5 London Field Preacher

Historians commonly suggest that religious revivals, as we know them, were invented in Great Britain and the American colonies in the eighteenth century. They also single out George Whitefield, "the Grand Itinerant," as the most powerful and arresting revivalist of an age that includes John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. Yet Whitefield has remained an elusive figure, far less understood than the founder of the Methodist movement or the theologian from Northhamption, Massachusetts, who wrote so profoundly about religious experience.

Stout's creative study brings Whitefield to life, capturing the essence of his meteoric rise and the arresting power of his preaching. The Divine Dramatist is superb biography in three respects. First, it is a vivid character study of a complex individual who was devoted both to sacrificial service and to fame and achievement. Whitefield was a man so passionate about his calling as preacher that he would allow no rival for his affections. He proposed to his wife without a confession of love and tolerated a marriage largely absent of warmth and passion. Spending as many as forty or fifty hours a week preaching, Whitefield was a man who lived almost exclusively for public performance. His private failures, frustrations, and ill health found their best cure in his proclamation of the gospel before an audience.

As history, this study also is brimming with original insights. It explains the power and significance of Whitefield's innovation: extemporaneous, open-air preaching to mass audiences. Whitefield became Anglo-America's first religious celebrity because he competed for public attention outside the arena of the churches - in the marketplace. Like his friend Benjamin Franklin, Whitefield also became a skilled promoter through the popular press. Stout's chapter on the remarkable relationship between the creed-denying Franklin and the deistdenying Whitefield sparkles with illuminating insight.

Stout suggests that the key to understanding Whitefield is the stage; drawing on his early affinity for acting, Whitefield transformed preaching from a bookish lecture to a powerful dramatic performance. He fused acting and preaching in such a way that audiences were held spellbound. Stout's dovetailing of the histories of preaching and of the stage greatly enriches our understanding of the power and significance of the Great Awakening.

The book's third strength is that it sheds light on the entire course of American religious history. Just as Whitefield broke the links that bound preaching to the church, so he envisioned revivals that would bring together persons apart from their ecclesiastical affiliations. He promoted the creation of a religious culture that subordinated churches to a larger reality - the individual experience of the New Birth. In this framework, personal experience replaced denominational creeds, sacraments, and communal covenants as the ultimate arbiter of authentic religious faith. In emphasizing the New Birth over against church and creed, Whitefield became the herald of the revival-centered voluntary movements that have been so characteristic of American religion.

Nathan 0. Hatch

I gratefully acknowledge fellowship support for this book from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Travel to Collections, and to a Yale University Senior Faculty Fellowship. The Huntington Library and Art Gallery, in particular Martin L. Ridge, and the American Antiquarian Society, in particular John B. Hench, graciously provided grants for travel and residency, as well as a collegial setting unexcelled for scholarly support and stimulating conversation. The research staffs of New College Library, University of Edinburgh, in particular Dr. Murray Simpson, the British Library, and Yale University's Sterling and Beinecke Libraries gave unstintingly of their time and enthusiasm in tracking down Whitefield materials.

I am especially grateful to my graduate assistants at the University of Connecticut and at Yale University for tracking down fugitive Whitefield sources and offering timely criticisms of earlier drafts. In particular I wish to acknowledge Louise Breen of the University of Connecticut and, at Yale, Christopher Grasso, Catherine Brekus, and Henry Blodget.

To friends and colleagues I owe more than I can say for their encouragement and criticism. At an early stage, my interest in George Whitefield was fueled by William H. Kenney. In a small way I hope this volume discharges a debt long in the making. Most recently, I have benefited immensely from the friendly counsel and criticism of my Early American colleagues at Yale. In particular, I wish to thank Jon Butler, Nancy Cott, John P. Demos, Kenneth Minkema, and Edmund S. Morgan for reading substantial portions of the manuscript and revising my thinking at several key points. I also wish to thank Jon Butler, Nathan 0. Hatch, and T. H. Breen for supplying books and materials from their own research that bore on this enterprise.

