Eight “Thy Maker is Thy Husband”: Whitefield Goes to Scotland
“THY MAKER IS THY HUSBAND”: WHITEFIELD GOES TO SCOTLAND
In the spring of 1742, Whitefield enjoyed some of his most successful preaching ever at Moorfields in London. Some there did not enjoy his successes very much, however. The fields—ripe for “Beelzebub’s harvest,” the itinerant reckoned—were lined with booths of stage players, puppeteers, clowns, and other entertainers. Whitefield wanted to “lift up a standard amongst them in the name of Jesus of Nazareth.” As he mounted a field pulpit, thousands of people left the players’ booths to hear Whitefield’s performance. The angry entertainers followed them, not to listen, but to accost the itinerant. Soon a hail of “stones, dirt, rotten eggs, and pieces of dead cats” pelted the preacher. A clown climbed upon a man’s shoulders and tried to slash Whitefield with a whip. Every time he swung at Whitefield, however, the clown tumbled down instead of hitting his target. Another clown climbed a tree close to Whitefield’s pulpit and “shamefully exposed his nakedness before all the people,” eliciting a chorus of hoots and laughter. Every attempt to silence Whitefield failed, and he went on preaching, praying, and singing for three hours.1
The danger was hardly over, however. The next day, descending from his pulpit after preaching at Marylebone fields, Whitefield suddenly felt his wig and hat nearly come off. He turned in time to see a sword graze his temple, thrust at him by a prospective assassin. A bystander knocked the attacker’s sword aside with his cane, and Whitefield narrowly escaped. Still, he would not stop preaching. Scores gave him notes expressing their spiritual progress and concerns. They were sinners, Whitefield wrote, “snatched, in such an unexpected, unlikely place and manner, out of the very jaws of the devil.”2
When we see the images of an aging Whitefield in his clerical wig and gown, we may struggle to understand these kinds of vicious reactions to him. Whitefield was no quaint parson—his ministry was intrusive, entrepreneurial, and well nigh revolutionary. Thus, it sometimes generated scorn and violence. Whitefield competed for adherents, regardless of how his tactics irritated adversaries representing the established church, Moorfields’ entertainers, or the stage actors of London’s theater district. To him, the gospel was important enough to use the new means of the marketplace to deliver it effectively. To many who responded, the ancient message of Christianity seemed, in Whitefield’s elocutions, fresh and new. One Methodist woman recalled that though she went regularly to church, she had never been “struck in such a manner” as when she heard the itinerant at Moorfields.3
Less than a year before the attempt on his life, Whitefield had arrived in Scotland, on July 30, 1741. He disembarked at Leith, Edinburgh’s port, which was just a short, “agreeable walk” to High Street, in the center of the city. Into Edinburgh flowed a range of raw and refined products, among them whales taken in the waters of Greenland, tobacco, textiles, and tea. Edinburgh handled much of the Scottish interior’s trade with London, hundreds of miles down the North Sea coast. Edinburgh was also the leading intellectual center of Scotland, graced by writers such as David Hume and Adam Smith.4
Although this was Whitefield’s first time in Scotland, he already had deep connections there. While traveling across Britain and America, he recommended works by Scottish authors such as Thomas Boston and Ralph Erskine in his short list of essential evangelical readings. Erskine was understandably pleased, telling Whitefield: “If I travel by pen as far as you do in person, and contribute my mite for spreading of gospel light, I rejoice.” Whitefield called Boston’s Human Nature in Its Four-Fold State (1720) a book “worth its weight in gold.” It was one of the best-selling Scottish books of the eighteenth century. Boston helped craft the evangelical emphasis on conversion, explaining, “We are once born sinners; we must be born again, that we may be saints.”5
Thomas Boston, who passed away in 1732, did not live to see the revivals for which he had prayed. But Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine appealed to Whitefield to bring his remarkable ministry to Scotland. Whitefield reached out to Ralph in March 1739, telling him of the awakenings in England and Wales. The more the Erskines heard about Whitefield, the more they wished he would visit Scotland, and in April 1741 Ralph implored him to come. “There is no face on earth I would desire more earnestly to see than yours,” he wrote. The Erskines resonated with Whitefield’s revivalist Calvinism, and Ralph commended Whitefield for confronting Wesley’s Arminianism. “To deny and defame divine election,” Ralph wrote, “and ascribe to themselves sinless absolute perfection is in my view such blasphemy, one might tremble to speak of it . . . Surely they may be ready next to burn their Bibles.”6
The Erskines and their allies advocated for renewal in the Church of Scotland, but authorities suspended them in the 1730s for criticizing the church. The Erskines, now representing the secessionist “Associate Presbytery,” asked Whitefield not to affiliate with pastors remaining within the Church of Scotland. Whitefield could not honor this request, disdaining denominational factions. “I come . . . to preach the simple gospel to all that are willing to hear me, of whatever denomination,” he told the Erskines. They grudgingly accepted his interdenominational bent, but asked that he at least do nothing to “strengthen the hands of our corrupt clergy.” Ebenezer also added, parenthetically, that he was “truly sorry for the Wesleys.”7
Even as Whitefield proceeded up the coast to Edinburgh, his thoughts returned to Bethesda. He sought means of helping the administrators and orphans from afar. Feverishly writing letters to Georgia (and elsewhere in Britain’s American colonies), he encouraged trusted supporters to do so as well. During an earlier preaching tour of England, he had visited Great Grandsen, the home of Anne Dutton. He wanted Dutton to use her epistolary talents for the good of key American followers, asking her specifically to write to Jonathan Bryan’s family and to James Habersham. He told Jonathan Barber at Bethesda that he was impressed with Dutton’s character. “Her conversation is as weighty as her letters,” he concluded. Whitefield was the key figure in the emerging “epistolary circuit” of Calvinist evangelicals, but many women and men across America, Britain, and the Continent played a vital role in it, too.8
Whitefield wrote personally to many residents at Bethesda, including some of the orphans. His counsel to these youths did not smooth the hard edges of his doctrines. To a Rebekah B., he confessed that his sole purpose in bringing her to Bethesda was that she might be “brought to Jesus.” Sympathizing with her struggles against sin (which she had discussed in an earlier letter), the itinerant told her, “You may well wonder, that God has not sent you to hell long ago.” (Whitefield wondered the same about himself, of course.) Similarly, Molly A. had confided to him that she was wresthng to maintain her passion for Christ, and he prayed that God would humble her by the experience. “You may now see,” he wrote, “what a poor wretch you are, how proud, how earthly, how sensual, how devilish; and yet, stupendous love! Jesus Christ will still receive you.”9
Letters went to friends in New England, too, where the revivals became more intense after his departure. Again, people in the midst of these events did not call it the “Great Awakening,” but Whitefield did rejoice that “this great awakening” had not passed over the household of one correspondent. From Daniel Rogers and Gilbert Tennent, he heard that there was a “shaking among the dry bones” among students at Harvard and Yale, and Whitefield told them that he was sorry he had said the colleges’ “light was become darkness.” Reminding them that learning without piety only promoted the devil’s interests, he urged Harvard and Yale students to study “not to get a parish, nor to be polite preachers, but to be great saints.”10
