One Dissecting the Heart
The newspapers from London all carried the story. A strange, exuberant figure had been transforming the faith of His Majesty’s kingdom. The reports said he was barely twenty-five years of age, sported a baby face, and cried real tears of passion. He told stories of hope and rage, of fear and damnation, and the beauty of eternal salvation. He offered the promise of love and peace at the right hand of Jesus Christ and encouraged his listeners to confess their sins and allow God’s grace to transform them, in a great moment of conversion he called the “New Birth.” Bringing his audience to fits of joy and excitement, he incited an uproar throughout Britain.
The tales almost seemed too outlandish to believe. This young Anglican priest, George Whitefield, was said to have preached to some 20,000 people near Bristol, and 80,000 in Hyde Park. With the doors of many established churches closed to him, he took his message to open fields and meadows, or wherever people could hear him, including “table tops, open windows, courtyards, hills, wagons, and marketplaces”—even a “Tomb-Stone in Islington Church Yard,” with his audience dangling from tree limbs to hear his words.
His followers called him the “Grand Itinerant” for his inspired wanderings to offer his testimony wherever the spirit led him. He called his approach “preaching without doors” and, whether in a church or a forest clearing, he spoke without notes and delivered his gospel homilies off the cuff, in great dramatic bursts of inspiration. Newspapers claimed he preached to upwards of a million Britons over the summer of 1739, which gave him a reputation as a spellbinding orator who could transform the lives of his listeners and improve their spirits and, perhaps, their souls.
The reports crossed the Atlantic Ocean and drew the interest of thousands of American colonists eager to read about the gospel of Whitefield and perhaps even experience it for themselves. One publisher who knew this was a story too compelling to keep from his readers was Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin had been printing the tales of Whitefield in his Pennsylvania Gazette for several years, though he regarded them as potentially exaggerated. He had heard talk of country preachers tantalizing crowds and performing miracles before, but these stories typically carried the air of folklore. Franklin was too wise, and certainly too wary, to accept such reports at face value, but he remained intrigued by the man’s traveling ministry. Some 80,000 listeners in one venue . . . a million overall . . . these were colossal numbers that, even if overblown, could not be imagined in the parks and meetinghouses of the colonies.
He understood why so many of his readers had become transfixed: Whitefield had tapped into something deeper in people’s hearts, something beyond conventional Christianity, perhaps even beyond religion. So despite whatever doubts he may have had, as the summer came, Franklin resolved to heighten the young priest’s profile even further. Soon enough, all his readers would know the life and legend of the Grand Itinerant, what he preached, and how he preached it, and that he would be arriving in the colonies the following November.
Yet Whitefield’s religion was not Ben Franklin’s religion. This was not to say that Franklin had no religion, simply that he went his own way. He thought he knew God. He thought he understood him, had reconciled with him, even made an ally of him. As a rational thirty-three-year-old newspaper publisher and entrepreneur, Franklin embraced the idea of God, along with the social utility of religion, for its salutary effects on people’s behavior. He imagined Whitefield might encourage such effects, even if the preacher’s traditional views clashed with Franklin’s own idiosyncratic perspective.
Franklin envisioned the Lord not as a raging, vindictive tyrant, as some orthodox believers did, but simply as a wise and skillful “Creator of the Universe” who had made the earth and “govern’d it by his Providence.” He created immortal souls, punished vice and rewarded virtue, and established those fundamental principles that Franklin had come to live by in life and business: truth, sincerity, and integrity. And while he didn’t know God personally, because surely he didn’t, at least he could articulate the deity’s purpose and praise his ennobling effect on his fellow Pennsylvanians.
This knowledge did not come without struggle. Throughout his youth Franklin had chafed at his education in the Presbyterian Church, whose “peculiar doctrines . . . were all to me very dry, uninteresting and unedifying.” Instead he created a detailed moral inventory, a list of attainable virtues, which included thirteen key traits ranging from temperance and cleanliness to chastity and humility. And he measured his actions every day on a graph to plot how closely he upheld or deviated from his personal standard for ideal behavior. This was his “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral Perfection”—his own handcrafted religion.
Franklin’s philosophy served him well and gave him a sense of duty to achieve success and a determination to uplift the character of the colony’s citizens, just as he had improved his own. From the time he arrived in Philadelphia at 17, he had been advancing his reputation. He set type and kept the books for print houses, helped found one of the colonies’ first subscription libraries and volunteer fire companies, and printed the currency for New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. He also began to investigate the workings of the natural world with scientific experiments and formed a social club for moral and educational improvement called the Junto. But more than anything, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette brought him much of his early notoriety.
