Three Incredible Rhapsodies
Gilbert Tennent needed more soldiers to fight for the New Birth. He had zeal and passion on the New Side, but not enough believers to transform his battles against the Presbyterian elite into a full-scale war. So he came to Nottingham, Pennsylvania, to support the work of the Reverend Samuel Blair, a graduate of the Log College who had achieved a measure of fame for his inspired evangelism. Blair had recently led a revival in Londonderry Township, in the heart of the conservative southwest part of the colony, a stronghold of Scots-Irish Old Siders and named after a city in Northern Ireland. Despite the region’s hostility to the revival, Blair had worked his magic here, bringing his parishioners to fits of weeping and fainting, and experiencing “unusual bodily motions” under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Word had spread into New York and New Jersey about the wonders Blair had effected, and numerous revivalists traveled to the region to discover more about it and spread the flames however they could. If their crusade could triumph in this region, it could work anywhere in the Middle Colonies.
Nottingham was a test case: twenty miles from Londonderry, it lacked a minister after the previous one had died and was split between rival Presbyterian factions. Many people seemed ripe for swaying to the New Side, but still maintained ties to the traditional church and its respect for order and hierarchy. Gilbert wanted to change this. He knew the power of the revival lay in its emotional appeal, tapping into people’s deepest hopes and fears, their ecstasy and misery. He could not deploy subtle logic and meticulous theology to win them over; he had to overpower them with the strongest force he had. And on March 8, 1740, he delivered it.
Most of the Nottingham worshippers had never seen a preacher quite like him. He rose to the pulpit not wearing a wig and clerical robes, but sporting a huge coat that was tied in the middle with a leather girdle, his hair flowing freely. His striking, untamed appearance made him resemble a “New Testament prophet of Christ’s coming,” not unlike John the Baptist. And like the oracles of old, he cast a dramatic spell over his audience.
He began by telling them he knew he was going to stir up trouble and wasn’t happy about it. In fact he was quite sad, riddled with “grief for the injuries that have been done to the Church of God by natural ministers, that has extorted such acrimony from my pen.” He could not be blamed for the terrible words he was about to speak; his foes drove him to it.
He turned to a familiar theme: the depravity of his enemies: “An ungodly ministry is a great curse and judgment: These caterpillars labor to devour every green thing.” Those who had fought against the gospel of the revivalists were no better than insects. He also compared them to the “heaps of Pharisee-teachers” from the Bible who taught wisdom and law, but rejected Jesus. They might be educated, they might hold powerful offices, but “they had no experience of the New Birth. O sad!”
Gilbert was just getting started. He pitched his voice to a commanding tone and harrowed his audience with the horrors of sin. He told them the enemies of Christ were the unconverted ministers—those who had not been reborn like himself. Like the Pharisees, these vile men were “polished with wit and rhetoric” and marked with their “zeal, fidelity, peace, good order, and unity.” But none of those things guaranteed salvation, only uncompromising faith in God.
He issued a list of the blasphemies he blamed for the decline in modern piety: the emphasis on rationality and logic, and the celebration of ethics and good works as a way to achieve salvation. Enemy pastors promoted such heresies in their teachings, which “are cold and sapless, and as it were freeze between their lips. . . . They have not the courage, or honesty, to thrust the nail of terror into sleeping souls.”
But if they would not, Gilbert was happy to. He pushed the nail of his argument into the heart of his listeners and celebrated the turmoil that resulted. He told them it was a myth that Jesus brought tranquility to the world. No, Gilbert said, “our blessed Lord informs us that he came not to send peace on earth, but rather a sword, variance, fire, and division, and that even among relations.” Jesus was a warrior, and so was Gilbert Tennent. That gave him license to fight a war for the imperial heaven.
Gilbert now thundered at the congregation. He accused his foes in the church of being “doubtlessly damnably wicked in their manner of performance, and do deserve the wrath and curse of a sin-avenging GOD.” These enemies of Christ were everywhere—among them in the pews, preaching from pulpits, walking in the street—and faithful Christians must learn to identify them: “While some are sincere servants of God, are not many servants of Satan under a religious mask?”
Your neighbor could be a friend of God or an agent of the devil. Even worse, your dutiful minister, who preached at your community meetinghouse where you had been baptized and took communion, might very well be hell-bound himself. So it was your responsibility as a Christian to judge between the saintly and the damned, especially those in high pulpits. “Does not the spiritual man judge all things? Though he cannot know the states of subtle hypocrites infallibly; yet may he not give a near guess[?]” Gilbert didn’t have to guess; he knew who the damned were.
Devout Christians should demand nothing less than that their leaders be reborn! They should inquire into the condition of their pastors’ souls, and reject them if they were found lacking. The old wicked unredeemed ministers should be cast out and replaced with fresh new ones who had been reborn—even if those ministers had just wandered into their parishes as itinerants, without seeking permission.