In addition to personal correspondence, Whitefield bolstered his publishing efforts in England, adjusting for James Hutton’s defection. In London, John Lewis was printing a struggling evangelical periodical called the Christian’s Amusement, and upon his return to England in spring 1741, Whitefield began managing the paper, renaming it the Weekly History; or, An Account of the Most Remarkable Particulars Relating to the Present Progress of the Gospel. The Weekly History supplied revival news across the Anglo-American world and gave Whitefield’s followers a sense of participating in one common transatlantic, interdenominational movement. The first issue, printed by Lewis in London, featured a sermon by the South Carolina Baptist pastor Isaac Chanler, prefaced by the Boston Congregationalist minister William Cooper. By controlling the content of the Weekly History, Whitefield could promote the work of Calvinist evangelical allies, who implicitly contradicted the Wesleys on election and perfectionism. As he itinerated, Whitefield sent letters to Lewis and to friends such as Howell Harris, asking that supporters read the letters in meetings and that they be printed in the Weekly History. The Weekly History and similar periodicals in Scotland and America helped overcome the disadvantages of relying exclusively on personal, unprinted correspondence to maintain the evangelical network. Magazine issues were easily reproducible and relatively cheap, and buying them meant that one did not need to correspond directly with any particular figure to know what was happening in far-distant corners of the evangelical world.11
Whitefield increasingly realized that preaching biblical truth alone did not satisfy his responsibility to communicate: he needed to use media, both old-fashioned (letters) and new (magazines), to get the word out. Every product should be used in multiple ways. He preached sermons repeatedly, then published them. Letters were to be circulated, read out loud, and printed in the Weekly History.
Upon arriving in Scotland, Whitefield sought out Ralph Erskine, taking a ferry across the Firth of Forth (the mouth of the river Forth) to Dunfermline. There he preached at Erskine’s meetinghouse, and was pleasantly surprised that when he named his text, many in the audience began rusthng the pages of their Bibles to read along with him. (He came to believe that this reflected a general Scottish pattern, telling a Glasgow audience that he thought the Scots “are better acquainted with your bibles than others are.” Daniel Defoe had similarly noted on a trip to Scotland in 1707 that “when the minister names any text of Scripture, you shall hear a little rusthng noise over the whole place, made by the turning the leaves of the bible.”) Apparently in England, Wales, and America, fewer people brought Bibles to meetings.12
The Erskines and their allies told Whitefield that they, too, had seen great workings of the Holy Spirit in recent times. Ralph had earlier apprised Whitefield that they had hosted “sacramental solemnities . . . where vast multitudes of people were present at the tents, without doors as well as in the churches.” He had never experienced God’s presence more than on these occasions: “The Spirit was sometimes remarkably poured out, and the power of the Lord was present to heal many souls.” These great outdoor celebrations of the Lord’s Supper had deep roots in the Scottish Reformed tradition. At one meeting in Dunfermline in the late 1730s, about five thousand people took communion, with tables served in the fields from nine in the morning until midnight.13
Delighted to meet Whitefield, the Erskines eagerly anticipated seeing him preach. They did not drop the issue of his denominational affiliation, however. Although Whitefield had promised to return quickly to Edinburgh, they urged him to stay longer so that they could (as Whitefield put it) “set me right about church government.” He assured them that he would return to discuss their concerns. In Edinburgh, Whitefield preached at the nonseceding Canongate Kirk, and Ralph Erskine attended and even went up into the pulpit with him. Others in the Erskines’ Associate Presbytery found this development appalling, and they took Whitefield to task for fellowshipping with the Church of Scotland clergy. The “set of grave venerable men,” the itinerant wrote, pressed him to announce an alliance with their presbytery. They also asked him to endorse the Solemn League and Covenant, an agreement dating to the 1640s and the English Civil War in which Parliamentarians formally committed themselves to promoting the Scottish Presbyterian model of church government. (England repudiated the Solemn League and Covenant in 1661 upon the restoration of Charles II.)14
Whitefield did not intend to ally exclusively with the Erskines’ presbytery, nor did he intend to recommend the Solemn League and Covenant. He found that issue arcane, at best. Ebenezer Erskine reminded the Associate Presbyterians that as an Englishman, Whitefield really could not be expected to appreciate the significance of this covenant. Patience was in order. One pastor, however, said that Whitefield deserved no patience, because England “had revolted most with respect to church government.” The itinerant tried to explain that he had not studied these issues closely, “being too busy about other matters, as I judged, of greater importance.” That excuse did not go over well. (“I never met with such narrow spirits” as the militant seceders, he complained to Gilbert Tennent.)15
Some Associate Presbytery ministers agreed that he need not immediately subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant, but they still demanded that he stop preaching at nonseceding churches. Whitefield, however, would never limit himself in such a way. “If the Pope himself would lend me his pulpit,” he declared, he “would gladly proclaim the righteousness of Jesus Christ therein.” They simply could not agree, and the end result, Whitefield regretfully noted, was an “open breach.” Although he tried to maintain a friendly relationship with the Erskines, one of Edinburgh’s Associate Presbytery pastors published in 1742 the pamphlet A Warning against Countenancing the Ministrations of Mr. George Whitefield. The pamphlet asserted that Whitefield was “no minister of Jesus Christ” and that his success was “diabolical” in origin. (Whitefield called this the “most virulent pamphlet [he] ever saw.”) Another fractious episode between potential allies was not what Whitefield needed, but principles of theology and church government kept dividing his evangelical cohort. He wrote wistfully to a correspondent about how much more irenic American Presbyterians were than the Scots: “Our brethren in America, blessed be God, have not so learned Christ” (Ephesians 4:20)16
The creation of the transatlantic evangelical network was so remarkable that we might forget just how much its members struggled to stay unified. Everywhere, disagreements troubled the movement: in England, debates between Calvinists and Arminians and fights over Moravian piety; in Scotland, feuds between Church of Scotland pastors and the Associate Presbytery; in America, tensions between Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Moravians, Anglicans, and others, and questions about the role of the evangelical radicals. Everywhere, there were personality clashes between major leaders. And evangelicals constantly wrestled with how to interpret manifestations of spiritual fervor and the workings of the Holy Spirit. While we may speak of an evangelical movement that emerged in the late 1730s, centered on Whitefield, we should not overstate evangelicals’ ability to maintain a united front.
