Seven “Hearing Him Preach, Gave Me a Heart Wound”: Calvinist Preaching, Calvinist Controversy
“HEARING HIM PREACH, GAVE ME A HEART WOUND”: CALVINIST PREACHING, CALVINIST CONTROVERSY
George Whitefield’s preaching changed the life of Nathan Cole, a farmer in Kensington, Connecticut. Before the fall of 1740, Cole was a nominal Christian. As an “Arminian,” the twenty-nine-year-old figured that if he were moral and pious, he would be saved. After reading reports about the sensational itinerant’s travels, Cole wished that he would visit central Connecticut. He heard that Whitefield was at Boston; then closer, at Northampton. One morning a messenger rode into his field and announced that Whitefield was to preach later that day at Middletown, twelve miles away.1
“I dropt my tool that I had in my hand,” Cole recalled, “and ran home to my wife telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitefield preach.” They galloped off, fearing they would miss him. As they approached the road that ran from Hartford to Middletown, he saw “a cloud or fogg rising.” It took him a second to discover what was happening:
I first thought it came from the great river, but as I came nearer the road, I heard a noise something like a low rumbling thunder and presently found it was the noise of horses’ feet coming down the road and this cloud was a cloud of dust made by the horses’ feet.
Everywhere he looked were determined riders on lathered horses. The countryside was emptying, the road funneling everyone toward Middletown.2 Arriving just in time to see Whitefield ascend the platform, Cole recalled the scene:
He looked almost angelical; a young, slim, slender youth before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted countenance, and my hearing how God was with him everywhere as he came along it solemnized my mind; and put me into a trembling fear before he began to preach; for he looked as if he was clothed with authority from the great God; and a sweet solemn solemnity sat upon his brow. And my hearing him preach, gave me a heart wound; by God’s blessing: my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.
This was only the beginning of Cole’s conversion, not the end. For two years more he wrestled with God, especially concerning divine election and unmerited grace. From Whitefield, he understood these doctrines to be essential to authentic Christianity. Finally accepting them, he experienced conversion and assurance of forgiveness. For decades Cole was a key leader in Kensington’s radical evangelical movement, separating from his Congregational church and eventually becoming a Baptist.3
Hearing Whitefield preach began a conversion ordeal for Hannah Heaton, too, a farm woman of North Haven, Connecticut. Whitefield delivered “preaching as I never heard before,” she wrote, as he explicated the marks of an unconverted person. Did the audience members’ minds ever wander to worldly business as they sat through long church services? Did they struggle to devote even one day exclusively to the Lord? “How could you endure to be in heaven with him forever where nothing but praises are?” he asked. Heaton, stricken with guilt, knew that her attention often drifted during Sunday meetings. “I began to think my nature must be changed but how to attain it I knew not,” she wrote. She struggled for another eight months to discover the way to salvation. Finally, she received a brilliant vision of Christ, “a lovely God man with his arms open ready to receive me.” Full of praise and thanksgiving, she knew that Christ would pardon her sins.4
Conversion took only weeks, not months or years, for the Harvard tutor Daniel Rogers. Rogers had grown up in a minister’s family in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and he was under consideration for a ministerial position at Boston’s New North Church when Whitefield arrived. A 1725 Harvard graduate, Rogers knew Christian doctrine and ethics, but had never experienced the new birth. Perhaps Whitefield could help him break through, he thought, and so he joined the evangelist’s traveling cohort.5
Whitefield may have encouraged Rogers to start journaling. His diary began just as he set out with Whitefield from Boston, his spiritual struggles spilling onto the pages. The day before Nathan Cole heard Whitefield preach, Rogers wrote: “I am heart sick of the kingdom of sin and Satan, and want the Kingdom of God within me in righteousness peace etc. I hunger, I thirst. Lord Jesus, let me be filled, Lord help me to wait upon thee, to believe in thee, to hope in, rely upon thy promise. I find myself a lost damned creature without thee . . . I hunger I thirst after an experimental knowledge of Jesus Christ.”6 Rogers received such “experimental knowledge” as they approached New York City. “It pleased God of his free and sovereign grace to come into my poor soul with power and so to fill me with peace,” Rogers wrote, “yea with such joy in the Holy Ghost as I never experienced before. I could not forbear smiling nay laughing for joy and gladness of heart.” He told Whitefield and his other happy companions that he had experienced the new birth.7
These three conversion accounts from the fall of 1740 show that certainty about salvation could come quickly to some evangelicals, though it was rarely secured during a single meeting. For some, like Cole, it could take years. Particular themes came up repeatedly: hearing a preacher, Whitefield or someone else, who delivered a focused message on the new birth was ordinarily a part of the story. Converts typically were already aware of their sinful nature, their particular offenses, and the divine judgment awaiting them if they did not find a way of escape. Personally discovering that way through Christ led to elation. Although others eventually fell away, for Rogers, Heaton, and Cole, conversion was the entryway into a long life of evangelical devotion.
