Three “God is Preparing Me for Something Extraordinary”: Whitefield the Methodist Missionary
“GOD IS PREPARING ME FOR SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY”: WHITEFIELD THE METHODIST MISSIONARY
A capacity crowd pressed into pews at Gloucester’s St. Mary de Crypt church on June 27, 1736. They had come to hear George Whitefield preach publicly for the first time. His mother, Elizabeth, forsaken by her husband but loved by her son, sat beaming in the front row. Many friends and acquaintances were there, happy for the Gloucester boy who had made them proud by graduating from Oxford. This was the church where Whitefield had received baptism and first communion; here he had attended the St. Mary’s Church school and first tested his talents in public speaking.1
If the crowd was expecting a polite, appreciative sermon, it did not get one. Whitefield wrote that his preaching kindled a “fire” in the audience, and that he was “enabled to speak with some degree of gospel authority.” Some discomfited audience members jeered at him for coming on so strong, but most seemed awed (or “struck,” as Whitefield put it). Afterward, some complained to the bishop—the man who had just ordained Whitefield—that the boy’s preaching had driven fifteen overwrought people “mad.” Whitefield was not concerned, though. He was delighted. “Glory! Glory! Glory!” he wrote.2
The title of Whitefield’s first sermon, “The Necessity and Benefits of Religious Society,” does not sound very exciting. Whitefield’s sermons, when read today, seem doctrinally conventional, but not brilliant, certainly not as brilliant as sermons of his contemporary Jonathan Edwards. It requires imagination to envision how Whitefield turned his sermons into emotional masterpieces. Some of the explanation for their powerful effects lay in Whitefield’s talent for public speaking. But he also noted how he leaned on his training in rhetoric, both in school and in speaking to prisoners during his time at Oxford. (He had spoken regularly in private meetings too in the months leading up to his debut.) These experiences made him “accustomed to public speaking” and kept him from being “daunted over much.” Whitefield may have struggled with nervousness before preaching, but once in the pulpit, he dazzled.3
That first public sermon reflected his Methodist experiences at Oxford. Escaping the dangers of lukewarm religion, Whitefield insisted, required surrounding oneself with like-minded believers. They could bolster a Christian’s faith as he in turn bolstered theirs. He lauded the benefits of belonging to such a group: “It [is] an invaluable privilege to have a company of fellow soldiers continually about us, animating and exhorting each other to stand our ground, to keep our ranks, and manfully to follow the Captain of our Salvation, though it be through a sea of blood.” To Whitefield, Christianity was not for the faint of heart: it was for the manly and the martial.4
Still, Whitefield believed that even religious societies could mask hypocrisy. He warned the congregation of God’s coming judgment, in which all would be revealed. “Think not that it will be sufficient for you to plead at the last day, ‘Lord, have we not assembled ourselves together in thy Name, and enlivened each other, by singing psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs?’ For verily, I say unto you notwithstanding this, our blessed Lord will bid you depart from him; nay, that you shall receive a greater damnation, if, in the midst of these great pretensions, you are found to be workers of iniquity,” he cautioned. Even the Methodists’ intense disciplines could not hide an unregenerate heart in the end. Hypocrisy would show itself eventually, usually in the indulgence of secret sins. Only the true believer would maintain consistent public and private holiness.5
Some in Whitefield’s Gloucester audience must have found his vision of the devout Christian life unsetthng. He had no patience for the obligatory routine of church attendance. Instead, he called people to discipline and accountability, summoning them to enter the “narrow passage of a sound conversion,” which was the “one way now to heaven.” This was a life reordered around Christ and the fellowship of true believers. To some, it was an exhilarating prospect. Others considered Whitefield’s message puritanical and picky.6
His conversion, ordination, and impending graduation from Oxford boosted Whitefield’s confidence. It also helped him find his pastoral voice. Shortly after preaching his first sermon, he wrote to a Gloucester friend and urged her to bear up under earthly difficulties with thoughts of heaven’s glories. Meditate on the time, he recommended, when “we shall see the blessed Jesus, whom our souls have so eagerly thirsted after in this life, surrounded with glory, and attended with myriads of his holy angels, who will rejoice at our safe arrival to their happy mansions.” Certainty of heaven made Whitefield’s proclamation of the new birth more urgent. Whitefield became a religious celebrity without peer, but we shouldn't forget that theological conviction underlay his gospel preaching and the promotion of his ministry.7
Shortly after giving his sermon at Gloucester, Whitefield returned to Oxford, fortified by the salary from Sir John Philips, to continue building the Methodist movement there. He found “few friends” left at Oxford, the Wesleys having departed for Georgia. Hostility to the Methodists lingered; their names “stunk” to fellow students. Nevertheless, Whitefield remained optimistic. Soon after coming back to the university, he formally received his bachelor’s degree.8
Whitefield planned also to pursue an MA. This was the usual path for ministers. The Oxford MA was not rigorous, mostly involving unmonitored requirements to attend lectures. Candidates also had to present formal addresses (ostensibly) of their own composition, but students often found themselves giving these recitations to empty rooms, which explains why many called the MA speeches “wall lectures.” Some students plagiarized previous orations.9
Whitefield found he had plenty of other things to do as he worked on his MA. He not only was the key Methodist leader at Oxford, but also soon received a call from a friend, Thomas Broughton, to preach for a couple months at the chapel of the Tower of London, where Broughton was an assistant minister. In early August, Whitefield rode to the great metropolis by stagecoach. Even relatively cosmopolitan Oxford had not prepared the boy preacher for the sights of England’s behemoth city, where hundreds of thousands of residents lived in conditions ranging from opulence to squalor.10
On his way to the tower, Whitefield traveled on the north bank of the Thames, passing London Bridge on his right. This bridge had existed in various forms since the time of Christ, in ancient Roman Britain. By the 1730s, the bridge had become overcrowded and bulging with so many buildings that it looked more like a city street than a normal bridge. English rulers had traditionally placed the heads of traitors on pikes on the bridge, the most famous such head belonging to the Scottish rebel William Wallace, who was decapitated, drawn, and quartered in 1305.
