One “The Circumstance of My Being Born in an Inn”: George Whitefield and Eighteenth-Century England
“THE CIRCUMSTANCE OF MY BEING BORN IN AN INN”: GEORGE WHITEFIELD AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND
Two inns in December, one in Bethlehem of Judea, and the other in Gloucester, England. These were the humble birthplaces of Jesus and, seventeen centuries later, one of his most celebrated disciples, George Whitefield. Whitefield himself made this connection to Jesus in the original edition (it was excised in later ones) of his Journals, one of the best-selling publications of the eighteenth century in England and America. (A Short Account of God’s Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, which covered his early life and conversion in college, was first published in 1740, a couple years after the initial publication of his early travel journals.) “The circumstance of my being born in an inn,” he wrote, “has been often of service to me in exciting my endeavours to . . . follow the example of my dear Saviour, who was born in a manger belonging to an inn.”1
The Gloucester of Whitefield’s birth was a plain town, neither cosmopolitan nor rustic. It lay about a hundred miles west of London, England’s vast metropolis. In spite of the ravages of the Great Plague and Great Fire of the 1660s, London’s population still stood at about 500,000, making it one of the world’s largest cities. Around 1660, the population of Gloucester was just under 5,000, making it one of the thirty largest provincial towns in England. An early nineteenth-century town booster, George Counsel, lamented that “it has been much the fashion with tourists to describe Gloucester as a dull heavy, place,” yet even he—an Englishman enamored of the history of kings—claimed that from 1687 (a visit by James II) to 1788 (a visit by George III), “no interesting event” had occurred there. From the perspective of religious history, Counsel’s statement is laughable.2
Gloucester’s economy was inextricably connected with Bristol, about thirty-five miles to the southwest. The Whitefield family was likewise deeply linked with that city. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Bristol’s population was more than 20,000. It was England’s second-largest seaport. The thriving town teemed with sailors, merchants, and customs officers. At a mile-long quay, dockworkers loaded and unloaded cargo from across the Atlantic world. Countinghouses, churches, sugar refineries, taverns, and coffeehouses ringed the town’s wharfs and the river Avon. One of Bristol’s merchants was Thomas Whitefield, George’s father, who worked in the imported wine business, a longtime staple of Bristol trade. Later he would open Gloucester’s Bell Inn. Whitefield’s oldest brother, Andrew, also worked in Bristol, and George visited him there as a teenager. Bristol was a critical commercial hub for Britain and America, and Whitefield would regularly preach in and pass through the town during his career.3
Whitefield was born in a time of profound political and religious transition for England. Nearly two centuries earlier, in 1534, King Henry VIII had broken with the Roman Catholic Church and formed the Church of England, setting in motion a persistent conflict over faith, politics, and Britain’s monarchy. By the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s long reign (1559–1603), the English people had become firmly Protestant, but clashes over the denominational allegiance of the monarch persisted. Beginning in 1642, feuding between Parliamentarians (many of them Puritans) and Royalists (many of them moderate Anglicans) precipitated the English Civil War, leading King Charles I to flee London for his safety.