Whitefield visited Yale College in October 1740 and found the environment there similar to Harvard’s. Not yet forty years old, Yale had endured financial and religious struggles, not least the defection of Rector Timothy Cutler to Anglicanism in the 1720s. Whitefield noted that the school had “one rector [Thomas Clap], three tutors, and about a hundred students.” He heard no reports of significant awakenings at Yale (those would come soon). As at Harvard, he spoke intently with the students, warning them of “the dreadful ill consequences of an unconverted ministry.” He cautioned them that they could receive the best education available and still miss the most important qualification for a preacher: the new birth. As Whitefield prepared to leave New England, he wrote that Harvard’s and Yale’s “light is become darkness, darkness that may be felt” (Exodus 10:21). But he was nonetheless hopeful: “I pray God those fountains may be purified, and send forth pure streams to water the city of our God.” This characterization (which soon appeared in print) stung the college authorities; they would bring it up four years later upon Whitefield’s return.8
Whitefield’s provocations regarding unconverted ministers irritated many, but to his sympathizers, they confirmed fears felt for some time. Some recognized that they had helped ordain ministers who did not show definitive signs of conversion. At Stamford, Connecticut, Whitefield wrote, “At dinner, the Spirit of the Lord came upon me again,” enabling him to speak confidently against sending unconverted men into the ministry. Two of the ministers there began weeping and confessed that they had laid “hands on young men [in ordination services] without so much as asking them, ‘whether they were born again of God, or not?'”9 Whitefield helped some ministers, such as Daniel Rogers, see that they had never experienced the new birth. An older minister visiting the itinerant at Stamford cried bitterly as he confessed, despite having “preached the doctrines of grace a long time,” “I believe I never have felt the power of them in my own soul.”10
At the end of October, Whitefield’s tour of New England came to a close. Marked by remarkable crowds and fervor everywhere he went, his time in New England was arguably the greatest triumph among the many he enjoyed in ministry. Whitefield attributed much of New England’s religious strength to its Puritan founders, but he believed that its devotion had grown cold, polite, and formal. “I like New England exceeding well,” he wrote, “and when a spirit of reformation revives, it certainly will prevail more [there] than in any other place, because they are simple in their worship, less corrupt in their principles, and consequently easier to be brought over to the form of sound words, into which so many of their pious ancestors were delivered.” Without saying so explicitly, Whitefield was conceding that the Dissenting origins of New England gave it a firmer basis for revival than the Anglican-dominated colonies or England itself.11
Whitefield enjoyed a pleasant reunion with friends in New York, including James Davenport. But he was also confronted with more published attacks, led by Alexander Garden’s Six Letters to the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, and The Querists, which had been produced by the antirevivalist New Castle Presbytery. Garden, whom Whitefield regarded as “angry overmuch,” raged against Whitefield’s “Mobb Harangues” and his contention that many Anglicans did not preach salvation by grace alone. Garden also took exception to Whitefield’s attacks on Archbishop Tillotson. The commissary told Whitefield that Tillotson’s fame would persist well after “you and your dirty pamphlets are sunk into oblivion.”12
Whitefield generally ignored Garden, which compounded the commissary’s rage. But The Querists touched a nerve, coming as it did from Presbyterians rather than predictably hostile Anglicans. The Querists combed Whitefield’s writings for troubling passages. The authors cautioned readers that some of his ideas so strongly identified born-again believers with the divine that they smacked of “Antinomian reveries, of being god-ed with God, and christ-ed with Christ.” Ironically, given Garden’s attacks, The Querists charged Whitefield with implying that good works contributed to salvation. (At other points, the authors claimed he suggested that believers had no obligation to obey God at all.) Whitefield obviously did not believe in salvation by works, but these Presbyterians’ accusations showed how easily an emphasis on obedience could imply that religious duties earned a sinner merit before God.13
Although he called it a “bitter pamphlet” in his journal, Whitefield’s printed response to The Querists was uncharacteristically gentle. The Querists gave him an opportunity to correct some of the misleading “expressions that have formerly drop'd” from his pen, he said. Some of the mistakes had occurred before God gave him a clear understanding of the doctrines of grace. (He compared his apology to that of “St. Austin [Augustine]” before him, who, toward the end of his life, published the Retractions.) Whitefield readily conceded instances of poor phrasing and imprecise theological understanding, in most cases agreeing with The Querists’ complaints.14
He was especially keen to distance himself from John Wesley’s errors, with which The Querists connected him. (Whitefield’s ministry, as well as the debates about it, proceeded in a thoroughly Anglo-American context, facilitated by the circulation of printed texts between Britain and the colonies.) Whitefield used his reply to The Querists to refute Wesley on the doctrine of perfectionism. The Querists especially noted that Whitefield had endorsed Wesley’s edition of The Life and Death of the Reverend Learned and Pious Mr. Thomas Halyburton (1739), in the preface of which Wesley asserted that truly converted Christians could stop committing sin altogether. Having sloppily failed to read Wesley’s preface, Whitefield said that he would not have endorsed it if he knew what Wesley had said. Indeed, he had begun ripping out that section of Wesley’s preface before giving away copies of the Halyburton memoir.15
Although responding to The Querists kept Whitefield busy, what he really wanted was to see revival in New York. Whitefield put a great deal of emphasis on the audience’s reaction to his sermons—probably too much emphasis. He commented on displays of the Word’s and the Holy Spirit’s power, or the absence thereof, at nearly every meeting. The subtle implication was that when there was no manifest reaction to his sermons, he had somehow failed. But audience’s moods were fickle, and after all, was not the real work of revival up to God?