In his newspaper, he wrote witty and incisive commentary on politics and society—often under assumed names—sold advertising, ran classified ads, and reprinted news from abroad. However, though the Gazette had become the most popular publication in the colony, he faced real competition from Andrew Bradford and his American Weekly Mercury. While Franklin saw its articles as a collection of shopworn ideas by hidebound authors, he took his contest with Bradford seriously, and had recently trumped his rival by displacing him as postmaster—thus giving him an advantage in distributing his publications across the colonies. He had also created a juggernaut with Poor Richard’s Almanack, in which Franklin recycled a series of popular proverbs from other sources in new American packaging, encouraging thrift, modesty, humility, frugality, and other virtues that he revered.
Though Franklin had gained over Bradford in ways large and small, he knew success could be fleeting and complacency could lead to failure. He channeled his energy into finding new avenues for attracting public interest, driving the print operation forward, trying to reach more subscribers, more advertisers, more readers. How could the Gazette finally eclipse the Mercury? Where could he expand his business? And how could he enchant the public while uplifting their morality? He thought he might have found the answer to all these questions in George Whitefield.
Typically, Franklin would have been wary of such a man, especially if he followed the unforgiving doctrine of Calvinism, as so many others did throughout the colonies. As an arch Calvinist, Whitefield saw human beings as fundamentally base and depraved creatures, whose only hope of salvation was to confess their sins before Christ and submit to him in unquestioning faith and devotion. But there was a catch: even with such a confession and submission, only God knew for certain whether any individual would be saved, for he had predestined only a sliver of humanity to sit with him in heaven at the Lord’s Table. Everyone else was damned, regardless of how many good works they undertook, or how devout they were, or how spotless their reputation might be. God favored only the Elect, and only he knew who they were.
How much ink had Franklin spilled attempting to disprove the link between that kind of faith, of which there was too much, and morality, of which there was too little? He had inveighed against orthodoxy for years in the Gazette, but only saw incremental progress in the advance of reason and morality against the dull tide of devout conformity. Yet here was a preacher whose message was just as rigid and pious as that of any dogmatic Christian—yet Franklin was intrigued by him.
The logic made a certain kind of sense. While Whitefield’s system of belief had almost nothing to do with Franklin’s own philosophy, he appreciated the preacher’s call to good behavior. The public certainly needed no instruction in drinking, stealing, and gambling, and some of its members had proven quite adept in those lowly arts. Rather, it needed guidance in moral philosophy and a teacher who could steer them on a proper course, away from vice and indulgence and toward ethical behavior and civil conduct. So regardless of whether Whitefield proclaimed Calvinism or some other baleful theology, if he could encourage a sense of virtue, honor, and responsibility in his audience, Franklin would do all he could to advance his message.
Beyond religious belief, Franklin faced a more fundamental problem with Whitefield. Namely, he knew what a good businessman the preacher was, and that he was no rube in negotiating a good rate for publishing his works. Indeed, the minister had converted the appeal of his message into brisk sales of his sermons and journals in Britain. This could be a very lucrative business too, since the printed words of clergymen often became best sellers in bookstores in Europe and the colonies, and the evangelical publisher James Hutton had achieved a signal success in gaining the exclusive right in Britain to publish the first Whitefield journal of his travels.
Franklin knew Whitefield had recently arranged for the publication of his sermons in serial form, sending subscribers a weekly sermon for the price of two pence over the course of twenty weeks. This clever arrangement locked in paying readers for the preacher’s message and guaranteed him an audience. It also helped that he and his press agent William Seward had created a transnational publicity network to advertise his appearances, relying on letters to sympathetic preachers, handbills and public notices, and even ads in newspapers to rouse a growing audience to attend his revival events and purchase his tracts. In short, Whitefield was a businessman on par with even Franklin himself, and he had to cut a deal with him.
Franklin wondered how great an investment he could make in the preacher. Though he had achieved various recent successes, Franklin had also put his hard-earned cash into ventures that had foundered. From the colonial doctor who wrote of the “Disease of Virginia” to a divinity series by one Magnus Falconar, Franklin’s would-be authors had failed to draw an audience for their subscription plans and had cost him no small amount of money. Would the same be true of Whitefield? He wasn’t sure. But considering the stakes, he knew he had to cut a deal with Whitefield before Andrew Bradford did.
