Six “To Revive the Flame Again”: Whitefield Comes to New England
“TO REVIVE THE FLAME AGAIN”: WHITEFIELD COMES TO NEW ENGLAND
On an October Sunday morning in 1740, George Whitefield ascended the pulpit of the Northampton, Massachusetts, meetinghouse. Five years earlier, Jonathan Edwards’s church had experienced what has become perhaps the most famous revival in Christian history outside of those recorded in the book of Acts. Now the great itinerant visited Northampton, at Edwards’s invitation, in hopes of “reviv[ing] the flame again, even in the darkest times.” Edwards thought that the new revivals in Britain and America might signal “the dawning of a day of God’s might power and glorious grace.” Having heard several years earlier about Edwards’s 1734–35 revival, Whitefield eagerly made his way to the frontier town to call on the Northampton congregation to return to their first love. Edwards noted that the congregation was “extraordinarily melted”; almost everyone there wept. Among those deeply moved was Edwards himself. “Dear Mr. Edwards wept during the whole time of exercise,” Whitefield noted. It was a remarkable meeting of the two greatest leaders of the Great Awakening.1
Upon returning to Philadelphia in April, Whitefield delivered three letters to Ben Franklin for publication, first in the Pennsylvania Gazette and then as a pamphlet. The letters confronted two of the most controversial topics imaginable: the faith of Anglican archbishop John Tillotson, and the state of American slavery. Tillotson, who died in 1694, was one of the most influential Anglican writers of the period, promoting a latitudinarian faith emphasizing rationality and morals. He was irenic but anti-Calvinist, and his prominence—which continued well after his death—fed into evangelical Calvinists’ sense that biblical theology was under attack. In his travels, Whitefield routinely met Anglicans who loved Tillotston’s works. Whitefield often told these devotees that Tillotson was “natural” and unconverted. The archbishop, he believed, was one of the chief defenders of a polite, quasi-Christian moralism that Whitefield believed would lead its adherents to hell. It was time to expose the “mystery of iniquity” (2 Thessalonians 2:7) he saw woven into the man’s writings.2
Archbishop Tillotson, Whitefield declared, “knew no more of true Christianity than Mahomet.” (Whitefield noted that this comparison was not original to him; he had heard John Wesley make it first.) He cited Tillotson as saying that believers must “perform the conditions of the Gospel” in order to become partakers of its blessings. To Calvinists and also to Arminians such as Wesley, this belief was unadulterated works-righteousness. Tillotson understood nothing of a Christian’s acceptance by God through faith in Christ, nor of justification by faith alone, Whitefield asserted.3
Critics were appalled. Did Whitefield mean to say that Tillotson was in hell? The attack on Tillotson would help turn Harvard College’s faculty against Whitefield. Tillotson had helped Increase Mather secure Massachusetts’s new charter in 1692, leaving a positive memory of the archbishop even among conservative New England pastors. The letter secured Anglican animosity toward the itinerant, nowhere more so than in Philadelphia. The Anglican commissary, Archibald Cummings, had allowed Whitefield to preach at the city’s Christ Church on his initial visits, but once he learned of the anti-Tillotson publication, Cummings barred him from the pulpit. Some of the itinerant’s Anglican supporters began attending Dissenting meetings because of the clash between Cummings and Whitefield. Cummings complained of some parishioners, “Several have refused to contribute to my subsistence which was bare and precarious” already.4
Cummings’s reaction to Whitefield, published in a pamphlet titled Faith Absolutely Necessary, But Not Sufficient to Salvation Without Good Works, showed again that while the clash between the itinerant and his Anglican opponents was about power, it was also rooted in theological differences. Cummings rejected Whitefield’s argument that salvation came by grace alone, through faith alone, and that good works were a by-product of true conversion. The difference between good works as the fruit of salvation, and good works as a condition of salvation, was “evasive and trifling,” the commissary declared. Faith, to Cummings, had to include sincere obedience, or it was not saving faith. To Cummings, Whitefield and his fellow itinerants were fanatics “disgorging themselves in flames of fire and brimstone; threatening hell and everlasting damnation against all that would not implicitly believe their incredible rhapsodies.”5
The theological feud between Whitefield and his critics had a broader popular resonance, since many laypeople readily recognized its significance. Did good works add anything to one’s salvation? If not, what role did morality play in the Christian life? The American Weekly Mercury printed a snide ditty about Whitefield and his followers that raised just this point:
WHITEFIELD to what end do you preach,
Since you have no good works to teach?
No man e'er preach'd so much as you;
Yet, more good, many preachers do.
None e'er such crowds of hearers had,
And none so FEW, that were not mad.6
Following his break with Cummings, Whitefield found most of his support (as in Charleston) among Philadelphia’s Dissenting pastors. Given the nondenominational tendencies of modern evangelicals, it is difficult to appreciate the novelty of the Anglican Whitefield’s impact on American Dissenters. Whitefield even admired certain Baptist ministers (many Anglicans and Dissenters disdained Baptists because of their refusal to baptize infants), regarding the Baptist pastor Jenkin Jones as the “only preacher that I know of in Philadelphia, who speaks feelingly and with authority.”7
As Whitefield cooperated with Dissenting ministers and preached from their pulpits, some experienced conversion through his ministry. This may have been the case for the Welsh Baptist minister Abel Morgan, who was so affected by “Brother Whitefield’s spirit” that he became an itinerant himself, going “forth preaching the glad tidings of salvation towards the sea coast in the Jerseys.” And while Richard Treat, a Presbyterian minister of Abingdon, had taught the Calvinist “doctrines of grace” for years before hearing Whitefield preach, he realized that he had never “experienced them in his heart.” Treat told his congregation that he had “deceived both himself and them” and asked that they pray for his conversion. (Whitefield reported in a later edition of his journals that Treat had indeed experienced “comfort” and had been walking with God for years.)8
In addition to its attack on Tillotson, Whitefield’s Three Letters launched a salvo against slave masters in “Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina.” Although public criticism of slavery was fairly limited in Britain and America at the time, Whitefield was not the first Methodist to comment upon its horrors. Charles Wesley had recounted a number of stories of the “diabolical cruelty” meted out against slaves for the slightest infractions. He said that white children were given slaves of their own age to abuse and tyrannize for sport. Wesley also recalled hearing of a dancing master in Charleston who whipped a female slave until she fell unconscious; then, with the assistance of a physician, he revived her and continued the whipping. He climaxed the torture by pouring hot wax onto her ripped flesh. “Her crime,” Wesley wrote, “was over-filling a tea cup.”9
Wesley jotted that passage in his journal, which was not published in his lifetime. For Whitefield to go on record publicly about the evils of American slavery was far more significant. As he passed through the South on his overland journey, Whitefield was “touched with a fellow-feeling of the miseries of the poor negroes,” he confessed. White southerners’ troubles, from the Stono Rebellion to disease and war, reflected God’s “quarrel” with them for their “abuse of and cruelty to the poor negroes.” He shuddered at the stories of vicious beatings by masters, who whipped and “ploughed upon their backs, and made long furrows [Psalm 129:3], and at length brought them even to death itself.” Because of such severe treatment, the southern colonies had occasionally faced slave uprisings, such as the one at Stono. He wondered why the slaves did not revolt more often.10
Many masters also intentionally kept their slaves ignorant of the gospel and Christianity, Whitefield charged. They casually permitted slaves to violate the Sabbath by “dancing, piping, and such like,” thereby putting their souls in jeopardy. Whitefield considered this neglect particularly ironic: if the slaves embraced Christianity, they would become more obedient. In a reflection of his interest in a possible school for African Americans, he averred that blacks and whites were both naturally sinful, but both also equally susceptible to moral and intellectual improvement.11