Gloucester played a key role in the war. The town was a Parliamentarian stronghold in the generally Royalist southwestern region of England. In August 1643, the king’s army laid siege to the town, hoping to stage a campaign against London from Gloucester. Charles ordered a siege rather than an assault because of concern over the potential for high casualties. Gloucester’s small garrison entrenched itself behind the town’s ancient Roman-era walls, earthworks, and moat while the Royalist army—some thirteen thousand strong—began a fierce bombardment. The shelling continued through the warm nights of August, when cannonballs, according to one diarist, seemed to fly “through the air like a star shooting.”4
Gloucester’s defenders had come perilously close to running out of supplies and ammunition, with only three barrels of gunpowder left, when town leaders called for a day of prayer and fasting (for noncombatants) on September 5. As watchmen peered over the Roman wall that day, they beheld a surprising sight: the Royalist army began burning its siege huts and retreating from the city. The king’s men had received word that a Parliamentarian army of fourteen thousand was approaching from the east, having been raised in London to relieve beleaguered Gloucester. On September 8, the Parliamentarian army entered Gloucester, to the jubilation of its suffering residents. The Parliamentarians ultimately defeated King Charles I, leading to his arrest and public beheading in London in 1649. Following the siege, Gloucester rebuilt the damaged south gate of the city and placed an inscription upon it: “A city assailed by man, but saved by God.” King Charles II (Charles I’s son) reclaimed the English throne in 1660, and he remembered well Gloucester’s resistance during the war. He ordered the city’s walls to be torn down in 1662.5
Even after the restoration of the monarchy, the question of the king’s faith still stirred fear and resentment. Charles II converted to Catholicism on his deathbed in 1685. His brother and successor, James II, had embraced Catholicism earlier in life. Could Protestantism survive if England’s king was Catholic? Many English Protestants thought not; they pointed to the cruel fate of the French Protestants, who had just suffered a horrific crackdown under the forces of Louis XIV following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the same year James II came to the English throne. Catholics were bent on utter domination, militant Protestants believed, and could never be trusted with political power in a Protestant nation. Moreover, James II kept unnervingly close connections with the French government. He repeatedly tried to free Catholics from various disadvantages imposed on them by English law. An anonymous pamphlet spoke for many, in anti-Catholic themes that George Whitefield would later echo, when it described Catholicism as the most “destructive religion in the world; as not deeming any people worthy to live upon the earth, but the slaves of papal jurisdiction.”6
When James’s wife bore him a son in 1688, the prospect of a Catholic succession seemed more certain than ever. It was time to act. So Protestant leaders forced James II from the throne in late 1688 in what Protestants called the Glorious Revolution. He was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary—who apparently had no reservations about booting out her father—and her Dutch Calvinist husband, William of Orange. The couple were actually first cousins, both of them grandchildren of Charles I. James II was England’s last Catholic king. William and Mary’s coronation left no doubt that their Protestantism was of preeminent importance: for the first time, a copy of the Authorized Version of the Bible (King James’s 1611 translation) was included in the royal procession to Westminster Abbey. The new king and queen had to swear, also for the first time, to rule according to the “Protestant reformed religion established by law.”7
William and Mary’s assumption of the throne would have settled the matter of the monarch’s religion, except that they were childless. When William died in 1702 (Mary had died of smallpox in 1694), the crown passed to Mary’s younger sister, Anne. Anne suffered through eighteen pregnancies in her life, thirteen resulting in miscarriages or stillborn children. Compounding her tragedies, four of her five children who survived childbirth then died in infancy. Even her son William, who lived to age eleven, died in 1700. This development incited panic among monarchy watchers, for all of Anne’s closest relatives—and candidates to succeed her—were Catholics. But Parliament passed the Act of Settlement in 1701, which stipulated that anyone who “should profess the popish religion” or who married a Catholic could not become England’s king or queen. This law remains in effect in Britain today.8
When Anne died in August 1714, five months before George Whitefield’s birth, the crown of England passed over more than fifty of her closer Catholic relatives to Georg Ludwig (anglicized to George Louis) of Hanover, part of the Holy Roman Empire (present-day Germany), a fifty-four-year old nobleman who spoke almost no English. That linguistic deficiency did not matter, for George I was a Protestant (a Lutheran, to be precise). Most Protestants in England and the colonies celebrated the accession of George I as heralding permanent Protestant control of the monarchy. A Dissenting (non-Anglican) minister in London proclaimed, “The hand of Providence hath touched the Revolution over again.” Even during the week of Whitefield’s birth, the London Daily Courant reported on the celebrations honoring the new king in New York City, which were accompanied by fireworks, toasts to the king’s health, and many “huzzas and great acclamations of joy.” The colonists wanted George I to know that he had no better friends than the devoted Protestants of America.9
George Whitefield’s future celebrity in places like New York City and Boston seemed highly improbable when his mother Elizabeth gave birth at the Bell Inn on December 16. He was the youngest of seven children. Nine days later, on Christmas Day, baby George was baptized at his family’s twelfth-century parish church, St. Mary de Crypt, which stood just a hundred yards down the street from their inn. He was baptized according to the tradition of the Anglican Church (and almost all other Protestants at the time), which sprinkled infants with water soon after birth. For more than a hundred years, the small Baptist movement in England had been insisting that baptism was not for infants—to them, only the baptism of adults by immersion accurately reflected the inner transformation of a believer saved by God’s grace. Whitefield’s parents had no such qualms. Baptizing their baby placed him under the protective canopy of the Anglican Church and, they hoped, set him on the path of salvation.