My immediate family has offered infinite goodwill and assistance throughout this project. My daughter, Deborah J. Stout, devoted two summers to the rather thankless task of word processing, while my wife, Susan J. Stout, applied her skilled touch in ways too numerous to list. My son, James, offered timely encouragement, together with frequent voicings of every scholar's favorite question: "When will it be done?"

My greatest debt, evidenced elsewhere, is to Mark A. Noll, who read the manuscript in its entirety. His friendship and encouragement got me through the rough times, and his critical discernment is responsible for whatever final clarity of language the book may possess.

To most historians George Whitefield is known as AngloAmerica's most popular eighteenth-century preacher and its first truly mass revivalist. And he was. But in the course of writing this biography, it became clear to me that he was far more than a great preacher. Such was the scope of his fame and popularity that he rightly can be labeled Anglo-America's first modern celebrity, a preacher capable of commanding mass audiences (and offerings) across two continents, without any institutional support, through the sheer power of his personality. Where other influential preachers and churchmen wrote learned treatises and preached in meetinghouses and cathedrals to audiences totaling in the thousands or tens of thousands, Whitefield wrote best-selling journals and drew audiences that must be totaled in the millions. White and black, male and female, friends and enemies - all flocked in unprecedented numbers to hear the "Grand Itinerant." Wherever he visited, people could do anything, it seemed, but stay away. For comparison one must look to an electronic age and come dians, movie stars, athletes, or evangelists like Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, and Jimmy Swaggart. In the eighteenth century there was only Whitefield.

Considered as a religious celebrity, Whitefield must be understood in social and cultural as well as religious terms. In a career spanning three decades, during which he preached over 18,000 times, his impact as religious revivalist was uniformly powerful in England, Scotland, and North America. In all of these places he showed how religion could be made popular. But in colonial America his significance had an added dimension. There he became not only the prototype for future mass evangelists but the prototypical culture hero as well. In Whitefield, colonial Americans discovered their first intercolonial hero, the first in a long line of public figures whose claims to influence would rest on celebrity and popularity rather than birth, breeding, or institutional fiat.

True, most of the American self-made heroes have been political leaders whose names are identified with the creation of the American republic. But this should not blind us to the fact that America's first hero originated outside of the political arena. Pre-Revolutionary America was very much a religious culture the primary common symbols and rituals of which were substantially sacred in nature. So it is not surprising that its first hero emerged in that religious setting. Unlike England or Scotland, moreover, America had no single established church. Thus it was uniquely receptive to an interdenominational appeal that could fuse an intercolonial sense of religious loyalty and common identity. Whitefield's American legacy was doubly significant. He not only saved souls and swelled church memberships but rallied as well an entire group of disparate and previously unrelated peoples into a common movement for revival, a group that looked to him as its spokesman. Out of his revivals there emerged a pan-American - indeed, an Anglo-American - common cultural identity.

Whitefield's stunning successes as the evangelical "mar vel of the age" call for explanation. And here the biographer encounters a significant problem. Virtually all of the Whitefield primary sources, such as private papers and diaries, have been lost or destroyed. While a significant corpus of Whitefield's sermons survive, most of them were composed in the first five years of his ministry. To reconstruct Whitefield's character and times, it is necessary to turn to other sources. In place of private notes and journals the historian must rely on external sources including Whitefield's own published writings and letters, contemporary diaries, letters, magazines, and, most important, newspapers.

When all of the fugitive sources are consulted, together with general histories of the eighteenth century, a fascinating story emerges that reveals a surprising amount of information about Whitefield's personality as seen from the outside in and about the times in which he lived. If an autobiographical account of Whitefield's charisma remains inaccessible, we can nevertheless ask how it became manifest. How was his charisma discovered and expressed? How did he manage to transform charisma into an international reputation as the "Grand Itinerant"? How do we understand the man behind the achievement, and how do we interpret the significance of his achievements for both religious history and popular culture? These are the central questions addressed in this biography.