The Tower of London was a royal palace and fortress on the Thames, dating back to the eleventh century and the rule of William the Conqueror. The starkly beautiful St. John’s Chapel, where Whitefield was to preach, occupied the second floor of the White Tower, the oldest part of the compound, and featured white stone pillars and Norman arches (see figure 3.1).
Whitefield rambled through the city’s streets in his clerical gown and cassock, gawking at the shops and theaters, knowing that when he was younger, the attractions of London would have proved irresistible. “Not many years ago,” he wrote, “I would have given much money, would my circumstances have permitted, to have [gone] up and seen a play.” But now he was surrounded by evangelical friends, including his patron, John Philips, and he found countless opportunities for ministry.11
One of these opportunities—one fitting the Methodists’ emphasis on reaching the destitute—was to preach at London’s Ludgate Prison every Tuesday. This prison, also on the Thames’s north bank, normally housed respectable citizens convicted of less serious crimes, including excessive debt. (Newgate Prison was used for felons.) But a critic in 1725 called Ludgate the “worst of prisons,” contending that it was wracked with corruption and extortionist practices that kept its residents mired in insolvency.12
Whitefield’s fame as a preacher began to spread in London. The Tower Chapel was thronged with people when he spoke on Sundays. Methodists eagerly came to hear him, and he began to attract younger followers who were, he wrote, “under serious impressions, to hear me discourse about the new birth.” But after two months, Broughton returned, and Whitefield returned to Oxford. These were happy times for Whitefield, who wrote that he had a “delightful life” at the university as his prominence grew.13
While in London, Whitefield received a letter from John Wesley, who was in the Georgia colony, with Charles, to establish a Methodist mission. “Does your heart burn within you,” Wesley asked, “to turn many others to righteousness? Behold, the whole land, thousands of thousands, are before you! . . . Who will bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, till they are meet to be preachers of righteousness? Here are adults from the farthest parts of Europe and Asia, and the inmost kingdoms of Africa. Add to these the known and unknown natives of this vast continent, and you will indeed have a great multitude which no man can number.” This plea jarred Whitefield. He was just getting comfortable with his preaching duties in London and Oxford. But Wesley’s letter made him think that perhaps there was an even higher level of commitment to Christ—the kind of commitment required of a missionary—that he had not yet reached.14
Georgia was, to the Methodists, like a new New World. Founded in 1732, it was the last addition to the thirteen mainland American colonies that would rebel against the British four decades later. Georgia’s trustees believed that the colony could achieve several desirable ends at once. It would serve, the charter said, as a buffer against the aggression of Spanish and Indian “savages,” as an outlet for resetthng “poor subjects” from the masses of London, as a market for British refined goods, and as a model Christian society at a time when some of the other colonies seemed to have lost their original, pious character. The Georgia founders hoped to attract Christian settlers from across Europe, and accordingly, they guaranteed “liberty of conscience” and “free exercise of their religion” to all Christians except Catholics. The prospect of imperial war between Catholic and Protestant powers always loomed, so Catholics were unwelcome in the frontier colony.15
An early booster visited tiny Savannah, Georgia, and proclaimed that the place had “the pleasantest climate in the world, for it’s neither too warm in the summer, nor too cold in the winter; they have certainly the finest water in the world, and the land is extraordinarily good.” It is not known whether this visitor actually stayed through an oppressive Savannah summer, but the piece was written to promote the colony, which the author called the “Land of Canaan.” When the Wesleys came to Savannah, it remained a village of frame houses and huts cut out of the surrounding pine forests, perched on a cliff overlooking the Savannah River (see figure 3.2). The town’s modest homes rarely lasted long, since termites wreaked havoc on their wooden foundations. Settlers discovered that all manner of wildlife, from toads to rattlesnakes, easily entered their shacks.16
The trustees envisioned Georgia as a holy experiment. This aspiration partly explains their decision to ban slavery from the colony. James Oglethorpe, the chief organizer, was no radical abolitionist, but he and other trustees thought that if Georgia was to become a model of Christian virtue, they would have to exclude chattel slavery. Anglo-Americans widely believed that while slave plantations—especially the sugar plantations of the Caribbean—were great engines of agricultural profit, they fostered corruption and laziness among whites. Slaves destabilized colonies in times of military emergency. The importation of slaves did not comport with the Georgia trustees’ mercantile and imperial goals, or with their intention to employ poor Englishmen as laborers.17
Georgia trustees, including Oglethorpe and the Oxford pastor and scholar John Burton, began recruiting John Wesley in August 1735. “Surely,” Oglethorpe wrote to Wesley, “there are more persons capable of doing the offices required by the Church in England than there are capable of undergoing all that is necessary for propagating the gospel in new countries.” For the Methodists, the prospect of reaching higher levels of devotion to the gospel was always tantalizing.18
Wesley, however, had not yet experienced Whitefield’s clarity about salvation. Having agreed to go to Georgia, Wesley frankly explained to John Burton that his “chief motive” in taking on the mission was “the hope of saving [his] own soul.” The emerging evangelical movement would emphasize good works and Christian activism, but not as means of salvation. Wesley here revealed that in 1735, he still conflated sanctification (the process of becoming more holy) with redemption.19
In Wesley’s romantic image, Georgia seemed like an oasis of innocence where he could start fresh with an unadulterated gospel. He was particularly intrigued by the prospect of preaching to the “heathens,” who had no pseudo-Christian philosophy to corrupt their minds, as Englishmen did. He could leave behind the frustrations of ministering to lukewarm cultural Christians. In the New World, Wesley anticipated learning from the childlike faith of Native American converts and discovering “the purity of that faith which was once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). He envisioned Georgia as a spiritual Eden.20