Even before the Grand Itinerant arrived in America, Franklin arranged a contract with his agents for their mutual benefit. While he would not get exclusive rights to Whitefield’s sermons, Franklin would be able to offer his readers a chance to subscribe to their serial publication, and thus be given the first opportunity to own them. He would also be the primary publisher of Whitefield’s journals, at prices five times that of the sermons, which would allow Franklin to capitalize on his investment if it bore fruit. If it did not, Whitefield would be yet another European attraction who failed to translate his success overseas, and Franklin’s scheme would fail. But if he did succeed, Whitefield could become a transatlantic phenomenon and Franklin could pummel Bradford at the newsstand. It seemed like a worthy gamble.
On this way to America, George Whitefield felt sick in body and spirit. It had been more than two months since the Anglican priest had spied land, and the convulsions of nautical travel mixed with the frailty of his constitution had rendered him pallid and heaving. Few knew of his dire condition. He performed his duties, held public prayers, delivered the sacrament to the ship’s crew, and shared with them the spirit of Christ in a great “love-feast.” But in private he struggled, and not merely with infirmity.
He knew that as a man he was base and wicked, cursed with a “polluted, proud, and treacherous heart.” Was this not the condition of all men? Scripture said it was, and he could never help but be reminded of his depravity, especially during those evenings in which he, risen from sleep, felt “inexpressible agonies of soul” that would last for several days “at the remembrance of my sins, and the bitter consequences of them.” He recoiled at the memory of his youthful villainy, at the thought of the time before he was saved, and compared himself to Adam chucked out of paradise, or David convicted of adultery, or Peter denying Jesus. These thoughts plagued him, wrenched his stomach, and twisted his heart to despair. He knew he was a sinner and deserved to suffer.
The miseries onboard the ship lasted until late October, when he disembarked at Lewis Town, 150 miles from Philadelphia, his next destination. Upon his journey to that city, he felt his spirits improve as he traveled over the rough, pristine landscape—his constitution settled and delight rose in him, as the “remembrance of my humiliations is sweet unto my soul, and the freedom which God has given me over some darling failings, fills me with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”
He spoke of God’s grace to the inhabitants of the countryside and ate a meal at a humble tavern: unleavened bread, cider, and eggs. And he marveled at how his lord deigned to make his presence felt even in such low and mean conditions—“Amazing that the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity should condescend to dwell in earthly tabernacles!” And with that, he filled his belly, had a restful sleep, and rose the next day to begin his deeper exploration of America.
Upon his further travels, he saw a great number of colonists, of varying rank and status, race and provenance, and especially religion and creed: Congregationalists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, among others. How teeming the country was with dissenters! In Britain they might have been made to answer for their beliefs, or restricted in their worship by the Crown. But here in Pennsylvania, they evaded any such punishment, and practiced their faith openly and without restriction. The much-persecuted Quaker sect even ran the colony, naming it after the father of one of their own, William Penn.
Such nonconformists rejected the teaching of the Anglican Church. In Britain that stance had made the government suspicious of them, and wary of their effect on the social order. The century before, the forerunner of Congregationalists—famously known as Puritans—had declared war on the king, executed him, crushed the state religion, and upended English society. When the Crown restored its power, it punished them for their transgressions.
Despite their reputation, Reverend Whitefield found a strange kind of sympathy for the dissenters. Though he was not one of them, he helped lead a reform movement in the Church of England that some called Methodism. Designed to purify worship and root out moral corruption, Methodists often found themselves enduring as much abuse as the dissenters. Anglican churchmen called them “young quacks” and fanatics, and they endured heckling and public scorn for their fiery preaching and challenge to the authorities. Whitefield wasn’t a true dissenter, but he understood the meaning of the term, and spoke to the colonists as potential allies and genuine seekers of God’s mercy. He resolved to preach to them all, regardless of sect. He would tell them of their sins and guide them toward the New Birth. He would be open and affectionate and accept these people without judgment or derision—or at least be kinder to them than they were toward each other.
