Eleven “As I Grew Moderate”: Whitefield Mends Rivalries
“AS I GREW MODERATE”: WHITEFIELD MENDS RIVALRIES
Except for a brief chase by a French warship, the itinerant’s journey from Bermuda to London was placid, giving him time to rest and think. He spent much of the voyage producing a new edition of his journals. This edition would not appear for another eight years, but during the Atlantic passage he wrote about his mindset as he tempered the journals’ tone: “Alas! Alas! In how many things have I judged and acted wrong. I have been too rash and hasty in giving characters, both of places and persons. Being fond of scripture language, I have often used a style too apostolical, and at the same time I have been too bitter in my zeal. Wild-fire has been mixed with it, and I find that I frequently wrote and spoke in my own spirit, when I thought I was writing and speaking by the assistance of the spirit of God.” He had given too much weight to spiritual impressions and experiences, including revelatory dreams. Nevertheless, he thanked God for carrying him through trials “both of popularity and contempt” and for “ripening [his] judgment a little more.” His moderation went only so far, though: readers of the new version would still learn about the Spirit moving in his meetings, and about the importance of the “abiding witness and indwelling of the blessed Spirit of God” in their hearts.1
Here Whitefield was musing, as openly as he ever would, on the ministry of the Holy Spirit and on the way he should portray his spiritual journey. A decade earlier, Whitefield had so zealously embraced the promptings of the Spirit that he took little time to reflect on the risks of confusing the flesh with the Spirit. Jonathan Edwards and other revivalists had to evaluate this tension, too, and one of Edwards’s greatest successes was to formulate a rubric for assessing a believer’s experience in the Spirit, articulated in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, and especially Religious Affections, arguably Edwards’s most important theological work.
In Religious Affections, Edwards explained how an emotional response to truth about God represented the core of authentic Christianity. “True religion,” he proposed, “in great part, consists in holy affections.” The tenets of the gospel—the threat of God’s wrath, our inability to save ourselves by our works, and God’s gracious gift of salvation through Jesus’s death on the cross—will produce “lively” heart reactions when embraced by a sinner. Thus, dramatic manifestations of spiritual transport might be signs of real revival. Or they might not be. Emotions and transcendent testimonies could be fake or hypocritical. Viewing the revivals in retrospect, Edwards admitted that many of the intense experiences of the “late extraordinary season” came to nothing, leading some critics to disparage all expressions of spiritual zeal. But the only way to know the difference between godly affections and bogus ones, Edwards argued, was to test the fruit of revival. If those affective experiences enhanced the glory of God and the holiness of a believer, then one could assume they were of the Spirit. If the experiences drew attention only to the individual, and if that person showed no signs of long-term transformation, then one should question his or her claims.2
Looking back over the decade, Whitefield realized that he had not given enough thought to such distinctions between flesh and Spirit. He would never fundamentally question the role of the Holy Spirit in fostering revival. He was also cautious about denouncing even the most radical itinerants, such as James Davenport (who was on his own path to moderation). As we shall see, the Moravians were the only radical group he would openly condemn, in order to preserve his connection with Gilbert Tennent. But as he revised his journals, he knew that he needed to cast himself in a more moderate posture.
Whitefield’s and John Wesley’s published journals presented the preachers themselves as models for the Methodist movement. For an evangelical reader, Whitefield’s journal provided an exemplary life of piety, though not one without fleshly struggles. Whitefield showed followers that he wrestled with sin, weariness, and illness, yet kept striving to give his all for Christ. Editing out more “enthusiastic” aspects of the initial versions implicitly conveyed to his followers that they should not put as much emphasis on impressions and dreams, and that they should not assume that their opinions matched the will of God. He also excised references, such as the comparison of his birth in an inn to Christ’s, implying that God had uniquely raised him up as a latter-day apostle. Responding to the Spirit while maintaining humility about one’s limits: that balance was a major theme of the rest of Whitefield’s career.3
Whitefield’s journals, then, had a pastoral function for his audience; they were not merely a chronological account of things that happened to him. Even a private diary typically has a literary perspective and leaves out most of what transpires in one’s daily life. Whitefield’s journals did include questionable factual details, such as the size of crowds. His cutting and revising years later also reminds us that Whitefield depicted his life as one that average readers could use as a model their own Christian devotion. By the late 1740s, Whitefield had become convinced that focusing on dreams, impressions, and quick spiritual judgments had caused many of his movement’s early problems (seen most obviously in the career of James Davenport), and that he should no longer place them at the center of exemplary piety.4
The thirty-three-year-old Whitefield had not been forgotten in Britain during his nearly four-year absence. Public discussion about him waned, however, almost ceasing until 1748, when erroneous reports of his death appeared. One newspaper, under the heading “Tragical Occurrences,” reported in March 1748 that Whitefield lay dying at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Then in May, London newspapers announced the “death of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield, the famous itinerant preacher.” Some may have been shocked on July 3 when, as London’s General Advertiser reported, “the Rev. Mr. Whitefield (reported dead for some time since) arrived in town.” His return made the General Advertiser’s 1749 New Year’s list of “Principal Events in the Year 1748.”5
Supporters rejoiced to have their “spiritual father in Christ” back in England. The relieved editor of London’s Christian History wrote that “a new face appears on things.” Whitefield’s work had certainly continued in his absence, fueled by print and less well-known preachers. One of these preachers wrote to Whitefield from Plymouth, telling how he became an exhorter. At a crowded Methodist meeting, this man wrote, “[I] sat about reading one of Mr. Whitefield’s sermons as usual, but before I had scarce ended one page, the Lord opened my mouth to speak of my own experience, and just what he gave me I delivered to the people; so that our Savior’s glory seemed to break forth, and his power to be manifested amongst them.” The new evangelicals depended heavily on Whitefield, but their work was hardly confined to areas of his physical presence.6
