WAS FINNEY A LAWYER?

Read almost any book about Charles G. Finney, and it will begin with the assumption that he was a lawyer. Finney never made such a claim himself. Some of the new Ai-style videos posted online about Finney make much of his preaching style coming out of his days as a lawyer. The fact was, Finney was a law clerk studying to be a lawyer, with very little time spent arguing the small claim cases assigned to him in a courtroom.

In the young village of Adams, New York, Charles G. Finney entered the law office of Wright and Wardwell to study law. He was an apprentice for the next three years, taking small cases, until the fall of 1821 when, at age twenty-nine, he had a life-changing encounter with the living Christ. Immediately, he began to prepare for the ministry. There were several things that happened that year, leading up to his powerful conversion.

First, part of his legal training required him to read Blackstone’s law commentaries. What surprised him most was that he began to see how many of our laws are based on the laws given in the Old Testament. This piqued his curiosity about the Bible, so he took the extra step of buying one for himself. He found that he could not put it down. When someone would come into the law office, he would hide the Bible he was reading under another book, but as soon as they left, he was back to reading it.

It was then that young Finney began to see a discrepancy between what he was reading about New Testament Christianity and what he was seeing in the church in Adams. For example, when Jesus spoke about prayer, He said, “Ask, and you shall receive,” but Finney noted how often he had attended the local prayer meetings, where he said their prayers were weak and feeble, and he saw no apparent answers to them.

The second thing that happened was that his younger brother, George, had written him a letter, saying he had just become a Christian. This caused Finney to break down and cry as he considered how improbable it was that God would save someone from his family.

Finally, a young woman named Lydia Andrews was visiting her sister in Adams and could not help but notice Finney leading the choir. She began seriously praying for him, not knowing that she would soon become his wife.

I THOUGHT FINNEY WAS A LAWYER

Like many people, I always thought that Finney was a lawyer. Almost everyone who writes anything about him begins by stating that he was a lawyer. Even his earliest biographer and friend, G. F. Wright, said that he was admitted to the bar:

After a four years’ absence from home, he returned for a visit, intending still to complete his plan of further teaching and private study at the South. But in view of his mother’s ill health, he was led to remain within reach of her, and so began the study of law in the office of Benjamin Wright, in the town of Adams, a few miles away; there in due time he was admitted to the bar, and entered upon the work of his profession.¹

However, in an 1858 sermon, Finney was to have said:

After my conversion the whole subject of going into court to engross myself in other men’s quarrels became unutterably loathsome. I saw that I had never managed a case with real honesty. All I had cared for was to get my case and do well for my client, and my soul turned away from it with loathing. Though pressed very hard to engage again, I refused. Now I do not say that no man can serve God at the bar, but I do say that if he has known God indeed, he will not wish to serve in that sphere. He will beg to be excused.²

So, when Deacon Barney came into the Adams law office the morning after Finney had been converted, he asked, “Mr. Finney, do you recollect that my case is to be tried at ten o’clock this morning? I suppose you are ready?”

Finney stated his now-famous line, “Deacon Barney, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead His cause, and I cannot plead yours.”³

After hearing this, and learning that Finney had just become a Christian, the deacon was speechless, leaving the office in shock. Later, Finney happened to look out the window to see the deacon standing in the middle of the street, lost in his own thoughts. As it turned out, he went and settled the suit out of court.

FINNEY HAD NOT GONE TO THE BAR

One day, early in my research, I came across a letter on file at the South Jefferson Historical Society, written by the curator to the State Archives, asking for information about when Finney had been admitted to the bar. The head of the research services unit replied, saying they had searched all the available court records and had not found any mention that he had been accepted at the bar. Then I came across a footnote in the Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, edited by Dupuis and Rosell, which said that Finney was not licensed to be a lawyer at the time of his conversion.³ They quoted from the autobiography of Pastor George Gale, Finney’s pastor in Adams, who wrote about the young man’s educational path:

When I was preaching at Adams, before my settlement, he [Finney] was in the office of Wright & Wardwell, a student at law, where he continued ‘till his conversion in the fall of 1821. He was expecting at the time of his conversion, to be licensed soon in the Supreme Court. He could have been licensed some two or three years before, according to the usages, or laws, of the state, in the court of “common pleas” but he did not choose to do so. He had all the business he wanted, and that was enough to support him, in Justice’s Courts. He proposed having all the time he could for study. He was a good student, it was said, and had obtained a knowledge of the law which many practitioners had not obtained in that section of country, and when meeting them as opponents in justice’s courts was more than a match for them. He was a young man of clear mind, of quick perception and logic, without much training in the art. He had had but little more than a common education. He had attended an Academy where he got some knowledge of Latin, in addition to his English. He had studied some of the higher branches of English education, but nothing very extensively. I should judge, from what he told me, that his education was about what might be required to enter college, except that he had not studied Greek. His study of law, however, had given him considerable discipline of mind.⁴

To finally solve this discrepancy, I went back into Finney’s own memoirs and noticed that he had never referred to himself as anything other than a “student of law.” Here is a clear mention of this in his own words, as he explains his reason for coming to Adams:

The teacher to whom I have referred, wished me to join him in conducting an academy in one of the Southern States. I was inclined to accept his proposal, with the design of pursuing and completing my studies under his instruction. But when I informed my parents, whom I had not seen for four years, of my contemplated movement south, they both came immediately after me, and prevailed on me to go home with them to Jefferson county, New York. After making them a visit, I concluded to enter, as a student, the law office of Squire Wright, at Adams, in that county. This was in 1818.⁵

Finney’s grandson, William C. Cochran, in a memorial address he gave about Finney’s background, wrote:

In 1818, Mr. Finney settled down to the study of law at Adams, a lively little town near his paternal home. He read law diligently, became the law clerk of Judge Benjamin Wright, the most prominent lawyer and politician in that region, was admitted to practice, at the age of twenty-eight, and at once became active in the profession.⁶

As an apprentice, he would have taken some minor cases under the supervision of his employer and would have been able to do various duties which lawyers often do. He was such a stickler for details about titles and dates, I cannot imagine he would have overlooked his admission to the bar. I feel confident in concluding that he was never a licensed attorney.

