Twelve “This Pilgrimage Kind of Life”: The End of Whitefield's Travels
“THIS PILGRIMAGE KIND OF LIFE”: THE END OF WHITEFIELD'S TRAVELS
“O this bigotry, this party spirit, this love of power, how doth it contract the heart and fill the soul with corroding jealousies and needless fears!” Upon his return to England in 1755, the lamenting Whitefield heard that at a recent conference of Methodists, John Wesley gave a sermon on self-denial and cited the itinerant as an example of one who neither preached nor practiced that virtue. (One attendee was so repulsed by this statement that he confronted Wesley, who promised to speak no more about Whitefield from the pulpit.) Wesley and Whitefield had known each other for two decades, yet they seemed no closer than ever to living at peace.1
The rivals exchanged tense letters in August when Whitefield spoke at a Norwich assembly led by a preacher whom Wesley had expelled from his conference. Whitefield declared that his time was “too precious to be employed in hearkening to, or vindicating of [himself] against, the false and invidious insinuations of narrow and low-life informers.” These informers tried to cast Whitefield’s Norwich appearance in factional terms, but the itinerant insisted that only Christ’s glory motivated him. When Wesley and Whitefield saw one another, it seemed to help. During a personal visit with Whitefield in November, Wesley announced, “Disputings are no more. We love one another and join hand in hand to promote the cause of our common Master.”2
After age forty, Whitefield became increasingly weary of personal conflict, illness, and traveling. Always sickly, he had never shied away from discussing his ill health. Now he was also gaining weight (reflected in drawings of the older Whitefield), which added to his lassitude (see figure 12.1). He told correspondents, “I dread a corpulent body. But it breaks in upon me like an armed man.” He was physically spent: “God knows how long I am to drag this crazy load along . . . I am sick of myself, sick of the world, sick of the Church and am panting daily after the full enjoyment of my God.” News of the passing of friends came regularly. In 1758 he marked the “death of Mr. Jonathan Edwards.” Edwards, who had recently assumed the presidency of Princeton, died of a smallpox inoculation gone awry. Whitefield himself kept preaching, usually about fifteen times a week.3
Although he remained absent from the colonies—the Seven Years’ War would keep him away for eight long years—Whitefield waited eagerly for news of the conflict in America. The news that came was bad. In July 1755, General Edward Braddock perished in Britain’s defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela, east of Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh). The British had ordered Braddock’s expedition as revenge for Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity. Benjamin Franklin helped British forces as they prepared to go to western Pennsylvania, securing donations of eleven wagonloads of wine, chocolate, cheese, coffee, and tea. But Franklin also cautioned Braddock to watch out for the “ambuscades of Indians” and their unconventional fighting methods. Braddock scoffed at the printer’s warning and proceeded to march his unsuspecting army into a furious attack by French and Native American forces, whom one British observer called “ravenous Hell-hounds.” Inexperienced at making war in the woods, the British force melted into chaos and lost miserably.4
Braddock’s demise galvanized Whitefield’s turn toward political preaching. Learning of the debacle, Whitefield gave a sermon on Isaiah 59:19, “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him.” The itinerant was confident that British Protestants would find this principle “true in a temporal and spiritual sense.” Balancing the earthly and heavenly was becoming ever-more imperative. He routinely made temporal applications of such verses as Romans 8:37, praying of Braddock’s death: “May the late defeat be sanctified; and then I doubt not but we shall be more than conquerors through the love of Christ.”5
Whitefield sometimes blended the affairs of heaven and earth to the point of confusion. He told one correspondent that it was always his “bounden duty, next to inviting sinners to the blessed Jesus, to exhort [his] hearers to exert themselves against the first approaches of popish tyranny and arbitrary power.” But the root of such tyranny lay within all people, Whitefield explained, warning against the “opposition of Antichrist in our hearts; for after all, there lies the most dangerous man of sin.” Even though he focused more on imperial concerns than ever before, he still tended to spiritualize political affairs. His turn to earthly matters did not escape the notice of critics: Samuel Johnson said that “he believed [Whitefield] sincerely meant well, but had a mixture of politics and ostentation.”6
In early 1756, Whitefield penned A Short Address to Persons of All Denominations, which, along with Britain’s Mercies (1746), was one of the two most popular sermons Whitefield had published since the early 1740s. Tellingly, both were on imperial topics. A Short Address quickly went through six editions published in London, Edinburgh, Boston, and New York. Whitefield personally sent the pamphlet to Franklin, who published it in Philadelphia. The address responded to a royal declaration warning of a possible French invasion of England. Defending the burgeoning conflict as a just war, Whitefield praised those Britons who were willing to draw their swords “in defense of our civil and religious liberties.” He invoked Deborah’s curse on Meroz from Judges 5:23, when, “under the immediate influence of the Holy Spirit,” she condemned Meroz for not coming “to the help of the Lord against the mighty.” As he had done during the Jacobite rising, Whitefield praised King George II as the preeminent defender of Britain’s liberties, even proposing that the sovereign be called “george the great.” Contemplating Britain’s prospects if Catholics were to come to power, the itinerant recommended that readers consult the “shocking accounts of the horrid butcheries, and cruel murders committed on the bodies of many of our fellow-subjects in America, by the hands of savage Indians, instigated thereto by more than savage Popish Priests.” He feared a similar fate for Britain, should the “Protestant interest” falter.7
His appeal to British Protestant patriotism did not appease all critics. In early 1756, Whitefield endured the worst antagonism he had seen in years. He had begun speaking twice a week at the Long Acre Dissenting chapel, in the West End section of London. The resistance to his preaching there was two-pronged: some came from the nearby theater community, which resented Whitefield’s antitheater preaching. Hooligans sang and made “an odd kind of noise” outside the chapel, and occasionally heaved large stones through the windows. Opposition also came from local Anglican authorities, especially Bishop Zachary Pearce, the dean of Westminster. The sixty-five-year-old Pearce was, according to Luke Tyerman, “a feeble orator, an active prelate, and a hearty hater of the Methodists.” The bishop tried to ban Whitefield from speaking at Long Acre because of its Dissenting affiliation, but the itinerant would not comply, writing lengthy missives asking the bishop whether he did not have more important things to do than restrict the preaching of the gospel. He chided Pearce for having misplaced priorities: “Ecclesiastical dissensions must be quite unseasonable, especially at this juncture, when France and Rome and hell ought to be the common butt of our resentment.” Every true lover of liberty would see the righteousness of his cause, Whitefield predicted.8