In Scotland, Whitefield saw such large crowds that it was not safe to give public notice of his sermons. “Pressing invitations” to preach came from around the country, but many also wished to recruit him for one side or the other in Scotland’s church controversies. He upbraided John Willison, the prominent pastor of Dundee, telling him, “I wish you would not trouble yourself or me in writing about the corruptions of the Church of England.” There was no perfect church under heaven, and Whitefield insisted that the Scots allow him to preach the gospel freely and to raise funds for Bethesda.17
In mid-September 1741, Whitefield preached ten times in Glasgow, which, at seventeen thousand residents, was about the same size of Boston, and roughly half as big as Edinburgh, its counterpart to the east. The Glasgow printer Robert Smith took sermons from Whitefield’s “own mouth” (as the title page advertised) and published them with the “outmost expedition.” A nineteen-year-old convert deeply affected by Whitefield’s Glasgow sermons testified that she could not “remember distinctly” whether it was hearing his sermons or reading the printed versions that made the deepest impact. Whitefield’s pulpit delivery packed a punch, of course, but many found the experience of reading his sermons (or hearing them read) compelling as well.18
In the few cases in which we can compare evidence from delivered and published sermons, we can see how Whitefield’s spoken rhetoric dazzled. The itinerant certainly felt more comfortable preaching sermons than publishing them—fewer critics could capture and attack his ephemeral spoken words, but they pored over every published sentence for hints of doctrinal error or enthusiasm. His printed works, therefore, tend toward verbal and theological moderation. For instance, a sixteen-year-old female Cambuslang convert recalled being thrown into “confusion and amazement” when Whitefield stated in his sermon “Thy Maker is Thy Husband” that if anyone refused Christ as a spiritual husband, the devil was their husband instead. Indeed, they “sleep all night in the devil’s arms.” (Cambuslang was a village about five miles southeast of Glasgow.) When you compare the printed text of the sermon, however, the line is not nearly as striking. There Whitefield states: “If you are not married to Jesus Christ, you are married to the law, the world, the flesh, and the devil.” It said nothing about sleeping in the devil’s arms.19
His sermons paired principled theology with passionate persuasion. In one of the Glasgow sermons, “The Lord Our Righteousness,” Whitefield defended the doctrine that Christ’s moral character was imputed to believers for the purpose of judgment. Quoting Martin Luther, Whitefield argued that by the principle of imputation, “the Reformation was brought about.” Two-thirds of the way through his address, Whitefield changed to a more emotional appeal, saying, “I have been too long upon the doctrinal part. To preach to your head without preaching to your heart is doing you no good.” He asked whether his listeners had felt Christ’s imputed righteousness in their hearts: “Can ye say The Lord is your Righteousness?” Looking out over Glasgow’s High Church yard, which included the burial ground, he declared that most of the gathered throng could not say that Christ was their source of holiness. Evocatively, he advised that if they died without Christ’s righteousness, “Ye may have a pompous burial, but while your friends are carrying your bodies to the grave, your soul may be in hell.” One previously passive attendee noted that this sermon gave her “clear and heart-affecting views . . . of the wonderful inconceivable glories and matchless beauty and excellency of God in Christ.” She could scarcely keep herself from crying out in the middle of the address.20
Often when retelling Bible stories, Whitefield set scenes with the thoughts, feelings, and appearance of characters. A key word he used to introduce such extrapolations was “methinks.” For example, in a Glasgow sermon on Saul’s (the Apostle Paul’s) conversion in the book of Acts, Whitefield re-created Saul’s journey to Damascus: “Methinks I see the young zealot riding along, pleasing himself with the thought with what triumph he should ride back to Jerusalem with the people of this mad way [Christians] dragged after him.” But the resurrected Christ confronted Saul on the Damascus road, leading to his remarkable conversion. When Saul first met the disciples at Damascus, having experienced that transforming grace, Whitefield said, “Methinks I see him breaking into floods of tears, and weeping over them, saying, alas my brother, can you forgive me? . . . Can ye forgive me that I intended to imbrue my hands in your precious blood?” Whitefield also applied biblical scenarios to modern events. In the same sermon, Whitefield said that Saul persecuted Christians because he saw them as a “company of enthusiastic mad men that talked of inward feeling, of the new birth, [and] of imputed righteousness.” Those apostolic Christians sounded much like the new evangelicals.21
Whitefield also meant to shake the people of Scotland out of their nominal Christianity. Many believed that since their parents had had them baptized, and they had grown up in an overwhelmingly Christian land, and they had attended church and taken communion, they were real Christians. But Whitefield doubted their authenticity; he thought that many of these so-called Christians were little better than “baptized heathens” who “have not so much faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Devil himself.” Many in the audience, he posited, would say that they had believed since early childhood, since before they could remember. This, to Whitefield, was dubious: When had they realized the damning gravity of their sin? When they had turned to Christ for rescue? Too many “mistake an historical faith for a true faith wrought in the heart by the Spirit of God,” he warned.22
It was a “dreadful thing to fall into the hands of an angry God,” Whitefield proclaimed. Just two months earlier (likely unbeknownst to Whitefield), Jonathan Edwards had preached his celebrated “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon in Enfield, Connecticut, heralding the same danger, based loosely on Hebrews 10:31. (Although the King James and Geneva Bibles spoke in that verse of the “living God,” the phrase “angry God” was used frequently in English Protestant circles.) In another Glasgow sermon, Whitefield also warned, Edwards-like, that the unconverted were “hanging over the fiery furnace, over hell-fire, by a single thread of this life.” Whitefield painted a horrifying scene of the damned being raised to judgment: “Methinks I see the poor wretches dragged out of their graves by the Devil, methinks I see them trembling, crying out to the hills and rocks to cover them. But the Devil will say, ‘come I will take you away,’ and then they will stand trembling before the judgment seat of Christ. They shall appear before him to see him once, and hear him pronounce that irrevocable sentence, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed’ [Matthew 7:23]. Methinks I hear the poor creature saying, ‘Lord, if we must be damned, let some angel pronounce the sentence.’” But no, Whitefield thundered, “The God of Love, Jesus Christ, will pronounce it.”23