He concluded that the pious should no more spend time in the meetinghouses of false ministers than they should in the company of the devil. With this, Gilbert encouraged his listeners to flee the churches of those who opposed the revival, and to “let those who live under the ministry of dead men, whether they have the form of religion or not, repair to the living where they may be edified.”
Thus Gilbert Tennent launched his greatest salvo against the Old Side, and he did so in Nottingham, well outside his own presbytery. Almost immediately, his powerful message and bracing imagery made the sermon famous. When word got out he had compared his enemies to corpses, devils, bugs and heathens, many in the established church were aghast. But more damaging they thought was how he goaded parishioners to cause trouble in the pews: to demand a level of holiness most ministers did not have, to reject well-qualified pastors who hadn’t been converted, to embrace the traveling preachers who spread conflict and division, and to undermine the entire clerical system by abandoning their parishes.
The Old Side despised Gilbert Tennent and how he used the Bible as a weapon. They also feared the discord he had brought to the church, and in recent months had been making small concessions to repair some of the damage. But now they could no sooner turn away from Gilbert’s challenge than they could accept his demands for all ministers to be reborn in Christ. They would fight him church by church, measure for measure, because they had no choice after Nottingham. Even the title of Gilbert’s sermon was a clear threat: The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.
The dissension in the pews emboldened Gilbert, and his increasingly aggressive preaching forced his audience to take a side. He had already adapted the style of George Whitefield to heighten the dramatic power of his words, and those words now echoed throughout the Middle Colonies. He imagined his influence only growing later in the spring when Whitefield planned to join him for a spring revival tour: What momentum they would have with the newly returned Itinerant in tow! And he looked forward to the Danger sermon finding a fresh new audience later in the year, when Ben Franklin published it throughout the colonies.
George Whitefield returned to Pennsylvania in April 1740, welcoming a respite from the hostile climate in the South and eager to see his friends again. The timing was opportune, for Ben Franklin had just published his attack on Archbishop Tillotson. The Pennsylvania Gazette fed the controversy and forced colonists to take sides in the battle between Whitefield and the Church of England. Was the Itinerant justified in shredding the reputation of an esteemed cleric who couldn’t defend himself? Or had he finally gone too far? Such questions not only pitted people against each other, they made for excellent publicity for Whitefield’s next round of colonial travels.
He spent ten days in and around Philadelphia and found that his appeal to the crowds had not diminished since the previous November. Some of his allies had even erected a stage for him upon Society Hill, where he could preach to some of the largest crowds he had ever seen in America. Depending on the day, 15,000 or even 20,000 worshippers came to hear him orate about the New Birth and the glory of souls “graciously melted” for Christ.
Whitefield had great plans for Pennsylvania. One of them involved a project north of Philadelphia that he called Nazareth. On 5,000 acres of land, he looked to erect a school and housing for slaves, which German Moravians—dissenting immigrant Christians—would build after they relocated to the tract. He envisioned it as an island of godliness in the wilderness, and his biggest enterprise yet. He sent his agent William Seward back to England to arrange financial matters for the new project and enlisted the aid of evangelicals in the region who wanted to assist him. But not everyone was pleased by his plans for the colony, or by his presence.
He had no sooner set foot in the City of Brotherly Love than he found a former friend had become an enemy: Archibald Cummings, the city’s Anglican commissary who had once allowed him use of Christ Church, now barred him from the pulpit and expressed his disdain for the Itinerant’s message and the way he delivered it. Whitefield was surprised to hear such a complaint. Hadn’t he been forthright in his opinions and civil in his differences with the likes of Cummings and other officials? Indeed he had, but he had also attacked the wrong archbishop in John Tillotson, and thereby lost all credit with Anglican authorities.
Commissary Cummings was happy to advertise his changed feelings. Through Andrew Bradford, he published a pamphlet entitled, Faith Absolutely Necessary, but Not Sufficient to Salvation Without Good Works. He condemned the idea that faith alone would allow Christians to jettison good works and moral behavior—“What wild, distracted notions are these? Into what dangerous mazes may they lead well-meaning credulous souls?” He accused Whitefield of besmirching a good man in Tillotson, and violating his vows: “Such vile and slanderous invectives are crimes doubtless.” And for the first time, a man of Cummings’s stature warned of the contagion that might envelop parishioners overcome by the zealots of the New Birth:
Some they have made stark mad, they have set the nearest and dearest relations at variance, disturbed the quiet of families, nay thrown whole neighborhoods and parishes into confusion by casting like Solomon’s madman, firebrands, arrows and death; nay disgorging themselves in flames of fire and brimstone; threatening Hell and everlasting damnation against all, that would not implicitly believe their incredible rhapsodies.