The more I studied Whitefield's career, the more apparent it became that the very lack of information on his inner and private life supplied important clues to the man. In fact, I became convinced that Whitefield lived his life almost exclusively for public performance. On many of his tours, he was occupied for as many as forty to fifty hours a week in the pulpit. This contrasts with totals a tenth of that for most other ministers and does not include the hours spent traveling between stops, setting up outdoor preaching locations, or exhorting in private groups. In reconstructing his public career as evangelist I was, at the same time, revealing his innermost biography.

Always at the forefront of this inquiry is Whitefield the preacher. This I take to be his most distinctive contribution to his times. In the course of his extemporaneous, open-air preaching to mass audiences, he transformed the traditional sermon into something different: a dramatic event capable of competing for public attention outside the arena of the churches - in fact, in the marketplace. Whitefield showed that preaching could be both edifying and entertaining. Others had preached out-of-doors before him, to be sure, but none had ranged so far in ever-expanding itinerant circuits, nor had any enjoyed Whitefield's personal, transatlantic appeal. It was left to Whitefield to become Anglo-America's first religious celebrity, the symbol for a dawning modern age.

Studies of Whitefield have too often abstracted him from the age in which he lived. To his contemporary admirers and later filiopietistic biographers, he is a timeless man, located on a continuum of faith and revival stretching from Abraham and Moses through Paul and Luther to the present. While such hagiography serves important religious functions in the community of faith, it deprives the general historical community of another - I do not say better - story in which Whitefield emerges as a man who belonged very much to his times. As such, his significance is bound up and connected with the age of his contemporaries and acquaintances, such as the great British actor David Garrick and colonial America's "representative man," Benjamin Franklin. These too were symbols for their age who recognized the new popular forces erupting in their societies and exploited them fully. And what Franklin achieved in journalism and politics, and Garrick on the stage, Whitefield achieved in religion, for many of the same reasons.

Like his entrepreneurial contemporaries in politics and theater, Whitefield confronted a society in crisis. New social, political, and economic forces were rapidly reshaping traditional institutions and, in the process, redefining the rules by which "society" existed and held together. Increasingly the logic and structure of the marketplace came to stand as a shaping metaphor for society in general. In place of a local, face-to face world premised on trust and personal familiarity, people were everywhere being thrust into larger webs of association premised on contract, mobility, and impersonal interest in common products, services, and markets. As the public sphere grew more impersonal and abstract, the private self gained proportionate importance as the repository of spiritual experience.

Inevitably these vast cultural transformations spilled over into religion. The religious crisis of the eighteenth century was not so much a crisis of thought as of mood and spirit. The sixteenth-century English Reformation and the seventeenth-century Puritan movement had successfully produced written constellations of ideas that would outhve their framers. The Thirty-nine Articles and the Westminster Confession of Faith would be their enduring monuments. The problem for the eighteenth century was how to make these inherited ideas come alive in ways that would speak compellingly to the rapidly changing landscape of eighteenth-century AngloAmerica. The critical issue was less one of definition than of presentation: how to take the old verities and present them through new voices that would speak to the changing circumstances of eighteenth-century society. How, in a word, were they to make religion popular, able to compete in a morally neutral and voluntaristic marketplace environment alongside all the goods and services of this world?

In turning to the social and cultural history of the age in which Whitefield preached, we find that Americans and Britons alike were caught up in a "consumer revolution" stimulated by vast increases in manufacturing, capital, and leisure time. This trend would not become general until the nineteenth century, but already by 1750 the seeds were sown, first in London and then outward. Inevitably this revolution created what the historian T. H. Breen has called a "shared language of consumption," which increasingly characterized society in the impersonal, market-driven terms of producer and consumer, buyer and seller. This shared language threatened to overtake social discourse. But at first it did not include religion. Public religion was confined to the tradition of the old churches and meetinghouses. The public square was naked; there was no sacred vocabulary or ritual to fill its ever-expanding stalls of goods and services.

George Whitefield's greatness lay in integrating religious discourse into this emerging language of consumption. Before him there had been only established "churches" and tolerated "sects." Aspiring religious leaders and reformers could think of nothing grander than reviving their own denominations and convincing those in other denominations of the errors of their ways. Only Whitefield thought to transcend denominational lines entirely and, in effect, ply a religious trade in the open air of the marketplace. His "product" he offered to all who would voluntarily enter under its canopy and participate.