Whitefield was reacting to the treatment of American slaves in the same way that some earlier Anglican parsons had done when they arrived in the colonies in the past century. While Anglican officials in Britain assumed that ethnicity was no necessary barrier to conversion and baptism, many southern and Caribbean planters spoke as if evangelistic overtures were wasted on blacks and Indians. By the 1740s, white southerners had become increasingly reluctant to proselytize or baptize their slaves (or to allow their ministers to do so), fearing that Christian slaves might expect to be liberated. Under European law, when a slave or indentured servant became a Christian, he or she often had to be freed. New Virginia statutes in 1667 and 1705 explicitly stipulated that Christian baptism did not require emancipation. If colonial authorities had intended such laws to encourage planters to permit the baptism of Africans and Indians, that is not what happened. The Anglican minister Morgan Godwyn, who came to Virginia in the 1660s, was shocked to find many parishioners hostile to the notion of baptizing black slaves. One white churchgoer told Godwyn that baptism was no more beneficial to a slave than to a “black bitch” (a dog).12
In advocating the evangelization and baptism of slaves, then, Whitefield was batthng against well-established white southern disregard for those Christian duties. Whitefield’s missive against slavery made one critical caveat, however. He demurred on the question “whether it be lawful for Christians to buy slaves.” He failed to call slavery itself sinful, leaving Christian ownership of slaves as a permissible option, one that Whitefield himself would come to accept.13
Indeed, Whitefield had already become convinced that introducing slavery into Georgia was essential to the colony’s economic prospects and to Bethesda’s welfare. Denying Georgians access to slaves (as well as to rum) was “little better than to tie their legs, and bid them walk,” he wrote. The proprietors of the colony meant well, he believed, but their vision of a southern colony without slaves was “absolutely impracticable.” When Whitefield sent William Seward back to England (he departed on April 28), he instructed him that the first item to discuss with the Georgia trustees was the “allowance of Negroes.”14
In the meantime, acting on his newfound urgency about educating slaves, Whitefield purchased a five-thousand-acre tract about seventy miles north of Philadelphia, in the Lehigh Valley. (He did not comment on the fact that a sizeable Lenni-Lenape Indian town was located on the property.) Calling the place Nazareth, he intended to open a school there for “all such negroes, whether young or old, as shall be sent to me.” He planned to buy some young slaves himself in order to send them to Nazareth, and hoped that some of his slave-owning supporters might sell prospective slave students to him at an “easy rate.” It is not clear whether he hoped eventually to free these students from slavery.15
He arranged for the relocation of German Moravians to the Nazareth tract from Georgia, to help build the school. But plans for Nazareth fizzled because of theological squabbles between Whitefield and the Moravians. Moravian craftsmen did build the “Whitefield House” on the property, but a year after purchasing the land, Whitefield sold Nazareth to the Moravians. His dreams of a school for African Americans never materialized. Nazareth became a largely German community, forerunners of people often called the “Pennsylvania Dutch.”16
Nevertheless, Whitefield reached out to free and enslaved African Americans in his ministry. In April 1740, for example, he preached in Philadelphia to a very large crowd, upward of ten thousand people. He spoke on the woman healed of chronic bleeding by Christ; as described in Luke 8, she received instantaneous restoration when she touched the hem of his garment. (This was one of the revivalist’s standard sermons.) Whitefield then “invited the poor Negroes to touch Jesus Christ by faith” for spiritual healing. If they did, they “would gain freedom from the slavery of sin and Satan,” he promised them.17 Freedom from spiritual slavery, but not freedom from earthly slavery? Today, this seems an insufferable contradiction, but early evangelicals often maintained that tension without any obvious ethical reservations. Whitefield lived in a world of all kinds of hierarchies and inequalities. His Bible never conclusively told him that slavery was evil. He was left to interpret for himself passages that, on one hand, told slaves to obey their masters, and, on the other, proclaimed that in Christ there was neither slave nor free, “for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
Reflecting a view shared by many Christians of the time, Whitefield believed that the Bible tacitly accepted slavery, but required masters to treat their laborers with kindness. Jonathan and Sarah Edwards kept household slaves. Jonathan had purchased “a Negro Girle named Venus” when he was in his late twenties, several years before the Northampton revival began. In 1741, at the height of the Great Awakening, Edwards found himself tasked with the awkward duty of defending one of his ministerial colleagues for owning a slave, even though that pastor, Benjamin Doolittle, reputedly had Arminian theological tendencies and did not embrace the revivals. Some of Doolittle’s parishioners had attacked him for a range of issues, including a lavish lifestyle. (Owning slaves was a mark of gentility.) Although Edwards may have sympathized with Doolittle’s critics on theological points, he did not approve of their complaints against Doolittle for holding slaves. Whites in the northern colonies were particularly touchy about this topic in 1741, since New York had just put down its rumored slave insurrection with mass arrests and public burnings of a number of African Americans.18
Edwards’s ministerial association asked him to draft a response to the charges against Doolittle. The Northampton pastor regarded the antislavery argument as disingenuous. Why focus on the immorality of owning a slave or two when far greater enormities transpired in the Atlantic slave trade? New England’s seagoing economy was deeply complicit in that human traffic. As for slave owning itself, Edwards thought that scripture accepted its existence, providing moral guidelines only for its practice. Nevertheless, Edwards signaled that the abuses and inequalities of slavery would vanish in the millennial era—the reign of Christ on earth—when, he expected, “many of the Negroes and Indians will be divines.”19
Whitefield shared Edwards’s ambivalence about slavery, but unlike Edwards, he felt glimmers of moral hesitation about the issue before, not after, becoming a slave owner. After 1740, Whitefield said little more about the widely known abuses within the slave system and never reflected at length on whether the actual practices of chattel slavery, with its mass transport of African captives, the cruel conditions of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic, the appalling death rates on plantations, and the frequent physical and sexual abuse, could be redeemed. To Whitefield, benevolence to slaves primarily entailed introducing them to the gospel. The itinerant adjusted his preaching when slaves were in the audience. He and his Methodist friends recorded numerous instances of speaking individually with African American seekers. Whitefield recorded that some even asked him, “Have I a soul?” Following the sermon on the healing of the bleeding woman, William Seward visited an African American woman and prayed personally with her, concluding that she had experienced divine grace in her heart. He found the experience “peculiarly sweet.”20
Franklin was happy to have Whitefield back in town, but not as pleased to be subjected to Whitefield’s fund-raising appeals: “His eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance,” the printer wrote. Franklin liked the concept of Bethesda, but he thought it made more sense to build it in Philadelphia than in remote Georgia. Whitefield disagreed, so Franklin “refused to contribute.”21
Then Franklin attended one of the itinerant’s sermons. Suspecting that he would ask for money, Franklin wrote: “I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all.”22
This passage from Franklin’s autobiography poked fun at Whitefield’s incessant requests for money. But Franklin was adamant that the revivalist had an impeccable character. Many spread rumors that Whitefield spent the charity’s money on himself, but to Franklin, those charges were absurd, and he defended Whitefield in print: “He was in all his conduct a perfectly honest man. And methinks my testimony in his favor ought to have the more weight, as we had no religious connection.” Franklin was no evangelical believer, despite Whitefield’s pleas for him to accept Christ’s offer of forgiveness. Whitefield wrote to Franklin in late 1740 and predicted that his friend would soon see “the reasonableness of Christianity.” He urged the printer to “apply to God; be willing to do the divine will, and you shall know it.” Looking back decades later, Franklin concluded that “ours was a mere civil friendship, sincere on both sides, and lasted to his death.” There was more depth to their friendship than the description “mere civil” might indicate, however. Franklin once told his brother James that Whitefield “is a good man and I love him.”23