The itinerant made significant ministry adjustments upon his return. First, he de-emphasized his role in heading the Calvinistic Methodist movement, feeling that it detracted from his preaching. While he still did not think that he and the Wesleys could bridge their theological differences, he did not want to build associations to compete against the Wesleys’. Longing to travel unfettered as the Lord directed, he sought to resign even his titular leadership of the Calvinistic Methodist Association and to find directors who permanently resided in Wales and England.7
Writing frankly to John Wesley a couple months after his return, Whitefield said that he feared that forming more Calvinistic Methodist societies would prove a “Penelope’s web.” This allusion, which recalled Whitefield’s classical training, was to the Odyssey, in which Ulysses’s wife, Penelope, in order to keep suitors at bay, perpetually wove and then unwove a funeral shroud (“web”), promising that she would choose her suitor once she finished it. Organization forming was a thankless task, one that did not suit Whitefield’s talents anyway. Instead of building an Anglican renewal movement (or worse, in his mind, a Dissenting denomination), he simply wished to “go about preaching the gospel to every creature.” Even if he and the Wesleys could not arrange a public reunion, he had no interest in fighting against their network. Encouraged by Howell Harris, Whitefield and the Wesleys continued to discuss possible union, and they met in Bristol in August 1749. Tangible improvements were elusive, however.8
Aside from such churchly affairs, Whitefield became involved in a peculiar conflict between the Wesley brothers over John’s intention to marry Grace Murray, a committed Methodist widow. (Wesley and Whitefield shared similar struggles in establishing healthy relationships with women.) Charles became convinced that Murray was an unsuitable mate for John, and he hurriedly arranged for Murray to marry another Methodist instead.9 The episode threatened to permanently damage the brothers’ relationship. Whitefield, who happened to come to Leeds just as this marital drama peaked, managed to broker peace between John and Charles. John arrived in Leeds, in northern England, in early October 1749. He wrote, “I found, not my brother, but Mr. Whitefield. I lay down by him on the bed.” They talked about what had happened, and Whitefield wept and prayed over him, trying to comfort John.10
The next day Charles arrived in town. John did not want to see him, but Whitefield implored him to do so. When the Wesleys met, Charles began to berate John, saying he would no longer have anything to do with him. But Whitefield and another pastor burst into tears at the prospect of the brothers’ estrangement, pleading with them to be reconciled. Finally, the Wesleys embraced and agreed not to be angry with each other any longer. (John did ultimately get married, two years later, to another widow, Mary Vazeille.) The remarkable scene suggested that the Wesleys still trusted Whitefield, in spite of their long-standing rivalry. Charles exulted, “George Whitefield, and my brother, and I are one,—a threefold cord which shall no more be broken.” Whitefield’s tearful role in reconciling the brothers did not resolve all differences between the Calvinist and Arminian Methodists, however.11
Whitefield’s ministry took another major turn with his appointment as a chaplain to Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon (see figure 11.1). After losing her husband in 1746, the forty-one-year-old countess suffered from grief and spiritual uncertainty. By 1748, she had come down firmly on the side of Whitefield’s Calvinist faith and made the itinerant her chaplain and close confidant. In August 1748 he preached four times at her London residence to “great company,” including a number of nobles. Among those who would hear him preach at the countess’s home were the future prime ministers William Pitt (the elder) and Frederick North. The countess gave him unprecedented levels of access to the wellborn. To Wesley (who was disappointed by Whitefield’s plum appointment), Whitefield wrote that “the hour is coming when some of the mighty and noble shall be called.” Whitefield did not see his emphasis on aristocrats as a turning away from common people; he saw the elites as a valued target audience who had often resisted evangelical appeals. It must also have occurred to him that wealthy benefactors could help him escape indebtedness over Bethesda.12
The turn to the aristocrats made sense to Benjamin Franklin, who told Whitefield, “If you can gain them to a good and exemplary life, wonderful changes will follow in the manner of the lower ranks.” Franklin thought that the wealthy needed Whitefield’s ministry, for “there are numbers that perhaps fear less the being in hell, than out of the fashion.”13
Whitefield soon returned to Scotland, journeying overland to Edinburgh, where he arrived in September. Complying with the countess’s request, he sent weekly updates about his travels. He confessed that he met with some “unexpected rubs” among the Scots. The Associate Presbytery continued opposing him and clamoring for his endorsement of the Solemn League and Covenant. His visit prompted them to pass a resolution vowing to use all lawful means “to extirpate Popery, Prelacy, Arminianism, Arianism, Tritheism, Sabellianism, and George Whitefieldism.” Even some of the Church of Scotland’s synods passed resolutions banning him from their churches, an action reminiscent of the hostile reception he had endured on his second visit to New England.14
He continued to see large crowds in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and also enjoyed a visit to Cambuslang, where “the great awakening was about six years ago.” Whitefield stayed only six weeks in Scotland this time, returning to London in late October. “I lead a moving life,” he said, figuring that he would have time for rest in heaven.15
To the extent that Whitefield maintained any interest in administration, it was focused on the Bethesda orphanage and Georgia. Upon his return to London, he wrote to the Countess of Huntingdon with news of what he regarded as a happy inevitability: “The negroes are allowed [in principle] by the trustees for Georgia,” he reported. If they followed through and legalized slavery, the itinerant believed that “the province, under God, will flourish.”16
