Two “The Day Star Arose in My Heart”: Whitefield's Conversion
“THE DAY STAR AROSE IN MY HEART”: WHITEFIELD'S CONVERSION
George Whitefield was a wreck. He shuffled through the halls of Oxford’s Pembroke College wearing “dirty shoes,” ratty wool gloves, and a patched scholar’s gown. Other students gawked at him and whispered; some mocked and pelted him with dirt. But his earthly tormentors did not particularly concern him. Instead, Whitefield was convinced that the devil was assaulting him, just as God had given the devil permission to torment Job in ancient times. Day and night Whitefield writhed on the floor of his room, praying and commanding the devil to leave his body, in the name of Jesus. He cringed as he entered the darkened stairwells of Pembroke, thinking that at any turn he might meet his evil adversary face-to-face. He hardly slept. He often fasted. When he occasionally ate, he intentionally chose the “worst sort of food.”1
In Whitefield’s world, conversion to faith in Christ was no polite, simple affair. You did not just walk an aisle and ask Jesus to come into your heart. It was a titanic spiritual struggle—the defining struggle of one’s life—to find out whether God or the devil would ultimately command your soul’s allegiance. Not that the devil had as much power as God: the dark enemy was infinitely weaker than the eternal Father. But for a lost, blinded sinner like Whitefield, the devil was the heart’s default option. God had to rescue you from the enemy’s clutches. God had to change your desires; he had to make you want to be rescued.
So Whitefield waited. As he recalled, “Every day God made me willing to renew the combat.” During Lent, he fasted even more assiduously than before, eating nothing but “coarse bread” and drinking only unsweetened sage tea. He became emaciated and extremely ill. He insisted upon going out on frosty mornings without his wool gloves. One of his hands began to turn black.2
This may all seem a bit extreme, and some today might question Whitefield’s mental health. But to this Oxford student, the months-long ordeal represented a path to redemption. For years he had carried the burden of his unforgiven sin and the separation it created between him and God. His bodily sickness was an outward manifestation of deep interior dislocation. But the Holy Spirit began ministering to him in his illness, purifying his soul and preparing him to fully identify with his Lord and Savior.
One day during the penitential season of Lent, Whitefield found himself beset by a physical thirst he could not slake. He wrote: “It was suggested to me,” presumably by the Holy Spirit, “that when Jesus Christ cried out, ‘I thirst,’ his sufferings were near at an end.” Whitefield seized upon this prompting, flung himself on his bed, and began bellowing, “I thirst, I thirst!”3
Now came Whitefield’s deliverance. The clouds of oppression began to lift: “The spirit of mourning was taken from me, and I knew what it was truly to rejoice in God my Savior.” The ordeal was over: “After a long night of desertion and temptation, the Star, which I had seen at a distance before, began to appear again.” Whitefield knew that, for him, this was the moment to which 2 Peter 1:19 referred: “the Day Star arose in my heart,” he wrote. The Spirit took “possession” of his soul. The experience that Whitefield would soon herald to untold thousands had happened to him. He was born again.4
Before his spiritual transformation, once Whitefield and his mother realized that he might gain admission to Oxford as a servitor, they immediately began making preparations for his matriculation. First he went back to the classical school at St. Mary de Crypt. But returning to school placed him in bad company again, and he began to consort with “a set of debauched, abandoned, atheistical youths.” “Atheism,” to Whitefield and most eighteenth-century writers, did not mean literal unbelief in God, but acting as if God did not exist. Continually sinning with no guilt was a form of atheism. For a time, egged on by his schoolmates, Whitefield lived this way. He repeated the tantalizing reference to his “secret sin.” Justifying his behavior, he asked, “Why [has] God had given me passions, and not permitted me to gratify them?” His “secret and darling sin” became more urgent with his rising sexual awareness as a teenager. But he indulged in other occasional indiscretions, too, such as being “overtaken in liquor.” Clearly, however, drunkenness was a negligible misdeed compared with his secret transgression: he recalled being truly drunk only two or three times in his life.5
Reading wholesome books constrained Whitefield’s temptations, as did attending church, which he did twice a day. He diligently read the assigned classics as well as the Greek New Testament. Whitefield has deservedly become known for his emphasis on religious experience, but he, like most of his pastoral colleagues in the Great Awakening, was a thoroughly educated man, the product of Latin- and Greek-based schooling in Gloucester and at Oxford. He possessed much more classical learning than typical evangelical pastors do today. This is not to say that Whitefield was an outstanding intellectual figure of his time, just that he typified the classically educated Oxford- and Cambridge-trained clergy of the mid-eighteenth century. He never countenanced anti-intellectualism; he just did not believe that the mind alone could carry a person to a saving faith.