Over weeks it became clear that the disturbances at Long Acre were “premeditated rioting.” He suspected that someone was hiring the “baser sort” to cause a ruckus. Things took a dark turn in April 1756 when he began receiving death threats. Three letters promised “a certain, sudden, and unavoidable stroke” if he did not stop preaching or if he pursued legal proceedings against his tormenters. These frightening developments came to the attention of George II’s court, which issued a royal proclamation condemning the threats and offered to pardon anyone involved who confessed and exposed his accomplices. This helped defuse the crisis, as did Whitefield’s announcement that he would begin building a more suitable preaching venue nearby, on Tottenham Court Road. When completed, including a 1759 expansion, this new chapel sat more than four thousand people. An Anglican critic called the place “Whitefield’s soul-trap.”9
It was not certain who was behind the riots at Long Acre or the menacing letters. But the theater community certainly perceived Whitefield as a hazard to their livelihood, both because he denounced the theater and also because he was such a compelling, dramatic orator. One Methodist recalled that before his conversion, he could not “discern any difference between Mr. Whitefield’s preaching and seeing a good tragedy.” Similarly, the actor and anti-Methodist critic Tate Wilkinson wrote some of the most pungent criticisms of Whitefield, attributing the power of Whitefield’s preaching to his background in the theater. Calling Whitefield the “first actor in the Methodist line,” he cruelly mocked Whitefield’s crossed eyes as a reason that he switched from acting to preaching. “As he liked tragedy, and found that a pair of squinting eyes . . . did not move the young ladies’ tender hearts, but produced laughter instead of tears, he [damned] the stage,” Wilkinson asserted, “but he often melted and squeezed to some purpose many a rich dowager, who felt the power of his feelings from their mutual sympathy.” Wilkinson, a close observer of elocution, recalled that Whitefield’s Gloucester “dialect was very particular,” saying “Lurd instead of Lord, Gud instead of God—as, O Lurd Gud!”10
Any preacher, of any faith, must walk a fine line between effective oratory and sensationalism. The more talented the orator, the more pressing the quandary. How do you use your God-given speaking gifts without using dramatic artifice simply to get an emotional response? Few would recommend that a preacher give intentionally dull sermons in order to avoid melodrama, but many have chosen to avoid Whitefield’s theatrical techniques. His was not a mode for every pastor. Whitefield was a phenomenally skillful speaker, and he used talents he cultivated in the theater to move his audiences. Some undoubtedly attended his meetings because of the emotions they felt there, but their experience had no lasting effect on their spiritual or personal lives. These facts alone, however, do not mean that Whitefield was insincere, and many did find that his preaching helped produce more enduring change. He would have been troubled by the notion that people in his audience did not gather the difference between his sermons and a “good tragedy.”
Prevented from returning to the colonies, Whitefield continued promoting the British Protestant cause in the Seven Years’ War. In late 1757, Whitefield delivered a celebratory sermon—thrice on one day in London—on Frederick the Great of Prussia’s magnificent tactical defeat of the French and Austrian armies at the Battle of Rossbach. During a thanksgiving service for the Prussian victory, Whitefield spoke for three hours, reading letters from the Continent and America that gave accounts of “the sufferings and cruel persecutions of our poor brethren of the Protestant religion by their implacable and unrelenting enemies the French.” He remained in contact with influential German Protestants such as Gotthilf August Francke of the University of Halle, whom Whitefield assured that thousands of Britons were praying daily for Prussian victory. After the Prussians suffered defeat by the Russian army at the Battle of Kunersdorf in 1759, Whitefield arranged for the London publication of a collection of letters titled Russian Cruelty, detailing the plight of refugee Protestants in Brandenburg, some of whom were receiving assistance from Francke. He also raised relief money for those “cruelly tortured and abused by the savage Cossacks.”11
In June 1757, Whitefield had tried to take these sorts of sentiments to Dublin, Ireland. Dublin was a large city of about 140,000 with a fast-growing Catholic population that was much less sympathetic to the Protestant forces in the Seven Years’ War, and to Whitefield’s British patriotism. Whitefield preached at Oxmantown Green, where Catholic and Protestant mobs were known to clash. He did not realize the danger he was courting by doing so. Finishing a sermon on the green one Sunday afternoon, the itinerant tried to leave, but suddenly found himself surrounded by “hundreds and hundreds of papists,” who began stoning him. Whitefield recorded the attack: “Every step I took, a fresh stone struck, and made me reel backwards and forwards, till I was almost breathless, and all over a gore of blood.” Only a thick beaver hat he wore saved him from suffering fatal head wounds. He narrowly escaped into a nearby minister’s house, where he waited until a Methodist colleague arrived with a coach. They sped away through the screaming throng of “Dublin rabble.” Whitefield reckoned that they had tried to kill him not for speaking against Catholicism specifically, but “for exciting all ranks to be faithful to King Jesus, and to our dear sovereign King George.”12
In spite of this harrowing experience, Whitefield continued making military and imperial topics staples of his preaching, far more so than earlier in his career. When he visited Scotland in August 1758, he delivered three thanksgiving sermons marking British and Prussian victories, including another victorious siege of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, which the British had returned to France in 1748. The Glasgow Courant commended Whitefield’s preaching on behalf of the “Protestant interest,” which made the itinerant’s visit “useful to the community in a civil, as well as a religious, light.”13
Whitefield began announcing days of thanksgiving related to the Seven Years’ War even before official royal pronouncements were made. This practice annoyed one Anglican critic, who scoffed that “being without law, [Whitefield] did not think it decency to wait till his Majesty appointed the day of thanksgiving.” But Whitefield ignored such strictures. One of the most joyous occasions came on October 20, 1759, when Whitefield celebrated the news of the “late remarkable conquest” of the walled citadel of Quebec by the British general James Wolfe, which was the decisive British victory in the North American conflict. The itinerant preached twice at the Tabernacle and once at Tottenham Court, and though his topic was as martial as spiritual, the results strongly resembled one of his older revival meetings. “Hundreds were filled as with new wine,” he told a New England correspondent. “Surely God is a wonder working, prayer hearing, promise keeping God.”14
Whitefield’s preaching remained so popular that it warranted an expansion of the Tottenham Court Road chapel, which reopened at the beginning of February 1760. “A great concourse of people” attended, hearing Whitefield preach on Jabez’s prayer from 1 Chronicles 4:10, “Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast.” But the blessings at the Tabernacle continued to raise the ire—and satire—of the theater community, resulting in the most memorable caricature of Whitefield ever: Dr. Squintum.15
Dr. Squintum was a character mentioned in Samuel Foote’s wildly popular play The Minor, which opened in London in 1760. Foote, an associate of Tate Wilkinson and other seminal figures in the London theater scene, had emerged as an influential writer and actor in the 1740s. He played Othello a number of times at the Haymarket Theater in London. But The Minor caused a major sensation, generating numerous pamphlets and prints, and went through many editions into the 1790s.16