The Wesley brothers landed at Savannah in February 1736. They joined hundreds of new settlers, including a number of Moravians. These German Pietist Christians had recently begun a missionary campaign of unprecedented scope, establishing stations across the Atlantic world. Contacts between early Methodists and Moravians added an international quality to the evangelical movement. One of the key Moravian leaders, August Spangenberg, visited Wesley and, in a legendary exchange, pressed the young Englishman about his spiritual state. “Does the spirit of God bear witness with your spirit, that you are a child of God?” Spangenberg inquired. Wesley wrote, “I was surprised, and knew not what to answer.” Spangenberg asked, “Do you know Jesus Christ?” Wesley paused and said, “I know he is the Saviour of the world.” “True,” replied Spangenberg, “but do you know he has saved you?” Wesley answered meekly, “I hope he has died to save me.” The conversation shook Wesley, making him realize his uncertain state before God.21
A series of tawdry episodes soon shattered Wesley’s hopes for the mission. Charles, whom Oglethorpe employed as a personal secretary, encountered scandalous claims by a Mrs. Hawkins and a Mrs. Welch that they had become intimately involved with Oglethorpe. What Charles did not realize was that the women were apparently telling Oglethorpe the same things about him! (John would face similar charges, and the unstable Mrs. Hawkins once assaulted John with a pair of scissors and a pistol, threatening to shoot him in the head.) Whatever the truth of Mrs. Hawkins and Mrs. Welch’s intrigues, Charles and Oglethorpe’s relationship grew quite strained.22
Charles found Georgia strange and forbidding. The settlers constantly worried about attacks from the Spanish or Native Americans. Even daily tasks entailed exotic dangers. In the summer, Charles recorded that he bathed in the Savannah River before sunrise because the water was cooler but also because “the alligators were not stirring so soon.” Hating his tedious secretarial work, Charles started to think that he had made a terrible mistake in coming to Georgia. He became physically ill and ultimately decided to leave the colony, departing for England in July 1736.23
John stayed on in Charles’s absence, but he likewise found his Georgia ministry derailed by personal conflicts. The bitterest controversy surrounded his relationship with Sophy Hopkey, a seventeen-year-old he met in March 1736. The thirty-two-year-old Wesley became smitten with the spiritually sensitive teenager. He had initially thought that coming to America would solve his previous sexual struggles, but upon meeting Sophy, his craving for intimacy came raging back. They engaged in months of emotionally charged courting, one day resolving to break off the relationship, the next engaging in reckless behavior. At one point they spent several nights together on a deserted island, but Wesley congratulated himself that they did not engage in any sexual indiscretions, although he did admit (in his private diary) to some hugging and kissing.24
Wesley brought up the topic of marriage with her, but never got around to proposing directly. At some of his Methodist colleagues’ behest, he drew lots to seek God’s guidance on marrying her. (This was also a common practice of the Moravians.) John picked a slip of paper that told him, “Think of it no more.” But Wesley could not bring himself to end the relationship.25
Growing frustrated with Wesley’s indecisiveness, Sophy began a rapid courtship with another man, William Williamson. In March 1737, Sophy informed Wesley that she was marrying Williamson, whom Wesley considered “not remarkable for handsomeness, neither for genteelness, neither for wit or knowledge or sense, and least of all, for religion.” Wesley’s low view notwithstanding, Sophy wished for him to publish the banns, the parish announcement of the couple’s intent to wed. Wesley understandably balked, and the couple absconded for South Carolina, where they were married. Wesley spitefully resolved to deny Sophy communion for her actions, which precipitated an ugly series of legal and ecclesiastical charges between Sophy’s new husband and Wesley. Wesley was accused of defaming Sophy’s character and of denying her communion without reasonable cause, and he faced a possible fine of £1,000.26
By the end of 1737, Savannah was in turmoil over the sordid affair. Although the colonial magistrates forbade him to leave the colony, Wesley became convinced that he had no hope of a fair hearing from the indignant Georgians, so he fled. After sunset on December 2, as the tide began to go out, Wesley said that he “shook off the dust of my feet and left Georgia.” He had been there less than two years. One of the Georgia trustees, the Earl of Egmont, wrote that the board was happy to see him resign, “he appearing to us to be a very odd mixture of a man, an enthusiast and at the same time a hypocrite, wholly distasteful to the greater part of the inhabitants.”27
Whitefield had obviously not anticipated Wesley’s spectacular debacle as he considered the invitation to come to Georgia, which Wesley made while his romance with Sophy was waxing. Whitefield continued ministering in Oxford, and he also supplied the pulpit in a relatively isolated parish in Dummer, southwest of London. “Thoughts of going to Georgia still crowded continually in,” Whitefield wrote. He received another letter from Wesley, reminding him that in Georgia, the harvest was great, but the laborers few. “What if thou art the man, Mr. Whitefield?” Wesley asked pointedly.28
Charles Wesley, having arrived back in England, contacted Whitefield to tell him that he was recruiting more ministers for the colony. (Whitefield did not realize, or Charles did not yet know, that Charles was not going back.) Things began to fall into place: his friend Charles Kinchin, for whom Whitefield was substituting at Dummer, received an appointment at Oxford, where he could oversee the Methodists’ ministry. The parish at Dummer likewise got a permanent replacement, so he was not needed there any longer. No obvious barriers stood between him and Georgia.29
In late December 1736, Whitefield wrote to Charles and said he would go to America, declaring, “I throw myself blindfold into the hands of my Heavenly Father, to conduct me where he pleases.” Whitefield perceived Charles’s dissatisfaction with Georgia, and began chiding him. Why, he asked, did Charles agree to be James Oglethorpe’s secretary instead of working as a missionary? “Did the bishop ordain us, my dear friend, to write bonds, receipts, etc., or to preach the gospel?” He suggested that Charles did not trust God enough to supply his material needs as a missionary. But then he backed off. “I go too far,” he wrote. “You know I was always heady and self-willed.”30 This was an aggressive tone for Whitefield to take with Charles, and it hinted at his coming break with the Wesleys. Charles’s irresolution, as well as John’s troubles in Georgia, eroded Whitefield’s veneration of them as spiritual fathers just as Whitefield was beginning to realize what a powerful ministry he could have on his own.