He also began to think that the orphanage might serve as a “seminary of learning” for training pastors. Otherwise, how could the southern colonies have an adequate supply of evangelical ministers? It was not clear whether the pastors would be Anglican, and if so, how they could receive ordination aside from making the transatlantic trips that Whitefield considered routine. There was still no resident bishop in the colonies to perform ordinations.17
Writing to the Georgia trustees in late 1748, Whitefield exhorted them to legalize slavery so that the colony (and orphanage) could prosper. Bethesda was the largest civil employer in the province, and he implicitly threatened to refocus his efforts on South Carolina and the Providence plantation if they delayed legalization. “Georgia never can or will be a flourishing province without negroes are allowed,” he chided. But he told them that he did not intend to bring slaves to Bethesda until he could “do it in a legal manner.”18
By 1749, however, there were already at least five “negros” (presumably slaves) at Bethesda, as reported in a private letter from one of its white residents. The black workers were clearing land for a plantation. Whitefield apparently permitted the illegal introduction of slavery in Georgia after all. By the mid-1740s, many slaves had already been smuggled into the colony, and by 1749, Whitefield and many of Georgia’s property owners were certain that the trustees would legalize their presence soon anyway.19
If they did introduce slavery, he wrote, it would bolster his intention to expand Bethesda into a “place of literature and academical studies.” The Lower South badly needed such a school. Virginia’s College of William and Mary (founded in 1693) was, thus far, the only institution of higher learning in the South. Benjamin Franklin had similarly proposed opening a Philadelphia academy, the precursor to the University of Pennsylvania. To house it, Franklin wanted to use the New Building, which supporters had erected for Whitefield’s preaching. From the beginning, Whitefield had hoped the building could serve as a school. (Gilbert Tennent’s congregation, which had been meeting there, was building a new meetinghouse.) In 1749, Franklin and wealthy trustees acquired the building and began developing plans for the academy, which would initially offer secondary education, and later, collegiate training.20
Franklin sent Whitefield a copy of his Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (1749). Whitefield liked it very much, except for one problem: “There wants aliquid Christi [something of Christ] in it, to make it so useful as I would desire.” Franklin had briefly noted that students would learn the value of public and private religion, and the “excellency of the Christian religion above all others.” But Whitefield thought this was only a perfunctory reference. He pushed Franklin to make the academy fully Christian: “The grand end of every Christian institution for forming tender minds, should be to convince them of their natural depravity, of the means of recovering out of it, and of the necessity of preparing for the enjoyment of the supreme Being in a future state . . . Arts and sciences may be built on this, and serve to embellish and set off this superstructure, but without this, I think there cannot be any good foundation.”21
This was a bracing vision of Christian education, but Franklin and the trustees were more concerned about the institution being nonsectarian than evangelistic. In 1751, the secondary academy opened, and in 1755, the College of Philadelphia was chartered as the first American institution of higher education with no denominational affiliation. Whitefield knew that Franklin’s ecumenical vision would win out at the college, so he put more effort into assisting the fledgling College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), the solidly evangelical school founded in 1746. “It forbodes good for America,” he wrote, “that such a spirit is excited in so many provinces for promoting a learned and religious education. God only knows how much my heart is on that side of the water.”22
Whitefield remained mindful of his spiritual differences with Franklin, which he occasionally brought up in letters. In 1752, he commended Franklin for his growing fame related to his scientific experiments. “As you have made a pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity,” Whitefield said, “I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mystery of the new-birth . . . One at whose bar we are shortly to appear, hath solemnly declared, that without it, ‘we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.’”23
The spiritual banter continued when Whitefield came across a copy of Franklin’s personal epitaph, which the printer had written in his early twenties: “The body of B. Franklin, printer; like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be wholly lost; for it will, as he believed, appear once more, in a new and more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the Author.” Saying he had seen the epitaph, Whitefield urged Franklin in 1755 to “believe on Jesus, and get a feeling possession of God in your heart, and you cannot possibly be disappointed of your expected second edition, finely corrected, and infinitely amended.” In spite of Whitefield’s prodding, Franklin recalled in his autobiography: “[Whitfield] us'd indeed sometimes to pray for my conversion, but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard.”24
Nevertheless, the peculiar friendship endured. Franklin even speculated in 1756 about the two of them setthng “a colony on the Ohio.” He reflected,
I imagine we could do it effectually, and without putting the nation to much expense. . . . What a glorious thing it would be, to settle in that fine country a large strong body of religious and industrious people! What a security to the other colonies; and advantage to Britain, by increasing her people, territory, strength and commerce. Might it not greatly facilitate the introduction of pure religion among the heathen, if we could, by such a colony, show them a better sample of Christians than they commonly see in our Indian traders, the most vicious and abandoned wretches of our nation?25
Why would Franklin care about such a project (which never came to pass), given his admitted skepticism? He gave part of the answer to the itinerant:
Life, like a dramatic piece, should not only be conducted with regularity, but methinks it should finish handsomely. Being now in the last act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with. Or if mine be more properly compared to an epigram, as some of its few lines are but barely tolerable, I am very desirous of concluding with a bright point. In such an enterprise I could spend the remainder of life with pleasure; and I firmly believe God would bless us with success, if we undertook it with a sincere regard to his honor, the service of our gracious King, and (which is the same thing) the public good.