In late April, Whitefield set out again for New York City. His return saw fairly large crowds but no notable response. New York would always be one of the toughest cities in America for Whitefield to reach. But from the eastern end of Long Island came enticing reports of “a most glorious work” led by two young ministers. One was Jonathan Barber of Oysterponds, who had begun to contemplate his own possible role in the unfolding work of God.24 One Saturday night a couple months before Whitefield’s visit, Barber had stayed up all night praying and reading his Bible. The next morning, he turned to Psalm 102, and the thirteenth verse jumped off the page at him. God himself seemed to say: “Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Zion: for the time to favour her, yea, the set time, is come.” Barber was so ecstatic when he read this passage that he fainted. He woke up in time for church and spent the rest of the week telling the people of Oysterponds how he had been overcome when God revealed this word to him.25
Affecting the style of an apostle, taking no money or even a change of clothes, Barber walked the roads of Long Island, resolving that he would go only where the Holy Spirit told him to go. The Spirit immediately led Barber to Southold, to visit the second minister whom Whitefield mentioned, James Davenport. Davenport, one of the most perplexing characters of the whole American awakening, had met Barber as part of a Pietist student group at Yale College. (The colony of Connecticut had founded Yale four decades earlier as a training school for Congregationalist pastors.) Davenport and Barber began meeting around the same time that Whitefield entered Oxford and encountered the Wesleys. Critics of the Yale “club” said that they heavily emphasized “impressions and impulses,” and that they sought guidance from the Holy Spirit, expecting God to impress scripture on their minds.26
The rambling Barber found that God had given Davenport a new passage of scripture, too. It was Psalm 115:12–14: “The Lord hath been mindful of us: he will bless us; he will bless the house of Israel; he will bless the house of Aaron. He will bless them that fear the Lord, both small and great. The Lord shall increase you more and more, you and your children.” Davenport, bolstered by Barber’s visit, entered an extraordinary new phase of ministry at his Southold church. He began openly naming church members that he regarded as unregenerate, and holding lengthy sessions with his supporters. At one point, he preached to them for almost twenty-four hours straight.27
Davenport had heard that Whitefield was coming to New York, and so he made the hundred-mile trip across the island to meet him. Whitefield was very impressed with the pastor. God had blessed Davenport’s ministry with a number of conversions, Whitefield wrote, yet he was “looked upon as an enthusiast and a madman by many of his reverend pharisaical brethren.” In private conversations, Whitefield reportedly said that he never knew someone who had a closer walk with God than Davenport. Indeed, one of Connecticut’s key revivalists, Benjamin Pomeroy, asserted that Davenport surpassed Whitefield in “heavenly communion” with God. The charges of fanaticism against Davenport would only grow louder over time, however.28
In their work in New York and Philadelphia, both Whitefield and William Seward continued to be deeply affected by conversations they had with African American converts, and they recorded a number of such discussions in their published journals. The Methodist emphases on charity and conversion met perfectly in ministering to blacks. Britain had very few African residents, so there was real novelty in proselytizing the large African populations in America. Reaching this largely unevangelized group with the gospel was of keen interest to Whitefield’s supporters. Seward told of an African American woman in Philadelphia who insisted that “Mr. Whitefield had been in a trance” as he addressed the city’s blacks, meaning that “Jesus Christ had told him what to speak to the people, or else he could not speak as he did.” Seward thought that such inroads among African Americans suggested that God was beginning a great new work. Perhaps it represented “the dawnings of the glory of the latter day” or the inauguration of the Kingdom of God on earth, Seward thought.29
Whitefield likewise noted personal interactions he had with blacks. In Philadelphia, he conversed with an African American woman who had experienced conversion through his preaching the previous autumn. She told him that she had struggled to attain assurance of salvation, but during a sermon preached by the Baptist evangelist Abel Morgan, “the Word came with such power upon her heart, that at last she was obliged to cry out.” She kept shouting so much that Morgan stopped his sermon. Several in attendance urged her to be quiet, but Whitefield concluded that “she could not help praising and blessing God.”30
There were not many settings in eighteenth-century America in which a black woman would interrupt a white man publicly. Whitefield, far from perturbed, thought her reaction was not only appropriate and godly, but “rational and solid.” He said that when God was working in an extraordinary manner, pastors should expect some people to respond likewise. He reminded blacks of Galatians 3:28, which said that in Christ there was “neither male or female, bond or free.” And “when the poor negroes are to be called,” Whitefield predicted, “God will highly favor them, to wipe off their reproach, and to show that he is no respecter of persons [Acts 10:34], but that whosoever believeth in him shall be saved [Romans 10:13].” This was robust spiritual egalitarianism, but to Whitefield, the social implications of this belief lay in an indeterminate future, when God would “wipe off the reproach” of people of African descent.31
Abel Morgan was not the only one seeing unusual outbursts in his meetings. Whitefield witnessed a remarkable outpouring of spiritual fervor at a Methodist-style society of young women in Philadelphia. (A later report indicated that at least twenty-six of these societies began meeting in the city as a result of the revivals.) Even as he began to pray over the meeting, he choked up and could not continue. But “a wonderful power was in the room,” he wrote, and “with one accord, they began to cry out and weep most bitterly for the space of half an hour.” The cacophony continued after he left, and he heard that five of the women were “affected as those that are in fits.” Unlike the African American woman’s cries of joy, Whitefield regarded these convulsions as coming from the devil, who wished to cause distracting controversy about the revivals.32
Whitefield’s dizzying experiences in Philadelphia continued the day after the young women’s meeting. He preached that Sunday morning to a crowd of perhaps fifteen thousand people and then went to the Anglican church to hear Commissary Cummings denounce him and his followers as those who “have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). Then he went outdoors again, preaching a farewell sermon to a mammoth assembly he estimated at twenty thousand. Supporters pressed around his rented house after the sermon. About fifty blacks were in the throng. Some, in spite of their apparent poverty, donated to Bethesda.33 In his sermon, Whitefield turned again from spiritual ideal to social reality, expressing hope that “masters and mistresses will shortly see, that Christianity will not make their negroes worse slaves.” For him, the first priority was always evangelism. From Whitefield’s perspective, suffering on earth as a slave did not compare with suffering eternal torments in hell. While he indicted slave owners for their worst abuses, he still envisioned a kind of benevolent Christian slave owning, in which masters would educate slaves in the gospel, not unlike the way they should nurture their own children.34
Unless we understand Whitefield and his fellow evangelicals’ conviction that heaven and hell were utterly real, we will struggle to fathom their apparent callousness toward slavery. A slave headed for heaven, Whitefield believed, was better off than a king headed for hell. Yet many younger British and American evangelicals, such as Whitefield’s friend the former slave trader John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” later realized that supporting slavery compromised their credibility as gospel preachers.