The day he finished his reply to The Querists, he preached twice to large crowds, “neither time without power.” The next day, a Sunday, he spoke with “some power” in the morning, but felt “dejected” and weak before the evening meeting. He dragged himself to the pulpit, but once he began the sermon, he felt the Spirit take over. “At length [the Spirit] came down like a mighty rushing wind, and carried all before it,” he wrote. “Shrieking, crying, weeping and wailing were to be heard in every corner.” People collapsed into the arms of friends. “The like I never saw before,” wrote Daniel Rogers. When the sermon ended, Whitefield went down among the people, finding one girl uncontrollably crying out, “Oh my Jesus, my Jesus!” A weeping little boy sprawled on the stairs leading to the pulpit. Someone asked why he cried, and the boy said that Whitefield’s sermon had cut him to the heart.16
Whitefield was hardly immune to overwhelming experiences in the Spirit. That night, he participated in the wedding of Jonathan Barber, who soon would become superintendent of the Bethesda orphanage. The “Holy Ghost” was so powerfully present at the ceremony that afterward when Whitefield retired to his lodgings, he recorded: “Divine manifestations flowed in so fast, that my frail tabernacle was scarce able to sustain them.” Friends gathered around his bedside, and he cried out in prayer for each of them, and was “pierced by the eye of faith, even within the veil” (Hebrews 6:19). He lay in this ecstatic state for thirty minutes. Whitefield explicitly linked this transcendent moment to publication of The Querists: “God has remarkably revealed himself to my soul, ever since I have seen the pamphlet published by the Presbyterians against me.” By the conclusion of this visit to New York in early November, however, Whitefield had not seen a citywide awakening there to compare with the glories in Boston.17
On Staten Island, Whitefield met with Gilbert Tennent, whose wife had recently passed away, taking him briefly off the front lines of the revivals. (Whitefield noted that Tennent had bravely preached the funeral sermon with his wife’s corpse lying in front of him.) They rode to Newark, New Jersey, where Whitefield gave an exhortation that precipitated another remarkable outpouring: “Oh how did the Word fall like a hammer and like a fire!” Many were overcome with weeping and lost their bodily strength. Whitefield was so physically taxed after the meeting that he vomited and collapsed on his bed.18
Whitefield’s cohort moved on to Basking Ridge, New Jersey, where on November 5 they saw one of the most intense outbreaks of fervor during the entire Great Awakening. Basking Ridge was the home of the Reverend John Cross, who was achieving a status akin to Tennent’s among evangelicals. James Davenport was also there, preaching in the morning to a crowd of several thousand. Once Tennent and Whitefield arrived, this may have been the most formidable assembly of preaching talent seen at one meeting during the American revivals.19
In the afternoon, Whitefield preached from the back of a wagon on the story of the blind beggar Bartimaeus, who cried out to Jesus and was healed in Mark 10. “The Holy Ghost displayed his power” as Whitefield exhorted the assembly to follow Bartimaeus’s example and call on Jesus. As he often did in his most evocative sermons, Whitefield spoke as if the story of Bartimaeus was being replayed that very day: “Jesus, I trust, is passing by; I feel his presence, I hope many of you feel it too; O then, cry mightily to him, who is mighty and willing to save you . . . Jesus will answer you, he will not cast out your prayer . . . the more they charge you to hold your peace, do you cry out so much the more a great deal, ‘Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on us.’” Daniel Rogers said that many in the audience took Whitefield’s exhortation literally and “after the example of the blind man [began] to cry out after Jesus.”20 A little boy, seven or eight years old, began weeping and calling out “exceeding piteously.” Cross brought the boy up into the wagon, and Whitefield stopped his sermon and called “upon the people to hear this lad preaching to them.” Again, this created a burst of emotion among the people, and, as Rogers wrote, some fainted and seemed ready to “fall into fits.”21
They took a short supper break, and then John Cross announced that there would be an evening meeting at his barn. Two hundred people pressed in there, among smells of livestock and sweat. Tennent preached first, then Whitefield prayed and gave an exhortation. The Holy Spirit surged. “I had seen great things before,” Rogers wrote, “yet this exceeded them all.” He struggled to represent the scene in his diary: people were “weeping, sighing, groaning, sobbing, screaching, crying out.” After Whitefield preached for six minutes, one man began calling out, “I have found him, I have found him!” and “He is come!” The man pressed through the throng to embrace Whitefield, who began praying over the convert. Finally, at eleven o'clock the exhausted preacher left the barn and retired to Cross’s house. The new convert accompanied Whitefield and remained in “an ecstasy” for an hour or two. The man spoke incessantly of Jesus, “his sweet Christ, his free-hearted Christ.” Rogers and James Davenport returned to preach in the barn into the wee hours of the morning. Many stayed all night.22