At Whitefield’s baptism, the rector at St. Mary de Crypt, according to the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer and the language of the Gospel of John, prayed that God would “give thy Holy Spirit to this infant, that he may be born again.” Many Anglicans believed that baptism was directly connected to this new birth, which would normally follow baptism as part of a believer’s maturing devotion to God. Whitefield would remain an Anglican, yet he would come to sharply distinguish the wrenching experience of the new birth from infant baptism. The new birth, to Whitefield, was a discernible, sometimes torturous experience of renouncing sin and turning to God for forgiveness in Christ. People weren't born again because they were baptized, or because they were Anglicans, or because they were British. They had to surrender their lives personally to Christ. If they didn't, they remained subject to God’s wrath and in danger of going to hell. Preaching the new birth would become the center of Whitefield’s gospel ministry and the defining cause of his life.10
At the outset of the baptismal liturgy, the rector intoned, “Dearly beloved, for as much as all men are conceived and born in sin . . . I beseech you to call upon God.” Ask God, he urged, to show the infant mercy and to make him part of the divine kingdom. Here the pastor identified the fundamental problem with humanity, even with the seemingly innocent baby before him: all people were tainted with sin—original sin, the sin of Adam—which separated them from their Creator.11
Whitefield soon came to recognize the truth about his own sinful nature. In the best-selling account of his life, written for devotional and evangelistic purposes, Whitefield opened the narrative (following his December birth in an inn) by describing the darkness of his heart, in language directly repeating the rector’s prayer: “I can remember such early stirrings of corruption in my heart, as abundantly convinces me that I was conceived and born in sin; that in me dwelleth no good thing by nature, and that if God had not freely prevented me by his grace, I must have been for ever banished from his divine presence.”12
The doctrine of original sin—the notion that all are corrupted by, and even guilty because of, Adam’s sin—was coming under criticism by 1714, but the rector’s prayer and Whitefield’s wholehearted acceptance of the principle remind us that Whitefield grew up in a world largely convinced of the depravity of man and the brokenness of creation. These grim realities entered the world upon Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. The idea of original sin was a hallmark of Reformation thought. John Calvin, the French theologian and pastor of the Protestant movement in Geneva, Switzerland, wrote in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “Original sin is a hereditary corruption and perversity of our nature . . . All are tangled up in original sin and stained with its spots.” Even children were fatally tainted with this sinful nature, Calvin wrote, so that their moral character could “only be displeasing and hateful to God.”13
To modern sensibilities, this talk of a perverse nature of humankind—even of children—and of God hating us for it, may seem extreme. But Anglo-Americans in Whitefield’s world widely accepted Calvin’s views, even if more liberal theologians had begun to question his tenets. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church (1563), a codification of English Protestant theology, defended the principle of inherent depravity. Original sin, said the ninth article, “is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man . . . therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation.” Recalling the misdeeds of one’s childhood became a standard feature of evangelical autobiography. Belief in depravity was not just theoretical speculation by male theologians, either. If anything, evangelical women seemed to take a darker view of their sinful natures than did men.14