Native Americans also drew Whitefield’s evangelistic attention. But language barriers and the danger of travel into the interior made Native American evangelism difficult. So Whitefield was delighted to meet an “Indian trader,” likely an Anglo-Pennsylvanian, who had experienced conversion under his preaching and had subsequently begun ministering to his Indian clients. Whitefield saw this trader’s work as a hopeful sign that God was fulfilling his promises to give Christ “the heathen for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession” (Psalm 2:8).35 Whitefield wrote to this aspiring trader-evangelist and advised him on the methods most likely to result in authentic conversions. He warned the man not to discuss baptism or the Lord’s Supper before the natives’ sincere reception of grace. Otherwise, no doubt thinking of Catholic proselytes among the Indians, “they will catch at a shadow, and neglect the substance.” He urged the trader to tell potential converts that real faith entailed the heart as much as the head, and that accepting Christ would make them truly happy. Real faith would also produce substantive change in their lives.36
Whitefield wrote a letter for the trader to pass on to the Indians of the Allegheny Mountains region. In it, he laid out the principles of Christianity and the “promises of the gospel that had especial reference to them.” He gave a broad overview of the Bible’s narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and the final return of Christ. Cautioning Native Americans to be wary of identifying all Europeans as Christians, he noted that “thousands of white people only believe in their heads, and therefore are no more Christians than those who never heard of Jesus Christ at all.” Apologizing for not coming to them himself, Whitefield said his other business would not permit it. In his career, the itinerant would never devote sustained attention to Native Americans, in contrast to James Davenport, who attracted a number of Indians to evangelical piety in the early 1740s, or Jonathan Edwards, who spent six years ministering to the Stockbridge Indians in the 1750s.37
Whitefield continued to see remarkable awakenings in the Philadelphia area, preaching on consecutive days in May 1740 at Nottingham and Fagg’s Manor, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia. Whitefield estimated the crowds at twelve thousand people. (Some of the same people likely attended both meetings, which were about twenty miles apart.) These areas had a deep Scots-Irish revival tradition, cultivated lately by the Tennent family and others in their circle. At Nottingham, thousands shouted and fainted, with some shrieking “as if they were in the sharpest agonies of death.” Whitefield himself was overcome with emotion and entered a trancelike state, sweetly lying at the “feet of my Jesus.”38
Coming out of this divine stupor, Whitefield moved on to Fagg’s Manor. The scene there was even more intense: “Some were struck pale as death, others wringing their hands, others lying on the ground, others sinking into the arms of their friends; and most lifting up their eyes towards heaven, and crying out to God.” Whitefield compared these sights to those he expected to see at Christ’s return to earth.39
An unwelcome guest abruptly brought Whitefield out of his reverie. Francis Alison, a hostile Presbyterian minister, approached Whitefield even as many lay moaning on the ground, and challenged him to a public debate. Alison was irritated by Whitefield’s teaching on assurance of salvation: the Presbyterian asserted that people could be true Christians without such confidence. Whitefield replied that he thought Christians might struggle with doubts concerning salvation, but that they should seek full assurance.40 As this confrontation unfolded, some who had been caught up in the meeting’s fervor became “exasperated” with the interloper, and one man began yelling at Alison. Whitefield rebuked his supporter for menacing Alison, but he also told Alison that it was inappropriate to seek a theological debate when “he saw the power of God so visibly amongst us.” Alison, looking out on a sea of angry faces, thought better of it and withdrew. But Alison’s appearance signaled increasing public opposition to Whitefield in the Middle Colonies.41
Hostility did not deter Whitefield, however: “The more I am opposed, the more joy I feel.” Whitefield believed that the events in Philadelphia were part of a “general awakening” unlike anything seen before in America. Evangelicals did not use the term “the Great Awakening” in the 1740s, just as participants did not initially know they were part of “the American Revolution.” But while England, Wales, Scotland, and the American colonies had seen local and regional revivals before, Whitefield’s ministry was producing far broader effects. Newspapers and pamphlets helped link and publicize a common spiritual awakening on both sides of the Atlantic. Whitefield’s presence at many centers of revival gave them a common leader. Especially in America, activity across denominational lines made this far more than an Anglican renewal. An unprecedented transatlantic awakening had begun.42
Whitefield boarded his ship, the Savannah, the next day, temporarily leaving Philadelphia behind. While on board, Whitefield sent John Wesley a letter addressing their growing theological rift. In the two months since his previous letter to Wesley, Whitefield had grown more confident. Before, he had asked Wesley only to stop bringing up Calvinism. Now, he boldly asserted that Wesley was wrong. His new certainty came partly from the relative theological unanimity among the American revivalists. In America, there were effectively no Arminian awakeners, at least not until Wesleyan Methodists began to arrive in the 1770s.43
Whitefield anticipated his return to England with trepidation because he knew it would require a confrontation with Wesley. He contemplated remaining in America, “where we all think and speak the same thing,” in order to avoid the clash. But he and Wesley would reunite either in this life or the next, Whitefield believed. If they met again only in glory, Wesley would then have realized “that sovereign, distinguishing, irresistible grace brought you to heaven.” More convinced than ever that they would not reconcile, Whitefield simply asked Wesley not to be angry with him. To the London printer James Hutton, Whitefield wrote, “For Christ’s sake [would you] desire dear Brother W[esley] to avoid disputing with me.”44
The orphanage, with about 130 residents, was thriving upon the itinerant’s return to Savannah. More incredible outbreaks of revival transpired during his brief visit there in June 1740. Bethesda’s children were particularly affected, as Whitefield noted: “The power of the Lord came as it were upon all. Most of the children, both boys and girls, cried bitterly.” The scene was reminiscent of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit surged “like a mighty rushing wind.” In the meetinghouse, the children knelt and prayed in every corner, “begging of Jesus to take full possession of their hearts.” Four or five girls wept uncontrollably for almost two hours, pleading for forgiveness and assurance of salvation. But Whitefield did not want just emotional reactions: immediately following his description of the children’s experiences, he noted that he had hired a Latin instructor for Bethesda, and that he was making plans to expand the orphanage into a proper university. To Whitefield, head and heart went together in true piety.45