Given Whitefield's unprecedented success in marketing religion to the eighteenth century, we have to wonder what techniques he employed. My search for an answer took me to a most unexpected and ironic source: the eighteenth-century English stage. For centuries the stage and church had stood in mortal combat for the souls of their nations. The intensity of their rivalry derived from the similar - and competing - nature of their appeal. Both encouraged a suspension of belief in the experience of the everyday to introduce their viewers to different worlds. Theater, in its capacity to combine the pageantry of art, the intensity of poetry, the enchantment of fiction, and the movement of dance, represented a religious-like amalgam of art and energy that, as one contemporary put it, had the power to "get Possession of the heart." Not surprisingly, many clerics accorded the contemporary stage the status of a church: the church of Satan.

At an early age - as remarkable in his own right as the musical prodigy Mozart, the runaway journalist Franklin, or the boy genius Edwards - Whitefield managed to fuse a public amalgam of preaching and acting that held audiences spellbound. His early affinity for the stage is well known and re counted in virtually every biography. But these passing concessions to childhood experience do not go far enough. At heart, Whitefield became an actor-preacher, as opposed to a scholar-preacher.

Surely the irony of identifying Whitefield with the stage would not have been lost on him. From his early infatuation with the stage he later turned with all the fury of a spurned lover. But beneath the rejection lay a born actor whose intrinsic need and special gift for dramatic self-expression never disappeared, even as its focus shifted from stage to pulpit. He applied the methods and ethos of acting to preaching with revolutionary results. While damning contemporary theater as the "devil's workshop" on the one hand, he co-opted its secrets and techniques on the other. The fusion of these two arts produced a new philosophy of preaching that emerged first in practice and later in theory.

Before Whitefield, everybody knew the difference between preaching and acting. With Whitefield's preaching it was no longer clear what was church and what was theater. More than any of his peers or predecessors, he turned his back on the academy and traditional homiletical manuals and adopted the assumptions of the actor. Passion would be the key to his preaching, and his body would be enlisted in raising passions in his audience to embrace traditional Protestant truths.

Contained in this theater-driven preaching was an implicit model of human psychology and homiletics that saw humankind less as rational and intellectual than as emotive and impassioned. In eighteenth-century actors' manuals, the individual psyche was divided into a triad of feelings, intellect, and will in which feelings reigned supreme. An unfeeling human is a nonperson, a mere machine with highly sophisticated mental functions. It is the passions that harmonize and coordinate intellect and will. In fact, they control and direct all the faculties.

Whitefield himself was a performer rather than a theoretician. Instead of theoretical treatises on preaching, he provided pulpit performances so powerful and compelling in their emotional intensity that none - including his greatest enemies in the church and theater - could stay away. Like no preacher before, and perhaps since, he demonstrated that the passions could be as effective an anchor of evangelical preaching as the intellect. Beyond that, a passion-based ministry was able to compete with the growing range of goods and services in the public square. Indeed, so effective was Whitefield's competition with the theater that the two became implacable foes. This biography traces this rivalry and discovers in it important clues to Whitefield's success.

A new homiletics invariably produces a new sense of the preacher's art and a new sense of the Scriptures from which that art is sculpted. Whitefield's dramatic appeal to the passions encouraged pious souls to become actors themselves and to transform the world from a profane stage to a sacred stage on which believers could enact roles of godliness modeled on biblical characters. In the course of moving from mind to passion, he restored narrative to the center of preaching. No longer was Scripture primarily a set of doctrines; now it became a dramatic script with a cast of characters whose lives and roles served as models for later generations to "impersonate." Whitefield's great ambition was to characterize and impersonate the world of the biblical saint, as preserved in Scripture narratives, with such compelling pathos and urgency that it would draw consumers away from the false gospel of the theater and the "world" and bring people into the Christian church.