The Americans did not worship in harmony. Whitefield had heard tell of their fearsome disagreements and bitter contests and knew the challenge of proclaiming the message of Christ here. Many shared his philosophy of Calvinism—emphasizing man’s helplessness in the face of God’s omniscient power—while others believed in free will, including many Anglicans and Methodists. But beyond theological divisions, practical matters also vexed American churches. Some parishioners might argue with their ministers over matters of long-held doctrine; others might challenge his salary or refuse to pay for his support; and still others might threaten to abandon their parish if they were insufficiently enlightened by him. As one wag said, this place was “heaven for farmers, paradise for artisans, and hell for officials and preachers.” Yet Whitefield felt no fear in spreading the gospel here. He had convinced himself he could marshal the Holy Spirit and bring about a great revival in his travels. Philadelphia would surely be an excellent place to start.
His friend William Seward had spread the word of his journey, writing hundreds, perhaps thousands of letters to sympathetic men and women willing to hear the story of Whitefield. Mr. Seward sought out the colonial weeklies to provide reports of his travels, and at each stop along Whitefield’s way, the crowds grew and the interest in his gospel swelled, until much of William Penn’s colony yearned to see the Grand Itinerant in the flesh.
Whitefield gained approval to speak at Christ Church by the commissary of Pennsylvania, Archibald Cummings, who represented the local authority in the Church of England. Cummings received him civilly and offered Whitefield the pulpit, and for this he was grateful. How many bishops and other officials had locked him out of their churches in Britain? How many had kept him from conveying the word of Christ simply because he lacked his own parish? And how many times had he fought them, and had to preach in barns and fields, just to bring the gospel to the great mass of British sinners? He had lost count.
On November 8, 1739, Whitefield spoke at Christ Church. He delivered his homilies with the usual vigor, but there were more parishioners who longed to hear his gospel than there were seats to accommodate them. So after he spoke, hundreds of people demanded he address them in a grander forum more suitable to his reputation. And so Whitefield chose to speak outside, on a blustery Thursday evening. As he climbed the steps of the courthouse on Market Street, he looked out on a crowd of 6,000 people—half the number of the entire city. He had preached to greater numbers, but never in a place so unfamiliar.
They had come by word of mouth, hearing of the Itinerant’s travels in the New World. They had come by way of broadsides scattered throughout the streets that offered the promise of salvation to those with a mind to be saved. They had come after seeing newspaper advertisements, or reading his sermons, or receiving letters from his emissaries, or just by dint of pure curiosity. They had come because they wanted to be transformed, illuminated, blessed, and entertained, and Whitefield knew he could not disappoint them. And so he did not.
He spoke without notes, gently at first, then rising in pitch and volume until his voice rang out over the assembled congregants. Some said he could be heard on the shore of New Jersey, others at least to the city wharves, clearly and without difficulty, hundreds of feet away.
He began to tell them the story of Abraham and Isaac, a familiar one to any Christian or Jew. But instead of dryly repeating the story’s moral lessons, Whitefield surprised them. For as he stood before them, he spoke not as a preacher but as an performer, delivering lines written by God.
In his youth he had been a budding actor, and a skilled one indeed, performing various roles in school performances and immersing himself in the English stage. And though God directed him toward the ministry instead of the theater, he had preserved his talent, and Whitefield took advantage of the gift.
First he took the role of the stoic patriarch Abraham, unquestioning servant of the Lord, called by his master to do the impossible—“Take now thy son, and offer him up for a burnt offering.”
This shocked Abraham. In the role, Whitefield reacted with terror at the thought of killing his own kin. He paused and trembled and wrestled with his faith, he became overcome with fear, and he resisted the holy command to murder. But he also trusted in God’s wisdom, and in the end chose to prepare the sacrifice.
Then Whitefield became Isaac, knowing nothing, the picture of innocence being led to his death. Whitefield conveyed the boy’s ignorance and confusion. Looking not much older than the boy himself, Whitefield inhabited the spirit of the child, a picture of fear and misery—asking to know why his father was taking him to a land three days’ distant. The audience felt a chill.
And then Whitefield was the father again, whispering and crying out, with words describing how God demanded a lamb for slaughter.
With tears in his eyes, he said, “You are to be the lamb, my son!”
Abraham’s emotions washed over his son, “Adieu, adieu, my son; the Lord gave you to me, and the Lord calls you away.” He produced the knife and held it to the boy’s throat.
Whitefield wept, his voice choked with emotion, his robes damp with sweat. He paused and let the terror of the moment sink in, the imaginary knife held to his own throat. The crowd held its breath, awaiting God’s verdict.
Abraham clutched the knife and prepared the slaughter. But just as he moved to cut the flesh and make the offering—
“The angel of the Lord called unto him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham,’” in the sweetest and most powerful tones Whitefield could muster. Abraham answered, and the angel said, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him; for now know I that thou fearest God, seeing thou has not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.”
