Two The Way to Imperial Heaven
Gilbert Tennent carried the force of God. He was not God, but as he preached he could feel that power coursing within him—demanding sinners repent, castigating the wicked, proclaiming the glory of the Kingdom to come. Had his voice ever thundered with such clarity? Had his audience ever trembled before him with such fear? He knew they had not. For the moment had come in his crusade to purify the church. God had chosen this moment to send him a soldier—God had chosen George Whitefield to help him fight the war.
What a scene it had been when Whitefield spoke! He had somehow drawn 6,000 people to Germantown, Pennsylvania, for a rousing sermon that left people weeping for nearly two hours. Members of some fifteen different sects watched him orate, many of them Swiss and German who couldn’t even speak English, yet who knew the power of the Itinerant’s gospel. They nearly mobbed him after the sermon, describing their own conversions to Christ, and sharing their experiences as dissenters or nonconformists or outcasts. And Whitefield welcomed them all to the fold, as new Christians, new converts to the New Birth, new subscribers to his works, new friends in the New World.
Whitefield called his brand of devotion “experimental piety.”
This was the religion of the heart in its full convulsive, cataclysmic power, offering the promise of salvation to sinners, showing the fire of Christianity—and aiding Gilbert in his struggle to defy the Philadelphia Synod and foment revolution in the church.
Gilbert’s journey to rebellion had taken half a lifetime. In 1718 his father William had brought him and his three brothers to America from County Armagh in Northern Ireland, all of them refugees from the authority of the Church of Ireland, which was associated with the Church of England. They were part of a growing wave of Protestant newcomers—Scots-Irish like them, as well as Germans, Swedes, Dutch, Swiss, and others looking to practice their religion free from restraint.
While a settlement with the Crown had made Presbyterianism the established church of Scotland, in Ireland the British government still freely persecuted the sect. Presbyterians and other nonconformists could not hold public office, graduate from universities, teach school, or take part in other aspects of community life that members of the established church took for granted. William Tennent saw such policies as odious, and looked to America to practice his faith, since a distance of 3,000 miles gave him sufficient space from oppressive monarchs and high churchmen.
Even better for him, the establishment of the Church of England was weak in the Middle Colonies. Colonies like New York and New Jersey provided fertile ground for the rise of the Presbyterian Church, and within that denomination, immigrants from the British Isles came to dominate the most prominent synod, based in Philadelphia. It should have been a successful pairing between the Scots-Irish Synod and the Scots-Irish Tennents. But William Tennent became a pariah.
Almost as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia, his beliefs came into question. Members of the Synod questioned his sincerity and fitness to be a minister. The conflicts only got worse as the decades passed and the Tennent patriarch clashed with the official rules on the education and ordination of ministers, and the role of faith and revival in spiritual practice. He chafed at their regulations and simmered with anger at their treatment of him.
The leaders who vexed him came from the “Old Side,” comprising Scottish and Irish immigrants who valued rules and conformity to Scottish standards above all else. They encouraged education in established colleges for theology, and rigorous examination of ministerial candidates to root out heresy. Men like William Tennent countered them on the “New Side.” They were less willing to conform to church law and argued faith and conversion should be paramount, not grilling would-be ministers about how orthodox they were.
After years of fighting to deliver the gospel his way, William Tennent’s frustrations had grown and his grievances had multiplied. He began to defy any doctrine he found disagreeable, and to challenge the authority of the church hierarchy. The Old Side did not speak for him—it spoke for the kind of hidebound, institutional religion that had crippled the souls of Europe. The religion of the New World had to be proud, assertive, and emotional, and reach depths of devotion that could never be attained with dry formalism. Tennent realized the only way to ensure that his kind of religion became the dominant one was to educate young pastors himself, as he saw fit. So he created his own school, called the Log College.
Built in the woods of Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, it was a school Ben Franklin described in the Pennsylvania Gazette as a log house measuring twenty-by-twenty feet, “and to me it seemed to resemble the school of the old prophets; for their habitations were mean. . . . From this despised place, seven or eight worthy ministers of Jesus have lately been sent forth.” Among them were the Tennent boys, and especially Gilbert, the most promising of the siblings and certainly the most committed. Despite the meager conditions of his father’s school, he gained an education in logic, philosophy, theology, Latin, and some Greek and Hebrew. The local Philadelphia presbytery granted him a license to preach at the age of twenty-two. He later found a pulpit in the New Brunswick presbytery in New Jersey.
Gilbert Tennent entered the ministry transformed. Guided by his father, he had not only learned the catechism of Protestant faith and Calvinism, he was reborn in Christ and found the experience overwhelming and irresistible. God demanded that Gilbert spread the gospel to all who would listen, and many who would not.