Even though Franklin was older than Whitefield, he was not exactly in the last act of his long life, which had almost thirty-four years to go. The printer may have doubted some specifics of Christian doctrine, but he hardly questioned the merit of working for God’s honor, the public good, and (in 1756) the service of the British monarch.26
Whitefield’s growing circumspection helped him restore relations with a number of Anglican ministers in England, as it had with Dissenting pastors in America. For example, he received a warm response in his hometown of Gloucester when he preached there in December 1748. The bishop hosted him “respectfully” at the cathedral, where he took communion, and one of his old childhood tutors commended him for his change of attitude. “He said, as I grew moderate, the offense the governors of the church had taken against me, would lessen and wear off,” Whitefield told the countess. Whitefield reflected that the “first zeal” of many preachers was often soiled with indiscretion. Yet those “first times have been generally blessed most, especially for awakening and converting souls.” He may have wondered whether those abundant “first times” had now passed him by as he entered his midthirties.27
We must not overstate the decline in Whitefield’s successes in the late 1740s. He continued to report large crowds, sometimes as large as twenty thousand. Still preaching tirelessly, he routinely put his health in jeopardy. In the summer of 1749, he toured southwestern England and southern Wales, estimating that he traveled a circuit of eight hundred miles, during which he preached to “upwards of a hundred thousand souls.” In the summer of 1750 he preached twenty times on a visit to Edinburgh, and “thousands attended morning and evening.” In mid-1751, he visited Dublin during his first preaching tour in Ireland, where he estimated one audience at ten thousand. He proceeded north to Belfast, and estimated that he spoke eighty times throughout Ireland altogether. Six weeks later he was in Edinburgh again, preaching fourteen sermons with as many as ten thousand attending each time. We inevitably grow less astonished at these repeated numbers, but his ability to draw massive crowds continued almost unabated in these years.28
A Whitefield visit still caused a sensation, especially in smaller towns. Traveling through northern England in 1750, he preached at tiny Haworth, England. The Anglican minister and Whitefield ally William Grimshaw of Haworth had experienced a dramatic conversion in the mid-1740s by reading evangelical classics such as John Owen’s The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (1677). Grimshaw went through a trancelike experience in which he “saw a dark foul passage into which he must go; and being entered, saw a very high wall on the right hand, on the other side of which was heaven, and another on the left hand, on the other side of which was hell.” He began to hear God the Father and Jesus discussing his fate: the Father said he should be damned because he still trusted in his own righteousness for salvation. But Jesus pleaded for him until the resolution arrived: “At last he evidently saw the Lord Jesus thrust down his hands and feet, as it were below the ceiling, while he remarked that the nail-holes were ragged and bluish, and streamed with fresh blood. Instantly he was filled with joyful assurance . . . [and] was filled with joy in the Holy Ghost.” During his 1750 visit to Haworth, Whitefield reportedly preached to “upwards of 10,000” people and assisted Grimshaw in serving communion to about 1,200.29
Controversy still followed the itinerant’s ministry, despite his efforts to defuse it. One Anglican official unconvinced by Whitefield’s moderate turn was George Lavington, the bishop of Exeter. Lavington launched one of the most bitter anti-Methodist attacks in years with The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists, Compar'd (1749), printed shortly after Whitefield itinerated in Exeter. There was no more damning charge than associating Methodists with Catholics, especially in the aftermath of the Jacobite uprising. Lavington detailed alarming passages in Whitefield’s and Wesley’s writings and compared them side by side with similar ones from Ignatius Loyola and other Catholic figures. He concluded that Methodism was a “composition of enthusiasm, superstition, and imposture,” and was “religion run mad.” The sensational tract appeared in multiple editions into the nineteenth century.30
Disgusted by the “virulent pamphlet,” Whitefield felt bound to respond, since Lavington was undermining Whitefield’s self-refashioning as a moderate. Indeed, Whitefield used his Some Remarks on a Pamphlet, Entitled, The Enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists Compar'd to reaffirm his new restraint. Lavington had criticized Whitefield’s and Wesley’s emphases on assurance of salvation and the inner witness of the Spirit, both of which the itinerant defended as biblical. Yet Whitefield readily conceded other youthful indiscretions. “My mistakes have been too many, and my blunders too frequent, to make me set up for infallibility,” he said. Whitefield included a copy of his shipboard “wild-fire” letter of June 1748, in which he had described some of his earlier tactics as “rash and hasty.”31
Howell Harris, however, told Whitefield that he thought he had apologized for too much, and that Some Remarks would “lessen his authority.” Harris and Whitefield’s relationship had grown increasingly strained since the itinerant’s return to England, not least because of Harris’s jealousy over Whitefield’s appointment as the Countess of Huntingdon’s chaplain. Fulfilling his wish to remove himself from administration, Whitefield formally named the thirty-five-year-old Harris superintendent of the Calvinistic Methodist societies. An awkward rift was simultaneously emerging between the two, however, especially over Moravian theology. Shortly after questioning him about Some Remarks, Harris challenged Whitefield’s speaking out against Moravians. “I see they have the main and great thing,” he told Whitefield, “the saving knowledge of Christ and his glory.”32
Harris soon began feuding with Elizabeth Whitefield, too, whom he had once considered marrying. He wrote in his journal that he received some “sore stabs” from her “spiritual pride.” The two of them apparently traveled together to Abergavenny in August, and Harris engaged in what he called a “home cutting reproving battle with Mrs. Whitefield about pride and self.”33
Harris—who never enjoyed stable relationships with women—saw his personal life spin out of control because of his indiscreet dealings with a charismatic woman named Sidney Griffith. Harris and his wife, Anne, assisted Griffith when she became estranged from her abusive husband. The same week that Harris clashed with Elizabeth Whitefield, he wrote that he attended a private society meeting at which he experienced “such triumphing, singing, dancing, rejoicing and weeping for joy” as he had never seen. Griffith was there, and Harris stayed up late talking with her and another woman. The next day, he wrote in his journal that his wife had begun worrying that he “did not love her.”34