The audience gasped. Many in the crowd cried as he did, overcome with pathos, standing transfixed and silent in the face of his oratory. The story they knew all too well had become vivid and electrifying in the performance of this traveling preacher.
Before he concluded, Whitefield offered his thoughts on the story of Abraham. He praised the patriarch’s decision to obey God, and he announced that the choice of Abraham was the choice all must make: whether to follow one’s faith and accept the word of the Lord, or to follow one’s conscience and reject it. But to devout Christians, there was really no choice. There was only the word of God, and nothing else. Faith and salvation were paramount, and no amount of questioning or equivocation could change that. And if God called a man to commit murder, he had to obey. If he listened to his conscience, he did not deserve to sit at the Lord’s Table.
The crowd exploded with joy and exaltation. Whitefield had lit the fuse of revival.
Ben Franklin stood in the crowd at one of Whitefield’s later sermons in Philadelphia and could hear his voice with clarion precision. He marveled at the minister’s vocal stylings and skill in projection, and resolved to discover how many people might have heard his words. He moved back to position himself nearer the river and imagined the Itinerant to be in the center of a semicircle, with the distance between himself and the preacher as its radius. Allotting two square feet per each of the audience members, “I computed that he might well be heard by more than thirty-thousand”—five times the number of people actually present.
Franklin was delighted by the calculation, for it meant that Whitefield might well have drawn upwards of 25,000 people or more to his British sermons, as the press had reported, and could draw up to half that number in the more thinly populated cities of America. Franklin did the math and found it reasonable to assume that Whitefield’s appeal would only broaden, and that the audience for the minister’s sermons and journals could be huge. He might become as colossal a phenomenon in America as in Britain.
Franklin made plans to publish twenty-four volumes of Whitefield’s sermons in two volumes, as well as the first two of his journals. Initial orders were brisk, and Franklin saw his faith in the firebrand justified. He would show his commitment to the gospel of Whitefield by featuring him regularly in the Gazette, in both news and opinion pieces, and by previewing each stop on his upcoming tour. This would feed enthusiasm for his appearances well before he ever arrived at a given city, hamlet, or coach stop.
This was one of Franklin’s greatest entrepreneurial risks to date, and one of his largest investments of any sort. It would provide Whitefield with a forum far greater than any other preacher, or any colonist, had yet attained, and it would give Franklin a lucrative source of income and a clear advantage in his publishing war with his rival. Andrew Bradford would have to find his own Grand Itinerant.
Franklin was curious to meet this preaching dynamo, so he arranged a meeting in which they could discuss their shared interests and business affairs. Upon meeting Whitefield, Franklin found him to be much less imposing than he seemed from a distance. He was, to be sure, tall and stately, if a bit stooped over, with somewhat gentle features. He appeared soft and childlike, befitting his youth, and had a curious lazy eye that made him appear cross-eyed. This was, his followers claimed, so he could keep one eye on God and the other on the devil.
Whitefield’s curious appearance and dramatic oratory, along with the growing number of female converts among his followers, made him a target for British critics. They claimed that with his soft features, effusive tears, and “clear and musical voice,” he incarnated not the spirit of God, but any common woman. His adversaries in the church dismissed the “feminine” qualities of his ministry, and one Anglican church weekly even sniped, “Hark! He talks of a sensible New Birth—then belike he is in labour, and the good women around him are come to his assistance. He dilates himself, cries out [and] is at last delivered.”
Franklin could not have disagreed more with such carping. In Whitefield’s powerful ministry, Franklin saw a beacon of revival—the kind he encouraged. He sealed his business arrangement with the preacher in Philadelphia, witnessed more of his sermons, and delighted over “the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers.” He wrote, “it was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants; from being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious; so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.”
Whitefield stayed in Philadelphia for a week before beginning the next leg of his journey. He found during his travels around New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York—the Middle Colonies, as they were known—that word of his preaching had preceded him. When he returned to Philadelphia in late November, Franklin marveled at the spectacle the preacher brought with him to the pulpit, along with his sense of integrity. He seemed to be a fair and honest man, wholly committed to his revival efforts, and had the audacity to criticize the Anglican Church in which he was ordained. Such boldness incurred the wrath of high churchmen and reminded Franklin of his own struggles against the formal, hierarchical Presbyterian Church in which he had been raised.
