To state the idea of conversion and salvation as then understood, one can readily see from our present standpoint that nothing could be more puzzling and harrowing to the young mind.  The revival fairly started, the most excitable were soon on the anxious seat.  There we learned the total depravity of human nature and the sinner’s awful danger of everlasting punishment.  This was enlarged upon until the most innocent girl believed herself a monster of iniquity and felt certain of eternal damnation.  Then God’s hatred of sin was emphasized and his irreconcilable position toward the sinner so justified that one felt like a miserable, helpless, forsaken worm of the dust in trying to approach him, even in prayer.

Having brought you into a condition of profound humility, the only cardinal virtue for one under conviction, in the depths of your despair you were told that it required no herculean effort on your part to be transformed into an angel, to be reconciled to God, to escape endless perdition.  The way to salvation was short and simple.  We had naught to do but to repent and believe and give our hearts to Jesus, who was ever ready to receive them.  How to do all this was the puzzling question.  Talking with Dr. Finney one day, I said: 

“I cannot understand what I am to do.  If you should tell me to go to the top of the church steeple and jump off, I would readily do it, if thereby I could save my soul; but I do not know how to go to Jesus.”

“Repent and believe,” said he, “that is all you have to do to be happy here and hereafter.”

“I am very sorry,” I replied, “for all the evil I have done, and I believe all you tell me, and the more sincerely I believe, the more unhappy I am.”

With the natural reaction from despair to hope many of us imagined ourselves converted, prayed and gave our experiences in the meetings, and at times rejoiced in the thought that we were Christians—­chosen children of God—­rather than sinners and outcasts.

But Dr. Finney’s terrible anathemas on the depravity and deceitfulness of the human heart soon shortened our newborn hopes.  His appearance in the pulpit on these memorable occasions is indelibly impressed on my mind.  I can see him now, his great eyes rolling around the congregation and his arms flying about in the air like those of a windmill.  One evening he described hell and the devil and the long procession of sinners being swept down the rapids, about to make the awful plunge into the burning depths of liquid fire below, and the rejoicing hosts in the inferno coming up to meet them with the shouts of the devils echoing through the vaulted arches.  He suddenly halted, and, pointing his index finger at the supposed procession, he exclaimed: 

“There, do you not see them!”