Whitefield eagerly read texts on practical piety. One particularly meaningful book for him during this period was the French Protestant pastor Charles Drelincourt’s The Christian’s Defense against the Fears of Death, a popular devotional that was translated into English as early as the 1670s. Given Whitefield’s personal struggles, he may have taken particular note of Drelincourt’s warnings about the wrath of God against dying sinners, who “know there is a sentence of eternal death pronounced against them in the court of the King of Kings, and that from this sentence there is no appeal nor escape.” Drelincourt invited readers to envision a damned person languishing in the exquisite miseries of hell, “devoured with worms, burning in hot flames, who is broken and tortured continually, in[to] whose wounds kindled brimstone is poured without intermission, with boiling lead and burning pitch . . . All this will give us but a light, and an imperfect image of hell torments.” This was horrifying imagery, but to Whitefield and other English people, hell and judgment seemed utterly real and dreadful.6
With these troubling thoughts churning in his mind, Whitefield dreamt one night that he was going to meet God on Mount Sinai, “but was afraid to meet him.” (Although Christian authorities debated the supernatural significance of dreams, or the lack thereof, few in evangelical circles doubted that one should pay attention to the messages they conveyed.) Sinai, as Whitefield’s readers would have known, was the place where God gave Moses the law. The dream was not difficult to interpret: as Drelincourt’s book had suggested, Whitefield—like all sinners—was proceeding, inexorably, toward death and judgment. If he had to meet God with the burden of guilt he carried, he would not be found righteous. He told an unnamed “gentlewoman,” possibly a spiritual confidant at church, about the dream, and she said, “George, this is a call from God.” A call to the ministry, perhaps, but more fundamentally, a call to salvation.7
The dream of God on Mount Sinai drove Whitefield to moral effort. He relentlessly pursued his penitential quest; he began “receiving the Sacrament monthly, fasting frequently, attending constantly on public worship, and praying often more than twice a day in private.” But moral effort did little more than keep him from falling to temptation. It did not resolve his fundamental crisis.8
While running an errand for his mother one night, Whitefield received a spiritual impression—an inexplicable belief or conviction that, to him, had divine sanction—that he would soon become a preacher. His mother, who may have cared more about Whitefield maximizing his talents than cultivating his piety, mocked the impression when he told her about it. Whitefield attributed her reaction to the devil. Even after his spiritual struggle was resolved, he tended to see demonic forces behind opposition to his efforts.9
The time came for Whitefield to go up to Oxford. The university town lay about fifty miles to the east, between Gloucester and London. Even though a majority of Oxford students were studying for the ministry, they had a frivolous reputation (see figure 2.1). They had to apply themselves in order to stay in school, but wealthy students made plenty of time for fun and socializing. The top social rank of students was formed by gentlemen commoners. These were the Oxford men whom lower-class students like Whitefield served. One of Whitefield’s contemporaries was a gentleman commoner named Erasmus Phillips, who combined his schooling with genteel recreations: horse races, cockfights, fox hunts, and fishing. Phillips’ experience was not unusual. One ditty from the era lampooned the Oxford student’s less than rigorous schedule:
I rise about nine, get to breakfast by ten,
Blow a tune on my flute and perhaps make a pen,
Read a play till eleven or cock my lac'd hat,
Then step to my neighbour’s till dinner to chat.
From the coffee house then I to tennis away,
And at five I post back to my College to pray . . .
When in punch or good claret my sorrows I drown,
And toss off a bowl ‘To the best in the town.’
At one in the morning I call what’s to pay,
Then home to my college I stagger away,
Thus I tope all the night as I trifle all day.10
The other most famous student from Pembroke during Whitefield’s era was Samuel Johnson, the English author immortalized in James Boswell’s biography of him. Johnson, who was in the middle rank of “commoners,” was not always the most diligent student. Students could be fined for skipping class at Pembroke, and when a particularly dull professor fined Johnson, he tartly retorted, “Sir, you have sconced me twopence for a lecture not worth a penny.”11
On the other hand, Johnson (like Whitefield) found his Oxford years to be a time of spiritual maturation, mediated in part by the reading of works such as William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, a text that would hold great meaning for Whitefield too. Johnson recalled that, having become a sort of amateur skeptic as a teenager, he expected to find Law’s “a dull book . . . and perhaps to laugh at it.” Instead, he found the book quite challenging, and it helped renew his interest in true Christianity. One also gets a flavor for the classical education at Pembroke from Boswell’s Life of Johnson. “He told me,” Boswell wrote, “what he read solidly at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysics.” Still, Johnson’s time at Pembroke was full of pranks and escapades. One colleague recalled that Johnson was “loved by all about him, was a gay and frolicksome fellow, and passed there the happiest part of his life.”12
