Clergyman And Educator

Revivals for the Middle Class.

Charles Grandison Finney was born the seventh of eight children to a farming family in Litchfield County, Connecticut, in 1792. His parents named him after the model of gentility in the popular novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753) by Samuel Richardson. When he was two, his family joined the tide of migration into western New York, settling in Oneida County, where he attended a district school and probably the Hamilton Oneida Academy. When he was sixteen, the family relocated to remote Jefferson County on the shores of Lake Ontario, where Charles taught district school. In 1812 he returned to Connecticut and then taught district school in New Jersey before returning to western New York in 1818 to study law. There he met the young and energetic Presbyterian minister George W. Gale, whom Finney engaged in closely argued debate until he experienced...