In preaching to mass audiences of disconnected individuals, strangers, Whitefield helped to introduce a new concept of religious experience that grew throughout the nineteenth century into a recognizably "evangelical" movement. In the new religious experience, piety was no longer something inextricably bound up with local community and corporate spirituality. The emphasis shifted to a more individualistic and subjective sense of piety that found its quintessential expression in the internal, highly personal experience of the "New Birth." Indeed, the individual experience of regeneration, detached from a particular place and time and existing within the self came to be the badge of religiosity and true piety in Whitefield's revivals. We will see how the very meaning of "revival" shifted from a mysterious, local, communal event to one that was predictable and highly subjective.

As the theater supplies clues to Whitefield's stunning outdoor successes, studies of the actor supply important clues to Whitefield's personality and character. Few great people achieve fame without aspiring to it, and Whitefield was no exception. But the fame he sought was not that of the metaphysical theologian or the denomination-builder. Rather he strove to achieve the actor's command performance on center stage. From his youth, Whitefield wanted to be a star, and the particular egotistical self-promotion he displayed in his career was very much in the manner of the great actor.

Every actor is necessarily a detached individual in the sense that he or she builds an imaginary world around self. The best actors become so contained in their self-centered dramatic worlds that the dividing line between the stage and "real life" begins to blur. For many, life becomes most "real" when lived on the stage, in the moments of public performance. As celebrities, moreover, actors instinctively reveal themselves - and their egos -to the public. Their lives become an open book.

In his classic twentieth-century treatise To the Actor, Michael Chekhov echoes the conventional wisdom when he distinguishes two different attitudes actors have toward the stage:

To some [actors] it is nothing but an empty space which from time to time is filled with actors, stagehands, settings and properties; to them, all that appears on the stage is only the visible and the audible. To the others, the small space of the stage is an entire world permeated with an atmosphere so strong, so magnetic that they can hardly bear to part with it after the performance is over.

Whitefield clearly fit the second category. His whole life was directed by the personalities from Scripture that he characterized and embodied in the pulpit. He lived his life for the public so exclusively and single-mindedly that his private life shrank into a small and relatively insignificant interlude between the big performances. Where many dissenters from John Bunyan onward tried to infuse their private lives with spiritual "drama," Whitefield sacrificed a private life to live wholly for his public.

In pursuing information on Whitefield's private life, one is struck by the paucity of information regarding his most intimate dealings with family and friends. This too provides important clues to his character that will be pursued in separate chapters on early methodist women of the revival and on Whitefield's own courtships and marriage. For the most part, he confined his energies and attentions to allies, male and female, in the methodist cause of revival. But in the case of Benjamin Franklin we find a fascinating exception that, like Whitefield's relationship with the theater and with women, has not been fully appreciated. Through that friendship we discover clues to both personalities that cannot be clearly seen in any other of their relationships.

As drama supplies the context for Whitefield's new brand of revivalism in this biography, "mass marketing" constitutes the means whereby he attracted - and directed - his mass religious following. Besides being a consummate performer, he was a self-promoter with sure business instincts. Earlier than his clerical peers he learned to exploit the emerging world of print journalism to promote his tours. He cared little whether he elicited adoring praise or vicious criticism: both served his purposes well. Through his own literary and journalistic innovations he succeeded in creating an image and presence that was larger than life. His journal (itself an innovation in its printed form), together with newspapers and a letter-writing network of friends and secretaries, supplied the marketing apparatus for creating a truly transatlantic revival.

Finally, some caveats. The Whitefield who emerges in this biography is very much a "modern" or protomodern figure. In exploiting the new media and the emerging marketplace mentality, he anticipates modern evangelists, particularly those in the "electronic church." Yet there is a danger here of anachronism. Much in modern evangelicalism Whitefield would neither have recognized nor sanctioned. From first to last he was a Calvinist who believed that God chose him for salvation and not the reverse. His piety was molded by a conversion experience that, he passionately believed, was unmerited and of divine initiative. This same Calvinism informed his selfconcept and placed even his most shameless self-promotions within a larger understanding of self and society molded by the premodern Calvinist tenets of total depravity, original sin, and unconditional election. If I have placed less emphasis on theology in this biography it is because it was of less importance to his significance, not because it was of less importance to him.