Within the play, Foote explicitly likened Whitefield and other Methodists to “public performers” like himself: “Whether we exhibit at Tottenham Court, or the Haymarket, our purpose is the same.” It was a provocative charge, suggesting that Whitefield was essentially a theatrical performer who was cutting in on actors’ business. Squintum does not appear in the play, but is repeatedly referred to by a former prostitute and (supposed) convert, Mrs. Cole. She provocatively spoke of how Dr. Squintum: “[He] stepp'd in with his saving grace, got me with the new birth, and I became, as you see, regenerate, and another creature.” And she reported that Dr. Squintum taught that a “woman’s not worth saving, that won't be guilty of a swinging sin.” The play ends with a mimic named Shift (played by a leering and winking Foote) realizing that he could have “a thriving traffic in my eye—Near the mad mansions of Moorfields I'll bawl.” Whitefield, in Foote’s rendering, was an opportunistic fraud.17
This mockery of Whitefield, and the play’s prurient use of scripture, unleashed a pamphlet war driven by years of pent-up resentment toward, as well as fascination with, Whitefield. Famous people attract mockers, sometimes simply because of their prominence. Virtually everyone in British towns had heard of Whitefield, thus they understood jokes made at his expense. The Countess of Huntingdon tried and failed to have the play banned, which only made it more popular. Some attacks on Whitefield and his supporters were quite vicious, such as the poem Friendly Advice, For Dr. Squintum:
‘Do nothing and be saved,’ he cries,
His stupid audience close their eyes,
And groan in concert, to the lies,
Of canting Dr. Squintum.18
The Squintum-related publications came in numbers surpassed only by those occasioned by Whitefield’s initial rise to fame in the late 1730s. One of Whitefield’s supporters told him that because of The Minor, there was “hardly a grown up person in this land but will sooner or later give their opinion either for or against you.” Some missives against the play were satirical; one falsely claimed Whitefield as its author. Memoirs of the Life of a Modern Saint (1761), a mock biography of Squintum, was a takeoff on Whitefield’s journals. The Methodist (1761), a play trying to emulate The Minor’s success, included Squintum as an actual character, as did The Spiritual Minor (1763).19
William Hogarth’s engraving Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism: A Medley (1762) followed the Squintum firestorm (see figure 12.2). Hogarth, a fiercely anti-Methodist artist, used Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism to play on key themes within The Minor, especially the dangers of deception and sexual license. The woman lying in the lower left—with baby rabbits running out from under her skirts—may suggest Squintum’s devotee Mrs. Cole, but Hogarth primarily based her on the remarkable “Rabbit Woman,” Mary Toft, who in 1726 claimed to have given birth to seventeen rabbits. In his works, Hogarth repeatedly depicted the Toft fraud—and the initial inclination of some to believe her—as a species of medical enthusiasm, often paired with religious frenzy. The maniacal preacher “St. Money-Trap,” whose appearance is not strictly based on Whitefield, foments the crowd into sectarian madness as his wig falls back to reveal a Catholic clerical tonsure. Hogarth draped the pulpit with lines from a Whitefield hymn, “Only love to us be giv'n.” A foregrounded thermometer indicates the fruits of Methodist frenzy, from convulsions and lust to madness and suicide.20
Whitefield’s own response to The Minor was muted. “I am now mimicked and burlesqued upon the public stage,” he wrote. “All hail such contempt!” Perhaps after nearly dying in Dublin, mockery in the theater was relatively easy to absorb. During the fall of 1760, while much of the controversy convulsed London, he was away preaching in northern England, although Elizabeth sent copies of all the “low trash” published against him. In any case, the itinerant could not entirely avoid the Squintum frenzy: on at least one occasion after he returned to London, two young men interrupted Whitefield at the Tabernacle, loudly singing a “burlesque song of Doctor Squintum.”21
Experience told Whitefield that controversy, however galling, was good publicity, and publicity brought attention to the gospel. A correspondent from Newcastle, in far northern England, informed Whitefield in September 1760 that Foote’s “vile play” had been performed there, but God was using it for good. “I believe many would come to hear you now who never did before,” the correspondent noted, because of the interest generated by The Minor. Several Newcastle gentlemen who previously had little interest in religion were “shocked at it.” Maybe the play would become the means of opening people’s eyes to the gospel, his friend suggested. He received similar reports of heightened interest from London.22
By late 1760, Whitefield had returned to London, but with a cold so besetting that by the spring of 1761 he was gravely ill. Indeed, another erroneous report announced that Whitefield was dead, leading an anonymous poet to quickly print an elegy. The elegy was a bit exuberant about the extent of his influence, claiming, “He went through Europe, and through Asia, / Thro’ Afric also, and America. / ‘Mongst Turks, and Papists, Mahomets, and Jews, / Pagans, and Heathens, he did preach glad news.” Soon realizing their mistake, the newspapers noted that the itinerant was “dangerously ill, but not dead.” (There was also a false report of Elizabeth Whitefield’s death in early 1762.) The false death notice reached America, where it was printed in more newspapers than in England. One Philadelphia correspondent told Whitefield of her horror upon hearing the news of his demise, which made her go “cold all over.” The illness kept him from preaching and traveling for much of the year, which frustrated him. He was “frequently tempted to wish the report of my death had been true, since my disorder keeps me from my old delightful work of preaching,” he wrote.23
Whitefield’s health improved enough that he was able to go to Holland briefly in the summer of 1762. Upon his return to Norwich, Whitefield gave a glowing account of the trip to his “dear old friend” Charles Wesley, telling him that the familiar “cloud of Divine Providence” had directed him across the North Sea. “Deep impressions were made by the word preached at Rotterdam among the English,” he reported, although he lamented that he could not preach in Dutch. Nevertheless, he visited Dutch towns, including Amsterdam and Leyden, on his tour. Chiding Wesley, who had largely left off itinerating, Whitefield wondered what he would say to the offer of a sea voyage, perhaps to America? “Whilst you and yours lie at ease in London remember a poor pilgrim lying on a nasty stinking mat and bed and continually disturbed and bit by fleas at Norwich.” No wonder Whitefield struggled to recover his health!24
As his relationship with Charles grew sweeter, the itinerant and John Wesley continued to clash. Whitefield told Charles in March 1763 that John had written him “an angry letter without a cause” and that Whitefield thought it best not to reply. They remained on speaking terms, however; John visited Whitefield in Edinburgh in May, noting that “humanly speaking, [Whitefield] is worn out.” While Whitefield was in America, John wrote him a friendly letter, and the itinerant responded in kind, wishing Wesley and all his preachers “much prosperity.”25
In the late summer of 1762, Whitefield made his now-annual journey to Scotland, giving his departing sermon at Edinburgh on Aaron’s blessing to the children of Israel in Numbers 6. The published text of the sermon, “taken in short-hand from his mouth,” revealed that Whitefield had not muted his Calvinist convictions, though perhaps he emphasized them more before a friendly Scottish audience. He challenged those “who talk so much of the power of their free will”: “A free will of one kind to be sure you all have. But a free will to what? To everything that is wrong.” His old cadences and emotional phrases remained, but Whitefield also used his frailty, and Edinburgh’s familiarity with him, as part of his rhetoric. He had been visiting the city for so long that some of the young adults he spoke with had not been born when he first toured Scotland. He and the other faithful Scottish preachers had told them often of the grace of Christ, he reminded the people. But still they were not heeded: “Alas! what a monstrous heap of gospel sermons will lie at some people’s doors! This makes my heart bleed oftentimes when I come out of my chamber, not knowing but the sermon I would be glad to die in preaching, may rise up in judgment against some souls, for whose salvation I would be willing to spend every drop of my blood.” Having spent himself for them, he pleaded with the people of Edinburgh not to refuse Christ in the end.26