Gilbert could testify to the New Birth better than almost anyone. As he had experienced it, when the Lord wished to extend his grace to a miserable sinner and the sinner accepted that grace, the force of the Almighty devastated his heart, lacerated him, dissolved and crushed him. God rebuilt the heart and soul of a person—he didn’t just tinker with his mind or persuade him salvation was a good idea. He overpowered him with force.
He had seen this in his brother John’s conversion:
His conviction of his sin, danger, and misery, was the most violent in degree, of any I ever saw. For several days and nights together, he was made to cry out in the most dolorous and affecting manner, almost every moment. The words which he used in his soul-agony were these, “O my bloody, lost soul! What shall I do? Have mercy on me, O God, for Christ’s sake.” Sometimes, he was brought to the very brink of despair, and would conclude, “surely God would never have mercy on such a great sinner as he was.”
Yet John Tennent hardly sinned at all, except to lose his temper occasionally. So if God could level an innocent boy with such violent effect, what could he do to the heart of a committed sinner? Gilbert dared to imagine.
Throughout the 1730s, a spirit of antagonism grew in Gilbert, just as it had in his father. He had seen how the Old Siders repeatedly attacked and undermined the Log College. He had watched them try to thwart the ordination of his brother, Charles. And he had witnessed them drafting rules to prevent ministers like himself from preaching in vacant churches outside their jurisdictions, and how they kept his New Brunswick presbytery confined, shackled, and red-taped into submission. But despite their power, he would not yield to it. He had already faced the ferocity of the Lord, so he hardly feared breaking the rules of the Philadelphia Synod.
Gilbert asserted that his family’s Old Side adversaries knew nothing of God or godliness. They preached from ignorance, cast rules from decadent wisdom, and neutered the beauty, passion, and terror of true belief. And when he looked out at the spiritual landscape of the Middle Colonies, everywhere he saw Pharisees. They were men of the cloth, wigged and robed, speaking eloquently upon matters both earthly and sublime. They praised good works and rational belief and proper conduct. They lauded the latest philosophies from Europe. They read books and professed knowledge and played the role of wise counselors of law, reason, and benevolence. And he was convinced most of them were going to hell.
Who were these men? Who had given them license to preach? And how many of them had riddled and corrupted the soul of the Presbyterian Church? These questions raised his righteous anger to a boil. And what of the souls of their parishioners? For the sake of good works and rationalism, their ministers were steering them toward damnation. He could not accept it. He would not abide it. He had been batthng it since he had taken his vows.
Gilbert Tennent’s own theology was just as combative as his views of the Synod. With evidence from his own conversion, he was certain that “no person became a true believer without first experiencing the terror of sin, the searching of the soul, and the resulting realization that one was not a Christian.” Only through pain and misery could the path to salvation be found, and he accepted this idea as gospel.
From the Dutch Reformed minister Theodorus Frelinghuysen, who led revivals in the 1720s, Gilbert had learned to scare his parishioners out of their “presumptuous security” and into a state of fearful excitement. The examples were many:
• “Sluggish souls are overgrown with corruptions, deprived of the robes of the redeemers’ righteousness, and can expect nothing but shame and contempt.” That was the fate of lazy people.
• “Would it not cause intolerable pain to have one of your arms broken and crushed to pieces, and while the bones jarred and ripped against each other, to have it pulled off by the shoulder blade?” That was what sinning was like.
• “But is it not still more dreadful to have the breast dug and opened, and the heart that seat of life, and spring of motion, violently tore out of it, having first broke all these vital, bleeding cords, by which it was united to the body, and then to have the precordium (or skin that covers it) flayed off and the caul rent from it?” That’s what happened when God became jealous.
Gilbert Tennent’s reliance on terror became an essential and controversial part of his ministry. He laid out his dark view of humanity in the 1735 sermon, A Solemn Warning to the Secure World, from the God of Terrible Majesty, in which he identified righteous, complacent behavior as the fundamental sin against God, including “ignorance, negligence, self-love, inconsideration, pride, pretensions to perfection, palliatives for imperfections, and false conceits to all Christian graces” and described the draconian punishments that awaited anyone who committed such sins, in vehement and scorching language. In short, “Men must be frightened out of hell with the law [of God] and lured into heaven with the gospel.”
The Tennent family used deep-seated fear of the deity to keep their parishioners obedient to the gospel as they taught it. Other Calvinists also employed fear to control their congregants, but only Gilbert Tennent raised the practice to an art, inventing clever new ways men and women might be tortured for their errors, and describing such horrors in rich detail. As he described the path to salvation: “terrors first, comfort second.”
He realized his message was grim, but he thought the earthly fears he aroused could not compare to the torture awaiting fallen souls in hell. He scoffed at his critics who preached tolerance and moderation: Why offer a salve for sinners when they needed to be horrified into compliance with God’s law? If anything, he needed to preach more terrors, to save even more souls, to lift them out of base earthly depravity.