In August 1818, twenty-six-year-old Charles Finney moved to Adams, New York, which was one of the largest villages near his family’s home in nearby Henderson, New York.

In Durant’s “History of Jefferson County,” published in 1877, described Adams as a village having

four or five law offices, with one or more lawyers occupying their desks, five or six dry-goods stores, two public houses and mills of different kinds, two distilleries, an appendage to every village in that day, with mechanics of all sorts, three or four physicians and the bank of Jefferson County. At this time all the principal towns were without church edifices and held worship in schoolhouses.⁷

Charles G. Finney became a Christian in Adams on October 10, 1821, a few months before his thirtieth birthday.

PREPARING FOR THE MINISTRY

About six months after being converted, Finney formally placed himself under the care of the local presbytery as a candidate for the ministry. It was suggested that he go to Princeton, where Gale had studied, but he declined going there. When the presbytery pressed for a reason, he told them he could not afford to go. They offered to pay his expenses, but he declined again. When the pastors demanded to know why, he reluctantly told them that he felt they had been wrongly educated and that they did not meet his ideal of what a minister should be. They appointed Pastor Gale to watch over his home studies, even though Gale was only three years older than Finney and fresh out of Princeton Theological Seminary himself.

Finney was licensed in Adams on December 30, 1823. The first Sunday after this, Pastor Gale’s health failed, so he asked the young convert to preach in his place. However, Gale voiced he was “ashamed to have it known” that Finney studied theology with him.

In time, Gale would become more than willing to claim his special association with Charles G. Finney, even taking credit for his theological “training,” which proved useful when enrolling young people into his own Bible institute. In his autobiography, Gale said, “Mr. Finney supplied the pulpit for several weeks, but ‘a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.’ Some were not well pleased.”⁸

Pastor Gale had become sickly and was asking to be replaced. He was going to recommend Finney be chosen to take his place, but when he saw that the people of Adams were not going to call Finney to replace him, Gale recommended that the young man be sent out as a local missionary, supported by the Female Missionary Society. They were willing to try Finney, but only for three months. Gale wrote that he, in a fatherly manner, accompanied Finney out of town the day Finney left Adams for his first mission in Evans Mills. The young evangelist had only been saved about two-and-a-half years at that time.

LEAVING ADAMS

Finney left Adams in 1824, but his connection with the place remained with him throughout his life. He later worked with Abel Clary, someone who had been part of the church in Adams. Clary became a man of prayer, partnering with Finney, along the same lines as Daniel Nash did in the Rochester revival. Abel was the brother of Dexter Clary, who became one of the leading pastors in Jefferson County, based in nearby Dexter, New York, and who would eventually pastor the church in Adams.

Finney maintained correspondence with some of the people from the church there and followed the developments in the village with interest. He referred to Adams as “my spiritual nativity and labor as an evangelist.”⁹

A few years into his evangelistic ministry, he had opportunity to work with Pastor George Gale again, this time in Oneida County.

Finney made a trip to Henderson to see his mother and father once again and stopped into Adams after he had been in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Just ahead of the first Rochester revival in 1830, the church in Adams had invited him back to minister to work among them once again but a serious decline in his wife’s health prevented him from following through with those plans. He would never return to Adams again.

THE ORIGINAL LAW OFFICE

Few of the original buildings from Finney’s day have survived the more than two hundred years of hard winters and the many fires in Adams’ history. The one-story, two-room building that Squire Wright had used for his law office was replaced by a two-story stone building. Then in the 1950s, the stone building was replaced by a large brick building. It burned while I was doing research on Finney. Today, a small park sits on the southwest corner of Church Street and Main Street where the law office once stood.

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FINNEY AS A LAWYER ENDNOTES

1.     G. Frederick Wright, Charles Grandison Finney.

2.     Margaret Gale Hitchcock, Autobiography of George W. Gale, 183.

3.     Richard A. Dupuis and Garth M. Rosell, The Memoirs of Charles G. Finney. A footnote in this book says this fact was written by John Campbell, in The Valedictory Services, The British Banner [London], April 2, 1851, 220.

4.     Charles G. Finney, The Memoirs of Reverend Charles G. Finney.

5. Margaret Gale Hitchcock, Autobiography of George W. Gale.

6.     Samuel W. Durant and Henry B. Peirce, History of Jefferson County.

7.     Charles G. Finney, The Memoirs of Reverend Charles G. Finney.

8.     William C. Cochran, Charles Grandison Finney: Memorial Address.

9.     Oberlin Evangelist (September 1846): page 106.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

A history of various homes in Adams can be found at the South Jefferson County Historical Society. Ask for the “Jefferson County Historic Resources Survey, March 1982.”