The young minister now entered a peculiar phase of his early career. He had decided to go to Georgia, but his departure was delayed for the better part of 1737. In the intervening months, Whitefield “began to grow a little popular,” as he put it in his journals. His celebrity began to ascend just as he was about to leave the country. In fact, his imminent departure seemed to generate more widespread fascination with his preaching. Whitefield started to understand the value of a farewell tour.31
He preached for some weeks in Gloucester, but he began to see truly spectacular results during weeks of ministry in Bristol. People from a variety of denominations—Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians in addition to Anglicans—pressed in to hear him, and some were turned away for lack of seating. “The Word, through the mighty power of God, was sharper than a two-edged sword,” he wrote, quoting Hebrews 4:12. His teaching on the new birth and justification by faith “made its way like lightning into the hearers’ consciences.” Attendees crowded around him during breaks to ask advice about their spiritual state. Some offered him salaries if he would stay in Bristol instead of going to Georgia, but he would not be deterred.32
In March, Whitefield made his way to London to meet with James Oglethorpe and the Georgia trustees. Oglethorpe had been a member of Parliament since 1722, and was known as an outspoken, ambitious, and generous man. He repeatedly traveled between Georgia and London to raise support for the colony, and in 1737 he focused on convincing Parliament to provide military support for the colony to defend itself against possible Spanish aggression. The Spanish in Florida were none too pleased with the new English colony to their north, and they were mulling an attack.33
The well-connected Oglethorpe introduced Whitefield to a number of Anglican luminaries, including the archbishop of Canterbury (the highest-ranking cleric of the Church of England) and the bishop of London. But Whitefield had to wait on Oglethorpe to finish his business in England before they could depart. While waiting, he took a temporary pastoral position in Stonehouse, south of Gloucester. Although Whitefield would never settle into a permanent parish ministry, he loved the people in this country village. Crowds overflowed as he spoke at the church and parsonage, and his own soul was refreshed in ways reminiscent of his conversion ordeal. He “found uncommon manifestations granted” from God. At many waking moments, Jesus visited him in spirit: “Could the trees of a certain wood near Stone-House speak, they would tell what sweet communion I and some more dear souls enjoyed with the ever blessed God there.” Sometimes he felt as if his soul “would go out of the body.” At other times he was so overcome with emotion that he would throw himself on the ground. He offered his “soul as a blank in [God’s] hands, to write on it what he pleased.”34
On one memorable night, the villagers were alarmed as the sky grew unaccountably bright. Many of his parishioners were frightened, and Whitefield was determined to “stir them up to prepare for the coming of the Son of Man.” He and one of his friends, a “poor but pious countryman,” went out into the fields, “exulting in our God, and longing for that time, when Jesus should be revealed from heaven in a flame of fire!” He thought it was the happiest night of his life.35
Still, Whitefield was becoming ever more restless for Oglethorpe’s departure, and it did not appear imminent. In May, Whitefield returned to Bristol, where his celebrity began to crest. He preached five times a week, and crowds packed the churches well beyond normal capacity to get a glimpse of him. “People hung upon the rails of the organ-loft, climbed upon the [roof] of the church, and made the church itself so hot with their breath, that the steam would fall from the pillars like drops of rain,” he wrote. Whitefield had to push his way through the masses to get to the pulpit.36 Whitefield stayed for about a month in Bristol, and reported that when he bade farewell in June 1737, many wept bitterly and promised to follow him to Gloucester. So he left Bristol at three in the morning, hoping to avoid a protracted, emotional good-bye. After brief stays in Gloucester and Oxford, he went again to London. There his Methodist supporters encouraged him to begin publishing his sermons, including what would become one of his signature exhortations, “The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in Christ Jesus.”
