FINNEY ON PREACHERS AND PREACHING

"I am an old man, and many of the results of my views and methods are known to the public. Is it out of place for me to speak freely to the ministry on the subject of preaching? A judge of the Supreme Court once remarked to me: 'Ministers do not exercise good sense in addressing the people. They are afraid of repetition. They use language not well understood by the common people. Their illustrations are not taken from the common pursuits of life. They write in too elevated a style, and read without repetition, and are not understood by the people. Now, if lawyers should take such a course, they would ruin themselves and their cause. Our object is not to display our oratory, but to convince the jury and get a verdict on the spot. Now, if ministers would do this, the effects of their preaching would be unspeakably different from what they are. They go into their study and write a sermon; they go into their pulpits and read it, and those that listen to it, but poorly understand it. They do not address the people, expecting to convince them and to get their verdict in favor of Christ upon the spot. They seek no such object. They rather seem to aim at making fine literary productions, and displaying great eloquence and an ornate use of language.'

"I never entertained the least hard feelings toward my brethren for the roughness with which they often treated me. They really supposed that I should do much more good, and much less evil, if I should adopt their views. But I was of a different opinion.

"When I was preaching in Philadelphia a Dr. from Connecticut, came there, and heard me preach. He was indignant at the manner in Which I let down the dignity of the pulpit. He insisted that I should not be allowed to preach till I had a ministerial education; that I should stop preaching and go to Princeton and learn theology, and get better views of the way in which the gospel should be preached.

"I had not enjoyed the advantages of the higher schools of learning; and so conscious had I been that I lacked those qualifications that would make me acceptable, especially to ministers, and I feared to the people in large places, that I had never had any higher ambition or purpose than to go into the new settlements and places where they did not enjoy the gospel. Indeed, I was often surprised myself, in the first years of my preaching, to find it so edifying and acceptable to the most educated classes. This was more than I had expected, and greatly more than I had dared to hope. But the longer I preached, the less reason had I to think that my error lay in the direction in which it was supposed to lie, by my brother ministers. The more experience I had, the more I saw the results of my method of preaching; the more I conversed with all classes, high and low, educated and uneducated, the more was I confirmed in the fact that God had led me, had given me right conceptions in regard to the best manner of winning souls. I say that God taught me; and I know that it must have been so; for surely I had never obtained these notions from man. And I have often thought that I could say with perfect truth, as Paul said, that I was not taught the gospel by man, but by the Spirit of Christ Himself. And I was taught by the Spirit in a manner so clear and forcible that no argument of my ministerial brethren, with which I was plied so often and so long, had the least weight with me.

"I mention this as a matter of duty; for I am still solemnly impressed with the conviction that the schools are, to a great extent, spoiling the ministers. Ministers in these days have great facilities for obtaining information on all theological questions, and are vastly more learned, so far as theological, historical, and Biblical learning is concerned, than they perhaps ever have been in any age of the world. Yet, with all their learning, they do not know how to use it. They are, after all, to a great extent, like David in Saul's armor. A man can never learn to preach except by preaching.

"But one great thing ministers need, and that is singleness of eye, If they have a reputation to secure and to nurse, they will do but little good. Many years ago a beloved pastor of my acquaintance left home for his health, and employed a young man just from the seminary to fill his pulpit while he was absent. This young man wrote and preached as splendid sermons as he could. The pastor's wife finally ventured to say to him: 'You are preaching over the heads of the people. They do not understand your language or your illustrations. You bring too much of your learning into the pulpit.' He replied: 'I am a young man. I am cultivating a style. I am aiming to prepare myself for occupying a pulpit and surrounding myself with a cultivated congregation. I can not descend to your people. I must cultivate an elevated style.' I have had my eye upon that man ever since, and I have never seen his name connected with any revival, and I never expect to unless his views are radically changed.

"It was very common among ministers, in my earlier years of preaching, to agree among themselves that if I were to succeed in the ministry, it would bring the schools into disrepute. Now, I never had a thought of undervaluing the education furnished by colleges or theological seminaries; though I did think, and think now, that in certain respects they are greatly mistaken in their modes of training their students. They do not encourage them to talk to the people, and accustom themselves to extemporaneous addresses to the people in the surrounding country while pursuing their studies. Men can not learn to preach by study, without practice. the students should be encouraged to exercise and prove and improve their gifts and calling of God by going out into any place open to them, and holding Christ up to the people in earnest talks. They must thus learn to preach.

"Instead of this, the students are required to write "what they call sermons, and present them for criticism; to preach, that is, read them to the class and the professor. Thus they play preaching. No man can preach in this manner. These so-called sermons will, of course, under the criticism they receive, degenerate into literary essays. The people have no respect for such sermons, as sermons. This reading of elegant literary essays is not, to them, preaching. It is gratifying to literary taste, but not spiritually edifying. It does not meet the wants of the soul, nor is it calculated to win souls to Christ. The students are taught to cultivate a fine, elevated style of writing, As for real eloquence, that gushing, impressive, persuasive oratory that naturally flows from an educated man whose soul is on fire with his subject, and who is free to pour out his heart to a waiting and earnest people, they have none of it.