Whitefield’s English people did not just believe in sin because of statements like the Thirty-Nine Articles. They saw evidence for the brokenness of creation all around them. War, disease, fire, and crime ravaged their world. Just a year before Whitefield’s birth, the Treaty of Utrecht had ended the War of the Spanish Succession, the latest in a long line of conflicts over religion, monarchies, and the European balance of power. The Battle of Malplaquet (1709), pitting allied British and Dutch forces against the French, was the bloodiest battle in eighteenth-century Europe, in which 120,000 troops suffered 30,000 casualties, resulting in a pyrrhic victory for the British. A devout British officer walked the battlefield afterward and found that his horse could not move without treading upon the bodies heaped across the bloody ground. “God makes the nations a scourge to each other to work his holy ends,” the soldier mused, “by sweeping sinners off the face of the earth.”15
Most Britons needed no convincing about the world’s pervasive iniquity. Whitefield, though, saw his sin manifested not in titanic battles or nefarious crimes, but in his mundane life as a child in Gloucester. Other than what is recorded in Whitefield’s Journals, we do not have much information about his early childhood, but since he grew up in an inn, without a father in his house between the ages of two and eight (his father died in 1716), we might imagine that Whitefield had some exposure to the temptations of the flesh. He surely amplified his sinfulness for literary and theological effect, writing bluntly, “I was froward from my mother’s womb.” “Froward” is a term from the King James Bible meaning “wandering” or “perverse.” Its first appearance in the Bible refers to the sins of youth: “They are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faith” (Deuteronomy 32:20). That such words flowed easily from Whitefield’s pen reflects his deep saturation in the rhetoric of the King James Bible, which a century earlier had become the standard Bible of the English-speaking world. Whitefield’s preaching perpetuated the fame of that Bible, and its application to individual lives, in Britain and America.16
Whitefield was haunted by memories of his “early acts of uncleanness.” Even from boyhood, he wrote, he was “addicted” to “lying, filthy talking, and foolish jesting.” With deeper regret, he recalled regularly stealing from his widowed mother. His father died of unknown causes at the age of thirty-five. Death apparently came quickly: Thomas composed his will on December 23 (only a week after George’s second birthday) and passed away on the 26th. Undoubtedly, Whitefield helped his mother make ends meet, both before and after her troubled second marriage, but in his journal he chose to emphasize his audacious thefts of her money. He used the pilfered cash, he recalled, to satisfy his “sensual appetite” by buying fruits, tarts, and other treats.17
Whitefield might have had Saint Augustine in mind when he recalled this childhood thievery, which echoed Augustine’s spiritual autobiography. In one of the most famous passages of his Confessions, Augustine stole a neighbor’s pears, not for a lack of food, but only to enjoy “the theft and the sin itself.” Whitefield believed, with Augustine, that in childhood his sinful nature had begun to manifest itself in such spiteful acts. To Whitefield, stealing from his mother confirmed his Calvinist convictions about innate depravity. “If I trace myself from my cradle to my manhood,” he wrote, “I can see nothing in me but a fitness to be damned.” But this episode had the effect of presenting him in a more accessible light to readers. How many remembered their own senseless acts of disrespect toward their parents? Whitefield was no exalted saint; he was a wretch who had cheated his widowed mother when given the chance. His sin was as bad as any of those who converted under his preaching; he needed God’s grace as much as they did.18
Whitefield’s journal also mimicked Augustine’s autobiography in the way that Whitefield inserted biblical phrases and tropes at every turn of the narrative. Sometimes Whitefield compared himself to biblical characters, including Christ (as with his birth in an inn). Some readers (then and now) have found these associations with Christ at least slightly disconcerting, but the deep biblicism of the journal reflected the culture of eighteenth-century Anglo-America, the literature of the longer Christian tradition, and Whitefield’s own mindset. From Augustine to John Bunyan, great Christian writers had narrated their life experiences through stories of the Bible. To them, the Bible’s themes—fall and redemption, struggling with sin, and finding liberation from its captivity—were replayed in one’s own autobiography. The patterns of biblical history echoed through the centuries in the lives of individual believers.
