faith, a 
 revolution which he represents, in a statement which defines 
 it by the widest limits, as carrying him "from the extreme 
 bounds of Calvinism" — that is the way he expressed the 
 faith in which he had been bred — "to the quite opposite 
 pole of the evangelical faith" — which is his description of 
 his ultimate point of view. 117 This ultimate point of view 
 he describes again as "the antipodes of all the peculiarities 
 of the Calvinistic faith." 118 His mind here is chiefly on 
 the question of liberty and ability, and, accordingly, he 
 expresses elsewhere the revolution in faith which he suf- 
 fered as "changing fundamentally his life-long and fondly 
 cherished beliefs, and repudiating utterly the doctrine of 
 necessity and adopting that of liberty." 119 What he means 
 is that he rejected the whole conception of natural and 
 moral inability and adopted in its stead a doctrine of 
 plenary ability; 120 or, to put it more sharply, that he now 
 took up with the notion that obligation is limited by ability, 
 a notion which, he rightly says, compelled an entire re- 
 construction of his theology. 121 It seems to be clear 
 
 tent of the Atonement, e.g., Christian Perfection (1839) P- 26 f. : — (1) 
 Limited Atonement, "Christ died for a part only of the human race — 
 the elect," (2) General Atonement, — "Christ died for no individuals 
 of our race in particular, but for all in general," (3) Special atone- 
 ment, "Christ died for everyone in particular" — so much for each that 
 it might seem to him that it was for him alone that he died. It is the 
 third that Mahan makes his own. But he modified it so as to escape 
 universal salvation by saying that although Christ died for each, he 
 avails only for those who accept him. We do not get the full flavor 
 of this fervent individualism of Christ's death until we recall that the 
 theory 0! atonemenl held is the Rectoral! 
 
 1 17 Autobiogrophy, p. viii. 
 
 118 P. 320. 
 
 ll * Autobiography, p. 204. 
 «o Pp. 203-4. 
 "i P. 214. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 47 
 
 enough that this fundamental step was already taken be- 
 fore going to Oberlin ; so that he began his work there, like 
 Finney and his other colleagues, as a zealous preacher of 
 the "New Divinity." There is no reason to doubt there- 
 fore the accuracy of James H. Fairchild's representation, 122 
 that all the "founders" of Oberlin, including John J. Ship- 
 herd, and not only Finney, but Mahan and Morgan and 
 Cowles, held to "New School views," in the sense that they 
 insisted upon "the doctrine of human ability." "These 
 men," he says, and obviously very truly, "were all earnest 
 preachers of human ability, and the personal, voluntary re- 
 sponsibility of the sinner for everything about him that can 
 be reckoned as sin." 
 
 It is Fairchild also who reminds us 123 that the gathering 
 of a body of such men as these in a place like Oberlin, neces- 
 sarily concentrated the immense personal power which they 
 represented, specifically on the cultivation of the spiritual 
 life. Out in the wide world their energies had been in- 
 tensely directed to the conversion of sinners : here, in this 
 narrow sphere, where "there was only here and there a 
 sinner to be converted," they were naturally diverted to the 
 perfecting of the saints. Men were set to the intensive cul- 
 tivation of their Christian life; and the preachers pressed 
 upon them with all the insistence that had been employed in 
 the whirlwind revivals from which they had come, the 
 duties of examining themselves whether they were in Christ 
 and of immediate completion of their entire consecration to 
 His service. "It was not a rare thing," says Fairchild, "for 
 a large portion of the congregation, after a searching ser- 
 mon by Prof. Finney or Pres. Mahan, to rise up in acknowl- 
 edgment that they had reason to apprehend that they were 
 deceived as to their Christian character; and to express 
 their determination not to rest until their feet were estab- 
 lished upon the Rock." It is almost incredible that the 
 preachers did not realize from the beginning that what they 
 were demanding from their hearers was sheer perfection; 
 
