"In the days of Jonathan Edwards and his contemporaries, it had been customary to look upon revivals as the consequence of divine visitations. … By the time of Finney, this notion was in decline, and the voluntarism characteristic of the American evangelical tradition was in the ascendant. “Religion is the work of man,” Finney insisted. … A revival of religion, Finney asserted, “is not a miracle, or dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means."
— Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism and American Life , p. 109