When Whitefield was almost eight, his mother, Elizabeth, married an ironmonger named Capel Longden. It seemed like a good decision at first, since Longden came from a solid family background and was a church member at St. Mary de Crypt. But the union was a disaster. Whitefield called it “an unhappy match.” Longden took over the Bell Inn and ran it into the ground; Whitefield’s older brother Richard wrested control of the inn from Longden in 1729. Elizabeth left Longden six years after their marriage. As a college student, Whitefield worried about how to take care of his aging mother, who, he wrote, had “been greatly reduced by marrying a second husband.” Longden died in 1738.19
Since Whitefield’s father died when he was two, and his stepfather was an absent ne'er-do-well, what effect did this lack of a father have on Whitefield? He cast it in a redemptive light in his autobiography: “God overruled it for good . . . and made an uncommon impression upon my own heart.” The effects of childhood trauma, such as the lack of a father figure, are unpredictable. In Whitefield’s case, it seems to have fostered a determination to make something of himself in spite of his difficult circumstances. As he grew into adulthood, that resolve flowered into a sense of divine destiny, one that would lead him to associate his birth in an inn with his Lord’s. His difficult childhood bred an early sense of independence too, along with a willingness to work hard to provide for himself and his mother, his thefts from her notwithstanding.20
His mother, similarly, was determined not to let the family’s misfortunes ruin Whitefield’s opportunities for advancement. The key to those opportunities was education. When he was twelve, Whitefield enrolled at the school run by St. Mary de Crypt. He had had some earlier formal schooling, but this was the educational experience he first described at length. For all Whitefield’s talk of his wayward youth, it is worth remembering that in addition to attending church, he studied at the church’s school as well, and his thoughts had already begun to turn toward his becoming a serious Christian and a minister. He saved money to buy Bishop Thomas Ken’s Manual of Prayers for the Scholars Belonging to Winchester College, a popular devotional book that was, Whitefield wrote, “of great benefit to my soul.” This book fostered Whitefield’s emerging devotion to God. Designed primarily for Ken’s Anglican boys’ school, it advised students (again in the language of the King James) to “remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth” and to “fly youthful lusts” (Ecclesiastes 12:1; 2 Timothy 2:22). Bishop Ken offered the kind of program for piety and prayer that Whitefield was starting to crave, a regimen that did not shy away from mentioning temptations and experiences common to adolescent boys. Ken’s morning prayer, one that Whitefield may have uttered many times, read:
Glory be to thee, Lord God Almighty; glory be to thee, for renewing thy mercies to me every morning . . .
Lord, forgive whatever thou hast seen amiss in me this night; [Here if you are conscious to yourself of any sin committed in the night, confess it.] O Father of mercies, wash me thoroughly from my wickedness . . .
Whitefield, like many children, found his teenage years particularly challenging, fighting the temptations brought on by surging hormones and the new vistas opening to him in Gloucester.21
It was not all strict piety at St. Mary de Crypt’s school. Whitefield’s teachers noticed that he had talent in rhetoric and public performance—how could they not? They chose him to give special speeches before annual meetings of the school’s corporation. But Whitefield’s passion was for plays and acting. For centuries, Puritans—Calvinists who promoted further reformation in the Anglican Church—and other conservative Protestants had railed against impious plays. One 1583 pamphlet asked, “Do [plays] not maintain bawdry, insinuate foolery, and renew the remembrance of heathen idolatry? Do they not induce whoredom and uncleanness?” To be fair, many Puritans supported wholesome plays (some even admired Shakespeare), but many believed, as Whitefield would also, that plays cultivated temptations to sin and inculcated degenerate values.22
In repudiating the theater, Whitefield may have been drawing on Augustine’s experiences again. The saint attended plays in Carthage, but came to regret those experiences as fleshly indulgences. “Stage plays also captivated me,” Augustine wrote in the Confessions, “with their sights full of the images of my own miseries: fuel for my own fire.” He regarded it as “wretched madness” to enjoy viewing plays about the suffering and misery of others. Doing so was evidence not of compassion, but of sin. Attending plays unleashed “huge tides of loathsome lusts in which [compassion] is changed and altered past recognition, being diverted and corrupted from its celestial purity by its own will.” Whitefield did not explicitly refer to Augustine in his thoughts on theater, but his educational background and occasional comments about the saint in other writings suggest that he was familiar enough with Augustine to appropriate themes from the Confessions and other writings. Like the Bible, the works of great Christian writers such as Augustine framed Whitefield’s mental world.23