For all of its shock value, Gilbert found popular success with his version of the gospel. His published sermons appealed to a growing audience, who seemed to appreciate his lurid imagery and would pay a fair price for it. Some even enjoyed learning about the fate that awaited sinners in hell, which attracted readers who may not have witnessed his sermons in person and elevated him to be one of the best-known Presbyterian ministers in the Middle Colonies.
Notoriety, however, did not translate into success in his battles against the Synod. He remained another dissenting voice in a secondary presbytery in New Jersey, well away from the powerful pulpits of the major cities. He remained steadfast to the challenge, though, and began to see his earthly conflicts as a reflection in miniature of the cosmic struggle between Satan and God—a holy war in which he was a foot soldier. In one famous sermon, he praised “The Necessity of Religious Violence” and said, “We have a description of the way to the Imperial Heaven, and the violent take it by force.”
He could not defeat Satan in battle, but he had more hope in his war against the church hierarchy. He had been sharpening his strategy for many years, planning his attack, and waiting for the right moment to unleash it. In November 1739, that moment came when George Whitefield arrived in America.
On his recent tour of the Middle Colonies, Whitefield had seen the spiritual landscape of America through the lens of the Tennent family. To the Itinerant it was a providential pairing; to the family it was part of a carefully cultivated plan. Thus, it was no accident that William Tennent had sought out Whitefield so quickly when he arrived in Philadelphia. He directed him to visit New Brunswick, and Gilbert not only befriended Whitefield there, he helped him navigate the Middle Colonies, where to go and whom to meet.
Most of the controversy of the trip focused on the Anglican preacher’s clashes with commissaries like Jonathan Arnold and William Vesey, but Gilbert knew that, while Whitefield enjoyed delivering sermons in fields, he would still need proper meetinghouses to preach in and pulpits to preach from. And he had a few key dissenters in hand who could loan them.
Again, this was no accident. Pastors like Ebenezer Pemberton and Jonathan Dickinson weren’t just friendly well-wishers who could open their churches to him. They were important members of the Synod whom Gilbert was trying to convert to the New Side in his battles against the hierarchy. The influential Dickinson had a reputation as a moderate and had called the harsh rhetoric of revivalists like the Tennents “a dead fly in the apothecaries ointment.” Still, despite the criticism, Gilbert needed every ally he could find. Whitefield appeared at the perfect moment.
Pemberton and Dickinson came away impressed, even astounded, by the effect Whitefield had on his listeners. His marshaling of the Holy Spirit for the cause of worshippers’ salvation was unprecedented and convinced them and other Presbyterian ministers that the momentum had shifted to the New Side, to the Tennents, in the growing conflict within the church.
An added benefit: While Presbyterian ministers like Gilbert were limited by church law to preach only in their presbyteries, Whitefield could preach anywhere he liked. The Grand Itinerant respected no boundaries and could spread his gospel—or that of the Tennents—into any place that had a spare church, barn, field, or cemetery. His potential was unlimited, and Gilbert could only imagine the possibilities now that he had so potent a weapon as Whitefield in his arsenal.
A few hundred miles away on horseback, George Whitefield felt a bit sad to have to leave his new friends in the Middle Colonies. Gilbert Tennent wrote to him, “your sermons have much confirmed the truths of Christ which have been preached here for many years.” He wrote back, “I love and honor you in the bowels of Jesus Christ. You are seldom out of my thoughts.” Whitefield hated to go, but he knew there was more work to be done, more souls to be saved, in the southern part of America. He was making his way down the Eastern Seaboard toward Georgia, to oversee the creation of his orphanage.
In the Upper South colonies of Virginia and Maryland, he found a stronger Anglican presence in community life, but in neither colony did his experimental piety draw the mass attention or the conversions he had seen in the Middle Colonies. Perhaps the locals had read about him in the colonial weeklies, but that didn’t encourage more than a few hundred of them to turn up at meetinghouses where he spoke. The population was too scattered across the countryside to assemble in groups any larger.
He noticed his greatest appeal lay among dissenters, and his least among members of his own church. No doubt they had heard how he denounced the commissaries in the Northeast and railed against Anglican corruption. While nonconformists might enjoy this kind of rhetoric, it did not make him popular with his fellow clergymen. A few opened their doors to him, but more often he engaged in skirmishes with clerics who were unimpressed with his animated style and confrontational message, which only seemed to incite division and pit parishioners against one another for no clear reason.
One layman of the Church of England, Stephen Bordley, saw Whitefield preach in Annapolis. While taken by his good teeth, handsome presence, pleasant voice, and excellent pronunciation, he had harsh words for everything else: “[H]is language is mean and groveling, without the least elegance; and his method of discourse is ten times worse than his language, or rather he has no method at all.” He found Whitefield’s study of divinity suspect, his anticlerical attitude unfounded, and his rhetoric brutish. In short, “he is a very wretched divine. . . . If he is sincere, he certainly is a violent enthusiast. If not, he is a most vain and arrogant hypocrite.”