As his fame grew, so did the consternation of some church officials, who had begun to grumble about Whitefield’s views on conversion.37 Whitefield countered the “aspersions of enemies” in the printed preface to the sermon, in which he said he wished that his “reverend brethren, the ministers of the Church of England . . . would more frequently entertain their people with discourses of this nature, than they commonly do: And that they would not, out of a servile fear of displeasing some particular persons, fail to declare the whole will of God . . . nor suffer their people to rest satisfied with the shell and shadow of religion.” This critical statement irritated a number of clergymen, and two banned him from preaching in their churches when he refused to retract it.38
By the time he preached “The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth,” Whitefield saw conversion as an individual, deeply felt experience. This understanding of conversion was not new to him—he had learned it from works such as Joseph Alleine’s Alarm to Unconverted Sinners, and from his Methodist colleagues. (Whitefield would have argued that he found the doctrine in the Bible, especially in the Gospel of John, chapter 3, when Jesus told the Pharisee Nicodemus that “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”) Seventeenth-century Puritan and Pietist spirituality also emphasized the individual’s discernible moment of conversion. Alleine implored readers to ask themselves, “When was the time, where was the place, or what was the means by which this thorough change of the new birth was wro't in [your] soul?”39
Although the doctrine of the new birth was not new, Whitefield was the most important popularizer of the concept in Anglo-American history, at least until Billy Graham’s revivals of the twentieth century. In “The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth” (preached originally in Bristol), Whitefield displayed the focused attention on conversion that would mark his career. He called the new birth “one of the most fundamental doctrines of our holy religion” and “the very hinge on which the salvation of each of us turns.” Despite the importance of being born again, Whitefield insisted that the experience was not “experimentally understood by the generality” of nominal Christians. A renovation of the heart was required for people to become fit for heaven. Religious duties—attending church, praying, and fasting—were important and could help put a person in the path of grace. But to Whitefield, observing churchly rituals had nothing to do with securing the new birth, which required a miraculous infusion of faith, effected by the Holy Spirit. Nothing short of a soul-transforming conversion would save people.40
The volume containing “The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth” began to spread Whitefield’s fame in print, running through three editions by 1738. Whitefield said that the sermon “began the awakening at London, Bristol, Gloucester, and Gloucestershire.” By “awakening,” Whitefield meant spiritual excitement and inquisitiveness, especially among those who had not experienced conversion. Supporters subsidized The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth so that people could buy and distribute the published sermon in bulk (“two guineas per hundred to those who give them away,” it advertised).41
Published sermons were important to Whitefield’s fame, but nothing matched newspapers for generating interest in his ministry. News of Whitefield’s preaching began to appear as early as April 1737, when the London papers the Weekly Miscellany and Common Sense or The Englishman’s Journal reported that someone had donated £50 to Whitefield to help build a church in Frederica, Georgia. Then in July, supporters paid to advertise The Nature and Necessity of Our New Birth in the Daily Gazetteer.42
Whitefield, Wesley, and Edwards’s evangelicalism rode on new capabilities in media and transportation. Evangelicalism was truly a “movement”: it was a movement of ideas and people, but also a movement of methods and technologies, ones that were changing broader Anglo-American culture and the British Empire. Whitefield traversed the Atlantic on ships that were faster and more dependable, and (except during wartime) that made more trips, than ever before. American and Caribbean colonial ports saw ship traffic double between 1700 and 1750. In addition, Wesley and Whitefield itinerated on rapidly improving road networks within Britain. Their letters and publications traveled in coaches and ships along these same expanding routes. As we scramble today to understand the changes wrought by digital media and commerce, we may better understand the mood of the eighteenth century’s own “age of speed.”43
The key figure in the new media promotion of Whitefield was a Methodist convert named William Seward. Seward’s professional background was in finance, stocks, and publicity. He played a major role in the South Sea Bubble debacle of 1721, a speculative scheme that resulted in one of the first great stock crashes in modern economic history. After becoming an evangelical believer, Seward set about promoting Whitefield with the same sort of entrepreneurial energy, but for a more godly cause. Paid newspaper pieces focused on Whitefield’s charity sermons, but gave colorful information about Whitefield’s personality and the unprecedented excitement he generated. They also made sure to note that the rising star meant to “go voluntarily to preach the gospel in Georgia.”44
When Whitefield first saw one of his sermons described in the newspaper, he said that the notice “chagrined” him. He even asked the printer not to run any more stories about his preaching. The printer answered that he was “paid for doing it, and that he would not lose two shillings for anybody.” Whether the news of the payment came as a surprise to Whitefield, we do not know, but it did not take long for Whitefield to accept the tactic of paid publicity. It attracted more hearers, and more hearers meant exposure for the gospel. In October, he wrote sheepishly in a letter that he supposed a Gloucester friend had “heard of my mighty deeds, so called, by reading the news-papers.”45
At long last, in December 1737, it came time for Whitefield to leave. Oglethorpe was still not ready, but a detachment of his soldiers was going, so Whitefield began saying his final good-byes. Everyone knew that there was no guarantee of returning safe from any transatlantic voyage, so his parting was bittersweet. Whitefield’s Oxford follower John Scote, for one, seemed nearly undone by the experience, writing that he felt the “utmost perplexity” and “inexpressible uneasiness” upon the minister’s departure. He conceded, however, that had Whitefield’s ministry not touched him so deeply, he “could not have been so tenderly so sensibly affected with losing you.” He accepted that Whitefield had had to move on to London, but what, Scote wondered, would he do when the evangelist left for Georgia?46