This was an incredible high moment, but two of its key figures, John Cross and James Davenport, would soon fall into serious trouble. Cross was accused of sexual immorality and removed from the ministry in 1741. A published antirevivalist letter said that Cross had seduced a young woman in his congregation, reportedly suggesting that she needed to experience grievous sin before she could properly receive Christ’s forgiveness. (Tennent advised Whitefield of this debacle in early 1742.) Davenport, for his part, became the leader of the radical evangelical movement on Long Island and in New England. By 1742, the evangelicals of New England had begun to divide themselves bitterly into moderate and radical camps. A preacher’s position was often determined by his opinion of Davenport. Connecticut officials arrested and deported Davenport for illegal preaching in May 1742, but not before calling out the militia to quell a near riot by his supporters in Hartford. The increasingly moderate Tennent broke with Davenport later that year, saying that he could not countenance Davenport’s encouragement of independent revivalist congregations (which were illegal because of New England’s Congregationalist establishment) and his focus on the immediate inspiration of the Spirit. Whitefield would never definitively break with Davenport, even though he began to shy away from his radicalism.23
We do not know how many African Americans or Native Americans attended revival meetings like the one at Basking Ridge, but we do know that at least one female servant, probably a slave, was at that assembly. The “poor Negroe-woman” approached Whitefield the next day and asked to join his traveling company. Remarkably, her master had consented to this proposal. But in a telling response, Whitefield instructed her to go back home, “with a thankful heart[,] to serve her present master.” Whitefield had no interest in the immediate emancipation of slaves; instead, he believed in the evangelization and education of African Americans, the benevolent treatment of slaves, and the use of slave labor specifically to enhance the Bethesda project and the economy of Georgia. In this life, Whitefield thought the woman’s faith would make her a better servant to her master, and a witness for Christ in her appointed station.24
From Basking Ridge, Whitefield’s party moved on to Gilbert Tennent’s church in New Brunswick, New Jersey. There the group made a critical decision, one that Whitefield had contemplated for some time: they would part ways. Tennent and Daniel Rogers would go back to New England to “blow up the divine fire lately kindled there.” When it came time for them to say farewell, they prayed earnestly for one another. Tennent “was our mouth to God,” Whitefield wrote. “He prayed in the Holy Ghost” (Jude 20).25
Back in Philadelphia again, Whitefield discovered that supporters had erected the “New Building,” a commodious brick structure one hundred feet long and seventy feet wide, with a gallery ringing it. He had tried to discourage the construction of such a building in May, fearing that it would signal he was trying to confine the work of God to one place. But now that the edifice was mostly built, Whitefield seemed pleased to use it. Although the structure was not yet roofed, the builders boarded the floor and constructed a pulpit. Whitefield was eager to debut the facility, so he spoke under the chilly open sky, and “God’s glory filled the house.”26
In his Philadelphia sermons, Whitefield began to focus on the threat of Deism and natural reason. This new emphasis came partly through the conversion of Charles Brockden, a “notorious Deist.” Brockden had grown up in a religious family, but in early adulthood he “began to doubt of, and to dispute [God’s] very being.” On Whitefield’s first visit to Philadelphia, Brockden had attended a sermon out of curiosity. As Whitefield spoke on Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus in John 3, God struck Brockden’s heart, and he soon experienced the new birth.27
2.1 [Unidentified artist], after William Hogarth, Scholars at a Lecture, c.1736. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Belinda L. Randall from the collection of John Witt Randall, R5692. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
2.2 “Cathedral from Church Tower, Gloucester, England,” Snapshots of the Past (2007), Wikimedia Commons.
3.1 St. John’s Chapel inside the White Tower at the Tower of London, England. Photo by Bernard Gagnon, 2007. Wikimedia Commons.
3.2 Peter Gordon, “A View of Savannah as It Stood the 29th of March, 1734,” Toronto Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.
4.1 Frontispiece of George Whitefield, The Christian’s Companion: or, Sermons on Several Subjects (London, 1738), [C 1394.28], Houghton Library—Hyde Collection, Harvard University.
4.2 Dr Rock’s Political Speech to the Mob in Covent-Garden (London, 1743). ©The Trustees of the British Museum.
6.1 View of Boston, in The American Magazine (July, 1745). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
11.1 Countess of Huntingdon, from Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth, The Story of Hymns and Tunes (New York, 1906), Moody Memorial Library, Baylor University.
12.1 George Whitefield, by John Russell, oil on canvas laid on board, 1770?, NPG 1792, © National Portrait Gallery, London.
12.2 William Hogarth, Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (London, 1762). Wikimedia Commons.
13.1 Frontispiece of Phillis Wheatley, An Elegiac Poem: On the Death of That Celebrated Divine and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield (Boston, 1770). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
13.2 Silver medal for George Whitefield, 1770. Transfer from the Yale University Library, Numismatic Collection, 2001, Gift of Charles Wyllys Betts, B.A. 1867, M.A. 1871. Yale University Art Gallery.