Whitefield remained steadfast in the face of his critics, and he looked forward to seeing Georgia again, and escaping the Upper South as soon as he could. As he wrote in a letter to Gilbert, “in these parts Satan seems to lead people captive at his will.”
He began to take a closer look at the landscape of the South and its social and racial divides. In the same letter, he came to realize “Here there are no great towns, as in other provinces, and the commonality is made up of Negroes and convicts” who faced abuse at the hands of their respective masters, and endless demands to work ever harder.
By the end of the year he pushed on into North Carolina, crossing on horseback over rivers and swamps swollen by winter rains, past meager townships and hamlets in the thinly populated colony, where he found more dancing masters than ministers. The Christian revival had not ignited here, and Whitefield’s preaching didn’t spark it. His heart sank to witness “what an indifferent manner everything was carried on.”
Now isolated from his allies in the Middle Colonies and Britain, a spirit of desolation crept in. The old familiar doubts, the fears, the sadness were made worse by his spending Christmas in such a barren place. “I cried mightily to the Lord in my secret devotions, and in the afternoon when I read prayers and preached.” A poor local woman’s offer of a free holiday dinner cheered him up a bit.
Aside from the camaraderie of his traveling associates, he had few real friends and “virtually no local or private life,” as he preached up to fifty hours a week. He could dispense homilies and biblical wisdom, but he found it difficult to share confidences with old friends or make new ones. And like other Methodist reformers, Whitefield felt uncomfortable with the idea of romantic love. He could praise a couple’s shared admiration and worship of Christ, but anything further seemed to tempt carnality and moral depravity. He did become fixated on a woman, Elizabeth Delamotte, but agonized over his feelings for her, which seemed to invite physical desire, and that he could not allow. Still, since he could not be seen as a celibate priest, he soon proposed marriage to her in a letter. He offered that upon their matrimony, she would oversee the Georgia orphanage in his absence, and he would treat her “uprightly” like a sister, without resort to lust or physical indulgence of any kind. She rejected his proposal.
Whitefield reached South Carolina on New Year’s Day, 1740, but his spirits did not brighten after a few strained encounters with the locals. At dusk he came to a tavern where a local woman danced a jig to lively folk tunes. The Itinerant informed her such activity was sinful and suggested “how well pleased the devil was with every step she took.” He implored her and the musicians to abandon their frivolity with a lecture on their wantonness and ungodly behavior. He thought he had convinced them of their folly and went to bed, only to hear the same lively tunes and the stamping of dancers’ feet once more. Their saucy defiance brought him to anger. He asked God to “suffer them not to go on in such a carnal security till they lift up their eyes in torment!” But petty curses brought him no satisfaction. He began to miss Pennsylvania dearly.
There was so much about these dark and treacherous bottomlands that he did not understand. The few people he met did not respond to the Lord’s call with joy in their hearts. A great number of residents were either destitute and living off charity or bound to servitude and lives of misery. The Anglican gentry either reveled in idleness, or engaged in horse racing and pastimes like cockfighting and gambling, or gloried in gluttony and drunkenness. Human barbarity was a constant sight.
Masters reigned over their bondsmen with depraved cruelty, using severe punishment and outright torture to keep them in a state of terror. Even worse in Whitefield’s view was the lack of spiritual instruction given to slaves, whose masters kept them from experiencing such sacraments as baptism and the Eucharist. They separated men from their wives, sold their children to the highest bidder, and debauched the very idea of marriage and the family. Such realities nauseated him and deepened his vow to bring the message of Christ to all men and women, be they slaves or free.
Yet Whitefield resisted any greater liberties for the enslaved. During his first trip to Georgia in 1738, he had argued slavery should be made legal—since it had been banned by the colony’s trustees—to make the colony economically competitive. He differed with fellow Methodists John and Charles Wesley, who saw the practice as an abomination. Like most other Anglican ministers, Whitefield rejected the idea of abolition. Indeed, the few American churchmen who had done so were largely Quakers, and he would no more accept their idea of the equality of the races than he would their other “false and unscriptural” beliefs, which he criticized in his letters.
Moreover, Whitefield feared to encounter black people. In January at a South Carolina plantation, the owner offered him accommodation. In the vicinity he saw a “hut full of negroes,” which scared him and made him quicken his pace, only to see “another nest of such negroes . . . and one of my friends at a distance observed them dancing round the fire.” He decided these were the same sort of rebels who had launched an insurrection in the colony a few months before and were doubtless fugitives who might attack him and his friends, “in great peril of our lives.” When Whitefield and company returned to the plantation, the owner assured them of their safety. It didn’t matter—Whitefield thanked the Lord he had survived.