Whitefield, by then nearly eighteen, did not go up to Oxford to frolic. He had had enough of that already, and the servitor’s life did not offer much space for high jinks. Tending bar at the Bell Inn had prepared him well for the rigors of serving Oxford gentlemen commoners, as he noted: “By my diligent and ready attendance, I ingratiated myself into the gentlemen’s favour.” Soon a number of the wealthy students chose him as their servitor. He would clean their clothes, mop their rooms, and serve drinks at their parties. In an unpublished diary from 1735, Whitefield jotted down his daily duties: “fetch coal,” “fetch oatmeal,” and the like. The elite students did not include him in their circle of friends; indeed, he later became an object of their derision. It was a lonely time for Whitefield, as freshman year is for many college students. He recalled, “I went to Oxford without a friend; I had not a servant; I had not any one to introduce me; but God, by his Holy Spirit, was pleased to raise me up to preach for his great name’s sake.”13
Of course, even among the servitors there were opportunities for rowdiness, but Whitefield sustained his zeal for holy living. His servitor friends badgered him to “join in their excess of riot,” but he refused. Repeatedly rebuffed, they reckoned he was a prude and left him alone “as a singular odd fellow.”14
Oxford authorities were concerned about the riotous living of some undergraduates, but worried also about the extreme piety of students like Whitefield. Oxford (along with Cambridge) was a profoundly conservative institution, an arm of the established Church of England, and a pillar of religious stability against rabble-rousers of all kinds. The future archbishop of Canterbury (and future adversary of Whitefield) Thomas Secker gave a well-regarded address at Oxford in the summer after Whitefield arrived, in which he extolled the kind of tempered moral education offered at Oxford. The best educator, Secker argued, would squelch all disruptive tendencies among the students. Even spiritual pursuits of “well-meant fervor he will prudently moderate, when they give religion a gloomy appearance, or add to it a needless burden.” Secker also appreciated the threat of foolish exploits at Oxford, for he recommended an even stricter repression of “the opposite extreme of libertinism and profaneness.” Whitefield gravitated toward the spiritual extremes of what many Anglican officials nervously regarded as “well-meant fervor.”15
Continuing to plumb the depths of spiritual discipline, Whitefield finally decided to repudiate plays and the theater. One day while fasting, Whitefield grabbed a copy of a play in order to read a funny passage to a classmate. Then “God struck my heart,” he wrote, “with such power, that I was obliged to lay it down again; and, blessed be his name, I have not read any such book since.” For years, Whitefield had whipsawed between enjoying the theater and embracing an ascetic life of piety. Now he was committed: he would no longer read plays. Of course, a flair for the theatrical would never leave him; it was too wired into his talents and vibrant personality. But Whitefield now deplored the plays’ bawdy content.16
Godly books helped fill the gap left by abandoning plays. One of the most important of these books, as for Samuel Johnson, was Law’s A Serious Call. Though Whitefield had been familiar with the book while living in Gloucester, he had no money to buy a copy until coming to Oxford. “God worked powerfully” on his soul through A Serious Call, Whitefield wrote. Law offered the kind of rigorous, hourly piety that Whitefield was looking for. “He therefore is the devout man, who lives no longer to his own will . . ., but to the sole will of God, who considers God in everything . . ., who makes all the parts of his common life, parts of piety, by doing everything in the name of God,” Law wrote. Law particularly warned against those who were pious at church but who spent the rest of their lives in “idleness and folly,” including play going. A Serious Call spoke to Whitefield’s daily struggles and helped him envision an integrated life of holiness.17
A Serious Call became one of the most popular devotional books of the eighteenth century. John Wesley would publish an abridged edition, calling the book “a treatise which will hardly be excelled, if it be equaled, in the English tongue, either for beauty of expression, or for justness and depth of thought.” (Although its fame has receded in recent decades, A Serious Call was still listed in 25 Books Every Christian Should Read [2011], a guide to spiritual classics published by the evangelical ministry Renovaré.)18
Inspired by Law, Whitefield began a thrice-daily regimen of praying and psalm singing, and also renewed his regular participation in communion. It was through his attendance at communion services that he first encountered the Methodists. This group of students had sprung up around John and Charles Wesley. They were committed to a life of serious spiritual discipline. John Wesley had graduated from Oxford and received ordination as an Anglican minister in 1728. But like Whitefield, who was eleven years younger, Wesley craved more than just education and a respected clerical position; he wanted to find real spiritual depth and commitment to God. Also like Whitefield, Wesley struggled to renounce fleshly temptations and entertainments. With Oxford friends in the mid-1720s, Wesley frequented coffeehouses and taverns, attended horse races, and played billiards. He even read plays and went to the theater. But as Wesley became dissatisfied with his mediocre faith, he began pursuing higher levels of holiness.19
In 1730, Wesley read Law’s A Serious Call, which helped him see “the exceeding height, and breadth, and depth of the law of God.” Law’s book precipitated a new phase of his spiritual quest. “The light flowed in so mightily upon my soul that everything appeared in a new view,” Wesley wrote. One critic of the Methodists, Josiah Tucker, who graduated from Oxford in 1736, claimed that the Methodists saw Law “as their schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.”20