 122 The Congregational Quarterly, April 1876, p. 237. 
 
 123 As cited, p. 238. 
 
48 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 and that what they were preaching was mere perfectionism. 
 Perfection was men's duty, and all that was duty was prac- 
 ticable — for obligation and ability are co-extensive. But 
 we must remember that these were somewhat reckless men, 
 who made it a virtue not to count costs ; and who were 
 accustomed to tear every passion to tatters and to lash 
 every dawning emotion into excesses with unmeasured in- 
 vective ; pursuing their conceived ends without regard to the 
 inevitable consequences of the means employed. There is 
 no reason why we should not believe them when they tell 
 us that they were unaware that they were demanding per- 
 fection of their hearers as an achievable duty, until their 
 eyes were opened to it by their hearers themselves. One of 
 the odd circumstances connected with the situation was that 
 Finney and Mahan knew perfectly well what perfectionism 
 was. They had lived with it in Central and Western New 
 York : their companions in their evangelistic work there 
 had preached it in their presence : their followers had often 
 rushed headlong into it. They themselves had kept their 
 skirts free from it; partly, no doubt, because of their en- 
 grossment with the prior matter of conversion; more, no 
 doubt, because of the mystical and antinomian form taken 
 by "the New York Perfectionism," which was abhorrent to 
 them as preachers of righteousness. But they could not help 
 knowing that perfectionism lay at their door; and yet they 
 drove on, preaching an essential perfectionism without, they 
 say, being aware of it. 
 
 Perfectionism lay at their door even in the literal, physical 
 sense. Oberlin was not so isolated as to be insensible to 
 what was going on in Central and Western New York, or 
 even in its own immediate neighborhood, in the Western 
 Reserve of Ohio. Its settlers were recruited from the class 
 in which "New York Perfectionism" was prevalent; and 
 they did not shed their memories or break off their lines of 
 communication when they came to Oberlin. The students 
 of theology, to whom the appeals of the preachers were most 
 frequently addressed, were themselves the products — Mahan 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 49 
 
 says the best products — of "The Western Revivals," and 
 could not fail to be familiar with their constant accompani- 
 ments. Even if we lacked direct evidence of contact, there- 
 fore, we could not assume that Oberlin perfectionism arose 
 wholly apart from connection with the wide-spread per- 
 fectionist movement which preceded it In point of fact 
 direct evidence is not lacking. We know that, in the quar- 
 ters in which perfectionist tendencies first showed themselves 
 at Oberlin, not only was the earlier movement known, but 
 the Putney literature was read and an impulse derived from 
 it to repeat the experiences described in it. It served, for 
 instance, "to raise the question of obligation as to the degree 
 of holiness which Christians might obtain," 124 in the sum- 
 mer of 1836 (the second session of the Theological Semi- 
 nary), for a body of young men associated in a missionary 
 society and earnestly engaged upon their spiritual culture 
 in preparation for their prospective work. They rejected 
 with decision the antinomian features of the teaching they 
 found in this literature; but, under its influence, they ad- 
 vanced, along the lines of the "New Divinity" common to 
 it and themselves, to a full conviction of the duty and pos- 
 sibility of completely putting away sin. A fervid con- 
 secration meeting was held by them, in which they solemnly 
 bound themselves not to grieve their Master by any further 
 sinning. "They left the meeting" — so one of their number 
 records, 125 — "feeling that they were pledged to a life of 
 entire obedience, chiefly from the side of duty — the obliga- 
 tion and the possibility of it." Very naturally, and very 
 truly, a report went around that "the missionary society 
 had all become Perfectionists." We gather that the step 
 they had taken met, for the moment, with but imperfect — 
 certainly not with universal — sympathy, although it was 
 the only logical outcome of the searching preaching to which 
 they were listening day by day. It was a straw, however, 
 showing which way the wind was blowing ; and by the time 
 
 124 Fairchild, as cited, pp. 238-239. 
 
 125 \\r e are quoting from D. L. Leonard, The Story of Oberlin, p. 238. 
 
5<D THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 the session then in progress ended, the wind was blowing 
 a gale. 
 
 The preaching itself was growing ever more fervid and 
 insistent. Mahan represents himself as burdened in spirit 
 over the low state of Christian living, and earnestly seeking 
 light on the great problem of Christian attainment. One 
 day, he visited one of his associates, and they together 
 sought guidance in the Word. The conversation turned 
 on the passage, "The love of Christ constraineth us." 
 "While thus employed," 126 he says, "my heart leaped up in 
 ecstacy indescribable, with the exclamation, T have found 
 it.' " What he had found was that Christ is all in all. 
 "All in all; for in Him is to be had not merely our justifica- 
 tion, but also our sanctification : the one is as truly a gift 
 of grace, as exclusively a work of God, as the other, and is 
 to be had on the same condition." 127 "The highway of holi- 
 ness was now for the first time distinct in my mind ... ." 
 We may perhaps express what he found in the two words, 
 "Jesus only." In Him, he perceived, we obtain all we need ; 
 and we must go to Him for it all, and receive it all by a 
 direct act of faith. He had known hitherto what to do 
 when a sinner asked, What shall I do to be saved? He 
 would say, Go to Christ in faith. But he had not known 
 that precisely the same answer is to be given to the believer 
 who wishes to be delivered from his low plane of living. 
 He had been accustomed to instruct such "to confess their 
 sins, put them away, renew their purpose of obedience, and 
 go forward with a fixed resolution to do the entire will of 
 God." 128 He now saw that that was "a fundamental mis- 
 take." We are not only to be justified by the faith of Christ ; 
 but to be sanctified also by 'the faith that is in Him.' ' 
 We cannot be justified by faith, and be sanctified by "re- 
 solves" : "we must cease wholly from man and from our- 
 selves, and trust Christ universally." Along with this new 
 light on Christ as all in all, he now saw also the necessity 
 