It was as sharp and damning an attack as Whitefield had yet seen in print. But the challenge did not sway him; it only strengthened his resolve and increased his power. He wrote, “Little do my enemies think what service they do me. If they did, one would think, out of spite they would even desist from opposing me.” His battle with his own church only made him more popular on the revival circuit and gave credibility to his mission among the dissenters who had become his closest allies.
In his Journals, he wrote passages designed to enrage his critics further, adding even bolder invective against John Tillotson: “I do not despair of seeing people bring his works, as they once brought the books of curious arts [i.e., sorcery], and burn them before all men.” With Whitefield thus comparing the archbishop to a necromancer, he set out to meet the Tennents.
He visited the elder William Tennent in his Neshaminy meetinghouse and preached to some 5,000 people there. He felt honored to testify to the glory of God in one of the tinderboxes where the revival had been enflamed. Afterward, Whitefield continued on to eastern New Jersey and greeted Gilbert Tennent and a few other allies. With his Danger sermon, Gilbert had achieved the status of pariah among the Presbyterian hierarchy, and some of his associates had become even more despised than he was. One of them was John Rowland, to whom the Philadelphia Synod had denied ordination, but who had been ordained anyway through Gilbert’s defiance. Rowland and other rebels had waited years for their moment to upend the church, and Whitefield’s grand tour of America gave them the opportunity.
Thus, the Itinerant wasn’t just fighting a battle within the Church of England; he was waging a war by proxy among the Presbyterians. Every tract he published, every speech he gave, could be seen as a salvo in these conflicts. The arguments that ensued raged in print and in the pulpits and often became as petty as they were exhausting.
After multiple rounds of fending off the attacks of his enemies and launching his own, Whitefield came to realize all of this emotional labor had done foul things to his health. He frequently found himself ailing and laid up in bed, sometimes convulsed in body, other times in spirit. He began to have a hard time buoying his energy, and flagged in the spring heat, fatigued from his duties and in need of sleep. Sometimes it was difficult even to mount the stage to deliver his homilies, but inevitably he felt the Holy Spirit pulling, dragging him forward.
He also felt antagonism curdling in his heart. Whether due to poor health or the influence of the Tennents, his spirit took a bilious turn by the end of April. As he wrote to a friend in London, he had become disgusted by all the adversaries he was collecting in America—“[c]ovetous, proud boasters, self-willed blasphemers,” among other wretches who rejected his mission. He said such men had sowed strife and division, and he had merely defended himself from their onslaught, but his moderation would soon cease. As he wrote, “I abhor controversy and disputation; but my Master’s glory now calls me to be more explicit than I have been yet.”
He condemned the clergymen who locked their church doors to him and forced him to preach in fields and barns. He spoke against the “bigoted, self-righteous Quakers [who] now also begin to spit out a little of the venom of the serpent . . . One of their head teachers called original sin original nonsense.” He even attacked his dissenter allies, who could speak well of Calvinist theology, “but never truly felt it in their hearts.” He knew they had sinned as much as anyone, but if he dared to critique their devotion, they “shoot out their arrows, even bitter words.”
Again he felt alone, stranded in a strange continent, surrounded by adversaries, at war with the agents of Satan and the ignorant and the depraved and the doomed. But he knew such opposition could be a source of comfort, and proof of his valor. He would not relent; he would not retreat; and, yes, he welcomed their enmity. For “the more I am opposed, the more joy I feel.”
He shared this joy of confrontation with the Tennents. Only they seemed to fully grasp the stakes of the battles they fought and the spiritual campaigns they waged. But the Tennents had gone well beyond other revivalists into the realm of the ethereal: They saw divine intervention in their ministries, miracles in their daily lives, and holy apparitions of their mortality—the Reverend John Tennent had even forecasted his own death in 1732.
Other reborn Christians came to believe they spoke directly to God, and saw visions of the afterlife and angels and heavenly spirits among them. The more radical seers “imagined themselves as direct participants in an unfolding cosmic drama that was rapidly drawing to its apocalyptic close.” Such ideas were textbook “enthusiasm” that establishment clerics condemned, and many revivalists fought hard to rebut. Critics called such behavior a sign of madness or, worse to Protestants, akin to the miracles and superstitions of the Roman Catholic Church.
Whitefield came to understand this mystical side of the Tennents better when he went to New York City and met William Tennent Jr., namesake of the family patriarch. Unlike his brother Gilbert, this Tennent was a more relaxed soul, quieter and more hospitable, with a voice “mellowed by a sense of the divine pity.” Whitefield took to him immediately, when William “refreshed my heart” speaking of revival successes, and they enjoyed long, intense discussions into the night about salvation and the electric presence of God in a reborn soul. As Whitefield wrote of his encounter, “our hearts burn within us when we opened the Scriptures, and communicated our experiences to each other.” But William’s experiences were like no other preacher Whitefield had known.