In retrospect, one can see in Whitefield and the Wesleys’ use of Law more evidence of spiritual bricolage, especially in the early days of the evangelical movement. Whereas Thomas à Kempis had spoken of the individual deciding to convert himself, Law hardly spoke of conversion or the new birth at all. Law focused rigorously on Christian disciplines but did not emphasize the need for a preceding work of grace. Charles Wesley, for one, realized this problem after his own conversion, noting that because of Law, he had sought sanctification before he had the spiritual power to achieve it. Charles concluded that he needed justification by faith before sanctification, a distinction that Whitefield would come to affirm as well. But for the Wesleys and Whitefield, the craving for a holy life also helped precipitate conversion, since they despaired at how little strength they found to discipline themselves without an infusion of God’s transforming power.21
Whitefield arrived at Oxford at a transitional moment for the little group (or, more accurately, groups, at several Oxford colleges) that critics called Methodists, also known as the “Holy Club,” or “Bible-Moths.” They had begun to attract attention for their ascetic practices, including fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, getting up extremely early (especially for college students) for devotions, and dressing and eating as frugally as possible. They recorded their daily quest for holiness in carefully kept diaries. One antagonist ridiculed them for fastidiously monitoring such minutiae as “how many slices of bread and butter they ate.”22
The diary of a Methodist student named Benjamin Ingham gives a feel for the strict piety the group pursued. On March 1, 1734, Ingham recorded rising at four in the morning, noting that he “dressed, meditated,” and prayed. At five he meditated for another hour. (Methodist meditation gave deep attention to God’s holy and loving attributes, against which one’s own imperfections would become clearer.) Then Ingham read a commentary on the New Testament for an hour, attended a prayer service, and prayed privately for fifteen minutes. At ten a.m. he witnessed a commencement service at which William IV, the prince of Orange, was awarded a doctor of civil law degree. At two fifteen he met with Charles Wesley, who worked with him on keeping an “exacter diary.” Ingham broke his fast at three. At five he attended another prayer service, and at five thirty he wrote in his diary for a half an hour. He and his friends read Law’s A Serious Call at seven and discussed it for a couple hours. The day’s last entry recorded more meditation at nine forty-five. The next morning, a Saturday, he arose at four and began his disciplines again.23
When one of the Methodists’ earliest adherents died, rumors spread that fanatical rounds of fasting had killed him. John Wesley, who had preaching duties in and around Oxford, delivered a “landmark sermon,” as the editor of Wesley’s papers put it, at St. Mary’s Church two months after Whitefield’s matriculation. The sermon, “The Circumcision of the Heart,” explained that the Methodists’ rigorous commitment to holiness modeled on expectations set out in scripture. They sought “that habitual disposition of soul which in the sacred writings is termed holiness; . . . being cleansed from sin,” and “being so ‘renewed in the spirit of our mind,’ as to be ‘perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.’” True holiness was available through the Holy Spirit. To the Methodists, there was a level of commitment to God far above the nominal Christianity of everyday English culture.24
This was music to Whitefield’s ears. Here were the “spiritual friends” he had been seeking. He watched them from a distance, a bit intimidated by these older, radically committed scholars. A “ridiculing crowd” would sometimes assemble to watch the zealous students as they entered St. Mary’s to celebrate communion.25
When Whitefield came to Oxford, Charles Wesley had taken a more hands-on role in training initiates in Methodist ways. Charles was the eighteenth child born to Samuel and Susanna Wesley. He was more reticent than his more famous brother, more given to counseling, writing, and composing hymns. During his life, he composed some nine thousand songs and sacred poems. But he was also an effective preacher: one of his sermons, “Awake Thou That Sleepest,” became the best-selling publication by either of the Wesley brothers during their careers.26
Finally, Whitefield introduced himself to Charles, who quickly sized Whitefield up as a promising protégé and invited him to breakfast. It was a memorable meal, and “one of the most profitable visits I ever made in my life,” Whitefield recalled. The Methodists delighted in sharing edifying books with new recruits, and Charles urged several upon Whitefield. He began tutoring Whitefield in what one scholar has called “spiritual literacy,” which for the Methodists included the disciplines of reading the Bible and other godly books, keeping a diary, and writing edifying letters. The most important book Charles suggested to Whitefield was Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man (1677).27
For Whitefield, reading The Life of God in the Soul of Man represented another key breakthrough. The book fundamentally challenged Whitefield’s spiritual motivations. “Though I had fasted, watched and prayed, and received the Sacrament so long, yet I never knew what true religion was, till God sent me that excellent treatise by the hands of my never to be forgotten friend,” he remembered. Religious duties were meaningless, Whitefield realized, in the absence of vital communion with God. Scougal identified legalistic ritual as one of the most common false forms of religion, in which all the focus was on “the outward man, in a constant course of external duties, and a model of performances.” Other false forms focused too much on correct doctrine or on emotional experiences. For Scougal, real Christianity was something more spiritually profound; it was a “union of the soul with God, a real participation in the Divine Nature, the very image of God drawn upon the soul, or in the Apostle’s phrase, it is Christ formed within us.” By following sources such as Thomas à Kempis and Law, Whitefield had previously seen Christianity primarily as the repression of sin and the cultivation of devotion. He had not really known what Scougal called the “Divine Life.”28