Whitefield’s growing moderation had not fundamentally changed his doctrine or his undergirding emphasis on the Holy Spirit. One of his most popular pamphlets written in the 1760s, published in London, Edinburgh, Boston, and Philadelphia, was Observations on Some Fatal Mistakes, In a Book Lately Published, and Entitled, The Doctrine of Grace. Responding to an angry anti-Methodist work by the bishop of Gloucester, William Warburton, the itinerant argued that in Warburton’s effort to combat enthusiasm, he neglected the Spirit’s role in the church and in believers’ lives: “The Holy Ghost, like its almighty purchaser, is the same today as he was yesterday; [and] he is now, as well as formerly, in the use of all instituted means, appointed to convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and judgment” (John 16:8). Warburton ridiculed those vital operations of the Spirit instead of vindicating them. If it was fanaticism to pursue the “supernatural influences of the Blessed Spirit,” then Whitefield hoped true believers would become more fanatical every day. “To be filled with the Holy Ghost,” Whitefield averred several years later, “this is the grand point.”27
Whitefield returned to Scotland in the spring of 1763, with a long-awaited twist to his itinerary: he would return to America from the north of Britain. The denouement of the Seven Years’ War had come in 1762 as the British captured Havana, Cuba (and its £3 million in silver bullion), from Spain, and the Prussians scored their last major triumph at the Battle of Freiberg. (The peace treaties officially ending the war were signed in 1763.) Whitefield immediately realized that in spite of his faltering health, these favorable developments would open the door for another Atlantic crossing. Although most contemporaries regarded sea travel as fraught with danger, Whitefield still found it restorative. After all, his doctors had told him for years that he needed an extended break from preaching. An ocean voyage would do the trick, and he departed from Greenock, west of Glasgow, in June 1763 and headed for Virginia. “Jesus hath made the ship a Bethel,” he wrote a week into the trip, “and I enjoyed that quietness which I have in vain sought after for some years on shore.” The twelve-week journey did tax his health, but in August his ship cast anchor at the Virginia shore.28
Whitefield’s return received wide press coverage, perhaps because of the long break since his previous visit. As he traveled north to Philadelphia, reports emphasized his poor health. Newspapers in Boston, New York, Portsmouth, and Newport printed an excerpt of his letter to a Boston friend, in which Whitefield confessed that the “voyage and journey have quite shattered me.” Proceeding gingerly, in November he traveled to New York via Princeton. The College of New Jersey had suffered traumatic blows with the deaths of Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Davies, who had succeeded Edwards as president in 1759, four years after his fund-raising trip to England. When Davies died in 1761, the evangelical Presbyterian pastor Samuel Finley became the college’s fifth president. In spite of the school’s recent turmoil, Whitefield regarded Finley’s Princeton as a “blessed nursery; one of the purest perhaps in the universe.” He would preach at Princeton’s commencement in the fall of 1764.29
In New York, Whitefield—with apparent spontaneity—preached at the city jail on Christ’s words in Matthew 25, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” An admiring newspaper report noted that the itinerant promised to raise money to provide for the prisoners, and that he gave “out of his purse” to help imprisoned debtors buy wood for the winter, even bailing out some who were locked up for small debts. “What a pity,” the report lamented, “that such a God-like man’s constitution is almost worn out by apostolic labors!”30
Impromptu charitable work had become a hallmark of Whitefield’s ministry in recent years; for instance, he raised money to assist Boston when the town suffered a devastating fire in 1760. During his New York visit, he raised £120 for the Congregationalist minister Eleazar Wheelock’s Connecticut charity school for Native Americans (which would relocate to New Hampshire in 1770 and become Dartmouth College), promising Wheelock that he would also write to British benefactors on the school’s behalf. Likewise, he helped Harvard—where the faculty had long disliked Whitefield—rebuild its library holdings after a recent fire. Here he had additional motives: he asked supporters to give “puritanical books” to replace Harvard’s charred volumes of more dubious theology. Charitable acts not only fit the original Methodist mission, but also helped mute criticism that Whitefield was selfishly motivated. Raising money for projects other than Bethesda also deflected questions about how he spent money for the rural orphanage.31
Indeed, public criticism of Whitefield was almost entirely absent during this visit, in spite of the frequent newspaper pieces on his travels. One pamphlet, Methodism Anatomized; or, An Alarm to Pennsylvania, raised old fears of fanaticism and deception when he visited Philadelphia. “Beware! ye men of Pennsylvania! shun false doctrine, and false preachers;—the Arch-Deceiver is among you!” the Anglican partisan trumpeted. The writer scoffed at how the Methodists encouraged untutored men (and even women) to exhort and become ranting preachers themselves, their only qualification being “incoherent phrases, sham-crying, and distortion of phiz, with bawhng out, ‘The Lord Jesus Christ!’ ten times in a sentence.” (“Phiz,” short for “physiognomy,” meant one’s facial expression.) Such fusillades against him had become rare and seemed somewhat out of date, given Whitefield’s moderate turn.32
Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin exchanged letters, with Whitefield again imploring Franklin to accept evangelical faith. Replying with unusually serious sentiments, Franklin thanked Whitefield for his prayers. The printer expressed confidence that God loved him, adding, “And if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me not only here but hereafter? This to some may seem presumption; to me it appears the best grounded hope.”33
The itinerant traveled to his beloved New England in February 1764, preaching on Long Island as he went. “A sweet influence hath attended the word at Easthampton,” he noted. Samuel Buell, the pastor at Easthampton, stood at the threshold of the most intense season of revival seen in the region since the 1740s. It began a month after Whitefield’s visit. Yet Buell, who had served as a young itinerant during the earlier revivals, failed to note Whitefield’s presence in his published account of the revival. Similarly, John Cleaveland of Ipswich, Massachusetts, oversaw a major revival in his church that subsequently spread across northeastern Massachusetts. After visiting Ipswich, Whitefield told Eleazar Wheelock that “there is really a great awakening in those parts.” But Cleaveland did not mention Whitefield’s appearance in Ipswich in his narrative of the awakening, either. Younger American revivalists seemed to welcome Whitefield, but may have regarded him as a bit passé.34
Whitefield made a northern swing into New Hampshire, where he engaged in the most intriguing conversation of this American visit. He preached before thousands at the Portsmouth meetinghouses of Samuel Haven and Samuel Langdon, but before he left, the three met privately, and Whitefield told them a secret: “My heart bleeds for America. O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against both your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end. You have nothing but trouble before you. My information comes from the best authority in Great Britain. I was allowed to speak of the affair in general, but enjoined not to mention particulars. Your liberties will be lost.” Three days later, across the sea, Parliament passed the Sugar Act, the first major new revenue act following the Seven Years’ War. By August, leading Bostonians, led by Samuel Adams and James Otis, had begun to call for a boycott of British luxury goods.35