Franklin had a broad and open-minded view of spirituality, and wrote, “I esteemed the essentials of every religion, and being to be found in all the religions we had in our country I respected them all.” He detected a similar ecumenical spirit in Whitefield, evident from his ministry to all individuals—from Jews and Quakers to Congregationalists and Baptists—and his lack of hauteur, which so many other ministers from the high church in Britain seemed to have. All this made Franklin consider him an ally, as well as a friend. He even offered his home to Whitefield during one visit to Philadelphia: “You know my house, if you can make shift with its scanty accommodations you will be most heartily welcome. [Whitefield] replied, that if I made that kind offer for Christ’s sake, I should not miss of a reward—And I returned, Don’t let me be mistaken: it was not for Christ’s sake, but for your sake.”
Upon getting to know the minister better, Franklin had learned his purpose was not simply to save souls. He also had a mind to raise donations for an orphanage he was planning to complete in the southern colonies. This seemed like a noble enough cause, and for Franklin it was the very definition of charity and good-heartedness. But he could only wonder, why not Philadelphia instead? The Pennsylvania capital was surely a worthy spot to host an institution for indigent children, of which there were many, and it would help give the city a reputation for philanthropy and a generous spirit. But the preacher balked at such conventional notions. He would build his orphanage in the swamps of Georgia!
As Franklin saw the settlement of that forlorn colony:
[T]he only people fit for such an enterprise, it was with families of broken shopkeepers and other insolvent debtors, many of indolent and idle habits, taken out of the [jails], who being set down in the woods, unqualified for clearing land, and unable to endure the hardships of a new settlement, perished in numbers, leaving many helpless children unprovided for.
Only established a few years before, Georgia had begun as an experimental farming colony for its proprietor James Oglethorpe, but struggled to succeed in its early years. It was simply too isolated and too poorly sited—on the boundary of unfriendly Spanish Florida—for any but the most risk-taking farmers to want to live there. As for civilization of any sort, the colony was lacking. The culture, industry, and entertainments of British North America stopped at Charles Town (modern Charleston) in South Carolina and advanced no farther south.
Yet Whitefield persisted. He recalled the evangelism of his fellow Methodists John and Charles Wesley, who had come to Georgia several years before to convert souls and build a mission to the native Indians. Although they failed in their attempt, Whitefield respected their efforts. He followed their example and came to Georgia for his first brief trip to North America in 1738—but unlike them, he kept a foothold in it. He was now laying the groundwork for his institution, for which he had solicited money during his preaching tours in Britain. He would do the same in America and was already beseeching Pennsylvanians to open their hearts and pocketbooks for his great endeavor.
While Franklin could not be convinced that a Georgia orphanage was the best use of Whitefield’s efforts, he was happy to help him raise funds for it. He published in the Gazette an article describing the various goods Englishmen had donated to the cause—everything from brass candlesticks, nails, duck and goose shot, to rugs and blankets, buttons and silk—and how the auction of those goods in Philadelphia would be used to support the orphanage. He had no plans to donate his own goods or money to the cause, of course, because the enterprise was clearly a fool’s errand. Franklin even watched Whitefield ask for money from his congregants during one of his sermons, and “I silently resolved he should get nothing from me.”
His resolve didn’t last long. As he listened to Whitefield’s oratory, Franklin quickly changed his mind and gave a handful of copper coins to his ministry. Upon further reflection, Franklin decided he had been miserly, and so offered up the silver coins as well. By the end of the sermon, the preacher’s words had so moved Franklin that “I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”
Another parishioner, knowing of Whitefield’s power, had decided to protect himself against being lured into generosity and left his pockets bare before attending the sermon. By the end of it, he too was overcome with charity, and begged a neighbor to lend him money for the collection plate. The neighbor, however, was a Quaker known for his frugality. He responded, “At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now, for thee seems to be out of thy right senses.”
George Whitefield felt eager to explore America, and to find sympathetic Christians with whom he could discuss the workings of the Lord. The first opportunity came two days after his success on the courthouse steps in Philadelphia. He chanced to meet a wizened but influential figure of the Presbyterian Church, William Tennent. He was an “old, grey-headed disciple and soldier of Jesus Christ. . . . both he and his sons are secretly despised by the generality of the Synod.” Whitefield enjoyed meeting a fellow pariah, for the established Presbyterian Synod was as much an adversary to Tennent as the established Church of England was to Methodist reformers like himself.