The Welsh evangelist affirmed his commitment to Anne, but wrote in his journal that he had experienced a “total change” since meeting Griffith: he had been “raised to a new life, with God in everything.” (This sounded suspiciously like a second new birth.) He construed his relationship with Griffith as pristinely spiritual, and even told his wife that while he loved her more than ever, he was sure she would “rejoice in seeing my heart running over with pure love to others according to the ties the Holy Spirit lays me under.” Griffith had predicted that her own husband and Anne Harris would both soon die, a prophecy that Howell confided to Anne. On August 21, 1749, Anne wrote to Harris, complaining of a violent pain in her side and saying that she expected to perish soon. But she did not die, and a month later Harris noted a prayer that “Mrs. Griffith, my wife and I may be made as 3 cords in one.” In December, the three of them traveled to London together, passing an evening at the Bell Inn in Gloucester.35
In London, Harris had another “dreadful combat” with Elizabeth Whitefield, who told him that everyone there considered him prideful. After the fight, Harris had a “long conference with Mr. Whitefield.” Soon they began fighting, too, because Whitefield was not eager to have Harris preach any more. Harris told Whitefield that he was not growing in “the knowledge of Christ” and was preaching only “to the carnal and the weak, and to touch the affection.” Finally, on December 30, 1749, Whitefield told Harris, “'tis over.” He banned Harris from preaching at the Tabernacle. Harris glumly concluded that Whitefield had finally yielded to pressure from Elizabeth. “I think I am now hated by Mr. Whitefield,” he wrote.36
Remarkably, Harris continued to agitate for a public union between John Wesley and Whitefield, even after Whitefield expelled Harris from the Tabernacle. This work soon bore fruit, since Whitefield agreed to preach at Wesley’s chapel in January 1750 (Harris was still allowed to preach there, too). Wesley wrote that he and Whitefield took turns preaching and praying, and that the itinerant “preached a plain, affectionate discourse.” Wesley gratefully noted that “one more stumbling-block” had been removed by the show of unity, and Whitefield said that the “Lord was with us of a truth.” Whitefield and Wesley undoubtedly felt common indignation at Lavington’s Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar'd, which had painted both revivalists as crypto-Catholic fanatics. But not all was settled between the old rivals. A week later Wesley jotted down a backward compliment about Whitefield: “Even the little improprieties both of his language and manner were a means of profiting many, who would not have been touched by a more correct discourse, or a more calm and regular manner of speaking.” This section of Wesley’s journal was published in 1756.37
Whitefield kept up a furious pace of preaching throughout England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, but he longed to return to America. The time came in August 1751. Elizabeth stayed behind, having recently endured a miscarriage. She wrote to the Countess of Huntingdon that she was so grievously ill with a “pleuritic fever” that the doctor refused to bleed her (in medical hindsight, this was likely to her benefit). But God still supported her “in and under all [her] trials and temptations,” she said. Elizabeth and George corresponded while he was gone.38
The smooth journey to America was a welcome respite, since only a month earlier Whitefield had been throwing up blood. Upon arrival, he happily found the orphanage “in as good a situation as could be expected.” At the beginning of 1751, slavery had finally become legal in Georgia, making Whitefield optimistic about Bethesda’s prospects again (he soon began divesting himself of the Providence plantation in South Carolina). His acceptance of slavery had grown as he advocated its introduction. Whereas he had once denounced masters’ treatment of slaves in the South, now he articulated a biblical defense of slavery that anticipated proslavery thought in the antebellum American South. He told a correspondent that in his reading of Scripture, slavery accorded with God’s laws. Abraham and the ancient Israelites owned slaves, and in Joshua 9 “the Gibeonites were doomed to perpetual slavery.” He further assumed that some of the “servants” mentioned in the New Testament were slaves.39
Whitefield acknowledged that the slave trade was immoral because it violated precepts such as the injunction against “menstealers” in 1 Timothy 1. (Jonathan Edwards registered a similar objection against the slave trade, but not slave owning.) The itinerant figured that the slave trade would continue whether evangelicals liked it or not. He imagined making the best of the situation: “I should think myself highly favored if I could purchase a good number of them, in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” He never doubted Africans’ spiritual equality to Europeans, writing later that “their souls are equally precious in the eyes of an all gracious Redeemer, as ours.” Although race no doubt undergirded Whitefield’s view of slavery, he did not make a primarily racial argument for it, instead believing that Africans’ lack of civilization, education, and saving grace made them fit for slavery. He regarded other ethnic and regional groups as culturally inferior, too. Sometimes he spoke similarly of the “poor barbarous Highlanders” of Scotland and their resistance to the gospel.40
The itinerant strained credulity when he contended that he “had no hand in bringing [slaves] to Georgia,” but acknowledged that he had long favored slavery’s legalization. He noted, “I would not have a negro upon my plantation, till the use of them was publicly allowed.” As we have seen, however, slaves seem to have been residing at Bethesda by 1749, two years before legalization. Now that slavery was legal throughout the colonial South, Whitefield thought he and his associates should redeem the institution, financially and spiritually. His planter associate Jonathan Bryan helped him acquire more slaves for Bethesda. Bryan expressed frustration to the itinerant about inexplicable delays in their purchase. “I don't know why they are not bought,” Bryan fumed, “there has been several sales of Negroes . . . Your business can't go on well without them.” Another correspondent who purchased slaves for Whitefield reported that the trade was competitive, describing how the planters at the slave market would “fight striving who shall get into the Negro yard first in order to get the first choice.” The buyer acquired nine new slaves for Bethesda, including eight men and “a young wench.”41
Whitefield’s visit to America was surprisingly brief: he checked on the affairs of Bethesda and left. He cut short his trip for several reasons. The primary one was that he needed to return to England before the expiration of the Georgia trustees’ charter in mid-1752 so that he could “apply for some privileges.” He also learned that his mother had passed away during his visit. While he had remained in regular contact with her through these years, he left little indication of his reaction to her passing.42