This was a remarkable moment in Whitefield’s development as a political figure, and it places him as one of the earliest heralds of the Revolutionary crisis. However, the account of this conversation is historically questionable, since it comes from William Gordon’s four-volume The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of the United States of America, which was not published until 1788, twenty-four years after the reported exchange. Gordon was a Dissenting minister who moved to America in 1770, during the buildup to the Revolution. He became a Congregationalist pastor in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and for a time served as chaplain to the Massachusetts provincial congress. He went back to England in 1786, and completed his history two years later. For Gordon, the Whitefield anecdote represented a key turning point in the friendly relationship between Crown and colonists in the early 1760s, and the bitter feud that began to emerge in late 1764. Gordon said he got the information “in conversation” with Samuel Langdon, so we can probably assume that what Gordon reported was, at a minimum, not a direct quotation from Whitefield. How accurate it was beyond that is difficult to say.36
Whitefield likely had caught wind of British plans to raise new revenue from the colonists. He also realized that some in the Anglican hierarchy were thinking of introducing an American bishop. Ironically, Whitefield’s own name had come up as a bishop candidate as early as the mid-1740s. Some of Whitefield’s influential patrons, including those affiliated with Frederick, Prince of Wales, and the Countess of Huntingdon, entertained thoughts of having Whitefield made a bishop, but Frederick’s untimely death in 1751 hampered that prospect. Still, American and British newspapers reported in 1765 that if one or more American bishops were appointed, Whitefield would certainly be one of them. Fear over the imposition of a bishop, and a concomitant loss of religious liberty, was one of the most provocative religious controversies of the Revolutionary crisis. However, we should not exaggerate the colonists’ preparedness for revolution in 1764. The newspapers’ repeatedly printed June article on Whitefield’s farewell sermon in Boston opened with reports of Bostonians celebrating King George III’s twenty-sixth birthday, which was observed with fireworks and “demonstrations of loyalty and joy.”37
Leaving Boston to universal acclaim for his still-powerful preaching and emphasis on the “common cause of Christianity,” Whitefield began another overland trek to Georgia. For a man in poor health, it was a remarkable (and perhaps foolish) journey to take. But Whitefield would have it no other way: “This pilgrimage kind of life, is the very joy of my heart,” he wrote. Reports circulated that he intended to visit Bermuda again, or Spanish Florida, or even English settlements on the Mosquito Shore of Nicaragua, where Anglicans maintained a mission. But he traveled slowly, lingering in Philadelphia, then traversing the South to Charleston during November 1764. James Reed, an Anglican minister of New Bern, North Carolina, noted that the “surprising minister” was struggling with “an asthma, though fat and looks well.” Whitefield “kept quite clear of enthusiastic rant and within the bounds of decency” until the end of his New Bern sermon, when he “got to raving,” spoiling the sermon for many polite Anglicans. Nevertheless, Reed thought his visit helpful because he spoke against Separate Baptists, who had emerged from the revivals in New England and had begun to take root at Sandy Creek, North Carolina, in the mid-1750s. At New Bern, Whitefield “condemned the rebaptizing of adults” and endorsed infant baptism, in accord with the traditional practices of the Church of England.38
Whitefield was not altogether unhappy with the South’s radical evangelicals, however. As he passed through eastern North Carolina, he happily noted meeting “what they call New-Lights almost every stage.” Some of those itinerants received the sort of fearful response from critics that Whitefield himself had met with two decades earlier; one contemporary Anglican report described Virginia as a scene of “madness and enthusiasm”: “The Methodists from the North come down upon us like a torrent.” (Anglicans sometimes called the new evangelicals, including Baptists, by the catchall name “Methodists.”) Whitefield, preparing to pass his fiftieth birthday, generated widespread interest and notice in the newspapers, but no longer elicited many charges of enthusiasm.39
The itinerant returned to Bethesda in December 1764. More than a year after Whitefield had last left the orphanage, the Lutheran pastor Johann Martin Boltzius wrote a detailed description of Bethesda, which was developing into a slave plantation as much as a school. About three miles away from the original orphanage, Whitefield established a “Negro farm,” where around thirty slaves grew grain, beans, sweet potatoes, rice, and indigo. They also processed lumber into boards and shingles. Boltzius, who had criticized Whitefield’s efforts to introduce slavery in Georgia, ruefully noted that the slaves’ labors had not made enough money to keep up with the orphanage’s expenses.40
The Bethesda students, according to Boltzius, were “healthy and merry,” eating rice and grits and drinking a low-alcohol beer fermented from syrup, Indian corn, and hops. They raised some crops, too, but their attempts to make silk had produced few results. Students learned reading, writing, and arithmetic, and boys who seemed to be promising pastoral candidates studied Greek and Latin. All memorized the Westminster Catechism. “The Calvinist religion is the dominant religion in the orphanage,” Boltzius said. Whitefield was pleased with what he found there. “Peace and plenty reign in Bethesda,” he wrote. He sought to get as many of the residents placed in jobs as he could; by the time he left, there were as few as five orphan boys remaining there. Far fewer orphans remained than slaves. Indeed, newspapers reported that the orphan house had “ceased.”41
The itinerant was planning another major transition for the orphanage. While in Georgia, he began the process of having a charter approved for a college at Bethesda that would educate white, black, and Native American children (presumably boys). But expanding Bethesda would also mean buying more slaves: he announced that he planned to spend substantial funds “in purchasing a large number of negroes for the further cultivation of the present orphan-house and other additional lands, and for the future support of a worthy able president, professors and tutors.” The proposal easily won the approval of the Georgia governor and houses of assembly (his ally James Habersham was the president of the upper house). Whitefield worked for three more years on the charter, but Thomas Secker (the archbishop of Canterbury) and the king’s council finally derailed the proposal. Whitefield envisioned the college as evangelical and interdenominational rather than distinctly Anglican, which was contrary to the wishes of the British authorities. Whitefield had his drawn-out correspondence with the archbishop of Canterbury published widely, including in the colonies, where the misunderstanding further soured colonists’ views of the Anglican hierarchy as the crisis with Britain began to unfold. In the meantime, Whitefield made another accounting of Bethesda’s finances, which showed that the itinerant had not profited personally from funds raised, and had in fact spent more than £2,000 of his own money on the orphanage. These occasional reports did not entirely defuse the old charges of financial impropriety, of course. One burlesque performance from 1765, calling Whitefield the “bell-weather of the flock,” mocked that “with one eye he looks up to heaven . . . that’s his spiritual eye; and with the other he looks down to see what he can get; and that’s his carnal eye.”42