 126 Christian Perfection (1839) ed. 7, 1844, pp. 181 ff. 
 
 127 Autobiography, pp. 322 f. 
 
 128 Out of Darkness into Light, p. 140. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 5 1 
 
 of the work of the Spirit. And he considers it remarkable 
 that "the doctrine of Christ as our 'wisdom, righteousness, 
 sanctification and redemption' and the 'promise of the 
 Spirit,' as the great central truth of the Gospel," should 
 have been presented to his mind at one and the same time." 129 
 Of course, however, they necessarily go together because 
 they are only two aspects of the supernaturalness of sal- 
 vation. 
 
 For exactly what happened to Mahan in this great ex- 
 perience — this experience which he always looked back upon 
 as pivotal for his life, — was the rediscovery of the super- 
 naturalness of salvation. In this aspect of it, it was a re- 
 action from the emphasis which, as a preacher of the "New 
 Divinity," he had been placing on "ability," and a return to 
 what he calls "universal" dependence on the grace of Christ. 
 He says himself 130 that the teaching stands in contrast with 
 his talk, "in his ignorance," of "human ability to do all that 
 is required of us," and with the consequent "trust he had 
 put in his own resolutions." This seems a confession that 
 in teaching according to the formulas of the "New Divinity" 
 he had been walking in a Pelagian path : and, so far as there 
 was now a reaction from that bad way of thinking, he had 
 turned his face to the light, and ceasing from self-sufficiency 
 had put his dependence in God. This reaction, most com- 
 mendable in itself, was nevertheless, as actually experienced 
 by him, at once insufficient and excessive. He still reserved 
 faith entirely to man; he wished to exclude human effort 
 only from the walk in Christ. And like all Christians 
 of his class he could not conceive of truly concursive activ- 
 ities. He operated with an unconditioned either — or: 
 either works or grace; either effort or trust. As he had 
 formerly allowed no place for faith in sanctification, so 
 now he did not wish to allow any place for effort in sancti- 
 fication. He seems not to be able to understand that we 
 must both "work and pray," as the popular maxim puts it; 
 
 129 P. 147. 
 180 P. 141. 
 
52 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 both believe and labor; he wishes us to "cast all the respon- 
 sibility" on Christ after a fashion which smacks more of 
 mysticism than the Gospel. 181 Meanwhile the reader is 
 filled with amazement that this discovery of the supernat- 
 uralness of salvation should have seemed something new to 
 Mahan. Bred in " 'the straitest sect' of Calvinism," did he 
 have to wait for this moment to learn that Christ is all in 
 all; that in Him we have by faith all that we can need; 
 that He is made to us sanctification as well as justification 
 — yes, all that is included in redemption? 
 
 Naturally this great discovery did not remain inoperative 
 in Mahan's life. In the act of so learning Christ, he so 
 experienced Christ, — and this constituted his "second con- 
 version," in which he seemed to himself to rise into a higher 
 plane of Christian living, and passed, as he loves to express 
 it, from "twilight" into the full light of Christian experience. 
 It is interesting to observe, as he explicitly tells us, that 
 when he communicated his new experience to Finney, it 
 found a ready welcome with him, and was repeated in his 
 experience. "When my associate, then Professor Finney," 
 he relates in one characteristic account, 132 "became aware of 
 the great truth that, by being 'baptized with the Holy 
 Ghost,' we can 'be filled with all the fulness of God,' he of 
 course sought that baptism with all his heart and soul, and 
 very soon obtained what he sought." Finney also received 
 therefore at this time "the second blessing" ; and not Finney 
 only; the doctrine, the experience, was contagious. Of 
 course it was carried at once also into the preaching and 
 gave it an added insistence, an increased ardor. These men 
 and their preaching — whatever they or it had been before — 
 now became definitely perfectionist, though that was not 
 
 131 In his Autobiography, pp. 286 ff., he tells us that the great dif- 
 ference between the two points of view which had been successive in 
 his life turned on sanctification. In the one justification is held to be by 
 faith, while sanctification is by hard labor; in the other both justifica- 
 tion and sanctification are purely of faith, both arc wrought by God 
 alone and when we claim cither by faith — "our responsibility is at an 
 end." 
 