On January 10, he reached Savannah, Georgia, completing a journey on foot, on horseback, and by canoe over 1,200 miles—a rare feat for anyone, let alone someone preaching the whole way. Surprisingly, Whitefield’s stamina only seemed to increase with his labors, and he intended to marshal his energy to build his orphanage, which he called Bethesda. He meant it to be an example of Christian charity, where destitute and abandoned children could receive shelter and nourishment while they worked on a plantation picking cotton. They would also receive five daily hours of catechism modeled on his own Calvinist theology. He thought it to be a fine solution to their material and spiritual poverty, and a worthy cause for which he had been raising funds for several years—the very essence of his public ministry.
Yet he encountered confusion and hostility as soon as he arrived. The trustees of the colony questioned his plans for religious instruction, accusing him of trying to raise servile youth for a Methodist ministry and causing problems for Anglican leaders. They also made little progress on building him a proper church in Savannah, where he was due to act as the parish priest. One trustee even thought Whitefield to be a raving, enthusiastic fool. All of it frustrated and enraged him. He threatened to denounce the trustees publicly for administering their colony so poorly and wasting his orphanage funds. They responded by calling him a menace.
The problems mounted: Whitefield could not escape his critics’ demands that he provide an account of the expenses for his holy endeavor, how he had raised funds and where he had allocated them. In response, he provided a full list of contributors, but failed to break down how much had gone to his institution and how much into his own pockets, only showing debits for “sundry provisions” that were never detailed. His foes charged him with purloining the funds and stealing charity from the mouths of orphans. They claimed he was little more than a merchandiser of religion, a “retailer of trifles” and a “pedlar of divinity”—essentially a traveling huckster who fired people up, swiped their cash, and moved on to the next town before anyone wised up.
Such accusations only served to stiffen Whitefield’s spine; he responded to his enemies with the same sharp language. He reasoned that if these bitter contests were meant to advance God’s cause, then God’s cause had prospered very much indeed. He wrote to an ally, “It often pleases me to reflect how Christ’s kingdom is securely carried on in spite of men and devils.”
Yet the battles had also given him a reputation as a troublemaker and demagogue as much as a healer and evangelist. He felt torn by the need to spread love in the pulpit and to rip apart his foes at the same time. In a letter to a fellow Welsh revivalist, he admitted the toll such conflicts had taken on him: “I have not had much enlargement in preaching, since I have been here; but my heart is often weighed down, and torn to pieces with a sense of my desperately wicked and evil heart. . . . I sometimes think my heart is more vicious and perverse than anyone’s; and yet Jesus Christ will come and dwell in me.” As long as the Lord granted him favor, he would continue to wage the war.
On his travels he found many targets for his criticism. British North America seemed to be a world riven into a small number of wealthy men, who dominated industry and society, and the beleaguered masses who suffered under their heel. It especially galled him that such men of means refused to contribute to charity—especially his—and instead hoarded treasure for themselves and their heirs. He laid out the case in a sermon, “The Great Duty of Charity Recommended,” blasting the wealthy as a scourge in God’s eyes:
Our great men had much rather spend their money in a playhouse, at a ball, an assembly, or a masquerade, than relieve a poor distressed servant of Jesus Christ. They had rather spend their estates on their hawks and hounds, on their whores, and earthly, sensual, devilish pleasures, than comfort, nourish, or receive one of their distressed fellow creatures. . . . You will not be excused because you have had a great estate, a fine house, and lived in all the pleasures that earth could afford you; no, these things will be one means of your condemnation.
These elites might control the fate of the colonies and hold sway over societies and governments, but Whitefield told his parishioners that only made them subject to God’s curse: “Go on now, you rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you: your riches are corrupted, your garments are moth-eaten, your gold and silver is cankered, and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. . . . [These sins] shall be as a worm to your souls, and gnaw your consciences to all eternity.”
Whitefield said that such elites were not found only in dancing halls and theaters, but in the churches themselves. He called out sin and corruption among the ministers of America, and especially in his own Church of England. It seemed even worse in places like Virginia and South Carolina, where even the church’s establishment by law, and the duty of all citizens to support it financially, seemed to bear no fruit in converting people to Christ. In South Carolina, the planter Hugh Bryan even told him the writings of the theologian John Tillotson—a legend among Anglicans—had thwarted his understanding of the Bible; and Whitefield saw that many Christians followed his philosophy of good works at the expense of real faith.
Yet how could he counter such beliefs, with so many Anglican pulpits closed to him? The local church in Charles Town, St. Philip’s, had barred him from speaking there when he visited in January, and other institutions would doubtless follow its example. However, it was the Carolinians, perhaps more than any other colonists, who he felt desperately needed to hear his words. He resolved to try to preach again, with more vigor, when he revisited South Carolina in March 1740.
