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Charles Finney was already well known in England by the time he arrived for his first visit in 1849. News of his remarkable revival activities in America, now spanning some twenty-five years, was carried regularly in religious periodicals throughout the British Isles and was eagerly read by the Christian community there. His Lectures on Revivals of Religion (the English edition of which was published in 1837) became an immediate best seller—gaining Finney thousands of new friends throughout those countries. In Wales, for example, its impact was so substantial that the great Welsh awakening of the early 1840s came to be known in some circles as “Finney’s revival.”

Close ties, of course, had long existed between Britain and America. Since the early Seventeenth century, when the English colonies were first planted in the New World, many Christians from both sides of the ocean considered themselves to be part of the same family. Literally thousands of letters—many carrying news of revival activity—flowed back and forth across the Atlantic. Individuals too, despite the enormous difficulties which were involved, made the lengthy and hazardous crossing aboard the relatively small ships which gave them passage.

Among these courageous travellers were many of the notable revival leaders of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. George Whitefield, the great Church of England minister, had been one of the first. Under his powerful preaching, the religious revivals which had broken out in the 1720s quickly spread throughout the American colonies—combining ultimately in what historians have come to call The Great Awakening.

In the century and a half between George Whitefield’s visit to America in 1737 and Dwight L. Moody’s visit to England in 1873, scores of preachers sought to carry the fires of revival across the Atlantic. Emerson Andrews, Robert Baird, Lyman Beecher, James Caughey, Calvin Colton, Samuel H. Cox, Asahel Nettleton, Phoebe and Walter Palmer, and William Buell Sprague were among the better-known figures who did so. Their efforts contributed to the peaks of transatlantic revival activity which marked the late 1820s and early 1830s, the late 1830s and early 1840s, and the late 1850s. The story of these remarkable seasons of spiritual refreshment is told by Richard Carwardine in his superb volume Trans-Atlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865.

Perhaps the best-known figure to travel to England during these years, however, was Charles G. Finney. His two visits to the British Isles—from November 1849 to April 1851 and from December 1858 to August 1860—not only produced thousands of new converts but helped to bring renewed vitality to a number of churches in England and Scotland. Although he preached in small communities such as Houghton, where he was hosted by his generous friend Potto Brown, the bulk of Finney’s ministry was centered in larger cities such as London, Birmingham, Worcester, Edinburgh, Manchester and Liverpool. During his first visit, in fact, over eight months alone were spent preaching in the famous 3,000 seat Whitefield Tabernacle in London.

In many respects, Finney’s revival labors in Britain paralleled his practice in America. Proven measures such as prayer, protracted services, inquiry meetings, calls to public commitment, encouragement of lay leadership, and the like were used with success on both sides of the Atlantic. While he was at the Whitefield Tabernacle (built for George Whitefield in 1753), for example, Finney preached to crowded congregations not only twice on Sundays but on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings as well. Monday evenings were given to general prayer meetings at the Tabernacle. “I preached a course of sermons designed to convict the people of sin as deeply and as universally as possible,” Finney commented in his Memoirs. We are fortunate that twenty-two of these sermons are conveniently available to us in a collection which was published in 1851 under the title Sermons on Important Subjects.

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