Through his conversation with Tennent, he began to appreciate that danger lurked not only in the darkness of the sinful human heart, but in the very churches of which they were ministers. Great scheming evil had polluted the hearts of men, and Tennent described how the wickedness of powerful clerics had abused good and honest Christians and had made them pawns in the grip of Satan. He told Whitefield that high churchmen of many faiths had allowed reason and religion of the mind to debase their thinking. They privileged morality, ethics, and good works over the singular faith in God that was the only true path to heaven. And such vile clerics dismissed the energy that Whitefield brought to the pulpit and the emotional bond he formed with worshippers. They mocked the New Birth and called Whitefield’s converts “enthusiasts”—a grave insult suggesting frenzy and madness!
The words of Tennent struck Whitefield with force and made him realize dissenting Americans like this old man were engaged in spiritual combat throughout the Middle Colonies. Though Whitefield had brought words of joy and beauty to the New World, he now realized more was at stake. He became convinced of the truth of William Tennent’s words, and wrote, “Though we are but few, and stand alone . . . the Lord will appear to us, as He did for [Elijah], and make us more than conquerors.”
William Tennent guided him to New Brunswick, New Jersey, to meet his son, Gilbert. A man a half-generation older than Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent was a controversial figure and well known among dissenters of the Presbyterian Synod. He and his father and his three brothers had fought for many years over the proper role of the Presbyterian Church, the education of its ministers, and the actions of those ministers to spread the message of Christ. It didn’t take long for Whitefield to see Gilbert’s power. He bonded with him immediately over matters of faith and “what God had done for our souls.” Soon he became “my worthy brother” and a man deservedly among the greatest ministers in America, along with his other family members. “The devil and carnal secure ministers rage horribly against them.”
Gilbert planned to introduce Whitefield to an army of dissenters and iconoclasts who had fought the doctrines of their respective churches—men whose expressions were hardened but who remained undaunted in the face of threats from clerical authorities. For years Gilbert and his allies had battled to bring the power of the New Birth to their parishioners, to melt their hearts in Christ and to enflame the next revival throughout the colonies. They had no use for church formalities and bureaucracies—not when a great war of the spirit was underway, not when the fate of souls lay in the balance. And they wanted Whitefield to aid them in their cause.
Whitefield, however, feared he would disappoint them. He struggled to summon the energy even to preach at times, let alone to battle the authorities in a land he barely knew. He often felt sick and violently ill, especially before his sermons, and had contracted terrible diseases onboard ships crossing the Atlantic and in unfamiliar places. Moreover, he had no idea that even when he spoke with a measure of success, the clerics of his own church were busy trying to undermine him.
For one, the commissary of Philadelphia, Archibald Cummings, who had allowed him use of Christ Church in that city, now plotted against him. In a letter to other Anglican officials, he claimed Whitefield was no scholar or gentleman, but was skilled mainly in “railing against the regular clergy” in promoting his causes. If he were not constrained, his menace might spread and encourage his listeners to behave with unhinged emotion and demonic energy. Whitefield threatened to bring about such lunacy in his followers, for he was “enthusiastically mad.”
Whitefield did not at first realize he had been undermined. So when he came to ask Commissary William Vesey for the use of his Trinity Church in New York, Vesey ambushed him. Not only was he furious at Whitefield, he denied him use of his pulpit, and demanded to see his Letter of Orders in the church as well as his preaching license. Whitefield, however, refused to show him any of those things, which incurred the commissary’s wrath even more. The high church official charged him with violating canon law by preaching without a license, and Whitefield felt cornered. He responded that Vesey himself violated canon law by frequenting low establishments like tavern houses, as everyone knew! The Grand Itinerant thus made himself a powerful new enemy.
Following Vesey’s denial of the Trinity Church pulpit, another Anglican minister, Jonathan Arnold of Staten Island, added to the insult by publishing an open attack on Whitefield, whom he had just met. He went a step further than Vesey and called his theology and manners dubious, his ignorance and pride indisputable, and his attack on the clergy intolerable. He was nothing less than “an open enemy to religion.”
Whitefield now saw the battle joined. It seemed as if the words of the Tennents had been proven true—there was a war underway within Christianity, and Whitefield would have to help fight it. In response, he criticized those who had received him in New York and later had his disparaging journal entries published throughout the colonies. He wrote, “What manner of spirit are the generality of the clergy possessed with? Is this the spirit of the meek Lamb of God? Are these the fruits of the Holy Ghost? . . . Their bigotry, if it was nothing else, in time would destroy them.”
