LETTER OF
The GOSPEL TRUTH CHARLES G. FINNEY
To Phineas Camp Headley
Undated
[Extracts from one, or possibly two, letters from Finney are published in Phineas C. Headley, Evangelists in the Church from Philip, A.D. 35, to Moody and Sankey, A.D. 1875. (Boston: Henry Hoyt, 1875)]
page 152:
In reply to an inquiry, Mr. Finney says:&endash;
"After my settlement at Oberlin, I laboured half the time abroad as an evangelist, until 1860, when my strength no longer permitted such labors. I was in England a year and a half, at two different times, making three years there in all. Nine months I occupied Whitefield's old Tabernacle, was several months in Birmingham, Bolton, Manchester, and Edinburgh, and three weeks in Worcester."
page 166:
Not long ago we received a letter from him, in which he said:&endash;
[p. 167]
"A new course of Lectures on Pastoral Theology, which I must prepare and deliver, will use up my time and strength for the summer; and I should not dare to undertake any additional labor. There is plenty of room for a very useful book on the subject upon which you are writing. Nothing like justice has ever been done to it. The methods of labor pursued by evangelists, you are aware, have been very diverse, with equally various results in their outcome. The question of such an order of ministers as a divine gift to the church needs to be thoroughly discussed."
He also refers to a record of the great revivals between 1821-30 which he has made, with an exhaustive discussion of the measures employed, and the opposition to them by brethren in the ministry, which we hope now he is gone, will ere long be given to the public.