 132 Out of Darkness into Light, p. 180. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 53 
 
 yet recognized. Mahan explains their position by the use 
 of the contrasting adverbs "theoretically" and "prac- 
 tically." 133 They had become "practically" perfectionists, 
 he says, but not yet "theoretically" so. By this he does not 
 seem to mean here primarily that they had become perfect 
 and did not yet know it — although it is not clear that that 
 too does not lie in his meaning — but that they had adopted 
 and were preaching perfectionist doctrine, but had not yet 
 come to see clearly that this was what they had done. The 
 way he expresses it at large is this: "The redemption of 
 Christ was then presented to my mind as full and perfect 
 redemption. I felt that in Christ I was 'complete,' that in 
 Him every demand of my being was met, and perfectly 
 met. In this light I presented Him to others." But it was 
 only "by subsequent reflection that I became aware that 
 the principles which I had practically adopted necessarily 
 involved the doctrine of Christian perfection." We are not 
 now concerned with the defects of Mahan's logical pro- 
 cesses. The discovery of the supernaturalness of salvation 
 does not involve exclusion of the consumption of time in 
 the realization of all that is included in it. But we have 
 now merely to note that this was not perceived; and ac- 
 cordingly what Mahan and his colleagues had come to 
 believe and were now fervidly preaching was the possibility 
 and duty of the immediate enjoyment of all that Christ had 
 bought for His people, at least in the spiritual sphere, with- 
 out remainder. That is perfectionism. 
 
 With the leaven of perfectionism already working among 
 the students and preaching of this character proceeding 
 with ever increasing insistence, the end might easily have 
 been foreseen. During the autumn of 1836 a series of re- 
 vival meetings were held at Oberlin, by which the whole 
 community, citizens and students, was profoundly moved. 
 At most of these Mahan was the preacher; and at one of 
 them, held just after the close of the academic session, he 
 preached a powerful sermon, enforcing with great urgency 
 
 133 Biblical Repertory, October 1840, p. 425-6. 
 
54 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 the topic now always in his heart and on his lips, the duty 
 of a higher consecration. A young man in the audience, 
 just graduated from the theological department, — Sereno 
 Wright Streeter was his name, 134 — rose and asked with 
 solemn earnestness that his religious instructors, Finney and 
 Mahan, would tell him plainly to what extent he might 
 hope to be delivered from sinning; whether he could ex- 
 pect to receive really entire sanctification on faith. "When 
 we look to Christ for sanctification," he asked, 135 "what de- 
 gree of sanctification may we expect from Him? May we 
 look to Him to be sanctified wholly or not?" "I do not re- 
 collect that I was ever so shocked and confounded at any 
 question before or since," says Mahan. 130 "I felt for the 
 moment that the work of Christ among us would be marred, 
 and the mass of minds around us rush into Perfectionism." 
 An answer, definite and decided, could not be avoided ; but 
 it could be postponed — especially as the end of the session 
 had arrived which brought with it the time for the scat- 
 tering of both teachers and taught. No answer was at- 
 tempted, therefore, at the moment, but a promise was given 
 that the matter would be carefully canvassed and an answer 
 returned in due season. 
 
 Thus the Oberlin teachers were compelled fairly to face the 
 question of Perfectionism. They gave themselves diligently 
 to its solution. Finney was accustomed at this time to 
 spend the winter — vacation-time at Oberlin — in New York, 
 preaching in the "Broadway Tabernacle." On this occasion 
 Mahan accompanied him. They explored the Scriptures 
 together; and, says Mahan, 137 "after looking carefully at 
 
 184 See General Catalogue of Oberlin Seminary, 1898, sub nom. He 
 was graduated with the first theological class that was graduated and 
 ordained at Oberlin October 10, 1836. 
 
 135 Mahan, Christian Perfection, p. 188. The exact form of the ques- 
 tion is given differently in the various reports, but the substance always 
 remains the same. Cf. Mahan's Autobiography, p. 323; Fairchild, as 
 cited, pp. 239 f . ; Wright, Life of Finney, p. 204 ; Leonard, as cited, pp. 
 236 ff. 
 