Whitefield certainly appealed to listeners’ hearts, but he also referred regularly to weighty matters of doctrine and church history. In one of the Glasgow sermons, he mentioned in rapid succession the church fathers Ignatius of Antioch, Tertullian, and Polycarp, as well as Martin Luther, assuming that his audience would be familiar with each. Whitefield and his audiences lived in a world in which even modest home- and church-based educations centered on theology and Christian history. For those who know Whitefield only as a powerfully emotional preacher, the intellectual heft of his sermons may come as a surprise.24
Both Whitefield’s rift with John Wesley and his desire to marry continued to weigh on him in Scotland. He received word that Howell Harris had recently engaged in promising conversations with the Wesley brothers, and that he “saw room to hope, that the Lord would bring us together in truth.” Whitefield quickly wrote to John, taking the opportunity to apologize for publishing the report that Wesley had cast lots before publishing Free Grace. Suggesting that their theological differences need not divide them, Whitefield reminded Wesley that in practice he offered “Jesus freely to every individual soul,” even though he believed that only the elect would receive Christ as savior. Whitefield assured Wesley that he could go as far as he liked with teaching sanctification, but Whitefield would never agree with the notion that “the in-being of sin is to be destroyed in this life.”25
Somehow the blessedness of peacemaking had stirred Whitefield while visiting Scotland. The same day he wrote John Wesley, he also wrote Peter Böhler, the Moravian leader with whom he had split in 1740. Whitefield told Böhler that he was sorry he had brought up his name in his published letter against Wesley (he had suggested that Böhler taught that the damned in hell would eventually be saved). They both had made mistakes, Whitefield said. Dropping the apologetic tone, however, he emphasized that Böhler had “not acted simply in some things.” Nevertheless, Whitefield hoped that they could heal their public rift.26
The itinerant discovered that the bad feelings between him, the Moravians, and the Wesleys would not heal easily. He did not know that Charles had written John two weeks before Whitefield did, insisting that there could be no reunion with Whitefield until he denied predestination. Perhaps John had begun to waver about whether they needed to hold the line against the Calvinists, but Charles asked how they could ever “trust [Whitefield] while the wound he has made is yet unclosed?” Charles demanded that John assure him that he was warning his Methodist flock against the “Other Gospel.” If he did not, Charles would, “on the first preaching night[,] renounce [Whitefield] on the housetop.” Both Wesleys rebuffed Whitefield’s overtures, and Whitefield told Howell Harris in December 1741 that the Wesleys’ attitudes were “worse than ever” toward them. Nevertheless, Whitefield kept communicating with them, included positive letters about them in the Weekly History, and even recommended some of their works to his followers. In his letters, he advised associates to pursue unity with other believers wherever possible, saying he thought it best “not to dispute, when there is no probability of convincing.”27
While conflict with the Wesleys ground on, Whitefield’s marital status took a surprising turn. Whitefield left Edinburgh in late October, traveling hundreds of miles south by horse, through northern England to Abergavenny, Wales. There lived Elizabeth James, an evangelical widow who was ten years Whitefield’s senior. After arrangements made by Howell Harris, she was now Whitefield’s fiancée. Whitefield’s marriage to Elizabeth James concluded his troubled pursuit of matrimony. Harris had been aware that the revivalist wished to find a wife, in spite of his disastrous courtship of Elizabeth Delamotte. For his part, Harris felt drawn to celibacy, yet he became attracted to James, a follower of his ministry, in 1739. She had “no beauty, youth or riches,” Harris wrote in his diary, but they became spiritually close. James told Harris that “God had owned [him] to her,” which gave him a “great sweetness.”28
It was not the Lord’s will for Harris to marry Elizabeth, however. By the fall of 1740, Harris had begun to think that perhaps she would be a suitable wife for Whitefield. Giving Elizabeth up was a great test for Harris; he called her his “Isaac” (referring to Abraham’s sacrifice of his son in Genesis 22). After Whitefield returned from America, he and Harris began to discuss the possibility of his marrying Elizabeth. Harris broached the topic with Elizabeth in July 1741. Elizabeth chided him, saying that even her own father would not have the right of “disposing” of her against her will. Her chaotic feelings about shifting suitors from Harris to Whitefield caused her to lose both sleep and appetite. Nevertheless, she found it flattering to become the object of attention of the Lord’s “two greatest favorites in this nation.”29
James was conflicted, yet here was Whitefield, offering her the prospect of immediate marriage. She had deeper feelings for Harris, but he seemed set against marrying. Harris declared that Whitefield was “more holy & more able to make her happy & she more worthy of him than vile me.” To make things even more complicated, Harris had another love interest besides Elizabeth James, a woman named Anne Williams, whom he would eventually marry in 1744. Five days after Whitefield and James married, Harris wrote to Williams, imploring her to marry him and assuring her that he wanted to marry not to gratify fleshly lusts but to gain her assistance in his ministry. In a subsequent letter, he confided that he had loved Anne for three years (a fact he also divulged to Elizabeth James), but that he regarded those feelings as a temptation while he still thought he might marry Elizabeth. Harris had surrendered his feelings for James so that she could marry Whitefield, but Whitefield, surprisingly, did not support Harris’s marriage to Williams. Whitefield thought Williams should marry a man named John Syms, who had replaced William Seward as Whitefield’s bookkeeper. Harris became irritated with Whitefield, telling him that he was being “selfish.” It was an extraordinary display of relational intrigue—one might say foolishness—by two extraordinarily effective ministers.30
The circumstances of Whitefield and James’s union—arranged by others, and happening quickly after an initial meeting—were not unusual in British culture, especially among wealthier classes. Either George or Elizabeth could presumably have scuttled the marriage had they found the other unacceptable during their brief courtship. But their emphasis was on the religious propriety and functionality of their union, not on affectionate feelings, which Britons were only beginning to see as an indispensable ingredient of marriage. The Whitefields’ marriage did not begin with romance, but with a mutual sense of “matching religious temperaments,” to use one historian’s phrase.31