He found the environment in Charles Town more combustible upon his return. Dissent had begun openly breaking out in nonconforming pulpits against the dominance of Anglicanism. The old patrician gentry were uneasy with the waves of newcomers, among them French Huguenot Protestants driven out of Europe, and new Baptist and Congregational churches took root in defiance of official rules. Adding to the tension were recent smallpox and yellow fever epidemics, an economic recession, and the looming memory of the previous year’s Stono Rebellion, in which one hundred slaves fought for liberty and against inhuman conditions, killed twenty whites, and met defeat at the hands of the colonial militia. For those rebels not executed in battle, the authorities had their heads cut off and placed on pikes along roadsides as a warning to other slaves who wanted to flee their bonds.
The colonial hierarchy, then, was in no mood to compromise with Whitefield. His bellicose words threatened the church hierarchy. His racial sympathies threatened plantation owners. His appeal to the masses threatened the caste system. And his denunciation of gambling and dancing threatened the pleasures of the elite. Not surprisingly, his rise to fame alarmed several powerful figures in the southern colonies—and few were as powerful as Alexander Garden.
The commissary of South Carolina, Garden had received Whitefield cordially in 1738, when they first met. Whitefield came away impressed by his fortitude, describing him as “a good soldier of Jesus Christ.” Since March, however, Garden had been using an assumed name to condemn the Grand Itinerant in the South Carolina Gazette as a threat to the colonial order who trafficked in the ignorance of his parishioners and exploited division to achieve public acclaim. He claimed he judged others harshly who differed with him, preached dubious theology, and abused scripture to serve his own ends. Worse, Garden was known for his rapier wit, being as “conservative as Dr. Johnston [sic], as vehement as Swift, and as satirical as only a Scot in poor health can be.” For once, Whitefield hadn’t crossed swords with a blundering functionary; he had angered one of the church’s sharpest and most caustic minds, who wished to see his name blackened, and his reputation destroyed.
Whitefield felt stunned by Garden’s accusations. Had he not accurately represented the gospel of Jesus Christ? If he launched a diatribe on occasion from the pulpit or raised his voice in support of the Lord’s agenda, then surely he could not be blamed for it. After all, Whitefield reasoned, his foes within the church were the ones who had twisted the message of Christ. They dismissed the beauty of the New Birth and said it produced “an arrant jumble of contradiction and confusion” that may have owed to “a warm, frantic, enthusiastic brain.” But the Itinerant knew that such a deep and emotional connection to God was the only valid one, and to think otherwise made one a Roman Catholic, a Deist, or a lunatic.
When Whitefield met Garden again in the latter’s home, the accusations only mounted, this time with increased venom, and to his face. The commissary called him an enthusiast, a troublemaker, an inciter of disorder, and a preacher of false doctrine. Garden’s rage stemmed not only from Whitefield’s attacks on the clergy, but from his dismissal of Anglican protocol like following the Book of Common Prayer for church services. Instead of obeying tradition, Whitefield disregarded the book and preached whatever he felt like. Garden threatened him with violations of canon law and barred him from preaching in any church in the colony. Whitefield told him he gave any such command the same respect as an edict from the pope.
Whitefield added to the insult by questioning why Garden had allowed decadent public balls and “midnight assemblies” to occur in Charles Town instead of censuring them. The commissary said he saw no harm in such amusements. In return, Whitefield vowed to speak against such sinful frivolities, and to denounce Garden publicly for encouraging them.
The commissary responded, “Get you out of my house.”
It should have been a shameful moment, but Whitefield didn’t see it that way. Instead he felt pity for the commissary, as well as a sudden jolt of energy. Invigorated by the confrontation, he accepted the invitations of Congregational and Baptist ministers to preach in their meetinghouses and to speak truth to their worshippers. He felt God’s power running through him, and it only deepened his commitment to fight the Anglican power structure and authorities like Alexander Garden with every spiritual tool he had.
Whitefield felt so confident of his righteousness that he even attended church where Garden preached and listened to the commissary denounce him as a Pharisee from the pulpit. Garden claimed the Itinerant placed himself above other men, and thanked God for his elevation over them. In short, he was nothing less than a smug hypocrite.
The words stung Whitefield, and made him physically ill—but it would take more than insults to crush his spirit. He would remember all the slanders of his enemies, all their baseless charges and tyrannical behavior, and in his journals he would let the rest of the world know about it. But Garden too would find success on the public stage, and in Whitefield he would discover an ideal target for everything he thought wrong with the growing revival.
In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin had found success publishing the works of George Whitefield far beyond his expectation. Even as the preacher struggled in the South, his presence still loomed large in the Middle Colonies—and readers of Franklin’s publications could hardly avoid it. By spring 1740 Franklin had brought to the public almost everything the Grand Itinerant could produce: descriptions of his church services, reprints of his sermons, ads for his books and treatises, and his increasingly popular journals. Franklin made sure three-quarters of the Pennsylvania Gazette’s issues included at least a mention of the Itinerant, and he devoted one-quarter of the column text to him and featured him on the cover no fewer than eight times. It was remarkable, for the Gazette had hardly featured religion before Whitefield arrived in the colonies, and news of the British priest now dominated it.