Whitefield’s schoolmaster had no qualms about the stage. Indeed, he himself wrote plays for the students. Whitefield so loved acting that he would skip school just to focus on preparing for the plays. The memory of these school plays became bitter, not least because the master adopted the common practice in the English theater of having boys, including Whitefield, dress as girls to play the female characters. “The remembrance of this has often covered me with confusion of face,” Whitefield wrote. “Confusion of face” was another evocative phrase from the King James Bible (see Daniel 9:7–8); it is usually translated as “shame” in modern English editions. While Whitefield was deeply influenced by his Anglican schooling, this was a point on which he criticized his upbringing. “This way of training up youth,” he caustically noted, “has a natural tendency to debauch the mind, to raise ill passions, and to stuff the memory with things contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as light to darkness, heaven to hell.”24
It was also common to have women play male roles in the English theater. Such theatrical reversals became less common in the late eighteenth century, when the switching of genders onstage was more likely to elicit moral revulsion. Nevertheless, people were already complaining in the early eighteenth century not only about gender confusion in the theater, but also about the more widespread habit of men wearing “female” clothes and of women adopting manly fashions. One pamphlet published when Whitefield was in his early twenties cited Deuteronomy 22 to the effect that “the promiscuous use of apparel” was an “abomination unto the Lord thy God.” Men who wore women’s styles of clothes or wore their hair in feminine fashions, the author averred, “deface manhood, and ridiculously depart from the dignity of the sex.”25
So it was not theater per se, but its frivolity, gender-bending casts, and profane content that bothered Christian critics. In the decades following the restoration of Charles II, certain plays did have shockingly ribald content. One of the most popular at the time of Whitefield’s schooling, George Farquhar’s raunchy play The Recruiting Officer (1706), was full of jokes about bastardy, polygamy, and the like. This kind of play was not just reserved for adults: as an eleven-year-old in 1727, the future English acting celebrity David Garrick put on The Recruiting Officer with friends at school. The play was a hit throughout the empire; it was the first production ever held at the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1736, only a few years before Whitefield would indict the people of that town for their obsession with worldly entertainments.26
Frivolity and profanity aside, the theater taught Whitefield a great deal about how to perform in public. He resented the unwholesome aspects of his education, but praised his tutor for teaching students “to speak and write correctly.” And indeed, Whitefield could speak correctly. David Garrick reportedly said later that Whitefield could “make men weep or tremble by his varied utterances of the word ‘Mesopotamia.’”27
Yet Whitefield grew restless at school. Really enjoying only playacting, he saw no point in studying Latin and other topics suited only to boys who could reasonably hope to attend Oxford or Cambridge. Because of his family circumstances, Whitefield did not think he was one of those boys. So he began assisting his mother at the Bell Inn; as he described it, “I put on my blue apron and my [candle] snuffers, washed mops, cleaned rooms, and, in one word, became a professed and common drawer for nigh a year and a half.”28
He served drinks, cleaned rooms, and pondered his future. He winced as he watched his former classmates walking past the inn and going to St. Mary’s school. He wondered about a career. He didn't want to become an innkeeper. He wondered about God. Did God have some particular calling for him? Mulling over the prospect of preaching, he sketched a few rudimentary sermons and stayed up late reading the Bible. He reflected on own his standing before God, but found that he was “very unwilling to look into [his] heart.” As Whitefield moved into adulthood, he entered a season of spiritual crisis.29
Whitefield’s contemplation of the priesthood reflected his growing spiritual commitment, but also represented interest in social advancement. He had several Anglican parsons in his family background: an ancestor named William Whitefield attended Magdalen College at Oxford in the 1570s and became the vicar of Mayfield, southeast of London, in 1605. George’s great-uncle Samuel Whitefield graduated from Hart Hall (later Hertford College), Oxford, in 1671, and served as rector of Rockhampton (between Gloucester and Bristol) for almost forty-five years. For an ambitious, spiritually sensitive boy with Whitefield’s aptitude for speaking, the ministry was a serious vocational possibility. But his mother could envision no way to pay for him to attend college, and Anglican ordination required a college education. A friend would sometimes ask Whitefield, while he was tending the bar, why he did not go to Oxford. “I wish I could,” Whitefield replied.30