They must have found each other acceptable, for after a few days of visiting, George and Elizabeth wed in Caerphilly, Wales, on November 14, 1741. Attendees took communion and sang a John Cennick hymn on marriage. “Jesus was present” at the wedding, Whitefield recalled. Afterward he preached on a decidedly nonmatrimonial text, Matthew 9:12, in which Jesus said, “They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.” A few months later, Whitefield described Elizabeth to Gilbert Tennent: “A widow, of about thirty-six years of age . . . neither rich in fortune, nor beautiful as to her person, but, I believe, a true child of God, and would not, I think, attempt to hinder me in his work for the world. In that respect, I am just the same as before marriage.” It was common for a widow of middling financial status with children to remarry in Georgian England, and though Elizabeth was not rich, she was probably not poor either. Whitefield considered her a promising match mainly because of her piety and maturity. She was the sort of woman who would understand the unique demands of his traveling ministry. Some in eighteenth-century Britain and America might have begun to embrace a more romantic ideal of marriage, but if Elizabeth ever dreamt of a constant companion for a husband, George repeatedly disappointed her. A week after their wedding, he left to preach in Bristol and London. Long trips away from his wife, and from his new stepdaughter, Nancy (whose name was almost entirely absent from his subsequent correspondence), became the norm.32
Methodist itinerants, especially John Wesley, were ambivalent about marriage. Autobiographies of Methodist preachers from the era commonly say little about the itinerant’s wife or children, but highlight the camaraderie among the bands of brother pastors. The ideal Methodist minister was hardworking, self-controlled, and constantly traveling away from home. For decades, Wesley made no provision for the wives or widows of his network’s preachers. Charles entered into a happy marriage with Sarah Gwynne and had given up itinerancy by the mid-1750s, which helps explain the friction that grew between the brothers in those years. John would get married, too, but it was a miserable, fraught union. In his attitude toward marriage, Whitefield seemed to stand in between John and Charles: his marriage to Elizabeth was pragmatic, and would be marked with suffering and terrible misunderstandings. In the long run, however, George came to depend on Elizabeth as an organizer and a communication link for his work. In his way, he loved her, but their marriage was not cozy or sweet. And he would always remind followers that in Christ, God became the believer’s true spouse.33
Some in Whitefield’s circle found the marriage abrupt: one minister wrote that although he had heard of the wedding, “[I] did not believe it till I received your letter.” Critics scoffed that the preacher had hastily married a woman “old enough to be his mother.” No one in Whitefield’s family seems to have attended the wedding; indeed, his communication with his family had become quite limited since his emergence as an itinerant. He occasionally mentioned them in letters, and he visited his mother when he passed through Gloucester. We also know that his brother Richard continued to run the Bell Inn. Even as Whitefield’s revival preaching proceeded in 1742, a note in the London Evening Post advertised “A Great Cock Match” to be held at Richard Whitefield’s inn, “in a pit just built for that purpose.”34
By the time of his marriage, Whitefield’s ministry had fully recovered from the break with the Wesleys. There was a “very great awakening” in Scotland, Wales, and New England and in English cities, including London and Bristol, he told correspondents. Others told him of packed assemblies and dramatic conversions all over the Anglo-American world. It was a work the likes of which, according to Whitefield, “neither we nor our fathers have heard of.” Whitefield continued building his evangelical network as much as he could: though his popularity and talent generated intense interest, it was impossible for him to travel and preach more than he was already doing. He had the Weekly History printing accounts of far-flung revivals, and he “earnestly recommended” new evangelical texts, such as Jonathan Edwards’s The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. This sermon, given at the Yale College commencement in 1741, was published in Boston in 1741 and in Edinburgh and London in 1742. (John Wesley published an abridged edition of the sermon in 1744—with Edwards’s Calvinist theology removed.)35
In the midst of the burgeoning awakenings, Whitefield probed the limits of what he might expect as he experienced the Holy Spirit at greater depths. Echoing Christ’s phrase in Matthew 9:17, he routinely spoke of believers being filled with “new wine.” He sometimes wondered, during intense revival meetings, whether he was “in or out of the body.” For those who felt the deep “comforts of the Holy Ghost,” he advised humility. “It is a good thing,” he wrote, “to know how to manage a manifestation aright,” navigating a middle course between frenzy and spiritual torpor. Believers could tangibly apprehend the work of the Spirit, he insisted, but he and his followers mostly eschewed claims of miraculous works such as healings or speaking in tongues. The Scottish pastor John Willison, for example, wrote, “I have myself been witness to the Holy Ghost falling upon [Whitefield] and his hearers oftener than once, I don't say in a miraculous, though observable manner.”36
Despite his conflicts with Peter Böhler, Whitefield continued to see the Moravians as having unparalleled insight into the mysteries of spiritual experience. Increasingly, Whitefield spoke in the Moravians’ distinctive phrases of “blood and wounds” theology. Count Zinzendorf and other Moravians meditated on the wounds of Christ’s scourged body in order to appreciate personally the depth of his love. In typical Moravian language, Whitefield told a correspondent that he desired to “lie as a poor, very poor sinner at the feet of the wounded Lamb,” and he advised another to let Jesus’s “blood, his wounds be continually before you.” In a letter to John Cennick, who would eventually join the Moravians, Whitefield said he found all his happiness “in the wounds, and blood of a dying God.” John Gillies, the eighteenth-century editor of Whitefield’s papers, apparently regarded that statement as indiscreet, and edited it to say Whitefield found all his happiness “in a crucified God.”37
In the winter of 1741–42, Whitefield explored the viability of closer union with the Moravians, perhaps as a bulwark against the Wesleys. In March 1742, he chastised John for his prejudice against the Moravians and declared, “Jesus Christ fights for the Moravian Brethren. They will insensibly increase.” Although he gravitated toward a Moravian alliance, Whitefield had to be careful not to alienate American colleagues, including the increasingly moderate Gilbert Tennent, who opposed the Moravians. Tennent saw them as rank enthusiasts who promoted passion over correct doctrine. In late 1742, Whitefield spread the word among his American supporters that he had not, in fact, “joined with the Moravian Brethren.” He wanted to emphasize evangelical unity, but still recognized that some of his principles—especially those related to Calvinism—differed from the Moravians’ as far “as the east is from the west.”38