Franklin knew that Whitefield, despite his rigid theology, had built his appeal on the comfort he brought to his audiences, the drama of his oratory, and the simplicity of his Bible narratives—and his readers could not resist it. Subscribers had made Franklin’s gamble an unquestioned triumph, with 2,500 volumes ordered in the colonies, and some buyers ordering full sets and multiple copies. He had never seen anything like it and was delighted that fortune had once again favored his enterprise.
The investment in Whitefield also broadened his advantage over Andrew Bradford. While Franklin had shown the foresight to cut a deal with the Itinerant when he appeared in the colonies, Bradford had hesitated, and only printed two of his sermons after he arrived. The American Weekly Mercury not only failed to showcase Whitefield’s revival tours, it focused on the attacks of his critics. Franklin had no such desire to print such vitriol, and instead smothered his pages with news of the revival. A few wags even said Franklin acted as a sort of press agent for Whitefield, instead of maintaining an independent view. At first, Franklin ignored such claims, but when his bias became too obvious, he was forced to deny the charges.
On May 1, for example, the Gazette printed a story from Whitefield’s publicity agent William Seward in which he claimed he had quelled the “devilish diversions” of a music and dancing troupe in Philadelphia because the public no longer approved of such amusements. In fact, he had rented the troupe’s ballroom in advance and locked it without their permission, then claimed he had done the Lord’s work by imploring the dancers to quit their revels. In any case, the performers’ season had actually ended and they in no way intended to be swayed by the hectoring of the minister’s press flack. The hall’s owner condemned Seward’s “low craft” of a publicity stunt to “spread his master’s fame” and other critics of Whitefield’s eviscerated the false account in the Gazette. Franklin retorted with a hairsplitting defense of his actions: “the article is allowed to be literally true, yet by the manner of expression ’tis thought to insinuate something that is not true.” This convinced no one that Franklin and Whitefield weren’t in cahoots.
Indeed, Franklin’s bias was impossible to hide. For not only was religious news pushing out current events and political stories, Franklin had lessened the amount of ink he gave to the innovative novels, ideas, and philosophies of the day—the very fruit of the Enlightenment. He saw the public preferring “books of piety and devotion” over secular tomes, and psalms and hymns over “idle songs and ballads.” Since November, the revival had spread even further into Pennsylvanian life, invigorating religion in a way Franklin had never seen, and he meant to take advantage of it.
The New Birth had unquestionably altered the fabric of colonial society. Inspired by Whitefield, many congregations offered their pulpits to ministers who could bring drama to their sermons. Other parishioners questioned why their own pastors couldn’t preach in a more vigorous manner. Were they afraid to talk about about their relationship to Christ? Why couldn’t they express their devotion with greater passion, or describe how God had changed their hearts? Why couldn’t they be more like the Grand Itinerant?
Franklin appreciated the spread of the movement. It inspired better behavior and made people more virtuous. But he stopped at the New Birth. He would no more convert to the revival than he would renounce the money he had made from it. Yet Whitefield kept trying to make him change his mind. “Apply to God,” he wrote to him, and “be willing to do the divine will, and you shall know it.”
Franklin wasn’t surprised at Whitefield’s persistence. He knew the Itinerant would “pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard.” Mysteries like the Incarnation of Christ, and dogma like predestination and justification by faith, did not interest Franklin as matters of belief, and in any case had nothing to do with his quest for perfect moral conduct, in which Jesus was a model, not a messiah.
Although Whitefield’s demands for Franklin to convert were met with indifference, the printer had to admit the preacher appealed to him. He saw him as a worthy fellow, a trailblazing spirit, and a pillar of high-mindedness. And he felt the friendship growing between them. Their bond transcended religion, and profits, and cynicism. Upon Whitefield’s visits to Philadelphia, he would be a guest in Franklin’s own home, and the printer was happy to introduce him to his family and friends, or to anyone who might need to hear a good word or two.
How different this clergyman was from the others he had known. Instead of offering bombast and pretension, Franklin found Whitefield to be a genuine man of the cloth and a philanthropist. His ideas of salvation were not palliatives meant to soothe the consciences of rich and powerful men. Instead they applied to everyone, including many people so often ignored in holy discourses: women, orphans, the poor, and especially slaves. Franklin appreciated the broad scope of his friend’s ministry, even while he recognized Whitefield’s limits—as well as his own.
Franklin was no abolitionist. He owned several slaves in his early life and advertised them for sale in the Gazette. However, he acknowledged the ugliness associated with the practice, especially in his private letters. In January, Franklin learned the preacher had written a public letter, addressed to the residents of the South, that had incensed the plantation owners there because he condemned the barbarity of slavery.