Whitefield said that this distinction shook him. Upon reading Scougal, he recalled, a “ray of divine light was instantaneously darted in upon my soul, and from that moment, but not until then, did I know that I must be a new creature.” As Scougal wrote, acts of obedience to God, for the true Christian, were the “natural employments of the new born soul.”29
Later in life, Whitefield credited Scougal with showing him that good works could contribute absolutely nothing to his salvation. For all his prayers, church attendance, and fasting, he “knew no more that I was to be born again in God, born a new creature in Christ Jesus, than if I was never born at all.” Reading Scougal devastated his religious pretensions: he recoiled at first and thought of burning the book or throwing it away, but he could not get it off his mind. Whitefield finally stood, literally with Scougal’s book in hand, and prayed out loud: “Lord, if I am not a Christian, if I am not a real one, God, for Jesus Christ’s sake, show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned at last.” Aside from the Bible, Scougal was the most important book in introducing Whitefield to God-initiated conversion as the beginning of the Christian life.30
He began writing home, sending copies of Scougal and telling friends and relatives about the new birth. The letters got a “cold reception.” His correspondents wrote back and suggested that he was “going beside” himself. They implied that perhaps he was losing his mind; some “counted [his] life madness.” Disappointed with this reaction, Whitefield pursued deeper friendships with his new spiritual comrades. He sought more guidance from Charles, who (in spite of his new reservations about external practices) instructed him to practice spiritual disciplines with the same intensity as fellow Methodists such as Benjamin Ingham. He engaged in acts of charity, visiting prisoners, the sick, and the poor and reading godly books with them. In one of his earliest surviving letters, Whitefield told a Gloucester friend in 1734 that “early rising in the morning, public and private prayer, [and] a due temperance in all things” would help him achieve “true heavenly-mindedness.” Whitefield also began to feel the sting of other students’ scorn, which he received as he took communion with the Methodists. “I was set up as a mark for all the polite students that knew me to shoot at,” he wrote.31
Sometime around Whitefield’s twentieth birthday, he entered the last phase of his conversion travail. We should remember that Whitefield first related his conversion in print in 1740, at the height of the period of religious revival we conventionally call the Great Awakening. The itinerant penned the account for public consumption in order to present himself as an example of what penitents might expect to happen in conversion. He intended A Short Account of God’s Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield to communicate his personality and spiritual journey, which could only help draw more people to his meetings. Whitefield later deleted a number of the more extreme references in this narrative, such as his attempts to make Satan depart from him in the “Name of Jesus.”
Should we take Whitefield’s conversion testimony literally if he felt free to revise and edit it years later? There seems no reason to doubt its overall trajectory. Logic might suggest too that the earlier version—less cautious and more detailed—was more reflective of what he experienced in those intense months at Oxford. Whatever the case, it is important to remember that Whitefield fashioned the conversion account, like all his published journals, for an audience.
For years, going back to his time in Gloucester and Bristol, Whitefield had sought to resolve the grinding tension between his fleshly desires and devotion to God. Now he felt that he was on the edge of a final spiritual discovery. He was becoming an adult, he was charting his own path, and he had found like-minded friends at college who encouraged his spiritual zeal. Not surprisingly, the devil sought to derail his quest for divine resolution. “God was pleased to permit Satan to sift me like wheat,” Whitefield concluded (Luke 22:31). He became, for some months, seriously ill. When kneeling to pray, he was often overcome with sweaty “heavings.” He felt like a man “locked up in iron armour.”32
The bodily effects of the devil’s assaults on Whitefield—sickness, rigidity, and nausea—could have been interpreted by some in his era as symptoms of demonic possession. It is not clear exactly how Whitefield understood the devil’s role in this phase of his conversion. Protestants undergoing the throes of conversion sometimes recalled experiencing extreme satanic temptations to sin. It was less common among Protestants, however, for the contest to become so focused on the penitent’s physical state or for the prospective convert to pray for the devil to leave his body, as Whitefield did. Unlike Catholics, Protestants did not employ official exorcists, but any person could use prayer, fasting, or other means of devotion to combat the devil.33
Among Whitefield’s tools of resistance against temptation were spiritual books. Adding another literary item to his spiritual bricolage, he turned to the writings of Juan de Castaniza, a Spanish Benedictine monk of the sixteenth century. Whitefield’s world was heavily anti-Catholic, and his preaching would become explicitly hostile toward Catholicism in the mid-1740s, but that did not eliminate regard for the classic works of Catholic authors such as Castaniza and Thomas à Kempis. Castaniza’s The Spiritual Combat was translated into English in the 1650s. He prescribed methods for seeking “Christian Perfection,” methods rooted in “the true knowledge of God’s goodness and greatness, and of our own baseness, misery, and nothingness . . . the hatred of our selves, and the love of God.”34