Even if Whitefield had lost some of his novelty, many who attended his preaching for the first time were thrilled to see him. This was the experience in February 1765 of the memoirist Olaudah Equiano, a twenty-year-old slave who belonged to a Quaker on the small Caribbean island of Montserrat. His master encouraged Equiano to purchase his own freedom, which he would do the next year before going on to become one of the most compelling antislavery writers in England. Equiano was visiting Savannah on his master’s business (he remembered the episode as happening in Philadelphia, but it seems clear that he was confused about the location). He “came to a church crowded with people; the church-yard was full likewise, and a number of people were even mounted on ladders, looking in at the windows.” Equiano had never seen anything like the scene before, and he asked what accounted for it. Someone told him that the great itinerant Whitefield was there. “I had often heard of this gentleman,” he recalled, “and had wished to see and hear him; but I had never before had an opportunity.” Equiano pressed into the crowd and saw the “pious man exhorting the people with the greatest fervor and earnestness, and sweating as much as ever I did while in slavery on Montserrat beach.” (Whitefield’s sweaty preaching in clerical robes, and his frequent shedding of tears, account for his ever-present preaching handkerchief in portraits.) Equiano, who had never witnessed a minister so passionately engaged in speaking, assumed that this was why most other pastors spoke to relatively sparse crowds.43
In spite of his declining health, little evidence suggests that Whitefield lost his preaching vitality in his fifties. One of the best accounts of Whitefield’s late-career preaching came from his assistant Cornelius Winter, who had experienced the new birth under Whitefield’s ministry in 1760. Winter said that Whitefield would normally spend an hour or two in private prayer and reading before giving a sermon, and that he particularly depended upon study tools such as an annotated Bible published by the nonconformist minister Samuel Clarke, Alexander Cruden’s concordance, and Matthew Henry’s Bible commentary, which Whitefield called “unparalleled.” Textual analysis confirms that Whitefield frequently employed Henry’s commentary in composing his sermons. (Henry’s and Cruden’s books remain popular Bible study guides today.) All three writers stood outside the Anglican fold. Whitefield similarly continued to recommend the writings of evangelical Dissenters such as the Baptist John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The itinerant wrote a preface to a new edition of Bunyan’s works in 1767, praising Bunyan’s “catholic spirit” and noting how the irenic author maintained fellowship with non-Baptist Christians. Whitefield’s comfort with Dissenters emerged from alliances with them in Britain and, more importantly, in America. This interdenominational disposition damaged Whitefield’s credibility among certain Anglicans, including the officials who rejected the proposal for Bethesda College because he would not make it exclusively Anglican.44
Beyond Whitefield’s methods of preparation, Cornelius Winter emphasized the remarkable atmospherics of Whitefield’s oratory: “It would be only by hearing him, and by beholding his attitude and his tears, that a person could well conceive of the effect . . . He had a most peculiar art of speaking personally to you, in a congregation of four thousand people.” With a style polished by decades of practice, Whitefield almost never stumbled upon a word, and he exhibited deep emotion, often lifting his hands high, stamping his feet, and weeping. Critics saw the tears as stagecraft, but Winter thought this unfair. Sometimes he wept so bitterly that the audience wondered whether he could regain his composure, but he always did. Winter also noted the disturbing toll that preaching took on Whitefield in his later years; he routinely vomited “a vast discharge from the stomach, usually with a considerable quantity of blood,” after stepping down from the pulpit.45
Given the state of Whitefield’s health and his celebrity status, it is not surprising that he became crabbier and more inflexible in his later years, or at least Cornelius Winter thought he did. Although Winter loved Whitefield as his spiritual father, he felt that the itinerant did not always treat him or his servants reasonably: “He was very exact to the time appointed for his stated meals; a few minutes’ delay would be considered a great fault. He was irritable, but soon appeased.” Demanding that servants keep his house scrupulously tidy, he said he would not die in peace if he thought his gloves were laid out of place. He dined at a fashionably decorated table, but rarely enjoyed fancy foods. A loaf of bread and cheese were enough, but his favorite dish was cow’s heel. “How surprised would the world be,” the itinerant chuckled, “if they were to peep upon Doctor Squintum, and see a cow heel only upon his table.”46
Satisfied with Bethesda’s stability, Whitefield returned to New York, preaching along the way. He had already passed through Virginia when, on May 29, 1765, the twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry introduced resolves in the Virginia House of Burgesses against the Stamp Act, a new tax on printed goods, including newspapers, almanacs, and playing cards. In New York, plans had already begun for a colonies-wide meeting about the Stamp Act to transpire in October. By then, Whitefield had already returned to England, having crossed the Atlantic to pursue Bethesda’s college charter. Following a quick four-week passage, he arrived safely in Plymouth in July 1765.47
News about resistance to the Stamp Act followed Whitefield across the ocean. James Habersham, a senior adviser in the Georgia government, opposed the tax in principle, but threats against royal officials tasked with collecting the tax troubled him. In a plaintive letter to Whitefield in January 1766, Habersham said that his hands shook as he considered “the madness of the people here.” Agitators affiliated with the Sons of Liberty—leaders of the colonial resistance—had sent him a letter warning that they would tear down his home, should he attempt to enforce the Stamp Act. The frightened Habersham came to believe that the tumult of America’s “giddy multitude” was more dangerous than British imperial policy.48
The itinerant was not so sure. On February 13, 1766, he attended Benjamin Franklin’s testimony on the Stamp Act before the House of Commons, lending moral support to his longtime friend. Acting as an agent for the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin took questions from members of Parliament about the effect of the new taxes. “What was the temper of America towards Great-Britain before the year 1763?” they asked. “The best in the world,” the printer replied. “They were governed by this country at the expense only of a little pen, ink and paper. They were led by a thread.” But now, their temper was “much altered.” They would never willingly submit to the Stamp Act, he warned. A month later, a frustrated Parliament repealed the act, but still asserted an unconditional right to tax the colonists. Whitefield wrote in his letter book, “Stamp Act repealed, Gloria Deo.” A letter from “an eminent clergyman in London”—probably Whitefield—subsequently published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, assured readers that “Doctor Franklin spoke very heartily and judiciously, in his country’s behalf.”49
The erupting crisis between Britain and the colonies concerned Whitefield, but he remained occupied primarily with evangelistic and educational affairs. He never focused on America’s controversy with Britain as he much as he did on the course of the Seven Years’ War. The intra-Protestant, intra-British fracas in the colonies was a more delicate controversy for him to navigate than the great Catholic-Protestant clash of the 1750s and 1760s.