THE NARRATIVE OF WILLIAM TENNENT JR.
As a young man, William Tennent Jr. had died and been reborn—not metaphorically, but literally. He was only a student then, a minister in training under the tutelage of his brother Gilbert in New Jersey. He devoted his mind to the theology he learned, and his heart as a person reborn in Christ. But his studies were so rigorous, they caused “a pain in his breast, and a slight hectic.” In short order he took ill and became emaciated, little more than “a walking skeleton.” Death came quickly, and he passed away to the great grief of his family.
They laid him out on a rough board, making plans for his funeral. Hearing of the tragedy, the town folk in New Brunswick gathered to pray for his soul on its journey heavenward, but the attending physician interceded before the body could be buried. He examined the corpse and thought a bit of warmth issued from its armpit. He put the body to bed and asked that the young man’s funeral be canceled. Gilbert, however, would have none of it, “the eyes being sunk, the lips discolored, and the whole body cold and stiff.” He wanted to bury his brother. Instead, they all waited.
They persisted in watching over the corpse for three days, until its protruding tongue swelled, and the entire spectacle took a turn for the grotesque. The doctor even tried to feed the body, to Gilbert’s horror—“It is shameful to be feeding a lifeless corpse”—but at that moment, William opened his eyes and groaned. He descended back into lifeless paralysis, but the glimmer of life gave his family hope. He returned to gasp and breathe again an hour later and stayed dimly, distantly alive. That was more than his family could have ever hoped for. The town folk were shocked by the news and chastened in their doubts, especially those “who had been ridiculing the idea of restoring to life a dead body.”
After much praying and cajoling, over the course of days William regained a greater whisper of life, and over the course of a year, through much trial and pain, he slowly regained his health. Remembering his deathly experience, William recalled how he had walked with the Lord. “I saw an innumerable host of happy beings,” he said, “I heard things unutterable. . . . I felt joy unutterable and full of glory.” It was then that an angel tapped him on the shoulder and bade him return to earth. “This seemed like a sword through my heart,” he recounted. Death was preferable to living, but God still had plans for him on Earth, and so he returned to his mortal coil.
After that, William enjoyed an otherworldly kind of faith. He felt overcome by the divine presence and had searing visions of God in heaven and the afterlife. His mysticism also bred suspicion and a host of enemies. In one case he found himself accused of perjury, in an absurd accusation involving a clerical imposter and a stolen horse. The court case threatened his freedom, but before he could be convicted of the crime, a Pennsylvania couple had a dream he was endangered, and they traveled from Pennsylvania to New Jersey to corroborate his testimony and secure his acquittal.
But if God protected him through prophecy on some occasions, the devil attacked him on others. In one particularly lurid episode, William awoke from sleep to find his toes neatly severed. They bled profusely, though he had experienced no pain in their amputation, nor was there any physical evidence an animal or criminal had amputated them. He could only believe “the injury was done by the prince of darkness, of whose power and malice he was deeply convinced.” Thus, William lived his life as a holy pawn between Christ and Satan, and could only trust in the grace of the Lord, as revealed in his fantastical dreams and visions.
William’s example influenced the beliefs of his brothers and father. He channeled his mystical experiences into his ministry and developed a deep understanding of salvation and heaven. He assumed control of his recently deceased brother John’s pulpit in 1733 and continued a revival in Freehold, New Jersey, and brought the power of divine intervention toward saving souls. He made the Tennent family’s battles against their foes not merely earthbound and political, but universal and cosmic.
Inspired by the words of William Tennent Jr., Whitefield preached in Freehold to 3,000 people, sending them to fits of sorrow, ecstasy, terror, and delight. In his oratory, Whitefield felt the spirits of the family rising in him, with holy Providence transforming the lives of sinners, as “the power of God was much manifested.”
After his encounter with William Tennent Jr., Whitefield met new allies of the Tennent family, clergymen who seemed more like revolutionaries than pastors. Foremost among them was James Davenport, who had already acquired a reputation as a fervent visionary and uncompromising revivalist. In Southold, in far eastern Long Island, he had led his parishioners to experience the New Birth through desperate confessions of sin and fiery, cathartic conversions. Whitefield wrote, “God has lately highly honored [him]” by giving him the power to transform souls. Davenport had even brought children as young as eleven years of age to recount their failings and accept God’s grace and be reborn.
