Lectures to Professing Christians

From the Preface: As these Lectures occupied from an hour and a quarter to an hour and three quarters in the delivery, it will be seen by their length, as here given, that the reporter took down but little more than a full skeleton of them. I have made but very slight alterations and additions in revising them. From experience I have learned that the conversational and condensed style in which they were reported, is more interesting and edifying to common readers, than a more elevated and less laconic style. The author of the Lectures has no claim to literary merit; and, if he knows his own heart, has no desire that the Lectures should be anything else than useful. As my friends wish to have them in a volume, they must take them as they are. CHARLES G. FINNEY (1792-1875) was America's foremost evangelist. Over half a million people were soundly converted under his personal ministry in a day when there was no TV or microphones. He was also an excellent theologian, philosopher, educator, pastor and reformer while professor of theology and president of Oberlin College. Harvard's Perry Miller said, "Finney led America out of the eighteenth century." He is remembered, according to Harvard's W. G. McLoughlin, for his "textbook on how to promote revivals of religion. This book is the perennial classic to which all succeeding generations of revivalists have turned for authority and inspiration." He was also a father to the evangelical and holiness movements.