 189 Christian Perfection, p. 188. 
 
 187 Christian Perfection, p. 189. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 55 
 
 the testimony of Scripture, in respect to the provisions and 
 promises of divine grace, we were constrained to admit, that 
 but one answer to the above question could be given from 
 the Bible ; and the greatest wonder to me is, that I have been 
 a 'master of Israel' and have never before 'known these 
 things.' " But they did not confine themselves to the appeal 
 to Scripture. They sought guidance also from those who 
 had been perfectionists before them. It was naturally on 
 the Methodists that their glance was first cast and lingered 
 longest — for were not the Methodists the type of evangelical 
 perfectionists? Finney found their idea of sanctification 
 unacceptable, because it seemed to him "to relate almost 
 entirely to states of sensibility," and he elsewhere 138 de- 
 clares with decision that their notion that less is required 
 of us under the Gospel than was required under the law 
 is inadmissible. Nevertheless, he pronounced Wesley's 
 Plain Account of Christian Perfection — the acquaintance 
 of which he made at this time — though marred by some ex- 
 pressions (he thinks merely expressions) to which he should 
 object, "an admirable book," which he wishes every member 
 of his church would read. 139 By the side of Wesley's 
 Christian Perfection he places the Memoirs of James Brain- 
 erd Taylor — which he also hopes "every Christian will get 
 and study." He had read the most of it he says, "three 
 times within a few months." This same collocation of Wes- 
 ley and Taylor meets us also incidentally in a passage of 
 Mahan's: he speaks of "such men as John Wesley and 
 James B. Taylor, who believed that by the grace of Christ 
 applied to 'cleanse them from all sin,' they had 'been made 
 perfect in love.' " 
 
 What is odd about this is that it was just these two books 
 which John Humphrey Noyes read in the autumn of 1834 
 — two years earlier — when he was making his way also 
 to perfectionism. And Finney repeats the same gossip 
 which Noyes repeats, to the effect that Taylor's biographers 
 
 138 Memoirs, p. 340. 
 
 139 Lectures to Professing Christians, ed. 1880, pp. 358 f . 
 
56 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 had suppressed the most perfectionistic passages in his 
 letters. We have seen that perfectionism did not show itself 
 among the students of Oberlin apart from influences derived 
 from the earlier perfectionism of New York, or apart 
 specifically from the teachings of J. H. Noyes. It was much 
 more a matter of course that Finney and Mahan did not 
 arrive at their perfectionism in ignorance of these prior 
 movements. We are scarcely prepared, however, for the 
 emphasis which they seem to place on their knowledge of 
 them; or for what seems very much like a tendency to 
 apologize in part at least for them. "I have read their pub- 
 lications," says Finney, 140 "I have had some knowledge of 
 them as individuals." He cannot give assent to "many of 
 their views"; he repudiates the imputation to him of their 
 "peculiarities;" especially he turns with reprobation from 
 their "antinomianism." But he adds at once that they are 
 not all antinomians, — "some of their leading men" are 
 not; and although "there are still a number of important 
 points of difference between them and the orthodox church," 
 the points of agreement are very numerous. 141 Similarly 
 Mahan sees in all the perfectionist movements of the recent 
 past a divine preparation for what was to come in them; 
 and adopting them, along with the Methodists, as their own, 
 adds: 142 "Some outside the Methodist denomination had 
 'entered into rest' before we did." It is not merely misery 
 that loves company ; and the desire to discover precedents 
 is ordinarily strong enough to lead us to take them where 
 we can find them. It is meanwhile clear enough that Fin- 
 ney's and Mahan's sense of solidarity with perfectionists 
 as such was strong. It was strongest, of course, with the 
 Methodists, from whom they derived most — among other 
 things the terms by which they expressed their new doctrine. 
 "The terms by which we designate it," says Mahan, 143 "were 
 those by which it had been presented since the times of 
 "o P. 346. 
 