In early July, Whitefield returned to Charleston, where he found the Anglican commissary Alexander Garden ready to resume their feud. At Garden’s church, Whitefield “heard the commissary preach as virulent, unorthodox, and inconsistent a discourse” as he had ever heard. Following the sermon Garden sent his clerk to Whitefield, telling him to withhold himself from communion until they could resolve Garden’s complaints against him. Undeterred, Whitefield made the rounds at Dissenting congregations in the area, preaching and raising funds for Bethesda. Far from worrying about Garden’s fury, he struggled much more with a besetting ailment exacerbated by the broiling heat of the Carolina Lowcountry. But a week later, he was back at Garden’s church, where the commissary took aim at him again. “Had some infernal spirit been sent to draw my picture, I think it scarcely possible that he could have painted me in more horrid colours,” Whitefield wrote. Whitefield found that the Spirit strengthened him during Garden’s tirade, and he prayed for Garden’s conversion, asking the Lord to let Garden “know that it is Jesus whom he persecutes,” just as the Apostle Paul had persecuted Christians before his conversion.46
Yet Garden went even further. He brought Whitefield up for ecclesiastical trial, citing him for irregular preaching and for neglecting the Book of Common Prayer. The young cleric cleverly turned the trial into a debate about the South Carolina court’s jurisdiction over Whitefield as an itinerant, and the propriety of Garden functioning as a judge when he had already publicly condemned Whitefield. Whitefield had a right to appeal these matters to London. Because he did so, Garden could take no additional actions for a year. After receiving no word from English authorities (who simply ignored the case) for twelve months, Garden declared that for Whitefield’s “excesses and faults,” the court was suspending him from preaching. By then, Whitefield was back in England, and no one, least of all Whitefield, paid attention to Garden’s ruling.47
Even as Garden’s case proceeded, Whitefield continued to ponder the possibilities of ministry to southern slaves. A turning point came when he befriended the brothers Hugh and Jonathan Bryan, South Carolina planters who converted under Whitefield’s preaching. Hugh, formerly a nominal Anglican, had heedlessly left his slaves in “ignorance of the common salvation thro’ Jesus Christ.” He personally knew nothing of the new birth. His wife, Catherine, had a similarly superficial faith until a terrible illness frightened her about her eternal fate. Suddenly, “the light of God’s Spirit darted in upon her soul,” and she experienced conversion. Hugh marveled at her vigorous faith, but until he heard Whitefield preach, he did not understand that he too needed a new birth of salvation. Then he felt the illumining power of the Spirit, and received “assurance of God’s favour” to his soul.48
As Hugh’s friendship with Whitefield grew, they discussed the prospect of opening a “negro school” in South Carolina, like the one planned for Nazareth. In an extraordinary scene at Bryan’s plantation, however, Whitefield fell deathly ill from his heat-induced ailment. He “stretched for immortality,” he wrote, “and longed for the blessed angels to come and carry me to Abraham’s harbour.” Bryan sat by Whitefield’s bedside and wept while (as Whitefield recorded it) “poor negroes crowded round the windows, and . . . expressed a great concern” for him. Hugh told them that Whitefield was their friend, too.49
Upon Whitefield’s recovery, he returned to Savannah, where in early August 1740 the Bryan brothers and their brother-in-law Stephen Bull came to hear him preach. Before Whitefield had even finished his opening prayer, Bull swooned and “dropped down, as though shot with a gun.” But he got back up and listened attentively to Whitefield’s sermon. The next day, Whitefield met with Stephen and Jonathan, who was also struggling under conviction of sin and mourning his “misspent life.” Whitefield asked Bull why he had fallen down during the service. “The power of God’s Word,” Bull replied. The group knelt together and prayed, and Whitefield was confident that Bull and Bryan would break through to salvation. A couple of weeks later, when Whitefield saw Jonathan Bryan in Charleston, the itinerant found that he was “much established” in his faith.50
In late August 1740, Whitefield set out from South Carolina for New England. New Englanders had begun hearing reports of Whitefield’s ministry as early as the spring of 1739, when the Boston News-Letter included a story on his preaching to the Kingswood colliers. By mid-1739, news about Whitefield had become a staple of the Boston papers, and on November 20, 1739, the New England Weekly Journal reported on the itinerant’s arrival in America.51
In November 1739, Whitefield began writing to key New England pastors. One was Jonathan Edwards. “I rejoice for the great things God has done for many souls in Northampton,” Whitefield wrote. “I should rejoice to be instructed by you.” Edwards wrote back in February, extending an invitation to visit. Whitefield wrote also to Benjamin Colman, the sixty-six-year-old minister of Boston’s Brattle Street Church and the most influential pastor in Boston. Colman had much to teach him in ministry, Whitefield respectfully noted. But he soon wrote to Gilbert Tennent that he found Colman’s published sermons “acute and pointed, but . . . not searching enough by many degrees.”52
Colman, for his part, registered his own concerns in a reply to Whitefield, a letter subsequently published in Philadelphia. Colman was a key figure in the moderate wing of the emerging evangelical movement: he was delighted by the success of the gospel, but worried about maintaining sobriety and order. Whitefield was quite young, and some of his theology seemed unrefined, Colman noted. He also wondered about the propriety of Whitefield’s endless travels. Did he really need to come to America when so many more needed the gospel in England? Nevertheless, Colman was sure that Whitefield and the Methodists heralded a renewal of the “right evangelical articles of faith upon which the church reformed from Popery.”53
The newspapers in New England monitored Whitefield’s movements throughout 1740. One hostile letter from Philadelphia, printed in the Boston Weekly Post-Boy in June, deplored the “vulgar” people who thronged Whitefield’s field meetings. His assemblies subverted “all order and decency.” Some in the itinerant’s audiences were “terrified into despair,” while others were “transported with passions which influence them to believe that they have had the beatific vision, and immediate intercourse with him who is invisible.” And, the writer concluded, Boston could expect the zealot Whitefield to appear there in the autumn.54
Upon Whitefield’s arrival in Rhode Island, he arranged for a letter describing the work at Bethesda to go in the New England Weekly Journal. “Philadelphia, New York, & Charlestown people have been very liberal” in supporting the orphanage, he wrote. Now he was in New England, eager to see their response to his preaching and charitable appeals.55
His first stop was in Newport. At about six thousand residents, it was one of the five largest towns in America and a center of the transatlantic slave trade. It was also one of the most diverse cities in America. As a thriving seaport that honored religious liberty, it was home to a variety of Christians as well as a small community of Spanish and Portuguese Jews. A visitor to Newport four years later described the town as centered on one mile-long street so straight that someone standing at one end could see the other. All of it sat perched overlooking the wharfs and harbor. Wealthy women and men strolled the street, some of them from prominent South Carolina families who vacationed in Newport during the summer.56
Whitefield had his usual chilly meeting with the local Anglican minister, James Honeyman, who privately complained about “the noisie Mr. Whitefield.” Under pressure from congregants, Honeyman grudgingly gave Whitefield permission to preach at the spacious Trinity Church, erected in 1726. The itinerant estimated it could hold three thousand people. The sanctuary was packed beyond capacity for his services, attended by people from all denominations. Whitefield was far more impressed with the seventy-one-year-old Congregational pastor Nathaniel Clap than with Honeyman, calling Clap “the most venerable man I ever saw in my life.” He “looked like a good old Puritan, and gave me an idea of what stamp those men were, who first settled New England.”57