[Some slaves] have been, upon the most trifling provocation, cut with knives, and have forks thrown into their flesh: not to mention what numbers have been given up to the inhuman usage of cruel task-masters, who, by their unrelenting scourges, have ploughed upon their backs, and made long furrows, and, at length, brought them even to death itself. . . . And, though I pray God the slaves may never be permitted to get the upper hand, yet, should such a thing be permitted by Providence, all good men must acknowledge the judgment would be just.
Whitefield cursed the slave owners just as he cursed all powerful and greedy men. Indeed, ever since the Itinerant’s tour of the Middle Colonies, he had grown quite belligerent toward his foes, and his critiques went beyond doctrine or theology. They cast doubt into many corners of American life and threatened to undermine the social order and civility that Franklin had worked so hard to advance.
Along with the wealthy planters, Whitefield attacked the religious authorities with a newfound ferocity. He no doubt remembered what Alexander Garden had said about him—and from the pulpit no less!—and planned to lacerate any clerics with similar ideas. In a recent winter sermon in Savannah, he had described his fellow clergymen as “slothful shepherds and dumb dogs” for their poor theology, and around the same time, he made his greatest attack yet—on an icon of the Church of England.
Franklin learned Whitefield had targeted Archbishop John Tillotson. This was no humble pastor, but a well-known theologian who had died a half-century before, whose writings were more influential to the church and sold more copies to missionaries than any other volumes aside from the Bible itself. They exalted human reason and wisdom, guided parishioners to pursue good conduct and morals, gave a thoroughly Anglican understanding of the sacrifice of Christ, and steered away from Calvinist ideas like justification by faith alone.
To Whitefield this doctrine was anathema. In traveling throughout the colonies, he learned of the still-great influence the late archbishop wielded over the church and resolved to undermine it. In several letters, sermons and a pamphlet, he took aim at Tillotson in the most bracing and uncompromising language he could muster.
He said Tillotson’s theology was specious and his followers “have built their hopes of salvation on a false bottom” of anti-Christian “sorceries.” His works did not convert a single soul amid their “false divinity and fundamental errors.” He had no knowledge of God’s grace, of original sin, of justification by faith, or any other holy truths, and he “knew no more of true Christianity than Mahomet.” He was, in short, a fraud, and no true believer should have anything to do with reading his books or praising someone who was “no real Christian at heart.”
Such an attack troubled Franklin. For this was no mere dead clergyman with equally dead ideas. He was someone who provided rational spiritual guidance to countless people, who blended faith with reason, and brought hope to many—including Franklin himself. Some of the archbishop’s quips Franklin used to illustrate a point (such as “I never knew any good to come from the meetings of priests”) and his very mission aligned with Franklin’s own: exhorting good moral conduct, respecting the mystery and beauty of divine creation, allowing for the value of good works as well as faith, and rejecting severe and intemperate philosophies. In fact, Franklin “admired Tillotson more than any other theologian.”
But what to do about Whitefield’s attack? It was clearly uncharitable, for the spirit of Tillotson was peaceable and did not invite abuse of that sort. It was also misdirected, for it was less about Tillotson than it was about the churchmen who admired him and belittled Whitefield. And it was unabashedly self-promoting, as Whitefield himself admitted: “You may make what use you will of it. I care not if the contents are published upon the house top.” The material had already been published in Charles Town, where it had caused a stir within the church, and Whitefield had plans to publish the screed in London and New York, and would doubtless want it printed in Philadelphia as well. In sum, it would be a verbal assault on someone revered by the church of which Whitefield was a minister, and would thus guarantee a sizable audience for the Itinerant’s visit to the Middle Colonies in April.
Franklin knew the anti-Tillotson tracts would be hugely profitable, but would also run directly counter to his own ideas. They would expand the audience for Whitefield’s sermons and journals and make him into a publishing sensation without compare. They would also influence countless people to reject reason, logic and a hospitable faith in the Lord and replace it with uncontrolled emotion, anger, and passion. Franklin recognized the stakes of his decision, whether to publish the material, and was torn between devotion to his philosophy and promotion of his business. But in the end he did the only logical thing. He chose the latter.
On April 10, Franklin gave the entire front page of the Gazette to the Tillotson attack. He followed with another full-page display two weeks later, and bound the articles, the pamphlet and other material into a single volume that he sold to his readers soon after. With Whitefield’s return to the Middle Colonies imminent, the public response was an unprecedented success, as Franklin knew it would be. A firestorm erupted between the Church of England and its detractors, with Whitefield as the spark—and the beneficiary. The slandering of John Tillotson made for good business, and excellent publicity for the coming season of revival.
In fact, Whitefield’s latest controversy might have been the only thing most Pennsylvanians would have wanted to talk about, if not for the uproar Gilbert Tennent had already unleashed in their colony a few weeks before.