 141 ViiWt of Sanctification, 1840, pp. 134 ff- 
 
 142 Out of Darkness into Light, 1875. P- 195- 
 148 Autobiography, p. 367. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 57 
 
 Wesley and Fletcher, namely, Christian Perfection, Entire 
 Sanctification, and Full Salvation." The thing expressed 
 by these terms they would not admit they got from the 
 Methodists. What they offered they got direct from the 
 Scriptures, — though this affirmation naturally can be over- 
 pressed. "I gave myself earnestly," says Finney, 144 "to 
 search the Scriptures and to read whatever came to hand 
 upon the subject, until my mind was satisfied that an 
 altogether higher and more stable form of Christian life 
 was attainable and was the privilege of the Christian. . . . 
 I was satisfied that the doctrine of sanctification in this life, 
 and entire sanctification, in the sense that it was the privi- 
 lege of Christians to live without known sin, was a doctrine 
 taught in the Bible, and that abundant means are provided 
 for the securing of that attainment." The doctrine thus 
 described as derived from the Scriptures has in any case 
 somewhat close affinities with the Methodist doctrine. 145 
 
 No sooner was the Oberlin doctrine of perfection con- 
 ceived than it was published. Finney was the first to pub- 
 lish it. He was in New York during the winter months of 
 1 836-1 837 for the purpose of preaching in the "Broadway 
 Tabernacle." Preoccupied with the subject of the Chris- 
 tian walk, he delivered to his congregation a series of 
 Lectures to Professing Christians, which were printed as 
 they were delivered in the New York Evangelist, and soon 
 afterward (1837) were gathered into a volume. 148 Two 
 of these lectures were devoted to the subject of "Christian 
 Perfection." In this first exposition of Oberlin perfection- 
 ism there are naturally seen lying in the background all 
 the characteristic traits of Finney's theological thinking. 
 
 144 Memoirs, pp. 340 f . 
 
 145 The Methodist books were very diligently read, not only the 
 fundamental treatises of Wesley and Fletcher, but such biographies as 
 those of Hester Ann Rogers and William Carvosso (cf. J. S. Fairchild, 
 The Congregational Quarterly, April 1876, p. 242) ; and the Methodist 
 commentators — particularly Adam Clarke — were very much deferred to 
 (cf. Finney, Views of Sanctification) . Along with them the support of 
 other perfectionists like Robert Barclay, was welcomed. 
 
 146 Lectures to Professing Christians (1837) Oberlin, 1880. 
 
58 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 All virtue consists in disinterested benevolence; nothing is 
 sinful but voluntary action; we have no obligation beyond 
 our ability — we can do all that we ought to do, and what, 
 for any reason whatever, we cannot do, we no longer, in 
 any sense whatever, ought to do : it is such conceptions as 
 these which form the substructure. On this basis a per- 
 fectionism is developed which already bears the fundamental 
 character that ever afterwards marked the Oberlin doctrine. 
 What is taught is a perfection that consists in complete 
 righteousness, but in righteousness which is adjusted to 
 fluctuating ability. Enoch Pond, in reviewing the lectures, 
 rejoices to find that the perfection taught — in contrast with 
 the Wesleyan doctrine of a so-called "evangelical perfec- 
 tion" — requires the perfect fulfilment of the law of God. 147 
 But, as W. E. Boardman — discriminating later the "Ober- 
 linian" from the Wesleyan doctrine — points out, what is 
 really distinctive of "Oberlinian" perfection is the "view 
 of the claims of the law as graduated to the sinner's 
 ability." 148 This teaching is already here. But the more 
 fundamental idea that perfection is the fulfilment of the law 
 is more dwelt upon. The lectures are thus given the 
 aspect of insisting on perfect righteousness, and point is 
 given to this insistence by an open polemic against the 
 Wesleyan conception. "No part of the obligation of the 
 law is discharged," it is said: 149 "the Gospel holds those 
 under it to the same holiness as those under the law." The 
 definition of Christian Perfection is given crisply as "per- 
 fect obedience to the law of God;" and this is explained 
 as requiring that "we should do neither more nor less than 
 the law of God prescribes." "This," it is added, 150 "is being, 
 morally, just as perfect as God." 
 
 When Finney undertakes to show that this perfection is 
 attainable in this life, his argument runs on the familiar 
 