13.3 Wood, Enoch (1759–1846). George Whitefield. Bust. British, Burslem, Staffordshire, ca. 1790. Lead-glazed earthenware, H. 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm). Gift of Francis P. Garvan, 1940 (40.171.6). Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
Not long after learning about Brockden, Whitefield began preaching against Deism, perceiving that Philadelphia was a stronghold of skepticism. Deism could mean many things in the eighteenth century, but its proponents always emphasized human rationality as a reliable gauge of truth. This became Whitefield’s chief point of attack. On November 15, he found himself ill and uncertain of his text for preaching, but when he began his sermon, he found himself energized—“I felt the Holy Ghost come upon me”—and he spoke out against “depending on our natural reason.” This was a novel topic for him, and upon investigation (probably by asking Brockden), he learned that a “cluster” of Deists had been present at the meeting. “Then I knew wherefore I was so assisted,” he wrote. Whitefield was testing new levels of reliance on the Holy Spirit for guidance in preaching.28
A correspondent wrote a poem for Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette upon hearing Whitefield preach in the New Building, confirming the sense that the city’s skeptics were among his key adversaries:
Though haughty Deists, Favorites of the Times,
Do all thy Actions construe into Crimes:
Though some who to Religion make Pretence,
Want only Power to send thee bleeding hence:
Though Earth and Hell should with united Force
Employ their Malice to impede thy Course:
Yet fear thou not, be to thy Master true;
He will direct thee, and preserve thee too.29
The day after speaking against the Deists, Whitefield prepared to leave Philadelphia. He collected £105 for Bethesda and held a baptismal service for five adult female converts (presumably, they had never received baptism as children). He preached his farewell sermon to a large, emotional crowd, though not nearly as large as the one he saw upon departing Philadelphia six months earlier. Whitefield proceeded through New Jersey and Maryland, meeting enthusiastic assemblies at every stop, before embarking from Reedy Island in Delaware to return to the South. He estimated that he had preached 175 times publicly since his arrival in Rhode Island in September, averaging more than 2 sermons a day. “All things concur to convince me that America is to be my chief scene for action,” he concluded. He expected that God would soon remove the “candlestick” of favor from England (Revelation 2:5), and that America would become famous for the work of revival.30
Whitefield had reason to worry about England, for in his absence he had lost several of his key allies. His London publisher, James Hutton, had become more fully committed to the Moravians’ theology after a visit to their congregations on the Continent. In contrast to the Methodists’ emphasis on the spiritual disciplines of prayer and Bible reading, the Moravians taught a doctrine of “stillness.” They emphasized nonaction, even to the point of disparaging taking communion, reading scripture, and attending church for those without certain faith. They believed that religious busyness could confuse works with salvation. Whitefield considered their “stillness” a perversion of Psalm 46:10 (“Be still, and know that I am God”), an exhortation not designed, as he wrote to a Moravian, to keep Christians from striving for faith. In London, the tension between John Wesley (whose troubles with Whitefield also festered) and the Moravians came to a head in July 1740, when Wesley renounced Hutton’s Fetter Lane society.31
Whitefield too became increasingly troubled by the Moravians’ theology, both because of what he heard from England and also because of discussions he had with Peter Böhler. Along with Hutton, Böhler had been one of the key leaders of the Fetter Lane society before migrating to Pennsylvania in 1740. He and Whitefield conversed about selling the Nazareth tract, and about their theological differences, including the Moravians’ emphasis on perfectionism. They concluded that in order to avoid fruitless disputes, they would “carry on the work of God apart,” as Whitefield told Hutton.32
Similarly, Hutton had begun to balk at printing Whitefield’s works with which he disagreed. Whitefield told Hutton that he did not wish for him to print anything that would violate his conscience. And as with Wesley, he asked Hutton not to rashly denounce Calvinism. Whitefield craved a unified evangelical front, asking Hutton, “How can we build up a church unless we are like minded?” Whitefield, Wesley, and Hutton found that they were incapable of theological rapprochement. The strife made Whitefield long all the more for heaven, he said, where divisions between the brethren would cease.33
As Whitefield began to prepare for his return voyage to England, his trepidation about relationships there mounted. Before he left Philadelphia, he got the letter indicating that Elizabeth Delamotte’s parents remained opposed to their proposed union, even though Elizabeth herself seems not yet to have given him a final no. Whitefield also wrote to Gilbert Tennent and said that he expected William Seward to return to America soon to help manage the affairs of the orphanage. Unbeknownst to Whitefield, Seward had tragically died a month earlier at the hands of a rock-throwing mob in Wales.34
When Seward returned from America, he took up preaching with Howell Harris. In September 1740, Seward had been nearly blinded by a rock-throwing hooligan. He wrote that the angry crowd came prepared for the confrontation, throwing “continual showers of stones, walnuts, dirt, a cat and also a dead dog” at them. Then came the fatal showdown in the town of Hay, where Seward received a deadly blow to the head with a heavy rock. He perished several days later, at the age of thirty-eight. In faraway Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards was moved by Seward’s martyr-like death to paste a page from Seward’s printed elegy inside the front cover of his personal notebook titled “Faith.” Edwards placed another page from it on the inside back cover of his Hebrew and Greek Bible.35
Newspapers paid little notice to the tragedy, mentioning only that the deceased was the “famous enthusiast Mr. William Seward, formerly belonging to the Treasury Office in the South Sea House, and lately very remarkable in being a disciple and close follower of Mr. George Whitefield.” In his life, Seward had reportedly given more than £10,000 to Christian works, including Bethesda. But he apparently did not leave a will, leaving Whitefield “embarrassed,” as he put it, with debts for the orphanage—estimated at £1,000—that he had expected Seward to pay. Whitefield faced arrest if he did not pay Seward’s outstanding debts incurred for Bethesda, a risk averted only by a timely loan of several hundred pounds from an English benefactor.36