Whitefield longed to return to America, but following up his work in Scotland seemed more pressing. God had wrought a great renewal in the wake of his visit; exuberant Scottish Calvinist pastors told him that the “Lord Jesus is a picking up his elect vessels from among the herd that are reserved to a day of slaughter!” Particularly intriguing news came from the small parish of Cambuslang, where he had not yet preached. Cambuslang’s fifty-one-year-old pastor, William McCulloch, reported to Whitefield that three hundred people (in a town of less than a thousand) had come under conviction of sin, and that of those, perhaps two hundred had experienced authentic conversion. Many more descended on the town on Sunday mornings, and he estimated that crowds had numbered as many as ten thousand on recent Sabbaths. McCulloch pleaded with Whitefield to come to Cambuslang as soon as possible. Arriving in Edinburgh in early June, Whitefield told McCulloch, using language from 1 Kings 18: “The cloud is now only rising as big as a man’s hand; yet a little while, and we shall hear a sound of an abundance of gospel rain.”39
Whitefield finally came to Cambuslang in early July. Many at Cambuslang had heard Whitefield preach before: one Cambuslang convert—a nineteen-year-old seamstress from Glasgow—recalled rejoicing when she heard Whitefield was returning to Scotland, for it was by his preaching that she had “first fallen under soul distress.” News of Whitefield heightened the Cambuslang excitement, but his presence had not first catalyzed it.40
Whitefield played a unique role in the emerging Anglo-American evangelical movement, but we should remember that most conversions and revival meetings of the Great Awakening happened without him. One New England minister noted explicitly in 1742 that Whitefield never saw the kind of outpouring of revival that had happened since the itinerant “left this land.” Cambuslang was another example: it tapped into deeper resources within Scottish Presbyterianism, assisted by the interest generated by reports of awakenings elsewhere. Whitefield’s arrival marked a crest of the spiritual surge at Cambuslang, but McCulloch and other leaders played a longer-term pastoral role.41
McCulloch was, like Whitefield, a learned man, having graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1712 with expertise in classical languages. A published sermon, delivered on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 1726, revealed McCulloch as a man of scholarly Reformed sensibilities and of strident but typical anti-Catholicism. (November 5 commemorated the foiling of the Catholic conspirator Fawkes’s plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.) McCulloch bluntly titled the work A Sermon against the Idolatrous Worship of the Church of Rome. His goal was to boost the “interest of Reformed Religion, in giving people a just impression of the evil of Popery.” This was an anti-Catholic rant, but not one born out of ignorance: during the course of the sermon, McCulloch referred to the original Hebrew and Greek texts as well as to the Septuagint (the Hebrew Old Testament in Greek) and Latin translations. Apparently, some at Cambuslang found this learned style—one lacking Whitefield’s flair—less than compelling. McCulloch was what Scots called an “ale-minister,” meaning that when he got up to preach, some in the audience headed for the pub.42
Whatever McCulloch’s deficiencies as a public speaker, he and many of Cambuslang’s laypeople earnestly wanted to see revival in the parish. By early 1742, at the request of ninety heads of families in the church, he began preaching on the new birth, and on Sunday evenings he read accounts of Whitefield’s revivals, especially the remarkable news from New England. He was delighted to meet Whitefield, who preached repeatedly at Cambuslang in July 1742, from the afternoon until late in the evening. Sometimes McCulloch kept on preaching after Whitefield had finished. The “commotion” that ensued surpassed even the most remarkable revival scenes in the colonies, Whitefield said: “For about an hour and a half there was such weeping, so many falling into deep distress, and expressing it various ways, as is inexpressible.” Military metaphors seemed to best explain the sights: “The people seem to be slain by scores. They are carried off, and come into the house like soldiers wounded in, and carried off a field of battle.” Some stayed in Cambuslang’s fields all night, singing and praying.43
Whitefield returned to Cambuslang a week later to help with an outdoor sacramental occasion, like ones he had heard about from Scottish correspondents. Over a long weekend, throngs gathered in a natural amphitheater setting, on a hillside the Scots called a “brae,” near McCulloch’s church. Congregants built two wood-framed preaching tents and set up communion tables in the fields. On consecutive days, Whitefield preached to crowds he estimated at twenty thousand. The twenty-one-year-old John Erskine, who would go on to become one of Scotland’s leading evangelical ministers, described the brae as “the most commodious [place] for hearing ever I saw.” Although the number of attendees was disputed, Erskine was “certain a voice near as good as Mr. Whitefield’s could have reached a greater number had they been there.”44
On the Sabbath, it came time, for those who qualified, to take communion. Church members, meaning those who had made a convincing profession of faith in Christ, received small lead tokens with which they gained admission to the tables. Churches from Scotland to Ulster to the Scots-Irish settlements in America had designed different shapes for these tokens. Some were plain circular pieces with the minister’s initials; those used at the great Dunfermline revival featured two hearts becoming one, just as the believer united with Christ.45
McCulloch estimated that perhaps seventeen hundred of the tens of thousands of attendees received tokens at the July assembly. Whitefield attempted to help serve the communicants, but as he moved down the line, people got out of their seats and pressed around him, thanking him for coming and sharing prayer requests. Rather than become a distraction, he left the tables and allowed the other ministers to finish.46
Once everyone had been served, the whole assembly gathered before a tent, where Whitefield preached on Isaiah 54:5, “Thy Maker is thy husband; the Lord of hosts is his name.” Ralph Erskine published a frequently reprinted 1708 poem on this verse, which was also a favorite of the Moravian leader Nikolaus Zinzendorf. Although Whitefield preached numerous sermons at Cambuslang, this is the one that converts remembered best. There was considerable variation between the preached versions and the published one, since Whitefield seems to have used a memorized skeleton outhne, but in the estimation of an early Scottish church historian, he delivered it each time “as his own feelings and a sense of duty prompted.”47