This was the spiritual state at which Whitefield wished to arrive. But he found himself (prompted by suggestions from the devil, he believed) taking Castaniza too far, “into a state of quietism.” For example, whereas Castaniza advised believers to “talk but little,” Whitefield pushed it to the limit: “Satan said I must not talk at all.” Castaniza advised silent meditation, so Whitefield resolved never to pray out loud again. He was whipsawing spiritually, looking for an end to his ordeal, but instead finding only dead ends and overwrought extremes.35
Not surprisingly, Whitefield’s turmoil took a toll on his schoolwork. He was supposed to make regular oral presentations to his tutor, but soon he skipped one meeting, and then at the next he told his tutor that he “could not make a theme.” The tutor fined him for both episodes, but kindly inquired why Whitefield was not doing his work. Whitefield “burst into tears” and told the teacher that he meant no offense, but he simply could not perform his scholarly duties. The tutor worried that Whitefield was going mad.36
A concerned classmate reminded Whitefield that the scriptures required Christians to be subject to those in authority over them. Whitefield responded, “Yes, but I had a new revelation.” Contemporaries called this kind of talk antinomianism or “enthusiasm.” A new revelation? To polite Oxford folks, that sounded like something Quakers or other spiritual radicals might say. It was a dangerous path.37
Whitefield briefly tried isolating himself from his Methodist friends, since he was impressed with the Gospel of Mark’s account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, thinking that perhaps this was the next step in his arduous journey. Instead of meeting with his fellow students, he went out into the forested Christ Church Walk, praying under the trees, sometimes kneeling, sometimes prostrate. He began missing scheduled meetings and neglecting the Methodists’ program of spiritual disciplines, including church services. But soon he realized that this solitariness was another diabolical deception. He skipped a breakfast meeting with Charles Wesley, who tracked him down and told him that he should start meeting with his older brother John. He did so, and John’s advice helped deliver him, as Whitefield saw it, from the “wiles of Satan.”38
Whitefield’s temptations were not strictly spiritual. He continued to confess to falling “into sensuality.” But by prayer, godly reading, and church attendance—especially at communion services—he found ways to escape from his sin. Nothing, he wrote to a Gloucester friend in early 1735, “so much be-dwarfs us in religion . . . as starving our souls by keeping away from the heavenly banquet” of the Lord’s Supper.39
He also caught a glimpse of his vocational calling in ministering to the poor at the Oxford town jail. A poor woman whose husband was confined there confessed to Whitefield that she had considered suicide, but his ministry had helped dissuade her. He met with her and her husband at the jail, and both of them came to realize how profoundly they needed God’s help. From his time in the “wilderness” and his pastoral work with the distraught couple, Whitefield concluded, “Satan for some weeks had been biting my heel, [but] God was pleased to show me that I should soon bruise his head” (Genesis 3:15). Perhaps, he thought, he could emerge from his inner tumult and begin influencing others for Christ, as the Wesleys were doing.40
Indeed, the time had come for Whitefield to emerge from darkness. It was the late-winter season of Lent in 1735. Methodist students “strictly” observed Lent’s forty days of penance. Intense fasting left Whitefield emaciated and weak; he could barely climb the stairs at Pembroke. His tutor sent for a doctor, but Whitefield thought his fasting had had its desired result: “Though I had been imprudent, and lost much of my flesh, yet I had nevertheless increased in the Spirit.”41
Whitefield’s Lenten illness wracked him for seven weeks. Confirming some physical details of his travail, he noted in his unpublished diary that he lay “abed ill” all morning on April 3, and felt “great pressures in stomach” on the 4th. Surely, he thought, the Holy Spirit was using the sickness to purge him of his evil inclinations. He wrote down all the sins that he could identify, both sins of the heart and of actions, and confessed them to God. He pored over his Greek New Testament late into the night.42
Finally, the end arrived. His original version of the conversion associated it with Christ’s thirst on the cross, but he deleted that bold comparison in later versions, which related his entire new-birth experience in less provocative terms: “After having undergone innumerable buffetings of Satan, and many months’ inexpressible trials by night and day under the spirit of bondage, God was pleased at length to remove the heavy load [and] to enable me to lay hold on his dear Son by a living faith.” Even in the revised edition, this was a moment of intense emotion, when his “joys were like a spring tide, and, as it were, overflowed the banks.” As he strolled through the university, he happily sang psalms to himself, his heart filled with the joy of forgiveness.43
The experience left him weak, and Whitefield’s doctor ordered him to go to Gloucester to regain his strength. Cities like Oxford were widely regarded as unwholesome; a “change of air” would ostensibly help cure one’s ailments. Whitefield sought out John Wesley, asking whether he thought it was God’s will for him to go home. Wesley said yes. So although it was not exactly a country retreat (in his terse reply to Whitefield, Wesley jotted “Gloucester air worse”), Whitefield made his way back to Gloucester.44
Upon arrival, old Gloucester friends hassled him about his newfound spiritual mission. Why was Whitefield always talking about Jesus and going to church, they asked? Whitefield looked for new like-minded friends and continued ministering to the poor in Gloucester and Bristol, which he also visited again. He had gotten into some debt at Oxford during his illness, but now he found that God provided for him through unexpected channels. His brother (probably Andrew) returned from a sea journey and gave him some money. Even without speaking to him about his financial situation, other people offered financial help. Whitefield became increasingly convinced of the literal meaning of the “promise which I always pleaded,” he noted in his journal, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33).45
