![]() But I have had a weakness of anger and loosing my cool. I have never had a weakness for alcohol or drugs. People are tempted in various ways or should I say, people have different weaknesses. "Hence I had never read it" So when he told his ordination council that he received the Confession "for substance of doctrine," nothing could have been further from the truth! "I was not aware that the rules of the presbytery required them to ask a candidate if he accepted the Presbyterian Confession of faith," Finney wrote. He was woefully unprepared for ordination, and he had no business seeking a license to preach under the presbytery's auspices. The truth is that he had never even examined the Confession of Faith and knew nothing at all about it. But he betrays an appalling brashness for a clergyman in his own era.) Rather than plainly admitting he was utterly ignorant of his denomination's doctrinal standards, he says he "spoke in a way" that implied ("I think") that he did not know "much" about those documents. (His ability to parse legal terms would have served him well had he been a politician in the late Twentieth Century. ​Despite his Clintonesque insistence that he "answered honestly," it is clear that Finney deliberately misled his examiners. However, I answered honestly, as I understood it at the time. But I spoke in a way that plainly implied, I think, that I did not pretend to know much about it. I replied that I received it for substance of doctrine, so far as I understood it. I had not examined it -that is, the large work, containing the Catechisms and Presbyterian Confession. Unexpectedly to myself they asked me if I received the Confession of faith of the Presbyterian church.
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