Rhode Island charmed Whitefield, but he knew that his primary destination lay seventy miles to the north. Boston in 1740 remained the largest town in the colonies at 17,000 residents. Founded in 1630 during the Puritans’ Great Migration out of England, Boston was both a hive of churches and a hub of commerce. But it lagged behind Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston in commercial development, and its population would slowly dwindle over the next three decades as the American Revolution approached. An English traveler, John Bennett, writing the same year as Whitefield’s visit, noted that “the town was not built after any regular plan” but still paid it several compliments: “The streets are well paved, and lying upon a descent. The town is, for the generality, as dry and clean as any I remember to have seen.” For the colonies it was a large city, but to someone who knew London, it still seemed like a rustic outpost (see figure 6.1). Bennett, for one, complained that the taverns “have no good beer” and only a “sorry sort of Madeira wine,” and he regarded their Sabbath keeping as unreasonably strict.58
Whitefield arrived in Boston on September 18 and paid an obligatory visit to the Anglican church and its commissary, Timothy Cutler. Cutler, a fifty-six-year-old native of Massachusetts, was one of the Anglicans’ most formidable American leaders. The Harvard graduate became the rector of Yale College in 1719, but by then he had already begun to doubt the legitimacy of the Puritans’ Congregationalism, cut off as it was from the traditions of the Church of England. In 1722 he detonated an ecclesiastical explosion at Yale when he concluded his commencement prayer with “let all the people say, amen.” This was telltale episcopal language. The shocked audience realized that he was repudiating Congregationalism and affiliating with the Anglican Communion. Cutler soon sailed for London, where he received ordination, and upon his return he became rector at Christ Church, Boston.59
Cutler developed an extensive correspondence with Edmund Gibson, the bishop of London and one of Whitefield’s most articulate opponents. Already in May 1739, Cutler had apprised the bishop of evangelical agitation in America, particularly the 1734–35 Northampton revival led by Cutler’s former Yale student Jonathan Edwards. The skeptical Cutler highlighted the most enthusiastic aspects of that revival and concluded that while some good might have come of it, overall there was a “great deal fantastical and foolish in those shows” of religion.60
Cutler already had well-formed opinions of revivalists when Whitefield appeared in Boston. Their exchange, which Whitefield recorded at length, again revealed the fundamental theological rift between the new evangelicals and Anglican leaders. The key differences lay in their views of denominations and regeneration. Because Cutler saw the Church of England as having unique apostolic authority, he did not regard the Dissenting pastors’ ordinations as valid. Indeed, he regarded his own Congregationalist ordination as illegitimate. Whitefield, in spite of his Anglican ordination, was not concerned about the particular authority of any one church. Why did Whitefield cooperate with Dissenters, Cutler asked? Whitefield answered that he “saw regenerate souls among the Baptists, among the Presbyterians, among the Independents, and among the Church folks [Anglicans], all children of God, and yet all born again in a different way of worship, and who can tell which is most evangelical?” When it came to conversion and regeneration, one’s denomination (assuming, of course, that it was Protestant) did not matter.61
Whitefield’s statement that he “saw regenerate souls” in all denominations frustrated Cutler. “Can you see regeneration with your eyes?” he asked. Whitefield said that a true believer could perceive his or her own conversion, and others could see the “fruits of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23) in their lives. Cutler said that regeneration came at baptism, when the Holy Spirit fell upon the baptized person (ordinarily an infant). Whitefield protested that if every child was born again in baptism, then every baptized child would be saved. “And so they are,” said Cutler, unless they fell away from the grace conveyed at baptism. To Whitefield, this was nonsense—legions of people who had been baptized into the Church of England showed no more than nominal commitment to Christ as adults. Surely, baptism alone did not save them, without a subsequent experience of conversion.62
Although Cutler did not give Whitefield the rude reception that he got from Alexander Garden (Cutler even invited him to stay for lunch), their doctrinal differences were essential. To Cutler, those baptized in the Church of England could have a reasonable expectation of salvation if they led moral, obedient lives. To Whitefield, only a profound experience of grace, knowingly received by a sinner, could give legitimate assurance of everlasting life. Convinced that he would get no support from Cutler and his associates, Whitefield moved on to Colman’s Brattle Street Church, where a crowd of four thousand assembled to hear him preach.63
There Whitefield initiated a rapid series of Boston sermons, husthng from one supportive church to another. One Sunday, he visited Brattle Street to hear Colman preach, then addressed a crowd at the Old Brick Church. “Immediately” following that, he went to Boston Common and spoke to a teeming throng he estimated at fifteen thousand. A report in Philadelphia said there was “at least 8000” there. In any case, Whitefield attracted a crowd comprising at least half of Boston’s population.64
Perhaps it was inevitable that such overpacked rooms would precipitate a tragedy, and one transpired at the New South Church. In “a very sorrowfull accident,” people had “crowded so thick” into the gallery ringing the sanctuary that they became claustrophobic. When a board on which they were standing broke with a terrifying crack, some began to shout that the gallery was collapsing. The room melted into ugly chaos as people jumped from the galleries to the floor. Others flung themselves out the windows. In the press to get out the doors, some women and children were shoved down and trampled without regard for “the terrible screeches and outcries” of those underfoot. The stampede crushed four women and a “servant lad” to death.65
The panic occurred before Whitefield arrived at the church. When he saw the horrible aftermath, including “two or three lying on the ground in a pitiable condition,” he made a snap decision to go ahead with his sermon, but relocate it to the Common, a short walk away.66 Colonial Americans lived in a world filled with “awful providences” such as this, and instead of canceling his preaching, Whitefield sought to “improve what had befallen” the congregation. The itinerant saw the episode as a satanic assault on him and his followers: “Though Satan in this bruised our heel, yet I doubt not but even this will be a means of bruising his accursed head” (Genesis 3:15). As pointless as the deaths seem in retrospect, to Whitefield they exemplified the fleeting quality of life and the urgency of salvation. As he once asked listeners, “How do you know but this may be the last opportunity God will favour you with? How do you know, but e're midnight, your soul must launch into eternity?”67
Harvard College, the oldest institution of higher learning in America, was just over a century old when Whitefield arrived in Massachusetts. It remained relatively small: about one hundred students, four tutors, and a president (Edward Holyoke). Although Yale College had emerged as an alternative, Harvard remained the primary training school for Congregational pastors in New England and elsewhere, such as Charleston’s Josiah Smith. Its 1692 motto was not simply “Veritas,” as it is commonly shortened today, but “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” or “Truth for Christ and the Church.”