As he grew in his faith, the Bible became his chief source of guidance. He would not only pray kneeling, but also read the Bible kneeling. Kneeling helped him maintain a properly submissive attitude as he studied. As he read the Word and prayed, the Holy Spirit ministered “knowledge of divine things” to him. He compared his reception of divine insight to the priests of ancient Israel consulting the Urim and Thummim, sacred objects used for divination. God now led him “even in the minutest circumstances,” Whitefield wrote. He began to sketch sermon outhnes as an outlet for his new insights.46
He continued to read devotional books, too, especially books written by English Puritans that would become standards in the emerging evangelical movement. Two of these were Richard Baxter’s A Call to the Unconverted (1658) and Joseph Alleine’s An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners (1672). It is notable that even after Whitefield experienced conversion, he often read tracts like these, which were directed toward the “unconverted.” They spoke to his need for security in Christ, but also to his growing fascination with conversion itself. Calling people to divine transformation would become the center of his gospel ministry.47
Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted helped Whitefield articulate exactly what conversion entailed. Conversion was, Baxter wrote, “another kind of work, than most are aware of.” It was not the performance of religious duties. Conversion turned a person into a new kind of being, one with a God-ward inclination in his or her soul. The converted person, Baxter wrote, has “a new Understanding, a new Will, and Resolution, new Sorrows, and Desires, and Love, and Delight; new Thoughts, new Speech, new Company (if possible) and a new Conversation.” This change was just what Whitefield had been looking for.48
Alleine’s Alarm to Unconverted Sinners emphasized the sinner’s desperate state before God before conversion and insisted that conversion was entirely a work of God’s free grace. God found “nothing in a man to turn his heart, but to turn his stomach,” he warned. Alleine demanded that sinners—as well as converted Christians—take seriously the gravity of their sin: “Look back on thy self . . . reflect upon thy swinish nature, thy filthy swill, thy once beloved mire . . . Open thy sepulchre . . . Art thou struck almost dead with the hellish damp? Behold thy putrid soul, thy loathsome members. O stench unsufferable, if thou dost but sense thy own putrefaction!” Seeing the offense of one’s sin was a sign of conversion. People who thought their own sin was not so bad were still lost. Comprehending the seriousness of sin also helped the converted understand that the mercy of God alone, not any religious effort, moved him to bestow “converting grace” on sinners. Moreover, Alleine asserted, God made an effective offer of salvation only to the elect, those whom he had chosen for redemption. This understanding of free grace would, in time, precipitate a rift between Whitefield and the Wesleys.49
In the meantime, Whitefield leaned heavily on John Wesley for guidance. In the absence of a biological father, Whitefield called Wesley his “spiritual father in Christ.” He asked him myriad questions on topics including the healthiest diet, the best place to recuperate, theological dilemmas, and family struggles. In a lengthy letter from July 1735, Whitefield asked Wesley about a Dissenting friend who wished to join the Anglican Communion. Was Dissenting baptism legitimate, or did his friend need to be rebaptized before joining the Anglican Church? Whitefield also asked, wearily, what he should do about his mother and her no-account husband. They had not been “cohabitating” for years, yet his stepfather refused to give his mother adequate financial assistance. He inquired whether she could “on any terms can justify living separate from her husband”? (Wesley’s response does not survive.) Covering the gamut of spiritual topics, Whitefield even asked Wesley whether he should insist on having group prayer over a meal when eating with less devoted friends. One wonders whether Wesley grew weary of answering so many questions—he had many correspondents, after all.50
During Whitefield’s time of recuperation in Gloucester, the Anglican bishop there approached Whitefield about receiving holy orders, first as a deacon and then as a priest. Wresthng with his worthiness to become a minister, he worried about Paul’s warning in his first letter to Timothy against ordaining “novices, lest being puffed up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil.” God assured Whitefield that he was truly calling him, however, by giving him a revelatory dream about a meeting with the bishop (one to which he had yet to be summoned). He dreamed that the bishop gave him gold coins during their conversation. Sure enough, it was not long before the bishop asked for an appointment with Whitefield. The bishop told him that although he had intended never to ordain anyone under the age of twenty-three, the minimum age recommended by the church, he had decided to make an exception in Whitefield’s case. (Whitefield was twenty-one.) Then the bishop gave Whitefield a gift of five guineas to buy a book. As the coins clinked in his hand, Whitefield remembered the dream, and his “heart was filled with a sense of God’s love.”51