Whitefield's theatricality likewise requires specification. I have used theater as a window into Whitefield's career and personality, but, like all insights, it can be taken too far. In particular, analogies to the theater that apply to Whitefield do not accurately characterize the audiences at his revivals. Whitefield's intent in preaching was to activate his hearers to seek their salvation earnestly. In the best dramas, playgoers have a cathartic experience but they remain spectators, separated by the stage's fourth wall and usually addressed only indirectly. In contrast, Whitefield intimately bound himself to his audiences - or congregations: he preached to himself as he preached to them, and both were urged to action. Whitefield's audiences were told in no uncertain terms that they not only watched, but were being watched; the spothght turned on their chairs, and they, with Christ, became lead actors in the divine drama. To the believers in the audiences, Whitefield's revivals were more participatory than theater.

If theater, newspapers, and the actor's psyche provide keys to the interpretation of Whitefield's greatness in this biography, they are not meant to supplant or subvert traditional accounts of his piety. Beyond living a life for the public, Whitefield embodied the spiritual roles he played. Unlike many charismatic performers who followed in his footsteps, he remained undistracted by the allure of sex or wealth. If he was not a good family man, neither was he a hypocrite or one who merely "played" at spiritual roles for ulterior reasons. His personal character matched the biblical saints he portrayed, and his vast charitable efforts left him perennially near bankruptcy. It was his integrity that won the admiration of skeptics like Benjamin Franklin, who in time became his staunchest American supporter. In this sense, Whitefield was his own finest convert to the Christian lifestyle he proclaimed.

A NOTE ON USAGE

Throughout the biography, I have distinguished Methodism as a denomination, with the use of a capital M, from methodism as a reform movement within pre-existent Anglican or "Calvinist" denominations. When Whitefield spoke of his "beloved methodists" he did not have in mind an incipient denomination so much as a lifestyle and code of spirituality that, he believed, should be present in all denominations. This is quite different from the more institutionally grounded Methodism that came to be identified with John and Charles Wesley and that moved in Arminian and perfectionist traditions, which Whitefield rejected.

I was born in Gloucester, in the month of December, 1714. My father and Mother kept the Bell Inn. The former died when I was two years old; the latter is now alive, and has often told me how she endured fourteen weeks' sickness after she brought me into the world but was used to say, even when I was an infant, that she expected more comfort from me than any other of her children. This, with the circumstance of my being born in an inn, has been often of service to me in exciting my endeavors to make good my mother's expectation, and so follow the example of my dear Saviour, who was born in a manger belonging to an inn.

So begins George Whitefield's gospel-sounding account of his nativity. The passage was written at age 26, by which time he had already established himself as the most sensational and controversial preacher in the great London metropolis. For one who had risen so far so fast, the analogy to Jesus in the manger was both terribly egocentric and, at the same time, perfectly natural. It expressed exactly the conflicting impulses that raged in the young evangelist, pitting a deep-set piety against a determined ambition to be "somebody" in the cause of Christ.

Besides offering an unequaled window into the psyche of the young evangelist, Whitefield's journal remains the only source of information we have about his youth. When the didactic and self-promoting aims are stripped away from the text, several critical facts emerge that help to locate the formative influences of Whitefield's youth. Taken together, they provide indispensable clues to the character and qualities of the future evangelist.

First is family. Whitefield was born December 16, 1714, in the Bell Inn on Southgate Street, Bristol, the youngest of seven children. If his circumstances were not as bleak as the analogy to Bethlehem suggests, neither were they the usual stuff of which an Oxford gentleman was made. In the sharply stratified and hierarchical society of eighteenth-century England, Whitefield's family circumstances could best be summarized as one of declining status. His great-grandfather Samuel Whitefield was an Oxford graduate and rector of Rockhampton in Gloucestershire, and his grandfather Andrew succeeded Samuel at the family estate as a "private gentleman of means." But there the upward climb seems to have stopped. George's father, Thomas, began his career as an apprentice wine merchant in Bristol and eventually took over the ownership of the Bell Inn. Although a respectable establishment, the inn was not especially lucrative or prestigious. From the edge of gentility, the family had declined at a time when many other mercantile families were moving in the opposite direction.