In the published version of the sermon, Whitefield emphasized his simple preaching method. “I came not here to shoot over people’s heads,” he declared, but “to reach their hearts. Accordingly, I shall endeavor to clothe my ideas in such plain language, that the meanest [lowhest] Negro or servant, if God is pleased to give a hearing ear, may understand me.” He spoke directly to the correct practice of the communion many had just taken, urging ministers to serve the Lord’s Supper only to those who had united with Christ in spiritual marriage. Those who received communion in a worthy manner, he exclaimed, were “one with Christ, and Christ with them,” and “they dwell in Christ, and Christ in them.”48 Going to the matrimonial metaphor of his text, Whitefield insisted that the “poorest and most illiterate person here present [may] easily know, whether or not he is really married to Jesus Christ.” Furthermore, he or she could often (though not always) know the time and circumstances under which that union occurred. “The day of our espousals is, generally, a very remarkable day; a day to be had in everlasting remembrance,” he noted. Most true believers, he contended, could remember the moment of their conversion, just as they would remember their own wedding.49
Christ was the spiritual husband of every believer. Therefore, if earthly wives were to be “subject to their own husbands in everything, how much more ought believers, whether men or women, be subject to Jesus Christ.” They were Christ’s possession, body and soul. Whitefield’s comparison of the believer’s union with Christ to earthly marriage was common among early evangelicals; many preachers went further than Whitefield and used language of “ravishment”—a word with sexual overtones—to describe one’s experience with Christ. As seen in Isaiah 54:5, the Song of Solomon, and a number of other scriptural passages, the theme of marital union between God and his people frequently appeared in scripture as well.50
Still, one is struck by how evangelical men readily accepted the metaphor of a bride’s relationship with her husband to describe their relationship with Christ. Whitefield and other revivalists consistently promoted it, and men and women seem to have employed it with similar frequency in their conversion testimonies. In the absence of identifying biographical information, it is often difficult to tell whether a given evangelical testimony in this era was written by a man or woman. Some scholars suggest, however, that women emphasized the physicality and intimacy of the marital metaphor more than men did.51
For example, borrowing from the Song of Solomon, Newport’s Sarah Osborn spoke of Christ as a lover who “stood knocking till his head was filled with the dew and his locks with the drops of the night,” waiting for admission into her stubborn heart. (Her pastor and editor, Samuel Hopkins, deleted this passage from the published version.) After losing her first husband, who died at sea, the young widow seized upon the promise of Isaiah 54. In a critical moment of her conversion process, Osborn (apparently at random) turned to this passage and received it as words directly from God to her: “Thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of Hosts is his name.” This was in 1737, before the text had become a staple of Whitefield’s preaching.52
William McCulloch compiled a remarkable collection of 109 testimonies from the Cambuslang revival. He may have intended them for publication, but McCulloch’s two bound manuscripts have appeared only recently in modern print editions. The interviewees offered remarkable accounts of how they experienced Whitefield’s revival preaching. But even as the testimonies confirm Whitefield’s powerful influence, they suggest that neither Whitefield nor the other ministers could fully control laypeople’s responses to revival preaching.53
William Baillie, one of the converts, found that Whitefield’s “Thy Maker is Thy Husband” sermon helped him achieve assurance of salvation. Baillie had sought clear evidence of God’s work in his life for some time before the Cambuslang revival. His faith soared at Cambuslang’s communion tables, as he testified: “I was . . . enabled to receive Jesus Christ by faith, as exhibited in that ordinance, under the broken bread and poured out wine . . . I looked upon his body in that ordinance as broken for me.”54 That evening, Baillie heard Whitefield, “a stranger minister,” preach “Thy Maker is Thy Husband.” Baillie found himself cheered by Whitefield’s description of the believer’s marital responsibilities to Christ, “agreeing to every one of them, as ever bride did to the articles of a contract with one to be her husband.” Baillie hardly balked at the marriage metaphor, but instead found it full of spiritual comfort. Similarly, a twenty-year-old unmarried man said that he “greatly rejoiced” at the thought that he stood “in such a relation to Christ.”55
Dramatically concluding the sermon, Whitefield asked whether anyone wished “to take Christ for their husband.” If they did, he extended an invitation: “Come and I'll marry you to him just now.” This resonated biblically with the Apostle Paul’s statement to the Christians at Corinth that he had “espoused” the church to “one husband” so that he might present it “as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:2). A twenty-one-year old male convert said that when Whitefield “laid out the terms” of the union with Christ, he found his “heart made sweetly to agree to those terms.” Another convert ran to embrace a friend, exclaiming that the minister had “married my soul to Christ.” Then he lay down on the brae, wishing that he could die on the spot and go to be with Christ. Whitefield wrote that many “were married to the Lord Jesus that night.”56
Margaret Lap, an unmarried twenty-nine-year-old who heard Whitefield preach first on his initial visit to Scotland in September 1741, found that his evocation of the dangers of hell summoned “great confusion” in her. She also attended his preaching of “Thy Maker is Thy Husband.” The message lodged in her mind, staying with her for months or even years afterward. She frequently had Scripture passages impressed on her as she gained assurance, but early one Friday morning, while she still lay in bed, “these words, ‘Thy Maker is thy Husband,’” came rushing into her thoughts, along “with several notes of a sermon of a certain minister.” She became physically overwhelmed—“sick,” she said—with love for Jesus, and the Spirit made her believe that Christ was indeed her spiritual husband.57
Another McCulloch interviewee, Anne Wylie (thirty-two and also unmarried), experienced conversion during a sermon by McCulloch, but Whitefield’s printed sermons still played a role. Her experience was so awe inspiring that she fell into a kind of spiritual trance that lasted for an hour. Friends told her afterward that during this time she began repeating almost the whole text of a Whitefield sermon on Elijah “multiplying the widow’s oil” (1 Kings 17), which she had read earlier. She applied the sermon to herself: “I was the empty soul the Lord was filling and pouring the oil of His grace into.” It was not Whitefield alone who saw these kinds of effects: one convert testified that he had received many spiritual impressions of phrases and scriptures during his struggle for assurance of salvation. During one of Whitefield’s sermons, the phrase “a God of love” rushed into his mind, but he noted specifically that this was not something Whitefield had said. The words came directly from the Holy Spirit. He was immediately “swallowed up” in worship and adoration, scarcely knowing “whether [his] soul was in the body or out of the body.” Similarly, a Glasgow man testified that while he was listening to Whitefield, a text that McCulloch had preached on earlier struck him with such ferocity that he began crying out amidst the crowds on the Cambuslang hillside.58