When Whitefield came to Cambridge to visit Harvard, he was less than impressed. It was not only considerably smaller than Oxford, but also “not far superior to our universities in piety and true godliness.” This was an indirect way of saying that true godliness was in short supply. The tutors “neglect to pray with and examine the hearts of their pupils,” he said. Many ran after fashionable authors such as John Tillotson rather than reading the Puritan classics of their New England heritage. Addressing the students, Whitefield spoke on 2 Corinthians 2:17, “We are not as many who corrupt the Word of God.” President Holyoke treated him politely, but later became enraged when Whitefield’s published journal described the college in unflattering terms. Indeed, Whitefield would later come to regret his “rash and uncharitable” characterizations of Harvard and Yale.68
Some at Harvard certainly responded to his preaching. A skeptical tutor noted in his diary that a number of the students were under “great concern for their souls” and that some had gone to radical extremes. One pupil supposedly “pretended to see the devil in shape of a bear coming to his bedside,” and others spoke rapturously of great spiritual terrors and comforts. One of the tutors, Daniel Rogers, would soon leave Harvard to follow Whitefield, convinced by the itinerant’s insistence that formal piety was worthless without the new birth.69
Jonathan Belcher, the Massachusetts governor and a Harvard graduate, also warmly received Whitefield, inviting him and the ministers of Boston to dine at his home. In a private meeting, Belcher emotionally thanked the itinerant for his ministry and asked for his prayers. In addition, the fifty-eight-year-old Belcher made his carriage available for Whitefield’s use.70
An even more fervent assembly packed Boston Common to hear Whitefield on September 27. He estimated them at fifteen thousand people, many of whom were overcome with emotion. As he went back to his rented house, “the power and presence of the Lord accompanied and followed me,” he wrote. As he continued to speak to those assembled at his house, many “wept bitterly, and cried out under the Word.” A group stayed up praying with him, and Whitefield recorded the presence of the divine: “The Spirit of the Lord was upon them all. It made intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered.” This is a tantalizing reference, using language directly from Romans 8. Were some there speaking in tongues, in the language of the Spirit (glossolalia), which has become a mark of the modern Pentecostal movement? We do not know, but later, more cautious editions of his journals excised this passage.71
Whitefield continued to fly from one remarkable scene to another: one morning he spoke at the Old South meeting, collecting the vast sum of £555 for Bethesda. In the afternoon he preached at Benjamin Colman’s Brattle Street Church, collecting another £470. Colman pronounced it the “most pleasant time” he had enjoyed in four decades of ministry. After supper, Governor Belcher met privately with him. Going from the most elite to the lowhest of Boston society, Whitefield then visited with a group of African Americans, preaching on the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8. Returning bone-tired to his house, he found yet another crowd waiting for him, and he obliged them with a brief exhortation.72
Whitefield was running himself ragged and becoming extremely ill, violently vomiting between sermons. He was feverish, dehydrated, and sweating profusely. Nevertheless, he was up and gone by seven the next morning, bound for Marblehead and Salem. During his weeklong tour of towns in Boston’s northern hinterlands, he preached sixteen times and rode, he estimated, 178 miles. Yet he was not “in the least wearied or fatigued,” he asserted. Rambling along the rocky seacoast seemed to do him good.73
Continuing his nonstop preaching in Boston, he held a particularly notable meeting at the Old South Church on October 8. Again, the specter of tragic death hung over the meeting, this time because of a child who fell gravely ill just after hearing Whitefield preach. The boy reportedly said he would “go to Mr. Whitefield’s God,” and soon passed away. Whitefield specifically directed his preaching and praying toward the children present at the meeting. “Little children,” he said, “if your parents will not come to Christ, you [should] come and go to heaven without them.” This exhortation brought many children and adults to tears. “The Word smote them,” he reckoned. He had not seen a “greater commotion” since coming to Boston. The grateful audience contributed another £440 to the orphanage.74
The following day, Whitefield hurried to the Old South Church again. He had picked a passage of Scripture before leaving the house and had even folded down the text in his Bible. But as he drew near to the church, he found himself moved to switch and preach on Jesus’s meeting with the Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3. Nicodemus was a religious leader among the Jews, yet Jesus famously told him that “except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” A number of Boston area ministers attended the sermon. When Whitefield came to John 3:10, “Art thou a master in Israel, and knowest not these things?” he began to speak “boldly against unconverted ministers.”75 This was an inflammatory topic, one that Gilbert Tennent had broached in his March 1740 sermon “The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry.” Tennent had likewise reviled Pharisee-preachers who “had a very fair and strict out-side; yet were they ignorant of the new birth: Witness Rabbi Nicodemus, who talked like a fool about it.” Whitefield considered Tennent’s sermon “unanswerable” and, in his published journal, concluded that “the generality of preachers talk of an unknown, unfelt Christ.” Why have congregations been so dead, he asked? “Because dead men preach to them.” Ministers squirmed at these claims, but most declined to contradict Whitefield openly.76
Whitefield’s popularity was soaring, as abundantly illustrated on the day of his Boston farewell sermon. That morning he preached at the Old South Church to a congregation so packed that Whitefield had to enter the building through a window. Afterward he met privately with Governor Belcher, who took him in his coach to the Common. There Whitefield addressed a mammoth throng he initially estimated at thirty thousand (newspapers suggested twenty-three thousand; later editions of Whitefield’s journal said twenty thousand). In any case, the crowd was larger than the population of Boston, and possibly the largest ever gathered in the history of the English colonies. Darkness began to settle over the Common as he concluded his sermon, and many wept as he spoke of departing.77
In his journal, Whitefield wrote that a “glorious work” had begun in Boston, but that the town had fallen far from the founding glory of the Puritans. Too many Bostonians were caught up in the things of the world. Their church meetings seemed more like fashion shows than solemn assemblies: “jewels, patches, and gay apparel are commonly worn by the female sex, and even the common people . . . dressed up in the pride of life.” He encountered remarkably little opposition in the town. But he foresaw rising hostility if he became “more particular in [his] application to particular persons.” Too many had only a head knowledge of religion, he thought, maintaining outward duties without a vital, inward commitment to Christ. One report said that a small group of Boston gentlemen attributed his success “only to the force of sound and gestures.” But for now, criticism in New England remained minimal.78