Renewed problems with John Wesley seem also to have played a role in what he called his “sudden revolution to embark for England.” In February 1752, Whitefield wrote from Charleston that Wesley was continuing to teach against the eternal security of believers, probably even among Whitefield’s followers. After Whitefield’s departure, Wesley published Serious Thoughts upon the Perseverance of the Saints, in which he argued that Christians could fall away from God and “perish everlastingly.” “Poor Mr. W[esley] is striving against the stream,” Whitefield wrote. Believers should know, the itinerant averred, “that their stock is now put into safe hands; that the covenant of grace is not built upon the faithfulness of a poor fallible, changeable creature, but upon the never-failing faithfulness of an unchangeable God.” He trusted that this truth would prevail at the Tabernacle; by May, Whitefield had returned to London to check on the congregation there. Elizabeth also defended George in his absence. She speculated that Wesley would grieve to see Whitefield “returned so soon, before [Wesley] had fulfilled his whole will.”43
By the end of 1752, however, Whitefield was brokering peace again between John and Charles Wesley. The latter had written to Whitefield and implied that the brothers were close to another split. Whitefield told Charles that he wanted to do nothing to exacerbate the brothers’ strained relationship. But he did seem to side with Charles, noting of John: “He is still jealous of me and my proceedings.” Charles may have softened his opposition to Whitefield’s Calvinism, but theological differences continued to chafe at Whitefield’s relationship with John.44
Whitefield and the Wesleys whipsawed between friendly generosity and bitter criticism. In early 1753, Whitefield preached at the Wesleys’ chapel in London while construction proceeded on a new brick building for Whitefield’s Tabernacle. But then Whitefield spoke out against perfectionism again, calling it a “delusive dream” in a 1753 sermon, “The True Nature of Beholding the Lamb of God.” That sermon stung John. The published version appeared shortly before a Wesleyan conference at Leeds in May 1753. The assembly recommended that “a loving and respectful letter be wrote to Mr. Whitefield, wherein he may be desired to advise his preachers not to reflect (as they have done continually, and that both with great bitterness and rudeness) either upon the doctrines, or discipline, or person of Mr. Wesley, among his own societies; to abstain himself (at least when he is among Mr. Wesley’s people) from speaking against either his doctrines, rules, or preachers.” They warned him “not to declare war anew, as he has done by a needless digression in his late sermon.” John accordingly wrote to Whitefield and chastised him for promoting controversial doctrines among Wesley’s supporters, including the eternal security of believers and the impossibility of sinless perfection. Full reconciliation between Wesley and Whitefield remained elusive, yet a month later Whitefield cheerfully wrote that he and the “Messrs. [Wesley] are very friendly.”45
Whitefield and John Wesley’s clash over Calvinism set a pattern among British evangelicals for a generation. The itinerants’ feud would never again reach the public notoriety that it did in the late 1730s and early 1740s, but Wesley battled other Calvinist evangelicals in the subsequent decades. One of the most bitter clashes—one which also had a personal dynamic—occurred between Wesley and another Oxford Methodist, James Hervey, whose narrative dialogue Theron and Aspasio (1755) defended the doctrine of Christ’s imputed righteousness to the regenerate. Wesley published a 1758 rejoinder against Hervey, whom he called a “deeply-rooted Antinomian.” Hervey died at the end of the same year, before he could finish his reply to Wesley. John commented that Hervey had perished “cursing his spiritual father.”46
Once he returned to England from Georgia, Whitefield kept preaching as if he had never left, taking a tour through southwestern England and Wales to keep offering “the gospel wine and milk to sale.” In September 1752 he returned to Scotland by way of northern England, where he addressed audiences that were almost uniformly large and respectful (although some hooligans threw turnips at him in Leicester). At Edinburgh he “preached twice a day in the open air” with a number of aristocrats in attendance.47
Exactly how Whitefield determined his travel schedule is not clear. Of course, he preached more in summer than winter, and he received “continual calls” to visit and speak, more than he could accept. Certainly, he prayed over the requests, and he spoke often of going the direction the “cloud” was moving, referring to God’s presence with the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. For example, he told his longtime supporter Jonathan Belcher (by then the governor of New Jersey) in late 1752: “It was no small self-denial for me to leave America without going to the northward; but the cloud moved towards England.”48
Correspondents relentlessly pleaded with him to write and visit, sometimes professing to be “vexed” at the thought that he might not bring the gospel to their town. A “society of Christians at Sheerness” (east of London) wrote to Whitefield at length in 1752, outhning all the good effects his preaching could have in their village. They prayed that the lines of the letter might “have the same influence on you as the vision of the Macedonian had with St. Paul” (Acts 16:9). They even composed a brief verse: “The brazen doors, and iron bars shall yield, / When God Almighty speaks, by George Whitefield.” He must have received countless requests like this, and he honored many of them. In fact, he visited Sheerness in 1753.49
Even as he kept preaching and mending other relationships, Whitefield concluded that he needed to break decisively with the Moravians. This move came in his Expostulatory Letter (1753) to Count Zinzendorf. Whitefield had long admired the Moravians’ piety, but growing pressure from colleagues such as the Countess of Huntingdon and Gilbert Tennent, and increasing awareness of the Moravians’ peculiar theology, led to the final rupture. In the late 1740s, some Moravians had plumbed the depths of pietistic radicalism. They began emphasizing the motherhood of the Holy Spirit and putting an intense focus on the wounds of Christ, especially the “side hole,” where he was pierced on the cross. Moravian hymns (including ones in English translation published by Whitefield’s old printer James Hutton, by then a Moravian) featured prayers to the side hole itself, speaking in vivid terms about it:
Love’s smart will I feel for ever,
For the Side-hole I'll be sick;
Other matters whatsoever
Shall not to the heart me prick.
O for ever blessed,
Ne'er enough caressed,
Side-hole’s cavity so deep!