Margaret Clark, a married forty-two-year old, saw one of the most remarkable visions described by any Cambuslang convert. For some time, she had experienced deep consternation over her sins, thinking she could never be forgiven. But as she listened to one of Whitefield’s sermons, a powerful image appeared before her: “I verily thought I saw with my bodily eyes, Christ as hanging on the cross, and a great light about him in the air, and it was strongly impressed on my mind; that he was suffering there for my sins.” Evangelical pastors like McCulloch were cautious about visions seen with “bodily eyes” (as opposed to visions occurring in the mind or spirit). Clark noted, probably with McCulloch’s prompting, that she never saw the cross again, nor did she desire to see it again, and that she never “laid any stress of [her] salvation upon . . . seeing this sight.”59
For some converts, hearing Whitefield brought their spiritual struggles to a conclusion. For others, hearing the preacher initiated their travails. Twenty-one-year-old John Wier testified that he had contemplated his eternal fate before, but kept putting such thoughts aside until he began listening to Whitefield. Night after night at Cambuslang, and elsewhere around the Glasgow area, Wier sought to hear as much of the itinerant’s preaching as possible. The sermons did not bring joy, but fear, because he thought that he would go to hell. Indeed, Wier began to have visions of hell, once seeing it, “as it were,” as a fiery pit where the “wicked were frying.” During one evening sermon, he felt a crushing dread of damnation. Wier envisioned that when he was “at the top of the brae, that hell was just at the foot of it, and that [he] was ready to drop into it.” Casting his eyes about the packed hillside, he imagined that “all the brae was on fire.”60
Adding to his turmoil, Wier endured threats from antievangelical mockers. Wier was a tenant farmer, and the overseer of his rented plot thought the revival was enthusiastic nonsense. The overseer threatened to confiscate his crops and kick him off the land if he went back to the assemblies. He justified this penalty by suggesting that the revival was keeping Wier and another farmer from work, and that if they would go less frequently to Cambuslang, “we might pay our rent better, and work better.” The overseer “particularly abused a certain minister,” presumably Whitefield, “calling him a mountebank and damned rascal, who was putting all the people mad.” Even Whitefield’s clerical garb had a malevolent purpose: “he put on a black gown, to fright people out of their wits,” the overseer proclaimed, and “when he put on his black gown and black cap at night he frighted them terribly.” The overseer was apparently no anti-Christian skeptic, however: he advised Wier that reading the catechism was all the religion he needed.61
Whitefield’s ministry continued to generate hostility in personal encounters like this one as well as in print. The work at Cambuslang only deepened his rift with the Associate Presbytery, some of whom published the floridly titled “Declaration, Protestation and Testimony of the Suffering Remnant of the Anti-Popish, Anti-Lutheran, Anti-Prelatick, Anti-Whitefieldian, Anti-Erastian, Anti-Sectarian, true Presbyterian Church of Christ in Scotland” against the itinerant and his Scottish supporters. Whitefield was “an abjured prelatick [Anglican] hireling, of as lax toleration-principles as any that ever set up for the advancing of the Kingdom of Satan.” He was a “limb of Antichrist” and a “boar and wild beast from the Antichristian field of England.” Cambuslang was a “mere delusion of Satan.” Instead of leading participants to reject the apostate churches of England and Scotland, this faux revival birthed corrupt interdenominational cooperation and false shows of enthusiastic ecstasy, the seceders insisted.62
Even the relatively irenic Ebenezer Erskine reportedly condemned Whitefield and the Cambuslang awakening. A Whitefield supporter testified to Erskine, “I have . . . found the Gospel he preached to be the Word of God with power to my soul,” at which the indignant Erskine threw up his hands and cried, “God save me from Cambuslang conversion and Mr. Whitefield’s doctrine!” Whitefield noted that Erksine’s “people” held a fast to pray against the Cambuslang work. (For their part, McCulloch and his allies also prayed for the seceders, that God would “open their eyes [and] remove their prejudices.”)63
Undeterred by the attacks, McCulloch and other area ministers scheduled another sacramental observance for mid-August, which Whitefield also attended. By McCulloch’s reckoning, the second event surpassed the first, not only in numbers of attendees, but also in “the power and special presence of God.” Whitefield estimated that thirty thousand people attended, with twenty-five hundred communicants at the sacrament. McCulloch noted that Whitefield, while serving at the communion tables on Sunday evening, “appeared to be so filled with the love of God, as to be in a kind of ecstasy or transport.” At ten o'clock that night, Whitefield preached through a heavy rain. “There was a great awakening,” he concluded.64
Whitefield’s American friends and opponents eagerly followed news of the Cambuslang revival. In a letter to William McCulloch, Jonathan Edwards marveled at the news of this “glorious work of God” and noted that the awakening had “spread into many other towns and parishes in that part of Scotland.” Edwards had read accounts of the Cambuslang stir in the Glasgow Weekly-History and in the Kilsyth minister James Robe’s narrative of the revival, which was printed in London, Glasgow, Boston, and Philadelphia in 1742. Kilsyth had also seen a major revival, and Robe published an account of that awakening which he titled, with a nod to Edwards, A Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God.65
Thomas Fleet, the editor of the Boston Evening-Post, printed a front-page excerpt from the seceders’ “Anti-Whitefieldian” rant in May 1743, dubiously attributing the document to the Erskines. This elicited a defensive rejoinder from Thomas Prince, Jr., in the Boston Gazette. The squabble over the Scottish revivals continued for weeks. New Englanders were keenly aware not only of the revivals in Scotland, but also of the debates surrounding them.66
Whitefield’s correspondence and publishing networks worked well. The message was getting out. With the establishment of revival newspapers, the assistance of friendly printers such as Franklin, and the unpublished letters written by associates such as Jonathan Edwards, William McCulloch, and Anne Dutton, Anglo-American evangelicals believed they were serving a common movement spanning the Atlantic, part of the broader work of the Kingdom of God on earth. But letters were not enough: Whitefield longed to return to America, to see friends in person, and to check on Bethesda. He would have to wait two more years.