 147 The Biblical Repository, January 1839, pp. 44 ff. 
 
 148 The Higher Christian Life, 1859, p. 41. 
 
 140 p 342 
 
 100 P. 34i- 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 59 
 
 lines. 151 He pleads that God wills our perfection; that all 
 the promises and prophecies of God respecting our sanc- 
 tification have perfect sanctification in view ; that this is 
 the great blessing promised throughout the Bible ; and the 
 very object for which the Holy Spirit is given. Every one 
 of these propositions is true; and none of them is to the 
 point. The whole point at issue concerns the process by 
 which the believer is made perfect; or perhaps we would 
 better say, whether it is by a process that he is made perfect. 
 Avoiding the hinge of the argument, Finney endeavors to 
 impale his readers on dilemmas. "If it is not a practicable 
 duty to be perfectly holy in this world, then it will follow 
 that the devil has so completely accomplished his design of 
 corrupting mankind, that Jesus Christ is at fault, and has 
 no way to sanctify His people but by taking them out of 
 the world." "If perfect sanctification is not attainable in 
 this world it must be either from a want of motives in the 
 Gospel, or a want of sufficient power in the Spirit of God." 
 It would be a poor reader indeed who did not perceive at 
 once that such dilemnas could be applied equally to every 
 evil with which man is afflicted — disease, death, the un- 
 completed salvation of the world. If it is not a practicable 
 thing to be perfectly well in this world, then Jesus Christ 
 has been vanquished by the Devil and has no way to make 
 His people well except by taking them out of the world. 
 If freedom from death is not attainable in this world, 
 then it must be due to want of sufficient power in the Spirit 
 of God. If the world does not become at once the pure 
 Kingdom of God in which only righteousness dwells, then 
 we must infer either a want of sufficient motives in the Gos- 
 pel or a want of sufficient power in the Son of God. There 
 have been people who reasoned thus: the point of interest 
 now is, that it was not otherwise that Finney reasoned — 
 and that accounts for many things besides his perfectionism. 
 It is a simple matter of fact that the effects of redemption, 
 in the individual and in the world at large, are realized, not 
 
 181 Pp. 346 ff. 
 
60 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 all at once, but through a long process : and that their com- 
 plete enjoyment lies only "at the end." 
 
 A certain lack of logical coherence is discernable in other 
 features of these lectures also. Finney was too good a 
 Pelagian readily to homologate Quietistic conceptions: it is 
 not for the Pelagian to say, "Cast thy dreadful doing 
 down :" doing is with him rather the beginning, and middle, 
 and end of all things. Yet we have already seen Mahan 
 imbuing him with his newly-found notion (borrowed 
 ultimately from the Wesleyans) that sanctification is to be 
 attained immediately by an act of faith, and indeed also 
 with his mystical Quietistic explanation of how this sanctifi- 
 cation is brought about by faith. We noted at the time that 
 it was interesting to observe this, and the interest seems to 
 us to be enhanced when we observe the doctrine enunciated 
 — so far as it is enunciated — in the context of these lectures. 
 Finney the Pelagian denies that Christ in His Spirit can 
 work on man otherwise than by bringing motives to action 
 to bear on him — in a word by persuading him himself to 
 act. Whatever man does, then, in the way of obeying the 
 law — perfect obedience to which constitutes his perfection 
 — he must himself do: it cannot be done for him or in him 
 or through him by another; no other can affect him other- 
 wise than by presenting motives to action to him. We 
 should like to know then exactly what Finney means when 
 he rebukes those who seek sanctification "by their own 
 resolutions and works, their feelings and prayers, their en- 
 deavors and activity, instead of taking right hold of Christ 
 by faith, for sanctification, as they do for justification." 152 . 
 What he says is that we may — must — attain to sanctifica- 
 tion — or, as entire sanctification is meant, to perfection, 
 that perfection which is perfect obedience to the law of 
 God — immediately by an act of faith, without any resolu- 
 tion or effort on our part to obey the law, or apparently, 
 any activity on our part in obeying it. "Faith," he says, 
 "will bring Christ right into the soul and fill it with the 
 
 102 P. 362. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 6l 
 
 same spirit" — note the small s — "that breathes through 
 Himself/' We greately wonder how "faith" does all this, 
 and note only that it is faith that does it, not Christ : Christ 
 supplies only the model to which faith conforms us. For 
 light on this dark question, however, we shall have to go 
 elsewhere. 
 
 Finney's inconcinity is not occasional merely but con- 
 stant. Take another instance. 163 He is arguing that the 
 power of habit need not inhibit perfection, since it does not 
 inhibit conversion. The power of habit is a thing that may 
 be overcome. As he argues this point, however, he raises 
 in our minds a previous question — the question whether 
 God can save at all. The answer he supplies is Yes, some- 
 times; and sometimes, no — at least "consistently with His 
 wisdom," a phrase which does not vacate but only locates 
 His inability. Of man in his natural state we must recog- 
 nize, he says, that "selfishness has the entire control of the 
 mind, and the habits of sin are wholly unbroken." And 
 this condition of course presents an obstacle to salvation — 
 an obstacle, he says, "so great, in all cases, that no power 
 but that of the Holy Ghost can overcome it." It is indeed, 
 he adds, "so great in many instances, that God Himself can- 
 not, consistently with His wisdom, use the means necessary 
 to convert the soul." Men then, it seems, may be so set in 
 their wickedness that no "power" — the term is misleading; 
 God uses no power in the transaction except the power of 
 persuasion — which God, being wise, is willing to use upon 
 them will avail for their salvation. Finney says this is the 
 actual case "in many instances." These men, clearly, then, 
 are unsalvable. God, so long as he remains the wise God, 
 cannot save men so sunk in sin. We have thus reached 
 the astonishing conclusion that men may be too sinful to 
 be saved. They are saved, or they are not saved, accord- 
 ing to their determination in sin. Moderately sinful souls 
 can be saved, very sinful souls are beyond the possibilities 
 of salvation. This no doubt is good Pelagian doctrine : it is 
 