This kind of intense devotion to Whitefield was becoming common, and it brought out mockers. Read’s Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer reported with a touch of cynicism that when Whitefield preached for the last time at St. Helen’s Church, hundreds of people had to stand outside, “only to have the happiness of touching his garment.” (This was a reference to Matthew 14:36, in which crowds of the sick “besought [Jesus] that they might only touch the hem of his garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole.”) Whitefield recalled the moment less skeptically, of course. As he bade farewell at “great St. Helen’s”—a capacious twelfth-century church where William Shakespeare once worshipped—people moaned and wept openly. It took him a half an hour to get out the door after his sermon. On New Year’s Eve, Whitefield sailed to Gravesend, the port town on the south bank of the Thames where the river begins to open into the North Sea. After visiting Whitefield to send him off, Charles Wesley admiringly wrote to John Wesley that “God has poured out his Spirit” upon Whitefield and his Methodist colleagues. Finally, on January 6, 1738, Whitefield boarded the Whitaker, bound for America.47
Whitefield’s closest companion on the voyage to Georgia was James Habersham. Habersham, a London merchant a year younger than Whitefield, had experienced conversion under Whitefield’s preaching, and Whitefield had recruited Habersham as a schoolmaster for the Georgia mission. They studied Latin and sang psalms together, and Whitefield prayed that he might be “made an instrument of breeding [Habersham] up for God.”48
Sailing ships like the man-of-war Whitaker were heavily dependent on weather conditions, and adverse winds forced the boat to remain on the English coast. Within a few days, Whitefield wrote that the “winds and storms are blustering about our ears and teaching us lessons of obedience as fast as they can.” The ship docked at Deal for several weeks. Whitefield took the opportunity to preach in town, which kindled a “holy flame” of revival there. Overflowing crowds thronged the churches, and in one instance people stood on the roof of the church, peering in the upper windows to see Whitefield preaching.49
Coincidentally, John Wesley’s ship, returning from Georgia, arrived at Deal just before Whitefield’s departure. Wesley knew that Whitefield and Habersham were in the port, yet he did not go to visit them. Wesley was undoubtedly feeling embarrassed about the circumstances of his leaving Georgia. He apparently resorted again to casting lots to inquire whether he should visit Whitefield. The lot he drew said no. So Wesley left a letter for Whitefield and headed back to London. Whitefield politely responded to Wesley, but later, when they publicly split over theological differences, Whitefield threw the incident in Wesley’s face, writing in 1741, “The morning I sailed from Deal for Gibraltar, you arrived from Georgia.—Instead of giving me an opportunity to converse with you, tho’ the ship was not far off the shore; you drew a lot, and immediately set forwards to London.”50
In London, Wesley met the Moravian minister Peter Böhler, who (like Spangenberg in Georgia) questioned whether, in the midst of all his spiritual disciplines, John had actually come to know Jesus as his savior. Böhler similarly challenged Charles Wesley, and both brothers became convinced that they had not undergone conversion, with its accompanying assurance of salvation and forgiveness of sins. Within days of one another in May 1738, Charles and John experienced their breakthroughs. Charles wrote of his: “I now found myself at peace with God and rejoiced in the hope of loving Christ.” John famously wrote that at a fellowship meeting on Aldersgate Street, while one of the leaders was reading Martin Luther’s preface to Romans, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.”51
On February 2, 1738, Whitefield and the Whitaker finally sailed from Deal. Whitefield, unsurprisingly, took spiritual charge of the passengers, especially the soldiers on board. He held regular sermons and prayer services. As they rocked along in the rough seas of the Bay of Biscay, the captain ordered that makeshift pews be set up on deck for services. This was no cruise liner, and the landlubbers on board—including Whitefield—struggled with seasickness. Whitefield did not coddle the passengers or crew, devoting one afternoon’s sermon to “the eternity of hell torments,” preaching with the cries of seagulls in the background. Temperatures probably hovered in the forties (ˆF), sometimes even a bit lower.52
After two weeks, the Whitaker arrived at Gibraltar, the two-and-a-half-square-mile peninsula just off the southern tip of Spain. The town had come under British control in 1704, but had experienced centuries of Catholic Spanish and Moorish influence before that. An eighth-century Moorish castle and fort loomed over the rocky landscape. Whitefield was impressed by the imposing tower, writing that he could “scarce avoid crying out, ‘Who is so great a God as our God?'”53
The preacher found the sights of the diverse port fascinating yet troubling. A 1725 census put the population of Gibraltar at eleven hundred, the majority Catholic Genoese and Spaniards, and the minority Jews and Britons. Whitefield preached in town and drew crowds that he estimated at a thousand. (Whitefield’s crowd estimates could be a bit inflated, however.) He was surprised by this enthusiastic response, and concluded, “Christ has a flock, though but a little flock, in all places.”54 Whitefield repeatedly visited the “Romish chapel,” probably the sixteenth-century Cathedral of St. Mary the Crowned. He had little direct experience with Roman Catholics, although he had been reared in the anti-Catholic milieu of English Protestantism. In the cathedral, he saw “relics of a vast deal of pageantry, and several images of the Virgin Mary, dressed up, not like a poor Galilean, but in her silks and [Moorish] damasks.” He wondered why the Catholics “should thus depart from the simplicity of Christ, and go a whoring after their own inventions?”55
He also visited Gibraltar’s synagogue, Sha'ar HaShamayim, which had opened in 1724. A rabbi welcomed him warmly, saying that he appreciated a sermon Whitefield had delivered in town against vices such as swearing. The rabbi gave Whitefield a seat of honor, but Whitefield confessed that during the service he was praying (in words from 2 Corinthians 3:14–16 and Romans 11:23–26) that “the veil might be taken from their hearts” and that the “blessed time might come when his chosen people should again be engrafted into their own olive-tree, and all Israel be saved.” Whitefield, like many English Protestants, believed that Jews were suffering from spiritual blindness, having failed to recognize Jesus as their Messiah. But he also believed that in the last days Jews would be converted en masse to Christianity.56