Whitefield began to voice these sentiments from the pulpit, too, denouncing sinners in high places, and the crowds welcomed his indictments. His feelings of persecution and oppression, of being threatened and cornered, of facing a growing list of enemies—all of it fueled his ministry and added to his power of his sermons, which now featured as much anger as they did joy.
The commissaries and other local church leaders clearly saw the danger of Whitefield, as did the Bishop of London, who oversaw Anglican churches in the colonies. They feared his methods as well as his message—especially his means of delivering it. Itinerancy held bad stock with the authorities, be they Anglican or Presbyterian or any other faith that valued organization and control. To them, parish boundaries dictated that only an officially licensed minister be allowed to preach in a given area; his parishioners would look to him for guidance in spiritual matters, and he would be free to interpret the Bible without interlopers challenging him on it. But men like Whitefield did just that.
Throughout Britain, he paid little heed to respecting such boundaries, and willfully intruded upon them. To the clergy, this was a violation of canon law, of proper order, of the very foundation of the Church. Yet Whitefield persisted—if he were denied a pulpit, he would find one for himself, whether it be in an old barn, or a desolate moor, or a barren field, or a graveyard. And his listeners would follow wherever he led them.
Now feeling as persecuted in America as he had been in Britain, Whitefield returned to the method he had perfected. If church doors were closed to him, his followers would rush to him en masse into fields and meadows or wherever he spoke. He would tell them to follow their heart, to allow the grace of God to invest and uplift them, and to confess and renounce their sins and accept conversion to the true faith. If he met resistance from authorities, he would persist. If the gentry refused to worship with the “lower orders,” he would deride them. If parents tried to keep their children from him, he would tell the kids to “go to Heaven without them!” And if anyone called him a rouser of hordes and mobs, he would embrace the role. This made Whitefield a clear threat to the colonial order—which valued peace, reason, good conduct, and rigid hierarchy—and he reveled in it.
He spoke in a range of settings, from the grand Wall Street Presbyterian Church in New York, to an array of small towns and waysides. Anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 people might show up, crowding the dirt lanes, the woods, the cemeteries to witness his gospel. And Whitefield had no problem speaking atop wagons or out of windows or balconies or even over tombstones to express his message of the New Birth and condemn those who resisted it. The souls from the city and the country flocked to him, as he tried to change what the Middle Colonists believed and how they expressed their faith.
All the while, his energy and power grew. Even if he felt his innards heaving or his soul wavering or his sins multiplying, he would still exhort his listeners with tears and sweat and energy and volume. Whitefield was a warrior in the pulpit, and his enemies had no sound defense when he invaded their turf.
In his New York travels, Whitefield had a kindred spirit to accompany him. Gilbert Tennent had been guiding him throughout the Middle Colonies, finding new allies for him to meet, and instructing him on local politics and controversies. Gilbert also fed his enmity for the established churches, until the two men were united as rebels in Christ against the unjust actions of their foes. To further express his feelings, Gilbert found a meetinghouse in which to preach, and Whitefield witnessed his friend in action for the first time. The sermon stunned him.
Gilbert spoke with gravity, strength, and conviction, his loud voice booming out across the hall. He wasted no time in attacking the enemies of God and those who tried to shackle his gospel. He fulminated against sinners and the enfeebled preachers that he claimed had corrupted the church. He made no gentle entreaties to his audience as Whitefield did; instead he made bold demands of them, questioning their courage and fidelity to Christ. And he not only requested, he outright demanded that those who preached the word of God experience it in their hearts. Whitefield realized he had “never before heard such a searching sermon.”
The gospel of Gilbert Tennent shook Whitefield deeply. It made him recognize his own flaws and the gravity of his sins, and how much more he must do to advance the message of Christ. For Gilbert “has learned experimentally to dissect the heart of a natural man. Hypocrites must either soon be converted or enraged at his preaching. He is a son of thunder, and does not fear the faces of men.”
Whitefield could not resist the man’s message. He quickly learned to appreciate him not only as a friend, but as a teacher and a guiding light. “My soul was humbled and melted down with a sense of God’s mercies, and I found more and more what a babe and novice I was in the things of God.”
His first conversion had been in Britain, to the ministry of Jesus Christ. His second came in America, to the method of Gilbert Tennent. He realized he had been too soft on his listeners, too gentle against his nemeses, too mild when he should have been forceful—and he resolved to do better.
He would soon bring his own thunder to the pulpit.