Meanwhile, the revivalist dealt with pressing difficulties in the South. On November 18, 1740, a terrible fire ravaged Charleston, South Carolina, engulfing a third of the town and destroying about three hundred houses, the Dock Street Theater, and the public library, among other structures. Such fires were not unusual in cities of the British Empire; the Charleston fire hardly compared to the horror of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed more than thirteen thousand homes and scores of churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral. Nevertheless, the fire devastated the southern port, with estimated losses of £250,000. Whitefield arrived three weeks after the fire, and at his first opportunity preached on Isaiah 1:9: “Except the Lord of Hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.” Perhaps the experience would help the city’s residents escape the fires of hell, which “never shall be quenched” (Mark 9:43).37
Whitefield passed his twenty-sixth birthday and Christmas at Bethesda, bringing a much-needed infusion of more than £1,000 with him. Although the orphanage continued to struggle to cover its financial obligations and to maintain enough residents, Whitefield and his donors were happy with the project. A visitor wrote that the typical day for the fifty-four resident children consisted of a wake-up bell at sunrise, and “when the children arise, they sing a short hymn, and pray by themselves: then they go down and wash; and by the time they have done that, the bell calls to public worship.” They studied a classical curriculum, learned trades, and took meals in a common room, where a “wholesome diet [was] provided.” They attended worship services four times daily in summer; three in winter. The writer anticipated that if Georgia “allowed negroes, as it is thought must and will be,” the orphanage could expand.38
Whitefield wished to challenge the religious authorities in South Carolina and Georgia, just as he had in New England and the Middle Colonies, calling on them to preach a pure gospel of God’s grace. He and his allies had already discovered, via Alexander Garden’s attempted suspension of Whitefield, that the southern establishment was willing to use disciplinary power to stop them. James Habersham and Jonathan Barber, the new spiritual director of the orphanage, elicited the wrath of Georgia authorities when they confronted the new Anglican parson of Savannah, Christopher Orton, with pointed questions about his spiritual state. “After abundance of uncharitable and scurrilous behavior [and] denouncing damnation to Mr. Orton for preaching false doctrine,” they concluded that he was not a real Christian, wrote William Stephens, soon to be the governor of Georgia, with whom Whitefield had clashed over theology and the disposition of money for Bethesda. Although initially grateful for Whitefield’s electrifying presence, Stephens began to complain about the revivalist: “Mr. Whitefield preached . . . [on] the doctrine of the new birth, and justification by faith, provided it be such, as to produce an evidence within ourselves, that the Spirit of God is working in our hearts; which he insists on, we may feel with a real sensation; and till that is wrought within us, we are in a state of damnation.” After their confrontation with Orton, magistrates arrested Habersham and Barber for disturbing the peace, convicting and fining them at trial. Whitefield conceded that they should not have questioned whether Orton was a Christian, but he considered the arrests a fresh instance of “persecution.”39
The South Carolina planter Hugh Bryan likewise ran afoul of Charleston authorities for writing a blistering letter, with Whitefield’s assistance, about the spiritual lessons behind the city’s fire. Bryan blamed the disaster on the colony’s Anglican ministers, who were “deceiving precious souls and causing them to sleep in their sins to damnation.” Legions languished in religious nominalism, casually identifying as Christians but never embracing its doctrines or practice. Such people needed their ministers to tell them of divine judgment and the necessity of the new birth. “The blood of such,” Bryan warned, “will be required at their teachers’ hands.” He believed that the “dreadful fire of Charles-town hath spoken terror”: “If we regard not this to lay it to heart, humble ourselves, and repent truly of our sins; the just God will yet pour out upon us more terrible vials of his wrath.”40
Anglican officials did not take kindly to the letter, and constables briefly arrested Bryan and Whitefield for libeling the town’s ministers. Far from being humbled by the experience, Whitefield saw it as more persecution and counted it an honor to suffer for Christ. Echoing Jesus’s words on the cross, he prayed that God would be merciful to his antagonists: “They know not what they do.” The following Sunday, Whitefield preached on King Herod sending the wise men to find the Christ child, ostensibly wanting to worship him, but really intending to murder him instead. “How dreadful it was to persecute under a pretense of religion,” Whitefield warned.41
His brief detention did not interrupt his plan to sail for England. Charleston supporters showered him with so many provisions for the ship that he had to send most of them to Bethesda. Finally, on January 16, 1741, he boarded the Minerva; a week later the ship sailed. The journey took about six weeks, and was far easier than his previous return to England. It gave him some badly needed rest. He read, meditated, and prayed, regaining a “feeling possession” of God’s presence even as he contemplated the trials awaiting him in Britain. Already eager to return to America, he planned to do so within four or five months.42
The chief unpleasantness he had to face in England, aside from his dashed hopes of marrying Elizabeth Delamotte, was a confrontation with the Wesleys. The conflict between the Wesleys and Whitefield’s Calvinist allies reached a crescendo in Bristol while Whitefield was en route to London. John Cennick, the master of the Methodists’ Kingswood school, clashed with the Wesleys as John worked to consolidate control of the Methodist societies and to marginalize Calvinists. Cennick wrote to Whitefield to apprise him of the crisis. Wesley acquired a copy of the letter and read it aloud to a meeting of the Bristol society. Cennick had written that he believed “no atheist can more preach against predestination” than did the Wesleys. “All who believe [in] election are counted enemies to God, and called so” by the Wesleys, he said. Cennick admitted that he wrote the letter and would not retract what he said. Therefore, John expelled him and his allies from the society for scoffing “at the preaching of Mr. John and Charles Wesley” and for speaking “evil of them behind their backs.”43