I will weep
After thee, and in thee creep.50
In early 1753, Whitefield told a correspondent that he had anticipated the Moravians’ heterodox turn for some time. In a total reversal from his previous sympathy, he now regarded them as “antichristian in almost every respect.” “Antichristian,” to Whitefield, implied “Catholic,” and he excoriated their use of images of people from Christ to Zinzendorf himself in worship. They were “introducing a whole farrago of superstitious, not to say idolatrous fopperies into the English nation,” the itinerant wrote.51
His letter prompted angry responses from Zinzendorf, James Hutton, and John Syms, his former secretary, who said that he regarded Whitefield as “drunk with power and approbation.” Elizabeth conveyed the “threatening” tone of Syms’s letter to the traveling itinerant, who wrote back to Syms, regretting that “Moravianism leads us to break through the most sacred ties of nature, friendship, and disinterested love.” Peter Böhler, the German-born Moravian leader, likewise told Whitefield that his missive was one big lie.52
While he broke ties with the Moravians, he kept cultivating his connection with Dissenters, especially in America. That connection was enhanced by the arrival in late 1753 of Samuel Davies and Gilbert Tennent, who had come to England to raise funds for the fledgling College of New Jersey, which would relocate to Princeton in 1756. Their visit indirectly highlights just how few of Whitefield’s ministerial colleagues ever traversed the Atlantic. The Virginian Davies found sea travel debilitating; he wrote in his diary, “I had no appetite, and the little I eat, I vomited up immediately; and the smell of the ship, whenever I entered the cabin was nauseous beyond expression. Now and then I forced a little cheerfulness, but it was wholly unnatural.” He was delighted and relieved to sail into London on Christmas Day. The sights of the city—London Bridge, the Tower—as well as the pealing Christmas bells throughout the city, overwhelmed the American visitors.53
Whitefield immediately offered his home as a base during their stay. Davies, however, was ambivalent about that invitation, since he believed that the English Dissenters had generally become “disaffected” with the itinerant. (Whitefield’s Anglicanism still made some Dissenters wary, while others had embraced Arminianism or even Nontrinitarianism.) Tennent was happy to reunite with his old friend, however, and Davies found Whitefield so generous and charming that he could not but help “admire the man, as the Wonder of the Age.” When Davies went to hear Whitefield preach at the Tabernacle, he found the sermon “incoherent,” but “better calculated to do good to mankind than all the accurate, languid discourses I have heard.” Whitefield worked to connect Davies and Tennent with wealthy benefactors.54
The itinerant did not spend a great deal of time with his American guests, however, because in March he departed for the colonies again, with about a dozen orphans accompanying him to Bethesda. Leaving Elizabeth behind, he asked friends to visit her while he was away. He traveled by way of Lisbon, Portugal, where the ship’s captain unloaded a cargo of wheat and where Whitefield spent the better part of a month. Whitefield preceded the English novelist Henry Fielding in the city by about four months. Fielding, desperately ill with gout, hoped to convalesce in the sunny, sprawhng town of about 200,000 residents. But the writer was less than impressed by Lisbon at first glance, calling it the “nastiest city in the world.” Two months after he arrived, Fielding died and was buried there.55
As in Whitefield’s earlier visit to Gibraltar, the sights of Lisbon’s Catholic devotion—its “ecclesiastical curiosities”— troubled him. He noted “the frequency of crucifixes, and little images of the Virgin Mary, and other real or reputed saints, which were placed almost in every street . . . to these [he] observed the people bow as they passed along.” He watched as a procession of priests walked “two by two in diverse habits, holding a long and very large lighted wax-taper in their right hands—amidst these was carried, upon eight or ten men’s shoulders, a tall image of the Virgin Mary, in a kind of man’s attire; for . . . she had a very fine white wig on her head, (a dress she often appears in) and was much adorned with jewels and glittering stones.” Similar ceremonies featured images of Christ and Saint Francis, and in some cases penitents flagellated themselves on their bare backs. Since he stayed through Lent and Easter, he even saw a great reenactment of Christ’s Passion on Good Friday, a drama he considered a “tragi-comical, superstitious, idolatrous droll.” Some scholars today regard these processions as evidence of the vital, participatory lay piety of the Catholic (or “Counter”) Reformation. But Whitefield did not see them this way: “O for another Luther,” he mused. “O for that wished-for season, when everything that is antichristian shall be totally destroyed by the breath of the Redeemer’s mouth, and the brightness of his appearing!” (2 Thessalonians 2:8).56
A year and a half after Whitefield left Lisbon, it did indeed seem as if the apocalypse came upon the city. On the morning of All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1755, the city was decimated by a massive earthquake and the resultant tsunami and fires, all of which killed tens of thousands. Many of those who died were attending mass in the city’s enormous stone churches, which collapsed upon them. Undoubtedly, some victims were among those Whitefield had witnessed in Lenten processions. “Poor Lisbon!” he wrote, “how soon are all thy riches and superstitious pageantry swallowed up!” He thought the world had seen nothing like this calamity since Noah’s flood.57
After a six-week journey, Whitefield arrived in South Carolina in May 1754. After setthng his orphans at Bethesda, the itinerant prepared for a far longer American visit than his last. He found Bethesda in a “thriving situation,” happily noting that the “family” there now included 106 people, counting both whites and blacks. Following about eight weeks in the South, he sailed for the northern colonies. In Philadelphia, he was pleased to preach at the New Building, which now housed the academy he had discussed with Franklin. Franklin printed an effusive description of Whitefield’s preaching, saying that his “sermons have discovered a deep insight into human nature, and great skill in moral penciling; and these, with his manner of life, have gained him justly the character of an exemplary Christian, fine gentleman, and accomplished orator.”58
On a somber occasion in New York City, he preached at the Presbyterian church before about two thousand people, speaking on Amos 4:12 (“Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel”). A newspaper reported that in the application of the sermon, “he was extremely pathetick with regard to the disturbances, not only on the frontiers of this province, but likewise on those of our neighbors.” These “disturbances” heralded the beginning of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), a global conflict whose operations in America are known as the French and Indian War.59