Davenport spoke with a style few had ever seen: he shouted with abandon, he groaned in pain, he sang with joy, he spat out words in a frenzy, he used rough language, and he rejected the old style of sermonizing that American ministers had been using for at least a hundred years. Surprisingly, he had been properly trained at Yale and graduated at the top of his class, but something about the revival bred a strange new spirit in him, one that many people found tantalizing and irresistible.
But such behavior also bred enmity in his adversaries. Whitefield reported, “[He] is looked upon as an enthusiast and a madman by many of his reverend pharisaical brethren.” Increasingly, Anglican commissaries and Old Side Presbyterians denounced Davenport and other such radical ministers as wild-eyed fanatics, as dangers to spiritual harmony and social stability, as well as the gravest accusation of all, “antinomians.”
Simply put, antinomians believed that God’s grace, and unquestioning faith in him, gave them license to do as they pleased, without regard to good works or proper conduct. Those who were saved could behave any way they wished, since God had already guaranteed their heavenly reward. Although few people claimed to be antinomian (meaning, “against the law”), in a few cases, thieves and other scoundrels had defended their actions with the excuse they had been sanctified by God. And now Davenport, the Tennents, and Whitefield were charged with doing the same thing: acting with unjust liberty to undermine the foundations of society. Whitefield knew this was a lie, but he had a hard time disproving it, since the evidence of his innocence was in his heart, not his words. As he wrote, “I abhor the thoughts of it.”
Even as the accusations mounted against him, Whitefield felt himself energized by the response to his revival tour. He returned to Philadelphia a few days later and brought about an outpouring of emotion in his sermons. Many in his audience, free whites and blacks as well as slaves, erupted with outbursts of ecstasy, even interrupting him. As the shouts and cries and cacophony of voices rose, the tumult increased to such a pitch that some worshippers “seemed affected as those that are in fits.” He had seen nothing like it before, and worried about what it meant. The people in the crowd seemed stricken with mania, possessed by confusion more than salvation, and he began to doubt whether their outpourings of spirit were truly divine. “Some such-like bodily agonies, I believe, are from the devil” and would only serve to embarrass the revival and lend credence to his critics.
This was not the America he knew on his previous trip in 1738. Then, congregants sat in respectful, often sleepy, silence as their ministers spoke, and they deferred to authority even if they didn’t respect it. Disorder in the pews was unheard of and conformity of worship a necessity. But since then, a surge in religious passion had overwhelmed the colonies, as parishioners found their voices and expressed themselves with abandon. The feelings the revival had unleashed were both invigorating and frightening, and at times Whitefield couldn’t tell whether they issued from the hand of God or the paw of Satan. Whatever questions he may have had, though, he had no choice but to welcome the conversions of his listeners and accept whatever form they took.
The next day, he attended Christ Church and heard Archibald Cummings denounce him in person as a zealous ignoramus—another blunt insult from an Anglican cleric. He refused to acknowledge the criticism and instead spoke to some 20,000 people on Society Hill, which became one of his greatest successes to date. He also offered special praise to the Tennents, who were the “most worthy preachers of our dear Lord Jesus,” and his bosom allies in a world still largely unfamiliar, and sometimes quite hostile, to him.
These days it often seemed Whitefield spent as much time doing the bidding of the Tennent clan as he did promoting the revival. He preached where they preached, their allies were his allies, their enemies were his enemies, until he became as much a warrior for the New Side Presbyterians as they were. But unlike them, he also had to battle with the Church of England, whose colonial officials belittled and undermined him whenever they could, and sapped his strength to fight two wars at once. Still, he persisted; his passionate crowds of supporters always gave him fresh energy.
Whitefield marshaled that energy when he traveled to the very place where Gilbert had given his Danger sermon: Nottingham, Pennsylvania. He wasted no time following up on his friend’s work, preaching outdoors to some 12,000 people. The worshippers had come from all around western Pennsylvania to watch him play out his Bible stories, and they responded with breathless enthusiasm. He wrote, “thousands cried out, so that they almost drowned my voice. . . . Some fainted; and when they had got a little strength, they would hear and faint again. Others cried out in a manner, almost, as if they were in the sharpest agonies of death!”
Nottingham was another success and confirmed the region as newly conquered territory for the New Siders. Whitefield was overcome with delight and spent the rest of the night traveling to Samuel Blair’s house happily singing psalms and hymns, scarcely tired after the long day.
The following day he preached in Londonderry Township, to a crowd nearly as large and chaotic. He wrote, “some were struck pale as death, others wringing their hands, others lying on the ground, others sinking into the arms of friends, and most lifting up their eyes towards heaven, and crying to God!” It made Whitefield imagine what the final days would be like, for “they seemed like persons awakened by the last trump, and coming out of their graves to judgment.” But as he contemplated this, he was rudely interrupted.