One of his first duties upon his return to England was dedicating the Countess of Huntingdon’s new chapel at Bath, near Bristol. The countess had continued to recruit a network of evangelical Anglican ministers, and had begun to erect chapels at her residences throughout England, buildings that would effectively serve as churches exempt from Anglican oversight. One historian has characterized her construction of the chapels as “ecclesiastical subterfuge”: she formally remained an Anglican but had functionally begun to separate (she would officially break with the Church of England two decades later). Whitefield wept openly as he preached at the new chapel, which he described as “extremely plain, and yet equally grand.” A grumpy Howell Harris, however, regarded the place as lavish and popish.50
Whitefield also met with John Wesley upon his return, their repaired relations still holding. Wesley thought that Whitefield looked terrible, like an “old, old man.” Despite being a decade older than Whitefield, Wesley thought he was doing better physically. Indeed, Wesley reckoned that his health was as good as it was when he and Whitefield first met at Oxford, except for his having fewer teeth and more gray hair. Wesley had not forgotten their past disagreements, however, since he blamed Whitefield for making the first “breach among Methodists.” But he could not help noting of Whitefield: “He breathes nothing but peace and love. Bigotry cannot stand before him, but hides its head whenever he comes.” Their longtime rivalry seemed to be cooling at last. By late summer, the Countess of Huntingdon and Whitefield had engaged the Wesleys in a more formal union by which the Wesleys could preach in the countess’s chapels. The “quadruple alliance,” as Charles called it, would tenuously last through Whitefield’s death.51
In 1767, Whitefield attended one of John Wesley’s conference meetings. “Love and harmony reigned” there, wrote a pleased Wesley. He told a correspondent, “God has indeed effectually broken down the wall of partition which was between us. Thirty years ago we were one: then the sower of tares rent us asunder: but now a stronger [one] than him has made us one again.” Even the chastened Howell Harris attended, signaling that Whitefield and his old Welsh ally had quietly reconciled.52
Before Whitefield left for England, reports had indicated that the itinerant would bring with him a “Black, which he has converted.” This “Black” (a common term for Indians as well as African Americans) was a Mohegan, Samson Occom, the most influential Native American evangelical preacher of the eighteenth century. Whitefield had met Occom during his 1764 tour of New England. Although he did not actually accompany Whitefield, Occom arrived in England soon after the itinerant. For years, Whitefield had carried on a correspondence with Eleazar Wheelock about his plans for the Indian charity school, and about Occom, his star pupil. Wheelock and Whitefield routinely clashed about strategies for the school and Occom’s chronically underfunded missions to the Indians, whom Wheelock called the “most savage and barbarous [people] of the human race.” Whitefield suggested that it would be easier to raise money if Wheelock came to England, but Wheelock sent Occom and Nathaniel Whitaker, a Connecticut colleague, instead.53
In the weeks following Franklin’s interrogation at Parliament, Whitefield was busy hosting Occom, who preached “with acceptance” before leading Londoners, including Lord Dartmouth (who would become one of Wheelock’s key benefactors) and George III himself. Occom and Whitaker briefly stayed at the Whitefields’ London home and subsequently at lodgings the itinerant furnished for them. Occom found the sights of the metropolis overwhelming, with people “cursing, swearing, and damning one another,” he wrote in his journal. “Others was hollowing, wresthng, talking, giggling, and laughing, and coaches and footmen passing and repassing, crossing and cross-crossing, and the poor beggars praying, crying, and begging upon their knees.” Whitefield showed them around the city, and even took them to the Houses of Parliament on the day of Franklin’s testimony.54
Occom, accustomed to more negligent treatment by Wheelock, appreciated Whitefield’s generous hospitality. “He is a tender father to us,” Occom wrote, “he provides everything for us, he has got a house for us, the Lord reward him a thousand fold.” Occom also noted that Whitefield’s charity did not extend just to America, but to Londoners as well: the Whitefields’ home was “surrounded with the poor, the blind, the lame, the halt and the maimed, the widow, and the fatherless.” The itinerant had Occom speak at the Tabernacle, regarding him as a “settled humble Christian” who “behaves well.” But Whitefield worried that the lengthy visit to England might “spoil him for the wilderness.”55
Occom and Whitaker’s trip to the British Isles, which lasted two and a half years, was wonderfully successful, raising more than £12,000 as Occom preached more than three hundred times. But when Occom returned to Connecticut in 1768, he found his wife and children neglected and nearly destitute. Soon Wheelock relocated the Indian academy to Hanover, New Hampshire, obtaining a charter for Dartmouth College in 1769. He also gave up on the Indian school concept and began catering exclusively to white students. By 1771, the embittered Occom permanently broke with Wheelock. Whitefield had reportedly forecast Wheelock’s betrayal: just before Occom returned to America, the itinerant said, “You have been a fine tool to get money for them, but when you get home, they won't regard you, they'll set you adrift.” Occom doubted Whitefield’s prediction then, but he told Wheelock in 1771 that he was “ready to believe it now.”56
As Whitefield observed his fifty-third birthday, his relations with many evangelicals—Wesleyan Methodists, the Countess of Huntingdon’s quasi-independent Calvinist network, and British and American Dissenters—were better than ever. But with Anglican officials, like those who scuttled his plans for Bethesda College, feelings were growing ever sourer, especially because of a 1768 incident in which Oxford officials expelled six Methodist students. The students reminded Whitefield of the Holy Club members of the 1730s. Their removal led him to question Anglicans’ commitment to the toleration of Dissenters and of evangelicals (like himself) who remained within the Anglican fold. Other Anglicans thought the students got what they deserved: when James Boswell told Samuel Johnson that the students were good people, Johnson replied, “I believe they might be good beings; but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of the garden.”57
Whitefield disagreed, and in defense of the students, he argued that the fundamental difference between Methodists and the Anglican establishment lay in their views of the Holy Spirit. Oxford administrators became suspicious of the students’ society meetings, which featured hymn singing and extemporaneous prayers, neither of which struck Whitefield as offenses warranting expulsion. He reminded the officials that Anglican ordination candidates had to respond affirmatively to the question “Do you trust that you are inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost?” But Whitefield thought that if Oxford was going to banish students for such pious crimes, then the proper question should be “Do ye trust that you are not inwardly moved by the Holy Ghost?” A supporter of Oxford’s actions countered Whitefield’s “enthusiastic rants,” asserting that in the postapostolic age, the Spirit’s movements in a believer’s life were “secret and imperceptible.” Only manifest fruits, including love, joy, and peace, were a reliable gauge of the Spirit’s work.58