Not long after Whitefield’s arrival in the northern colonies, news had come of the French defeat of twenty-two-year-old Colonel George Washington at Fort Necessity, in western Pennsylvania. Washington had taken 160 men into the wilderness to confront French military garrisons there. During an initial firefight with the French, Washington’s Native American guides set upon wounded French soldiers, scalping and killing them, which elicited French charges of a massacre. The Virginians hastily built a circular open-air stockade, covering it with animal skins and bark. The French attacked in the midst of a torrential rain that left the inexperienced troops wallowing in mud and the blood of fallen comrades. Washington’s men abandoned the fort on July 4, 1754 (twenty-two years before the yet-unimaginable events of July 4, 1776). No one knew that Washington’s unsuccessful venture would precipitate a true world war, one whose battles stretched from Asia to the Caribbean and Europe. America’s frontiers churned with violence between French and British forces. Native Americans were allied mostly with the French at the war’s beginning, but their growing disenchantment with the French helped turn the conflict in favor of the British in the late 1750s.60
The Seven Years’ War made Whitefield even more sensitive to the fate of Protestant power, and to the danger of Catholic aggression, as represented by imperial France and Spain. The gospel of the new birth remained Whitefield’s central concern, but he also realized that without the political and religious liberty afforded under British Protestant rule, the preaching of that gospel could be at risk. Wartime anti-Catholicism proved a potent source of British unity, and ministers offered assurance about the conflict’s outcome. As one of Whitefield’s correspondents put it, in the war against the “Whore of Babylon,” God was “on our side.”61
In October 1754 Whitefield returned to New England. The itinerant reported that he had never enjoyed such successes, estimating that thousands routinely came to his meetings, even those he held at seven in the morning at the Old North Church. He called the New England tour, during which he preached almost a hundred times in eight weeks, the “most important one [he] was ever employed in.” His old ally James Davenport offered more sober analysis in a letter to Elizabeth. Certainly, the itinerant was “more flocked after than when last in America,” but not as much as “we were favored with in the years 1740–41.”62
It is challenging to interpret Whitefield’s optimistic view of his New England circuit. There is no question that his preaching was not eliciting the same kind of reaction, positive or negative, as the height of his ministry had seen. So how do we account for his effusive assessments? One explanation is that he naturally wanted to paint as positive a picture as he could for correspondents, including benefactors such as the Countess of Huntingdon. If the crowd numbers he reported did not match the titanic throngs of his early career, they nonetheless remained quite large, certainly larger than those any other preacher could expect to attract. We might also imagine that Whitefield genuinely appreciated that he could preach now with relatively little controversy. “Enemies are made to be at peace, and friends are everywhere hearty,” he happily wrote from Boston. His work from ten years earlier had substantially cleared his reputation from charges of fanaticism; supporters were delighted to see him, and opponents saw little harm in his visits. Whitefield remained remarkably popular, and much less controversial.63
Indeed, compared to his visit to New England in the mid-1740s, Whitefield’s return generated little notice in the media. A supporter published a broadsheet poem about him, playing off the Pennsylvania Gazette’s encomiums to the revivalist as a “fine gentleman and accomplished orator”:
Should we now offend the world,
We must and will declare
He is the man of whom there’s none,
For us we can compare.
The poet trumpeted his inclusiveness:
The Negroes too he'll not forget,
But tells them all to come;
Invites the black as well as white,
And says of them there’s room.64
Enemies were not entirely silent about the itinerant’s visit—grumbling still came from Harvard, where the Hollis Professor of Divinity, Edward Wigglesworth, preached on the special calling of an evangelist after Whitefield visited Cambridge. Wigglesworth had been a formidable, learned presence at Harvard since becoming the inaugural holder of the Hollis chair (the first endowed professorship in America) in 1722. Wigglesworth regarded biblical evangelists as “a sort of officer peculiar to the apostolic age,” which had gone out of existence once the canon of scripture came into place. Thus, he concluded that “the itinerants and exhorters, who have once and again overrun this, and the neighboring provinces and colonies, were no evangelists in the scripture sense of the word, as some of them pretended to be.” Here he footnoted Whitefield’s 1745 Letter to the Rev. the President, and Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor, of Harvard-College in Cambridge, in which Whitefield had affirmed that he did regard himself as an evangelist in the biblical sense, which justified his traveling ministry. Wigglesworth said that he had hoped that New Englanders had learned their lesson about the dangers of itinerancy and church separations. “But the length of a few years seems to have worn out all remembrance of past calamities,” and crowds were eager to hear Whitefield preach once more. Wigglesworth also reminded the Harvard audience that the itinerant had never fully apologized for his rude comments about the college years earlier.65
Wigglesworth also condemned Whitefield’s claims to speak with assistance from the Holy Spirit, saying such gifts had similarly been reserved for the apostolic period: “If any man pretends to speak as the Spirit gives him utterance, or to be under the immediate direction of the Spirit of God in his speech and preaching; you may conclude him to be a bold deceiver, or a man given over to strong delusions.” Wigglesworth assumed that anyone claiming to preach under the direction of the Holy Spirit had to be claiming “infallible guidance,” such as that given to the authors of the biblical texts. Whitefield never claimed infallibility, only that he had received assistance from the Spirit for courage and timely words. His critics failed to appreciate the distinction—if he spoke with the Spirit’s aid, did that not imply that his words carried unquestionable divine authority? Wigglesworth advocated a strong distinction between the operations of the Spirit in the apostolic period and in the church era, a kind of theology that would come to be called “cessationism” in the twentieth century. Much of the controversy over Whitefield’s ministry, and over the revivals generally, reflected clashing beliefs about the work of the Holy Spirit. That division persisted even after Whitefield had moderated his style.66
The chastened Whitefield passed his fortieth birthday as he proceeded south, heading back to Georgia. “I am now forty years of age,” he mused, “and would business permit, would gladly spend the day in retirement and deep humiliation before that Jesus for whom I have done so little.” Of course, nothing could be more incompatible with Whitefield’s disposition than “retirement.” But he was worn out, struggling with ailments that would mark much of his later decades. The arduous overland journey taxed him mightily, bringing his “old vomitings” back. Nevertheless, he briefly visited Bethesda and had the “orphan boys trained in weapons,” in preparation for possible expansion of war from the north. Otherwise finding Bethesda’s affairs in good order, he left for England again in March 1755. The journey went well, but he returned to the galling news that John Wesley had again stoked the flames of controversy against him.67