A certain Reverend Francis Alison rose to challenge Whitefield. He charged him with misquoting and misunderstanding the Bible, and was prepared to argue with him verse by verse. Shocked by the intrusion on his carefully crafted drama, Whitefield tried to defend himself, but the fellow kept after him. How did he know who had been saved and who hadn’t? Didn’t the Book of Isaiah say a person could be saved and not know it? And if this were the case, how could Whitefield judge anyone, since he wasn’t God?
This made Whitefield angry, but instead of debating the man or trying to defend himself, he issued a few sharp words and quickly mounted his horse. This villain had tried to ruin his great moment, and he could not forgive the insult. “I believe he was an enemy to God” he wrote. Later that night over dinner, still upset over the memory of the slight, Whitefield brewed with ill feeling: “I hate to have communion with ungodly unconverted ministers.” In fact, that minister was a champion of the Old Side, and a sworn enemy of Gilbert Tennent. He had ambushed Whitefield in order to embarrass him, and to remind him just how many enemies he was collecting, whether or not he even realized it.
That was Whitefield’s last major stop before he boarded a sloop and left for the South. Pleased with his work, the Tennents and his other friends bade him an emotional farewell, but the exhausted Whitefield could only return their love with a sigh of affection. Aboard the boat, he felt ashamed that he hadn’t been grateful enough for everything his friends had done for him. He resolved to do better, and asked God to grant him a humble heart.
Nine days later, still at sea, Whitefield pondered over how he had prospered in America despite the challenges, aided by so many friends who supported the revival and were willing to fight for it. He wrote, “Sometimes I think it best to stay here, where we all think and speak the same thing: The work goes on without divisions, and with more success, because all employed in it are of one mind.”
He was inspired to write to his fellow Methodist John Wesley, a close ally for many years and the original reason he had set sail for the New World in 1738. But now he meant to chastise him. He rebuked him for his resistance to Calvinism, and warned him, “I dread your coming over to America, because the work of God is carried on here (and that in a most glorious manner) by doctrines quite opposite to those you hold. . . . Here are many worthy experienced ministers, who would oppose your principles to the utmost.” He had once tolerated philosophical differences with his friends, but now felt empowered to scold them, even at the cost of their friendship.
Whitefield arrived in Savannah with a new commitment to his mission. He inspected the physical condition of the Bethesda orphanage and the spiritual condition of its residents and found them both improving. The institution now cared for forty young souls, and one hundred people overall, and he set them to work. He wrote, “The children are industrious. We have now in the house near one hundred yards of cloth spun and weaved.” Even better, they proved to be a captive audience for his gospel.
On one occasion, after telling them of the fearsome power of the Lord, and the dreadful “weight of their sins,” some of the orphans had been shocked, even horrified. They cried and moaned in the night, worrying about their accursed condition. Whitefield saw how “they are even now in frequent agonies, when lying and groaning under the sense of their original and actual sins. The next day after this awakening, for near two hours, they cried out as violently as they did the night before.” He saw this as a great success, and a path to their salvation.
The Georgia trustees, however, did not agree. Not only were they worried the orphanage might become a school for budding dissenting ministers, they were troubled by the way Whitefield made the children work and pray almost constantly during their waking hours. John Percival, Earl of Egmont, reported “not a moment of innocent recreation, though necessary to the health and strengthening of growing children, is allowed in the whole day, but much public and private prayer with frequent singing of psalms and hymns . . . [is] required. The whole discipline appears to be too strict.” The trustees tried to investigate Whitefield’s use of the funds he collected for the orphanage, only to have the Itinerant rebuff them. He would neither give an account of his finances nor consult with the trustees’ secretary on how best to assist the poor. He ignored their inquiries because he thought he knew best how to make the enterprise succeed—and he harbored scorn for them.
Feeling confident about Bethesda’s prospects, Whitefield planned to enlist the help of Jonathan Barber, an ally of James Davenport, to run the operation. With Barber’s reputation as an ardent revivalist, many Anglican critics openly worried the orphanage would be in the hands of a “parcel of wild enthusiasts.” But Whitefield cared little for their concerns, and regularly visited South Carolina to find new allies to add to his parcel.
One of them was the wealthy planter Hugh Bryan. Under his influence, Whitefield had written the tracts denouncing Archbishop Tillotson, and now Whitefield relied on him to aid the financing of Bethesda, as well as to build a school in Charles Town for the education of black children. Whitefield had personally converted Bryan and several of his close family members, and oversaw Bryan on his path to righteousness. After converting, Bryan began to have mystical visions, experiencing “raptures of joy from the rays of divine light and love” and informing others of his newfound ecstasy. This incurred the suspicions of some of his neighbors, who began to wonder just what kind of ideas Whitefield was preaching.