In denouncing the expulsions, Whitefield reminded his audience of the ongoing controversy over appointing an American bishop, a firestorm fueled by fears that Anglicans did not really respect religious liberty. The affair at Oxford would surely “increase the prejudices of our colonists . . . against the establishment of Episcopacy,” Whitefield predicted. (Indeed, an edition of Whitefield’s letter quickly appeared in Boston, stoking fears about a bishop there.) He simultaneously dismissed any notion that evangelical faith undermined political loyalty, asserting that “every additional proselyte to true Methodism, is an additional loyal subject to King George the Third.”59
Writing from Scotland in summer 1768, Whitefield asked one of his London assistants to send “tender love to all, particularly to my dear wife,” who was in failing health. Shortly after Whitefield’s return to England, a “violent fever” seized Elizabeth, and she died. Their union of almost twenty-seven years had seen suffering and trials, and in retrospect it is difficult to judge the quality of it. The most famous (and unfair) comment on Whitefield’s marriage came from the evangelical preacher John Berridge, who said that matrimony “might have spoiled John [Wesley] and George if a wise Master had not graciously sent them a brace of ferrets.” Whatever the truth of this comment about John Wesley’s wife, Mary Vazeille, it does not apply to Elizabeth Whitefield. If anything, Elizabeth seems to have patiently endured the demands of being married to the ever-rambling Whitefield. (Berridge, a bachelor, was widely regarded as rude and eccentric.)60
Weightier was the testimony of Cornelius Winter, who wrote of Whitefield: “He was not happy in his wife . . . He did not intentionally make his wife unhappy. He always preserved great decency and decorum in his conduct towards her. Her death set his mind much at liberty.” Winter, as we have seen, harbored grievances toward Whitefield, but there seems little doubt that George and Elizabeth did not enjoy an affectionate marriage. Yet he depended upon her as one of his key ministry coordinators, often referring correspondents to her for more information about his plans or mentioning that she had sent him information on various subjects. The darkest episode they endured was the death of their infant son in 1744, and Elizabeth also suffered the indignity of being left behind in South Carolina in 1749. After that point, she for the most part stopped traveling with him, helping operate Whitefield’s ministry from their home base in London.61
Others recognized the demands that his itinerant ministry put on Elizabeth. James Davenport wrote her in 1754 and asked, “Shall I now sympathize with you, under the frequent and sometimes long absence of your dear husband? Or shall I not rather? Or shall I not withal, congratulate you on his being about his Master’s business, and his success therein.” Whatever else we can say about their marriage, Whitefield depended on Elizabeth and certainly grieved the “unexpected breach” of losing her. Three months following her passing, he wrote to an associate, “I seem as if I were some other person than myself since I lost my dear wife.” Four months after that, he said he was still daily feeling her absence, as if he had lost his “right hand.”62
In 1769, Whitefield still met occasionally with John Wesley, and they reminisced about their days back in Oxford, “the former times and the manner wherein God prepared us for a work which it had not then entered into our hearts to conceive,” Wesley wrote. Wesley called the itinerant his “old friend and fellow-laborer.” Most of their animosity was now healed. When Wesley related the history of Methodism in his sermons, he would favorably include Whitefield.63
Whitefield had also begun making plans for a return to America, where he hoped to check on an expansion of Bethesda, which he had ordered in spite of the disappointment regarding the college charter. In late summer he held farewell services at the Tabernacle and the Tottenham Court chapel. At a “parting general sacrament” at the Tabernacle, there were almost two thousand communicants. Everyone knew that this could likely be the last time they would see the preacher.64
In his farewell sermon on August 30, 1769, Whitefield spoke on a favorite passage of Calvinists, John 10:27–28: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.” London printers secured a transcript of the sermon and published it so quickly that Whitefield got a copy before he left for America. He regarded the publication as shoddy, “injudiciously paragraphed,” and “wretchedly unconnected.” But such was an “unavoidable tax upon popularity,” he figured: people had long profited from his celebrity. A departing sermon, which could be his last ever delivered in England, was sure to sell copies.65
While the transcriber claimed that the farewell sermon was taken down “verbatim,” even the printers admitted that it was “impossible for the press to convey an idea of that pathetic [i.e., emotional], moving manner, which is peculiarly his own.” Regardless of Whitefield’s frustration with the printed version of the sermon, we can see in it typical themes that endured throughout his preaching career. Although Whitefield still identified explicitly as a Methodist, he insisted that ecclesiastical labels were ultimately meaningless. There were only two types of people: the saved and the unsaved, the sheep and the goats: “Christ does not say, are you an Independent, or Baptist, or Presbyterian? or are you a Church of England-man? nor did he ask, are you a Methodist? All these things are of our own silly invention.” Moreover, salvation came to the sheep by God’s sovereign choice in election, “by the Father in a covenant passed from eternity.”66
At the end of the sermon, Whitefield grew nostalgic and emotional, confessing that saying good-bye to London was “the hardest part I have to act” but was nonetheless necessary: “This is the thirteenth time of my crossing the water, and I find it a little difficult at this time of life. But I am willing to go. I am clear as light in my call.” Whitefield ended the sermon with a reverberating appeal to the unconverted. “Take care, take care, if you never was among Christ’s sheep, may you be brought into the number now. Come, come, see what it is to have eternal life! Haste! Haste! Haste away to the great, the glorious shepherd! . . . ‘Come! Come! Come! Come!’ said the Lord Jesus, ‘Nothing shall pluck you out of my hand!”‘67
In late September, Whitefield, accompanied by Cornelius Winter, embarked for America. (Whitefield had recruited Winter to come to Bethesda “to teach the negroes the way of salvation.”) After about eight weeks, the anxious and seasick Winter happily noted, “By the good hand of our God upon us, we set our feet upon the American shore.” Whitefield stepped off the boat at the waterfront in Charleston, South Carolina. He had returned to America for the last time.68