Lectures on Revivals of Religion
Twenty-two lectures on how revivals are promoted, given by the evangelist Charles Finney to his own congregation and published in 1835. They argue that a revival is the result of using the right means and defend the new measures of his meetings.
Read the text at ccel.org ↗Scan of an 1835 printing, New York (Internet Archive) ↗
Finney says in his preface that he gave the lectures to his own congregation without a plan, as one subject led to another, and that he let the editor of the Evangelist report them. He had learned, he says, that the spirit of revival had declined in the United States and that controversy prevailed. The first lecture defines a revival; later ones deal with prayer, preaching, the means to be used with sinners, and the measures, such as protracted meetings and the anxious seat, that his critics objected to.
The lectures are a practitioner’s manual and a defence of his own methods. They are cited in the Second Great Awakening for his teaching.
Cited in
- August 1801, firm date