Whitefield did not yet know about this episode as he penned another letter to Wesley while traveling to England. Why did John and Charles not remain silent about their disagreements with him, he asked? Charles had exacerbated the tension when he published an anti-Calvinist verse in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1740), declaring, “Horror to think that God is hate! / Fury in God can dwell! / God could a helpless world create, / To thrust them into hell!” Whitefield insisted that he could no longer preach the gospel without referring to predestination and election. He informed them that he had prepared a response to John’s sermon “Free Grace,” that he had left it to be published in Philadelphia and Boston, and that he would also publish it in London.44
Knowing that a definitive break with the Wesleys was imminent, Whitefield kept building a network of Calvinist evangelicals. One of the key links in that network was Anne Dutton of Great Gransden, England, where her husband led a Calvinistic Baptist church. Dutton, two decades older than Whitefield, was an insightful theological writer, and Whitefield came to depend on her to help strengthen his interdenominational Calvinist cohort. As he crossed the Atlantic, he wrote and asked her to write a substantial letter to Bethesda residents. Her book A Discourse on Walking with God (1735) had become a standard devotional text for Whitefield and his Bethesda colleagues. Telling her of troubles he expected to encounter back in England, he confessed that “it is an ease thus to unbosom one’s self to a friend.” Dutton was one of several key women—including the Countess of Huntingdon and his future wife, Elizabeth James—from whom Whitefield sought counsel and to whom he entrusted leadership responsibilities. For all but a few evangelical women of the time, formal pastoral roles were out of the question, although John Wesley did permit a number of female preachers (without ordination) to operate in his ministerial circuits. Whitefield never seems to have seriously entertained the possibility of allowing women to assume official pastoral positions. But he did not balk at enlisting women such as Dutton to help him bolster his revival network.45
It should be kept in mind that Methodism specifically and evangelicalism generally were predominantly women’s movements, especially when considering the percentage of men and women involved. Critics of revivalism often focused on the behavior of female participants, raising the specter of sexual indiscretions: “The levees of Whit[e]field and Wesley used to be crowded with young women enquiring about their sensation,” recalled one anti-Methodist writer, “and a number of grown females, widows, etc. were always coquetting in a song-of-Solomon way with these illustrious fathers.” These negative associations of women with evangelicalism implicitly suggested the prevalence of women in the movement, and the anxiety it created for some. While some observers have painted evangelicalism as misogynistic, most modern historians realize that even without access to formal pastorates, many women found revivalism spiritually and socially satisfying. Evangelical leaders placed important restrictions on women’s public roles, but the movement offered women vital social networks and outlets for expressing the “disciplined moral energy” that was essential to piety. Prominent women such as Anne Dutton, Elizabeth Whitefield, and the Countess of Huntingdon became pious exemplars, informal advisers, and trusted organizers for Whitefield and other male leaders.46
Whitefield arrived in London in late March 1741 and found the situation there as bleak as he had expected. The Methodists had fractured into Calvinist, Arminian, and Moravian factions. Whitefield saw large crowds—twenty thousand or more—on his initial return to Moorfields and Kennington Common, but follow-up meetings drew only a few hundred hard-core devotees. Finding out about Seward’s death was a blow, as was the realization of the financial distress it had caused. He also lamented the Moravian defection of James Hutton, who had made hundreds of pounds sterling by selling Whitefield’s sermons and journals, and who now refused to print his writings. Most bitter was discovering how many followers the Wesley brothers had turned away from him; “They will neither hear, see, nor give me the least assistance,” Whitefield wrote. Some passed by as he was preaching, but stuck their fingers in their ears to block out the sound. Some even sent him threatening letters saying that God would “speedily destroy” him.47
Whitefield met with Charles to seek reconciliation, and their deep personal history temporarily broke the ice. They wept and prayed that the “breach might be prevented.” Yet the split continued to widen. The Wesleys asked him to preach once at their new meeting place, the Foundry, but did not invite him again. Whitefield was devastated, fearing that all his earlier successes in London had come to naught. “All my work was to begin again,” he wrote.48
Whitefield had many remaining London friends, of course, and some (as in Philadelphia) began to build him a wooden preaching structure they called the Tabernacle. It was not far from the Wesleys’ Foundry. “A fresh awakening immediately began,” Whitefield wrote, and he started sending for Calvinist allies, including John Cennick and Howell Harris, to share preaching duties.49
Finally, Whitefield met personally with John Wesley. The reunion was not so sweet as the meeting with Charles. Wesley wrote, “Having heard much of Whitefield’s unkind behavior since his return from Georgia, I went to him to hear him speak for himself.” Whitefield told him that they “preached two different gospels.” He would no longer join with Wesley, the itinerant declared, nor even give him the “right hand of fellowship,” but would publicly preach against him. Perhaps the conversation was not as unpleasant as it sounds, for the next night Whitefield and Cennick attended a love-feast with Wesley.50