 153 P. 283. 
 
62 THE PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL REVIEW 
 
 not Paul's doctrine or Christ's. We are surprised to find 
 it here where Finney had started out to prove that evil 
 habits cannot inhibit the attainment of perfection, because 
 they do not inhibit the attainment of conversion. We have 
 ended by proving that "in many instances" they can and 
 do inhibit the attainment of conversion; and that, whether 
 we are converted or not does not depend therefore on 
 God who in many cases is helpless in the face of our sin- 
 fulness, but on the degree of our sinfulness. 
 
 In his Lectures on Systematic Theology,™* Finney makes 
 the following remarks concerning the lectures we have been 
 considering. "These lectures were soon spread before thou- 
 sands of readers. Whatever was thought of them, I heard 
 not a word of objection from any quarter. If any was 
 made, it did not, to my recollection, come to my knowl- 
 edge." He is often inexact in his historical statements; 
 and perhaps we should not wonder that he is inexact here 
 too. In point of fact the lectures received the normal atten- 
 tion of reviewers; and it is difficult to believe that the stric- 
 tures made on them were not at the time brought to the 
 author's attention. The Christian Spectator, the organ of 
 Finney's own party, gives them, it is true, only passing 
 mention. But this passing mention is not without its sig- 
 nificance. Its object is apparently to read Finney a lecture, 
 as the enfant terrible of the "New Divinity'' party, and to 
 serve notice on him that he was expected to keep within the 
 bounds and to content himself with repeating the shib- 
 boleths appointed for him. "On the subject of Christian 
 Perfection" we read, 155 "we think Mr. Finney is not always 
 sufficiently guarded, and though we do not believe he means 
 anything more than we should fully admit, — the possibility 
 and duty of obedience to God in all things commanded — 
 yet we fear he may be liable to misconstruction and injure 
 the consciences of many weak but pious persons." The 
 note of irritation here is unmistakable: in the sequence of 
 
 1B *Ed. I, vol. ii, 1847, P 170; ed. 2, 1851, p. 571. 
 155 Christian Spectator, June 1837, p. 342. 
 
OBERLIN PERFECTIONISM 63 
 
 obligation, ability, actualization, could not Finney, like the 
 rest of them, be satisfied with the first two without pushing 
 on inconsiderately to the third? So far then from there 
 having been no word of objection to the teaching of the 
 lectures spoken from any quarter, they were objected to 
 from all quarters. And, naturally, the reviewers "from 
 the other side" did not content themselves with passing 
 mention but subjected them to reasoned criticism. This 
 was done, for example, by Joseph Ives Foot in a trenchant 
 article in the Literary and Theological Review?™ which 
 was given the uncompromising title of "Influence of 
 Pelagianism on the Theological Course of Rev. C. G. 
 Finney, developed in his Sermons and Lectures." It was 
 done also by Enoch Pond in a prudent article published in 
 The Biblical Repository. 1 * 1 And although it was not done 
 in a subsequent article on current works on Perfectionism 
 published in the same journal by N. S. Folsom, 158 it was 
 made plain that that was only because the writer considered 
 that it had been already sufficiently done by Pond. Pond as 
 a good New Englander goes so far with Finney that he is 
 glad to allow "the attainableness" of perfection by the 
 Christian, or, as he phrases it, "its metaphysical attainable- 
 ness;" but like the Christian Spectator he wishes to stop 
 right there and deny that it is ever "attained actually." On 
 the ground of the current New England doctrine, which 
 postulated "natural ability" for all that can be required, 
 the whole question reduced itself thus for him to one of 
 mere fact, and he argues it on that understanding. 
 Princeton. B. B. Warfield. 
 
 156 March 1838, pp. 38 ff. See particularly pp. 52 fif. 
 
 157 January 1839, PP. 44 ff. 
 168 July 1839, p. 143-