No one had greater doubts than Commissary Alexander Garden, who had been nursing his grievances against Whitefield since he left for the Middle Colonies in the spring. Now that the Itinerant had returned, Garden had no intention of letting his quarry escape him again.
On July 13 Whitefield attended St. Philip’s in Charles Town to hear Garden’s sermon. But as Commissary Cummings had done in Philadelphia, Garden surprised him, attacking him personally as he sat in the pews. Whitefield wrote, “had some infernal spirit been sent to draw my picture, I think it scarcely possible he could paint me in more horrid colors. . . . The commissary seemed to ransack church history for instances of enthusiasm and grace abused.” Garden not only accused Whitefield of being akin to nonconformists like Quakers, he compared him to social radicals like the Ranters of 17th-century England, who went about naked in public; the fanatical “French Prophets,” who luridly warned of the end of the world; and the Dutartre family of South Carolina, who were “guilty of the most notorious incests and murders.”
Garden had already refused Whitefield the sacrament of communion, and the next day, he surprised him again by issuing a writ for him to appear in ecclesiastical court. The charge claimed his soul was in peril and demanded “the reformation and correction of his manners and excesses.” Whitefield and his attorney duly appeared in court the day after, and said Garden had no jurisdiction over him since he had previously acted as the parish priest of Savannah in Georgia, not South Carolina. The court gave him a year to appeal the case, and Whitefield and Garden waited for word from the Bishop of London, who administered the colonies. This ensured the case would not be resolved any time soon.
Upon reflection, Whitefield assumed Garden’s enmity grew from jealousy or confusion. He felt pity for him and asked people not to scorn him, but to pray for his soul. A few days later, he attended church once more at St. Philip’s. Garden again derided him from the pulpit, if not quite as viciously as before. Whitefield resolved to leave Charles Town, but not before having one last conference with the commissary.
The next day the men debated the finer points of scripture and laid out their differences, but in the end agreed on very little. Garden would not retract his insults, and Whitefield wouldn’t change his style of preaching. The Itinerant grew disgusted with the commissary, and no longer felt as much pity for him as contempt. He told him he was “an unregenerate man, an enemy to God, and of a like spirit with the persecutor Saul.” With that he left, and told his followers, “since the gospel was not preached in the church, to go and hear it in the meetinghouses” of the dissenters. He was finished with the commissary, or so he thought. He would later learn that such a deeply devoted enemy would not relent so easily.
Whitefield sometimes wondered why he had ever brought his ministry to the South. Though he remained committed to the success of the orphanage, the hostility he encountered from the Georgia trustees and Anglican clerics had been unrelenting. Had he really become such an outcast in the region? The passionate crowds at his sermons told him otherwise, but the corrupt establishment tried to thwart him at every turn. He knew he could not relent in the face of their rancor. He had to be stronger and bolder in sparking the greater revival and must quell any fears that plagued him. God expected wondrous things from him, and he could not fail his creator.
In mid-September Whitefield planned to bring his revival tour to New England. There he would be among like minds: fervent Calvinists whose orthodoxy was pure and unquestioned. The region was home to New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts; the latter two had established Congregationalism as the official church and supported it with public taxation. That made the Church of England a dissenting sect, which should have put him out of place as one of its priests, but considering how his ministry had flourished among nonconformists, he knew he would be among friends.
Whitefield had written to several of the region’s key ministers in the months before his embarkation. One of them, Jonathan Edwards, was known for leading a revival at Northampton a half-decade before and writing about it in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, which had made his name famous in the colonies. Edwards was the consummate intellectual, and Whitefield had respectfully written to him and another important cleric, Benjamin Colman, with hopes of borrowing their pulpits. Both men responded positively and led Whitefield to think his preaching would find a happy home in New England.
He was right: News of his travels had spread throughout region, with Ben Franklin and other publishers ensuring his name and controversies would be familiar to anyone reading a newspaper or visiting a bookstore. Boston ministers took sides for or against the Grand Itinerant, and weeklies carried extensive coverage of the revival—much of it written by William Seward or Whitefield himself—including inspiring stories of worshippers redeemed, souls saved, and critics repudiated.
Showing his ecumenical side, Whitefield first dropped anchor in Newport, Rhode Island, the notorious hotbed of dissent and freethinking that Anglican critics called “fertile soil of heresy and schism” and old-fashioned Congregationalists denounced as “the sewer of New England.” Yet his initial encounters in Newport were auspicious, and the city seemed to reflect the soul of the region. He wrote that one of the first ministers he met “looked like a good old Puritan, and gave me an idea of what stamp those men were, who first settled New England.”
As Whitefield and other ministers knew, the Puritans had been blessed with a legendary history. They had had settled here as dissenters from the state church, founded the colleges of Harvard and Yale, raised icons like John Winthrop and Cotton Mather, and built thriving societies on what had once been windswept scrubland. No wonder so many Britons and Anglicans still distrusted them. They had crafted a theocracy from the native soil, and made it grow.