Whatever the case, within a week of this meeting, Whitefield’s A Letter to the Reverend John Wesley: In Answer to His Sermon, Entitled Free-Grace was published in London, with other editions appearing in the colonies. He professed profound hesitation in confronting Wesley publicly: “Jonah could not go with more reluctance against Nineveh, than I now take pen in hand to write against you.” But Whitefield reminded his audience that Wesley had initiated the public controversy nearly two years earlier, having cast lots before publishing Free Grace. Whitefield wondered whether this method did not improperly “tempt the Lord.” (The itinerant did not reflect on the extent to which casting lots differed from receiving unmediated guidance from the Holy Spirit.)51
Much of Whitefield’s concern focused on Wesley’s handling of the controversy, but he objected to Wesley’s theology as well. Whitefield stated his own position succinctly: “I believe the doctrine of reprobation, that God intends to give saving grace, through Jesus Christ, only to a certain number, and that the rest of mankind, after the fall of Adam, being justly left of God to continue in sin, will at last suffer that eternal death, which is its proper wages.” Wesley argued that if God offered saving grace only to the elect, then preaching was pointless. Whitefield countered that the preaching of the gospel was God’s means of saving the elect. Pastors and evangelists could never know who in their audience was elect and who was reprobate, so they should “preach promiscuously to all” as a matter of obedience.52
Whitefield contested Wesley’s concept that believers could achieve perfect holiness in this life. While he had total confidence in salvation through Christ, Whitefield knew that he sometimes still sinned. The Bible presented this as the common struggle of all Christians. Unfortunately, Whitefield set up a straw man by arguing that scripture and experience contradicted the notion that “after a man is born again he cannot commit sin.” This was not Wesley’s position, although Whitefield did occasionally encounter followers of Wesley who claimed to have reached such a state of sinlessness that it had become impossible for them to sin. Regardless, speaking personally to Wesley, Whitefield speculated that his “fighting so strenuously against the doctrine of election, and pleading so vehemently for a sinless perfection, are among the reasons or culpable causes, why you are kept out of the liberties of the gospel, and that full assurance of faith, which they enjoy, who have experimentally tasted, and daily feed upon God’s electing, everlasting love.” Whitefield counted himself among those who had “experimentally tasted” that love. The itinerant predicted that when they reached heaven, he would be proved correct and Wesley would cast his “crown down at the feet of the Lamb, and as it were, [be] filled with a holy blushing for opposing the divine sovereignty in the manner you have done.”53
This was harsh talk. Wesley found the letter “imprudent” and “burlesque,” and told Whitefield as much shortly after receiving a copy. It made “an open (and probably irreparable) breach between him and me,” Wesley concluded. Citing Ecclesiasticus 22:22 from the Apocrypha (which at the time remained in the King James Bible), Wesley wrote, “for a treacherous wound, and for the betraying of secrets, every friend will depart.”54
Whitefield soon went to review the Methodists’ schools in Bristol and Kingswood, and was not pleased with the Wesleys’ influence there. A number of the Methodists now professed to have experienced total freedom from sin. One woman said she had been sin-free for a year, but Whitefield was dubious: “Alas! she showed many marks of imperfection while I was with her,” he wrote. In letters exchanged with John in late April, they bickered about expenses and management of the Bristol projects. But the real point of contention remained Whitefield’s publication against Wesley. Wesley insisted that if Whitefield had stuck to the theological point, and not made the letter so personal, he could have avoided the breach. According to Wesley, “[Whitefield could] have answered my proofs without mentioning my name.”55
Wesley tartly vowed not to “dwell on those things which have an immediate tendency to make [Whitefield] odious and contemptible,” promising not to return Whitefield’s attacks in kind. But if the Wesleys did not indict Whitefield and his associates by name, they made clear that their followers should avoid them and their Calvinism. John Cennick, for one, said that Charles “called Calvin the first-born son of the devil” and exhorted his audiences to despise even the proponents of predestination and election.56
These months, then, saw the opening of a bitter rivalry between England’s Arminian and Calvinist evangelicals. Howell Harris told John Cennick that the “hellish infection” of Arminianism had not yet come to Wales, but it festered close by in Bristol. Not even Harris and Whitefield were in complete accord theologically: at the same time that Whitefield and Wesley clashed over Calvinism, Harris and Whitefield engaged in a pointed exchange over a believer’s power over sin. As Whitefield countered Wesley on the “monstrous errors” of perfectionism, Harris wrote, he seemed to suggest that “there is no such thing as dominion over indwelling sin.” Harris thought this went too far. A true believer would enjoy greater freedom from sin over time, but Whitefield thought that even the holiest saint would still occasionally struggle with temptation and fall into sin. Chastising Harris, he speculated that he had become “tinctured with the doctrine of sinless perfection.” He hoped Harris would not become angry with him over the issue; he could not afford to lose another key ally.57
As Whitefield prepared for his first trip to Scotland, in June 1741, he was becoming chastened, having endured the pain of schism with his onetime spiritual father, John Wesley. He told Howell Harris that they needed to avoid the extremes of “party spirit,” on one hand, and too much “positiveness,” on another. “The farther we go in the spiritual life,” he said, “the more cool and rational shall we be, and yet more truly zealous. I speak this by experience.”58
Remaining committed to the defense of biblical doctrine (meaning Calvinism), Whitefield increasingly realized the value of maintaining a united evangelical front. The movement could not sustain another horrible breakup. And while Whitefield did not detach revival preaching from correct doctrine, he relished nothing so much as seeing lives transformed by the Spirit, through the proclamation of the gospel. Seeing people like Nathan Cole, Hannah Heaton, and Daniel Rogers experience the new birth was his real passion. He resolved to keep it his main business.