Whitefield’s prospects for college did not brighten when his brother Richard began running the Bell Inn. Whitefield disliked Richard’s wife. He began feuding with her and would refuse to speak to her for weeks on end. He believed that God was prompting him to leave the inn; in the words of Isaiah 12, he said, God was calling him “from drawing wine for drunkards, to draw water out of the wells of salvation for the refreshment of his spiritual Israel.” He quit the inn and went to visit his older brother Andrew in Bristol.31
Whitefield tarried in Bristol for two critical months. He was adrift professionally, but his spiritual journey moved forward. In Bristol, he wrote, “God was pleased to give me great foretastes of His love.” He began to experience “unspeakable raptures,” especially in one episode at St. John’s Church in Bristol, when he was “carried out” beyond himself. This was a common testimony of evangelical converts, the feeling of having one’s soul or spirit seemingly leave the body to commune with God and savor his grace and love.32
St. John’s—which still stands in Bristol—is a remarkable medieval church built right into the city wall in the late 1300s. Its interior is striking, with a single aisle running between two rows of wooden pews. The sanctuary is narrow but the ceiling is high, conveying feelings of both reverence and intimacy. It was there that the “unspeakable raptures” filled Whitefield’s mind and heart, probably during a special communion service, since he wrote how he “felt great hungerings and thirstings [for] the blessed Sacrament.” At the Lord’s Supper, the minister would have given the bread and wine to the kneeling Whitefield, saying in the words enjoined by the Book of Common Prayer, “The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee . . . The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee.” Whitefield was coming to realize that Christ did indeed suffer for him, and he found the notion overwhelming. He wrote to his mother and assured her that he would never serve patrons at the inn again.33
Whitefield keyed his personal awakening to his reading habits. In the days of his visit to Bristol, he was poring over Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, to his “great delight.” The Imitation of Christ (De Imitatione Christi) was the most popular devotional book of the period, appearing in a remarkable 444 Latin and vernacular editions during the seventeenth century. The author was a Catholic monk in fifteenth-century Holland, but in spite of its medieval Catholic origins, the Imitation became a favorite of many Anglo-American evangelicals, including Whitefield’s soon-to-be colleague John Wesley. Wesley later prayed that God would write “the rules of self-denial and love laid down by Thomas à Kempis” in his followers’ hearts.34
No doubt Whitefield read all of the Imitation, but given the context of the reference, we can be sure that Whitefield especially valued Thomas à Kempis’s reflections on communion, the topic of the fourth and final section of the Imitation. There he spoke of the Lord’s Supper as offering “foretastes” of immortality: “To be invited to eat of thy most blessed body, and admitted to partake of the lively figures of thy divine blood; the commemorations of thy death, and sure pledges of salvation! Lord! what am I, that I should thus be suffered to approach thee?” This intimate, tangible access to the divine Savior staggered both Thomas à Kempis and Whitefield.35
Given Whitefield’s emerging emphasis on the new birth and God-initiated conversion, one might think that he would have balked at some of Thomas à Kempis’s theology, such as his notion that conversion entailed an individual’s decision to repudiate sin and embrace full devotion to Christ. But Whitefield was not averse to a kind of spiritual bricolage in his reading habits. He loved Thomas à Kempis’s depiction of the Christian disciplines, so he did not register disagreement with the author when he encouraged readers to convert themselves to Christ, even as Christ converted them to him. Clarifying the exact process of conversion in response to a late-medieval Catholic interlocutor was not a pressing matter. Whitefield later engaged in debates about conversion with Protestant rivals when controversy over religious revivals began to erupt in the early 1740s.36
With Whitefield’s reading of Thomas à Kempis and his new experiences of God, he was unwittingly entering an emerging world of intense Protestant spirituality. In Europe, Britain, and colonial America, many pietistic Protestants were rediscovering a “religion of the heart,” as opposed to religion defined by doctrinal or liturgical conformity. Of course, religion of the heart was a biblical theme (“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise,” the psalmist wrote). But across Europe and America in this period—beginning as early as the 1670s in Germany, with a notable British-American surge in the 1730s—young men and women sought an authentic relationship to God that went beyond religious duties and formality. This desire helps explain similarities in the spiritual journeys of Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley, and other nascent leaders of the evangelical movement, whose quest for heart knowledge of God had commenced before they met one another.37