"A reflecting mind will feel as if it were infinitely out of place to present in the pulpit to immortal souls, hanging upon the verge of everlasting death, such specimens of learning and rhetoric. . . When men are entirely in earnest, their language is direct and simple. Their sentences are short, cogent, powerful. The appeal is made directly for action; and hence all such discourses take effect. . . The impassioned utterance of a common exhorter will often move a congregation far beyond anything that these splendid exhibitions of rhetoric can effect. Great sermons lead the people to praise the preacher. Good preaching leads the people to praise the Savior.

"My experience has been that 'honesty is the best policy' in a minister. . . Men are not fools. They have no solid respect for a man who will go into the pulpit and preach smooth things. They cordially despise it in their inmost souls. And let no man think that he will gain permanent respect, that he will be permanently honored by his people, unless as an ambassador of Christ he deals faithfully with their souls.

"My habit has always been to study the gospel, and the best application of it, all the time. I do not confine myself to hours and days of writing my sermons; but my mind is always pondering the truths of the gospel and the best way of using them. I go among the people, and learn their wants. Then, in the light of the Holy Spirit, I take a subject that I think will meet their present necessities. I think intensely on it, pray much over it, and get my mind full of it, and then go and pour it out to the people. One difficulty of a written sermon is, that after a man has written it, he needs to think but little of the subject. Unless men will begin and talk to the people as best they can, keeping their hearts full of truth and full of the Holy Ghost, they will never make extemporaneous preachers.

"I have spoken of my method of preparing for the pulpit in more recent years. When I first began to preach, and for some twelve years of my earliest ministry, I wrote not a word, and was most commonly obliged to preach without any preparation whatever, except what I got in prayer. Oftentimes I went into the pulpit without knowing upon what text I should speak or a word that I should say. I depended on the occasion and the Holy Ghost to suggest the text, and to open up the whole subject to my mind; and, certainly, in no part of my ministry have I preached with greater success and power. If I did not preach from inspiration, I don't know how I did preach. It was a common experience with me, and has been during all my ministerial life, that the subject would open up to my mind in a manner that was surprising to myself. It seemed that I could see with intuitive clearness just what I ought to say; and whole platoons of thoughts, words, and illustrations came to me as fast as I could deliver them. . . . I believe that all ministers, called by Christ to preach the gospel, ought to be, and may be, in such a sense so inspired as to 'preach the gospel with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven.' All ministers may be, and ought to be, so filled with the Holy Spirit that all who hear them shall be impressed with the conviction that God is with them of a truth." (Memoirs, pp. 85-97.)

"Men and women vary indefinitely in their natural powers of persuasion; but no human eloquence can ever convert a soul. Unless the Spirit of God sets home and makes the truth of God effectual, all human eloquence and learning will be in vain, And it is a fact worthy of all attention and consideration that, with very little human culture, this enduement of power will make a Christian wise and efficient in bringing souls to Christ. . It is very humiliating to human learning and pride, and always has been; nevertheless, it has been Christ's method from the beginning to choose the weak things of this world to confound the wise. . . . This enduement of power is not a thing into which people can grow by forming habits of persuasion and conversation, It is a gift, an anointing, Instantaneously received, and that may be enlarged or diminished as the possessor of it uses it, more or less faithfully and intensely, for the purposes for which it was given, It is oftentimes possessed and then lost, or its manifestation suspended by something that quenches the light of the Spirit in the soul.

"Where this power exists, the more learning and eloquence the better, But it is painful to observe the constant tendency to substitute culture for this power, or human learning and eloquence in place of this Divine enduement. I fear this tendency is increasing in the Church, The Churches are calling for men of great learning and eloquence in place of this Divine enduement, instead of men deeply baptized with the Holy Ghost.

"The seminaries of learning are much at fault in this thing. They do not lay half stress enough upon this enduement as an essential qualification for usefulness in the world. The manifestation of this enduement of power should be considered an indispensable qualification for a professor in college or in theological seminary, and the want of it should be considered a disqualification for a professorship, especially in a theological seminary. A theological professor who does not believe in this enduement of power, and who does not possess it in a manifest degree, can not fail to be a stumbling-block to his students, If he does not urge it upon them as the most important of all qualifications for the ministry, if he does not speak of it and treat it as altogether indispensable to success in the ministry, his teaching and his influence will be vitally defective; they will be a snare and a stumbling-block. This must be true, or this whole question of the enduement of power from on high must be a delusion." (Baptism of the Holy Ghost, pp. 245-247.)

I have quoted these extended remarks of Finney on preachers and preaching and ministerial instruction, because I believe they contain more sound judgment and wise counsel than can be found in any other equal amount of homiletical literature. I, too, have been through the disgusting farce of preaching a play sermon to a professor and classmates for criticism. I, too, have been kept from preaching for years while in the college and seminary. I, too, was trained and graduated, and sent out to preach, without having it ever even hinted to me by a professor that I needed the Divine anointing, the enduement of power from on high.

When we reflect that some three thousand Congregational and Presbyterian Churches annually do not report a conversion, with the most highly-educated clergy in the world, and that there are whole denominations that do still worse, it is quite manifest that something more is needed than the instruction of the schools to make preachers. Finney's success was so signal that theological professors, students, and preachers might well sit at his feet and take lessons in homiletics.