Back in London, Whitefield’s ally the bookseller and printer James Hutton had already begun to capitalize on the itinerant’s popularity by selling his sermons and “metzotinto” (mezzotint) prints of his likeness. Whitefield began supplying Hutton with journal accounts of his travels and spiritual experiences, sending a copy of his journal and a packet of letters to England during the stopover at Gibraltar. Whitefield intended eventually to make these journals public, but Thomas Cooper, a rival publisher who “clandestinely and treacherously” had gotten an early draft, printed the first version in August 1738, without Hutton’s authorization. Hutton denounced Cooper for publishing the “surreptitious copy.” Hutton soon made his own version available (which went through at least three editions by year’s end), and apparently paid Cooper to destroy his original copy of the journal. Regardless of this controversial start, the journals would become the most important publications for Whitefield and his booming ministry. Much more than a recitation of autobiographical facts, each edition of the journals entertained readers with colorful details of his travels. Spiritually, they identified his own struggles with his readers’ and gave them a model for a faithful (though hardly trouble-free) Christian life. The journals preached the gospel as much as his sermons did.57
In early March, the Whitaker left Gibraltar, and Whitefield soon fell ill with seasickness. He prayed that the malady would do him some spiritual good and “purge” his body. On board ship, and on two other vessels accompanying the Whitaker, Whitefield worked to reform the crass habits of soldiers and other passengers. He traded godly tomes for “bad books” and playing cards, which he promptly pitched overboard. He received requests to marry engaged couples, and Whitefield generally complied, regardless of the couple’s spiritual seriousness. But in one wedding, the groom behaved badly, snickering out loud as Whitefield read the liturgy. Whitefield slammed shut his Book of Common Prayer and glared at the man, who was probably drunk. The groom, worried that his boorish behavior had cost him and his betrothed their chance to be married at sea, began to cry. Whitefield grudgingly finished the ceremony, gave them a Bible, and told them to live in holiness together.58
Despite the trials of sea travel, the “beauty of the great deep” charmed the twenty-three-year-old. He saw a “shark about the length of a man” trailing the ship, and “a large grampus [probably a killer whale] rolling and spouting.” The captain caught and butchered a porpoise. It had a “head much like a pig” and was about six feet long, Whitefield wrote. The passengers dined on its liver. These were the kinds of details one would have expected from popular travel journals of the period. The appeal of Whitefield’s account was not exclusively religious.59
It is remarkable that Whitefield did not die on any of his trips across the Atlantic. Sickness and other dangers were ever present, and several passengers perished on the Whitaker’s voyage. Whitefield himself caught a fever in late April that nearly killed him. There was not much one could do for sick passengers—and they often did better if they received no care at all. Medical care was still based on the ancient assumption that illnesses represented imbalances of bodily “humors.” In a typical treatment, the ship’s doctor subjected the ailing Whitefield to bloodlettings three times, and blistering and vomiting once each. Whitefield saw the malady as a battle for his body and soul, in which he “had many violent conflicts with the powers of darkness . . . but Jesus Christ prayed for [him].” He came to the “last extremity” and felt that “Satan as it were had dominion” over him, but at the last moment God restored him. Taking the near-death experience as a sign, he reflected that “God is preparing me for something extraordinary.”60
Whitefield’s journals presented his many illnesses in a way that made him more accessible to audiences, many of whom struggled with similar maladies. Unlike John Wesley, Whitefield spent relatively little time exploring new treatments for illnesses or methods of preventative care. Wesley urgently recommended healthy habits and exercise to followers, insisting that their lives were at stake if they would not regularly engage in outdoor physical activity. He also prescribed a range of herbal remedies, including radish juice, garlic, and marigolds; onions and honey to cure baldness; and apples to keep insanity at bay. His Primitive Physic went through twenty-three editions during Wesley’s career.61
Whitefield did not actively promote such treatments, viewing bodily ailments as providential tests or even as infernal assaults (as seen in his sense that Satan had nearly defeated him during his shipboard fever). God could always redeem disease, however, and even turn it into a catalyst for conversion, as he did for Whitefield at Oxford. After his new birth, ever-present sickness helped Whitefield keep a loose grip on the things of the world. As he presented it, illness was an agent of sanctification, for his followers as well as him. The devout kept the faith in the face of sickness. Doing so was a sign of a heart fully committed to God.62
Two months after sailing from Gibraltar, the Whitaker sighted land and the mouth of the Savannah River. Whitefield found Georgia’s coast congenial. “America is not so horrid a place as it is represented,” he wrote to a friend in England. The weather was not bad, he wrote. In another account, however, he confessed that the heat of the summer was nearly intolerable, “sometimes burning me almost through my shoes.” He busied himself with ministerial duties, visiting house to house, catechizing, preaching, and reading liturgies from the Book of Common Prayer.63
Soon after arriving, Whitefield visited the ailing Creek Indian leader Tomochichi. He was known to Whitefield and other associates of the Georgia trustees, since Tomochichi had accompanied Oglethorpe on a promotional trip to England from 1734 to 1736. He even met with King George II and presented him with eagle feathers as a “sign of everlasting peace.” The Creek chief repeatedly called for a closer alliance with English authorities and appealed for them to educate Creek youths in Christianity.64
Whitefield found Tomochichi in fragile health (he died the next year), and he depended on translators to speak with him. He pressed the leader about his eternal destination, should he die. Tomochichi said he believed he would go to heaven, but Whitefield was dubious. “How can a drunkard enter there?” Whitefield wrote. He told Tomochichi’s nephew, their translator, “not to get drunk,” and said that because he understood English, he would be held accountable for following the gospel of Christ. The nephew “would be punished the more, if he did not live better.” The man indicated that he believed in heaven, but not hell. Whitefield observed “how natural it is to all mankind to believe there is a place of happiness,” but “how averse they are to believe in a place of torment, because they wish it may not be so.”65