Whitefield’s visit to Boston began well, as he “perceived fresh emanations of divine light [to] break in upon and refresh my soul.” God himself seemed to encourage Whitefield to spread the word of Christ in the fabled city of 17,000. While Boston was no longer the economic driver of the colonies, it retained a measure of piety and a good amount of orthodoxy that seemed irresistible to him. Yet before he could raise a revival, he had to contend with more hostile clergymen.
He met with five Anglican missionaries, including the local commissary Timothy Cutler. They had heard all about Whitefield’s controversies in South Carolina, how he had tangled with the fearsome Alexander Garden, and had faced his withering attacks—which had not ceased since Whitefield left the colony. The missionaries picked up where Garden left off, questioning his methods and philosophy, wondering why he had allied with such troublemakers as the Tennents, and asking why he had called them “faithful ministers of Jesus Christ.” Whitefield replied, “I believed they were.” He would not apologize for the family or their ideas because he had fully taken them to heart and made them his own.
Commissary Cutler grilled him further. He quizzed him on his knowledge of the Bible and his familiarity with the finer points of theology, but his essential question was, “Can you see regeneration with your eyes?” He didn’t believe Whitefield had any right to weigh the condition of the human heart, for only God could judge. But Whitefield claimed he could, too. He saw it in the pews, in the fields, in the barns where he preached—rebirth in Christ before his eyes, by the power of God’s grace. Sins confessed, hearts melted, souls rebuilt, salvation achieved.
Whitefield finished the combative interview. He had held his own against Cutler and the missionaries, defended his friends, and praised the New Birth without reservation. With that, he thundered into Boston.
Welcomed by Benjamin Colman and other important clergymen, Whitefield preached with great power from the outset. His audiences grew as fast as they had in Philadelphia: 4,000 people in Colman’s own meetinghouse, 6,000 in Samuel Sewall’s, 8,000 in Thomas Foxcroft’s, and then 15,000 on Boston Common! It was on the Common where he made the greatest impression, as he “roamed around the portable field pulpit at will, amazing his audience with the sheer pathos and passion of his delivery.” He channeled his ecstasy, sorrow, wrath, joy and fury into what was his best and most inspired performance in America to date. He wrote, “I felt much of the divine presence in my own soul.”
The furor of revival began to overwhelm him. He wrote in his Journal of the deep feelings he stirred and released:
There was more of the presence of God through the whole visitation than ever I had known at one time through the whole course of my life. Justly it might have been said of that place, it was no other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven! . . . The spirit of God, indeed, seemed to be moving upon the face of the waters at that time, and who knows, but that to a great many souls, God was pleased to say, Let there be light, and there was light.
Thus the Lord had not merely sanctioned Whitefield’s revival, he had reenacted the first words of the Bible to prove it.
Now the spirit came to affect Whitefield in body as well. He cried with those who wept deeply, and convulsed with those who felt trauma: “The Spirit of the Lord was upon them all. It made intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered”—possibly a sign of speaking in tongues, or other mysterious blessings. The passions crippled him for a spell, and he felt “ragged and becoming extremely ill, violently vomiting between sermons. He was feverish, dehydrated, and sweating profusely.” Yet he persisted, for his gospel had catalyzed the Holy Spirit as he had never seen it, and he would not allow illness to hamper him.
Tragedy would not stop him, either. On the afternoon of September 22, he planned to preach at Reverend Samuel Checkley’s meetinghouse. Though it was designed to hold only a few thousand people, the crowds on this day numbered many more, and they surged into the building without restraint. As Whitefield was preparing his sermon, a floorboard cracked, and panic ensued.
People plunged from the galleries, unleashing a mass of screaming and terrified parishioners, all running for their lives. Fueled by panic, they jumped out of the pews and leapt from the windows, and “many (especially women) were thrown down and trod upon by those that were crowding out, no regard being had to the sensible screeches and outcries of those in danger of their lives, or others.”
Five people died in the melee, and the moans of parishioners came not from the New Birth, but from sorrow and horror. Whitefield was stunned by the chaos and carnage of the scene, even walking by several lifeless bodies on the ground, and he blamed the devil for the tragedy. But he would not be deterred.
He led the remainder of the crowd away from the terrible scene and felt strangely at ease. “God was pleased to give me presence of mind,” he wrote, and “I gave notice I would immediately preach upon the Common.”
To the surprise of nearly everyone, Whitefield did not postpone his sermon, and instead spoke in a torrent of rain. He would not be daunted by the weather, or chastened by death, or defeated by Satan. He thundered on through the storm.