Whitefield proceeded west from Boston, visiting towns of the Massachusetts hinterlands. The pastor at Sudbury, Israel Loring, had been waiting to hear Whitefield for almost a year. In his journal, Loring had noted Whitefield’s arrival in America in November 1739. Loring met with his friend Benjamin Colman in Boston and “asked him what he thought of Mr. Whitefield.” Colman told him that he “looked upon him as one under more than ordinary influence of the Holy Spirit, even such as Luther, Calvin, and the first reformers.” Colman lent him a book of Whitefield’s sermons, and Loring rose early the next morning to begin reading it. He copied into his diary the newspaper reports of Whitefield’s successes in Philadelphia and New York, but he was never quite sure what to make of the itinerant. He dutifully recorded Whitefield’s appearances in Concord, Sudbury, and Marlborough, noting that he did not attend the final sermon. Whitefield described Loring as a “man of God,” but Loring was becoming alarmed by the radical tendencies of the revivals—especially the work of untutored exhorters, who by 1742 had routinely begun claiming to have visions and divine revelations. In denying itinerants access to his pulpit, Loring lamented that “such an enthusiastic, factious, censorious spirit was perhaps never more predominant in the land.” Whitefield could not convince all New England pastors that his ministry—or the broader awakening—was of God.79
The itinerant was soon ferried across the Connecticut River to Northampton, where, as Whitefield wrote, the “pastor’s name is Edwards.” Whitefield was deeply impressed with the Edwards family, and the relationship between Jonathan and Sarah. Indeed, so taken was he with Sarah that she inspired him to reflect on his desire for a godly wife: “She is a woman adorned with a meek and quiet spirit [1 Peter 3:4], talked feelingly and solidly of the things of God, and seemed to be such a helpmeet for her husband [Genesis 2], that she caused me to renew those prayers, which, for some months, I have put up to God, that he would be pleased to send me a daughter of Abraham to be my wife.” He asked that God would choose a wife for him, as God had chosen Rebekah for Isaac. No doubt the difficulties in courting Elizabeth Delamotte had made him weary and wary of pursuing a wife by his own initiative.80
Whitefield preached four times at Northampton, extending his stay longer than usual for a town of its size. The meetings grew increasingly emotional until the Sunday morning when many wept openly, including Edwards. That afternoon saw an even more powerful meeting; “Our Lord seemed to keep the good wine to the last” (John 2:10), Whitefield observed. He preached on Genesis 3, likely his oft-repeated sermon “The Seed of the Woman, and the Seed of the Serpent.” Speaking of the Last Judgment, he trumpeted: “Satan, the accuser of the brethren . . . shall then be cast out . . . then shall the righteous shine in the Kingdom of the Father, and sit with Christ on thrones, in majesty on high.” In rapid-fire staccato, he assured the audience that “the Lord Jesus has engaged to make you more than conqueror over all—plead with your Savior, plead—plead the promise in the text—wrestle, wrestle with God in prayer . . . Be not any wise terrified by your adversaries—The King of the Church has them all in a chain.”81
Whitefield hoped that he could help the people of Northampton recover “their first love,” and the visit did help precipitate a new revival. “Mr. Whitefield’s sermons were suitable to the circumstances of the town,” Edwards wrote, “containing just reproofs of our backslidings, and, in a most moving and affecting manner, making use of our great profession and great mercies as arguments with us to return to God, from whom we had departed.” By the end of the year, the church had awakened again, its young people showing particular interest in spiritual matters. Even some of Edwards’s own children apparently experienced conversion. Edwards asked for Whitefield to pray that he would be filled with the Holy Spirit and “become fervent, as a flame of fire in my work.”82
Edwards was delighted with Whitefield’s ministry, but the two were not in complete accord about the revivals. Even as Edwards accompanied Whitefield from Northampton to his father’s church in East Windsor, Connecticut, he told the itinerant (eleven years his junior) that he was giving too much credence to spiritual impulses, and that he should be more cautious about “judging other persons to be unconverted.” Whitefield did not try to argue with Edwards about these matters, nor did he seem particularly offended. Still, Edwards thought the awkward discussion put a damper on what was otherwise a wonderful visit. In fact, Edwards decided, “Mr. Whitefield liked me not so well, for my opposing these things,” and he believed that Whitefield kept their friendship at arm’s length from that point forward.83
Shortly after Whitefield’s visit, Edwards devoted a series of sermons to Christ’s parable of the sower in Matthew 13, warning about those who warmly responded to the initial message of the gospel but then fell away. Edwards worried that some Northamptonites might be reacting more to the sensation surrounding the itinerant than to his proclamation of the new birth. Some, he cautioned, “are drawn to take some notice of what the minister says, either by the unusualness of the subject, or the unusual manner of treating it, or the loudness of his voice, or his extraordinary earnestness.” They might even weep heartily, but still the seed of the gospel could fail to take root. Devotion to the messenger rather than the message could lead to deception and an even harder heart. Edwards would explain in Religious Affections (1746) that long-term commitment to Christ was the best test of one’s spiritual experiences, not fleeting reactions to any one preacher.84
Although Whitefield would never have a spectacular schism with Edwards as he did with John Wesley, Edwards permitted his private correction of Whitefield in 1740 to be publicized in 1745—ironically, in a pamphlet in which Edwards defended Whitefield against his critics. Edwards tried to establish that although he disagreed with the itinerant on some points, overall Whitefield was a legitimate minister. As Edwards’s biographer George Marsden has noted, it is striking that while Whitefield struggled to maintain friendships with fellow evangelicals such as Edwards and Wesley, he had no such difficulties with his skeptical friend Benjamin Franklin.85
The differences between Whitefield and Edwards may seem relatively minor in retrospect (the differences between Whitefield and Wesley were more significant), but both men knew that they were in the process of shaping a new evangelical movement. The importance of that opportunity magnified even small disagreements. Edwards and Wesley were both eleven years older than Whitefield, strongly opinionated, and inclined to correct the headstrong itinerant’s perceived errors. But in the end, Edwards and Whitefield remained committed to the same goals: the salvation of souls, and the revitalization of the Reformed Protestant world. Though Wesley and Whitefield were committed to those goals, too, that shared sense of purpose could not prevent an estrangement between them that would last for decades. The evangelical movement was formidable, but its most important leaders struggled terribly to maintain interpersonal harmony.