Hell was on Whitefield’s mind in those days. He had already preached a sermon on the topic in Gibraltar, and he delivered it again in Savannah. A Savannah parishioner had recently denied that the torments of hell were eternal, Whitefield discovered. It was a position that Whitefield regarded as “Antichristian.” Certain Anglicans, including Archbishop John Tillotson (1630–1694), had suggested the possibility of the annihilation of sinners in hell, rather than their perpetual agony. Whitefield would controversially highlight his disagreement with Tillotson on this point in 1740, citing it as one of the reasons he thought Tillotson “knew no more about true Christianity than Mahomet.”66
Evangelicals believed in an eternal hell just as much as they believed in an eternal heaven. Pressed by new latitudinarian challenges to the traditional understanding of God’s eternal wrath, preachers like Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards addressed the doctrines of judgment and hell more frequently and explicitly than some of their Reformed (Calvinist) predecessors. Edwards did so most famously in his revival sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” To Edwards, God’s mercy did not negate his justice. He thought it “unreasonable and unscriptural” to suggest that God was so gracious that he could not “bear that penal justice should be executed.” God perfectly balanced judgment and grace, Edwards insisted.67
In spite of Edwards’s running battle against Tillotson and other latitudinarians, his congregants knew that eternal damnation was only an occasional topic in his much larger theological corpus. Similarly, Whitefield’s preaching did not inordinately focus on hell, but a belief in eternal torment undergirded his evangelistic preaching. Superb orator though he was, Whitefield thought that preachers needed “no great art of rhetoric to persuade any understanding person to avoid and abhor those sins, which without repentance will certainly plunge him into this eternal gulf.” He admittedly found the topic of hell torments “melancholy,” but—especially because Tillotson and others had undermined the doctrine—he felt compelled to warn people about the wrath of God and their path of escape through Christ.68
In the meantime, Whitefield began making plans to open an orphanage. The Georgia trustees had instructed Charles Wesley to look into this prospect, and orphanages fit easily into the Methodists’ charitable vision. The Oxford Methodists were familiar with a large orphanage built by August Hermann Francke, a German Pietist pastor in Halle. (Whitefield, who had begun reading Francke’s Pietas Hallensis [1705] in early 1736, commented that he hoped to imitate Francke in his own ministry.) He also visited Ebenezer, a Salzburg Lutheran settlement about twenty-five miles up the river, which had an orphanage housing seventeen children. The Salzburgers loved “Herr Whitefield’s” preaching, especially his focus on justification by faith alone. They were also impressed that he did not speak from a written outhne, but “from the abundance of the heart.” Likewise impressed with the Lutherans’ orphanage, Whitefield thought this was just the sort of project that Savannah needed. “What I have most at heart,” he wrote, “is the building of an orphan-house, which I trust will be effected at my return to England.”69
Anglo-American and Continental evangelicals made benevolent endeavors central to their work. These included mission societies, charity schools, and orphanages. But unlike more liberal humanitarians, who increasingly saw charity and service as the heart of Christian devotion, evangelicals maintained a conflicted view of good works. Works could not save, and the lost needed much more than a warm meal and a roof over their heads. Whitefield mused on this in his sermon “The Great Duty of Charity Recommended”: “Our enemies say we deny all moral actions; but, blessed be God, they speak against us without cause . . . we highly value them; but we say, that faith in Christ, love of God, being born again, are of infinite more worth.” However, he cautioned that “you cannot be true Christians without having charity to your fellow creatures.” Benevolent works were among the fruits of true conversion, so making a Halle-style orphanage was an attractive project.70
Whitefield concluded in August that it was time to leave. Even before arriving in Savannah, the restless Whitefield had thoughts of recrossing the Atlantic. He knew that he needed to be ordained an Anglican priest, which would require a return to England. There were no bishops to ordain him in America. His decision to stay only three months caused some irritation among the Georgia trustees. One of them, Lord Egmont, spoke more than he knew when he said that the decision showed that Whitefield had a “roving temper.”71
Whitefield gave his farewell sermon to Savannah before an overflow crowd. Supporters brought him gifts of food and drink—“wine, ale, cake, coffee, tea, and other things proper for my passage,” he wrote. Making his way up the coast to Charleston, South Carolina, Whitefield found that city more established and sophisticated than Savannah. He met Charleston’s Anglican commissary, Alexander Garden, a man he called “a good soldier of Jesus Christ,” even though they would soon clash. Finally, he boarded the Mary, bound for England (the ship ended up going by way of Ireland, because of terrible delays and a resulting lack of supplies).72
Although he would spend relatively little time there, the Savannah orphanage became the center of Whitefield’s philanthropic ministry. Evangelism was always the focus of his preaching, but he closely linked conversion with a life of holiness and benevolence. The Savannah orphanage provided a ready application for converts: having learned to trust Christ, they should act on their faith. One way to do this was by supporting the indigent children of Georgia. Fund-raising for Georgia also helped blunt some of the fierce criticism leveled against Whitefield. Who could argue with a man raising money for orphans? Whitefield wrote that Savannah, “the place I intended to hide myself in, became . . . a means of increasing that popularity which was already begun.” He insisted that this happy conjunction of popularity and benevolence “was absolutely unforeseen, and as absolutely undesigned.”73
As Whitefield sailed for England, he stood at the threshold of the kind of widespread celebrity only hinted at by his debut sermon two years earlier. Whitefield did not know the magnitude of what was coming, yet it was clear that Savannah would never become his permanent base. As he sailed east into the Atlantic, he wrote to his Savannah followers, reminding them of “that one thing needful [Luke 10:42], of that new birth in Christ Jesus, that ineffable change which must pass upon our hearts before we can see God.” And to a friend in England, he wrote, “The seed of the glorious gospel has taken root in the American ground, and, I hope, will grow up into a great tree.”74