He would later come under fierce criticism for accepting dreams as divine validation of his vocation. Whitefield excised references to his revelatory dreams from later editions of the autobiography. But Whitefield, like many early Methodist itinerants, had focused on the role of dreams only in his conversion and ordination, not in his public ministry. As the historian Phyllis Mack has shown, this reflected a difference between male and female Methodist piety: while male leaders’ records of dreams typically stopped after they began preaching, nocturnal visions remained central to female Methodists’ piety. The prominent late eighteenth-century Methodist Sarah Boyce asked God to help her understand particular questions about faith and practice through dreams; her contemporary Hester Roe Rogers even fasted to facilitate the formation of intense dreams.52
The fulfillment of Whitefield’s dream convinced him to seek Anglican orders. The only question was where he would begin his ministerial work. Oxford friends implored him to return there to lead the Methodist cohort. As we shall see, the Wesleys had already left Oxford to serve as missionaries in the new colony of Georgia, and the Methodists’ work in Oxford was in disarray. Then Whitefield received an offer from one of the Methodists’ benefactors, Sir John Philips of Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire (in southwestern Wales), a member of Parliament. If Whitefield would work at Oxford, Philips would provide him £30 a year. Whitefield was persuaded, and in March 1736 he returned to Oxford, where he began to study for the oral examination required to complete his bachelor’s degree, and also for his ordination.53
At Oxford, Whitefield continued to bask in the delights of his newly converted state. In an unpublished diary running from March to June, most entries spoke of the Holy Spirit’s presence. Over and over, he wrote that he was “full of the Holy Ghost” or felt “joy in the Holy Ghost” for hours on end. On May 6, he exulted that he experienced “joy in the Holy Ghost Grace Grace Free Grace.” The Holy Spirit was an emotionally and mentally tangible presence to him. Whitefield often spoke to private meetings of friends, noting that the Holy Spirit assisted him in knowing what to say. On one occasion, the Spirit enabled him “to apply all the promises made to the Apostles to us.” On another, he (the Spirit) “suggested” to him “things just applicable to what we were discoursing,” and he even “put words into my mouth,” Whitefield noted. He concluded that one of the Spirit’s ministries to believers was “to point out appropriate particular texts to [their] particular circumstances.”54
This emphasis on the Holy Spirit would be a consistent theme in Whitefield’s career, although he would in time back away from claims for his immediate guidance. As I argued in my book The Great Awakening, many eighteenth-century evangelicals focused heavily on the work of the Spirit. Outpourings of the Spirit generated revivals, but the Spirit also regenerated sinners, giving them new life in Christ. Moreover, the Spirit comforted and guided individual believers, offering them the assurance and joy of salvation, and strength through trials.55
The most common definition of evangelicalism, one crafted by the historian David Bebbington, suggests that four primary characteristics mark evangelicals: conversionism (an emphasis on the need for a life-transforming encounter with God), activism (the conviction that the gospel demands action), biblicism (the idea that the Bible is the unique source of God’s truth), and crucicentrism (the theological primacy of Jesus’s death on the cross for sinners). While this definition, known as the “Bebbington quadrilateral,” accurately reflects four distinctive emphases of evangelical faith, it does not account for the enormous weight that evangelicals such as Whitefield put on the Holy Spirit’s ministry. Along with conversion, the experience of the Holy Spirit’s presence and power was what struck Whitefield and other evangelicals as the most novel aspect of their newborn lives.56
Life in the Spirit hardly negated the life of the mind for the new convert. Whitefield passed his Oxford examination in May, writing in his diary that he was enabled to recall “the true Greek text: Horace—Sallust offhand, fluently,” and “to translate an English book into Latin immediately.” Yet during the exams he was terribly nervous. Struggling to speak, he trembled violently, even during practice sessions. He would exhibit similar anxieties during public performances, including sermons, for much of his early career.57
Two weeks later Whitefield returned to Gloucester. Travel hampered his physical recovery, but he was still much better off than when he had returned to Gloucester for his convalescence. Leaving Oxford, he reflected on how far he had come since serving drinks and cleaning rooms at the Bell Inn: “How short a time it was since I was a common drawer in a publick house—had to be forcibly pulled out from thence to divine grace. I should have been the most abandoned wretch living.” Now he would become the “head of the Methodists” at Oxford.58
His ordination was scheduled for June 20, 1736, at Gloucester Cathedral (see figure 2.2). After preaching and praying, the bishop asked Whitefield whether he believed he was “truly called according to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the due order of this realm, to the ministry of the church?” Having answered this and every other question as honestly as he could, Whitefield knelt at the altar. The bishop laid his hands on Whitefield’s head and charged him: “Take thou authority to execute the office of a Deacon in the Church of God committed unto thee; in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The jubilant Whitefield wrote to a friend, “When the Bishop laid his hand upon me, I gave myself up to be a martyr for him, who hung upon the cross for me.”59
The next morning, while praying, Whitefield asked God what to do next. Of course he would be returning to Oxford to lead the Methodists, but he also had some sermons he had been working on privately. Should he begin to deliver those immediately, he wondered? As he was praying, the words “Speak out, Paul” surged into his mind. “Immediately my heart was enlarged,” he wrote. “God spake to me by his Spirit, and I was no longer dumb.” Yes, it was time. Now he would begin to preach.60