Whitefield had not yet experienced conversion, and his spiritual elation in Bristol was not to last. He returned to Gloucester and relapsed into sluggishness. He moved in with his mother, sleeping on a pallet on the ground in her tiny home. He had “nothing to do.” The devil used his listlessness to lure him back into old habits and old friendships. “Much of my time I spent in reading plays,” he wrote, “and in sauntering from place to place.” The sense of God’s presence wore off, replaced by surging temptations.38
Soon Whitefield fell, as he recalled, into “abominable secret sin, the dismal effects of which I have felt, and groaned under ever since.” He did not say what this sin was, but we can be virtually certain that it was masturbation. Indeed, in an unpublished diary held today at the British Library in London, Whitefield noted that in the spring of 1736 he began excerpting the popular book Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, intending to publish a tract-length version of it. (Onan was a man who “spilled [his seed] on the ground” in Genesis 38.) On April 24, Whitefield wrote that he was “greatly assisted in extracting Onania,” adding, “I hope God will enable me to finish it to his honour as a proof of [my] repentance.” This leaves little doubt as to the nature of the secret sin. Although Whitefield never published the extract, John Wesley did publish a similar one on the “sin of Onan” in the 1760s.39
Whitefield’s veiled admission of this private indiscretion was undoubtedly designed to enhance his rapport with readers who endured similar struggles. But critics seized upon the tantalizing reference to the “abominable secret sin” and relentlessly speculated about its meaning. One anti-Whitefield tract, The Expounder Expounded, even included the reference in its subtitle, promising that the secret transgression would be “particularly illustrated and explained” within. “Perhaps no passage that ever dropped from the pen of a sacred writer,” the pamphleteer whispered, “hath afforded so much speculation to the public, as the abominable secret sin . . . When a man is become of so much importance to the world, as the reverend gentleman, whose writings I am expounding, people will be for remarking the most trivial occurrences of his life, and particularly a practice for which he has expressed so ungovernable an affection.” The pamphlet, which examined all possible meanings of the secret sin, settled on masturbation as the most likely diagnosis. A 1749 satirical print of sailors rioting in London similarly featured both Onania and Whitefield’s memoirs being cast out of a brothel and into a bonfire. Whitefield had the dubious distinction of becoming one of the first people in world history whose personal life became a topic of rampant conjecture in the mass media.40
God was faithful to Whitefield, even though the young seeker was, in his own estimation, “continually doing despite to the Spirit of Grace.” Again Whitefield turned to scripture to understand his life’s narrative, this time to Ezekiel, chapter 16: “He saw me with pity and compassion, when lying in my blood. He passed by me; He said unto me, Live.” God began speaking to and through Whitefield regarding his pastoral calling. One morning while (notably) reading a play to his sister, he said to her, “God intends something for me which we know not of . . . God will provide for me some way or other that we cannot apprehend.” These words don't seem that remarkable now, but to Whitefield, they seemed touched with prophecy. “How I came to say these words I know not,” he wrote. “God afterwards showed me they came from him.”41
God disclosed his plan to Whitefield through a former schoolmate who was attending Oxford. The student was working as servitor at Oxford’s Pembroke College (Oxford was and is a federation of semi-independent colleges), a position that allowed him to cover his expenses. Whitefield and his mother were apparently not aware that this arrangement was a possibility, even though many students worked as servitors at Oxford colleges. In Whitefield’s telling, when his mother heard of the student’s employment, it struck her immediately as the means of George’s college education. “This will do for my son,” she announced. (Elizabeth had obviously been wondering how she would get the teenager off his pallet and moving toward viable employment.)42
“Will you go to Oxford, George?” she asked. “With all my heart,” he answered. Whitefield had found his ticket into the ministry. Although he did not realize it at the time, this was also the circumstance that would lead to his introduction to John and Charles Wesley, his conversion, and, eventually, his meteoric rise to fame.43