The slide grew even sharper when George's father died suddenly at age 35, leaving a widow, Elizabeth, and seven children. In 1724 Elizabeth sought to recoup some losses by marrying an ironmonger named Capel Longden. The marriage proved disastrous. After failing to wrest control of the inn from Elizabeth, Longden took what he could, deserted the family, and eventually filed for divorce. Of the marriage itself, Whitefield says practically nothing except that Longden's departure was a godsend to his "troubled Mother." It was undoubtedly a relief to young George as well. As a result, however, Whitefield would grow up without a strong father figure in his life.

George's older brothers helped to run the inn and eventually owned it. But it was George's mother who exercised the major influence on his childhood. From earliest memory he recalled her singling him out as the son who would make something of himself and the family. As long as she ran the inn she refused to let him work there. Both mother and elder siblings protected George from the world and held out high hopes for him. Inasmuch as earlier generations had made their mark in the Church of England, Elizabeth pointed George in that direction too. A clerical career would recapture the family's lost distinction and reestablish it on the fringes of English polite society.

Though Whitefield linked himself to Bethlehem, his mother was no Mary, nor - her name notwithstanding - was she a New Testament Elizabeth. Her vision for George was probably more social than spiritual. There was certainly no deep spiritual concern or biblical instruction in Elizabeth comparable to that of a Susannah Wesley or an Esther Edwards. Nor did it ever occur to her to depart from the established church or to plumb the depths of religious experience for herself. In fact, Whitefield wrote to his mother in later life urging her to move beyond her nominal faith and examine her heart for evidence of the "New Birth."

The religious career that Elizabeth Whitefield encouraged was powerful, but more in terms of a lost status than any of the internal calling or character formation for ministry found in many dissenters' homes. In contrast to Baptist, Congregational, and Presbyterian dissenters, George grew up with no alienation from the established church, without even a nonconformist's sense that some "truer" or more "faithful" recovery lay outside the state church. Recovering lost status was as significant as kindling spirituality as far as the family and young George were concerned.

The psychological effect of declining status engendered a deep sense of inferiority in Whitefield. This sense, moreover, was not simply subjective; in the context of eighteenth-century society, it was a social fact. In the finely gradated society of eighteenth-century England, the only distinction that really mattered was that between "gentleman" and commoner. In George, this reality kindled a mounting ambition. He could not claim gentility, but he could reclaim it and win back the respect due his family and himself. Yet even while he continued to covet respectability and status, he nonetheless dismissed the trappings of the world, including the church. This love/hate relationship with the world, status, and achievement was evident throughout his life.

In part through his mother's influence, and in part through his own fertile imagination, Whitefield resolved this inferiority-based tension through an all-compelling sense of personal destiny. Unlike the destiny that many eighteenthcentury gentlemen sought - personal fame and virtue, achieved through their own superior will, efforts, and abilities - Whitefield's sense of destiny was invariably tied up with a supernatural deliverer who would pick him up out of his lowly situation and catapult him to apostle-like status. Whitefield lived in an imaginary world of destiny derived from the humble saints of old who did not choose but were chosen from above to be luminaries of the faith. Such a destiny did not require class and social rank. The beauty of a divine sense of destiny was its social inversion. God often took the humble to instruct the great.

Along with his dreams of sacred destiny, Whitefield instinctively took on the words and language of the apostles - particularly Paul - for his own speech. While his mother's ambitions pointed to an administrative niche in the church, his personal ambitions transcended institutions in more personal, charismatic ways. As the church would be his arena, so Christ would be his deliverer.

Perhaps because he knew early on his mother's expecta tions of something great for him in the church, Whitefield seems to have attended Anglican and Presbyterian services regularly. Long before spiritual crises welled up within his conscience and transformed his life, he practiced the moves and mannerisms of the preachers he observed. While still a child, he repeated before his family sermons he had heard, and on occasion he recited some that he had composed himself. The interest seems to have been dramatic and imitative rather than spiritual.

Invariably the young boy's knack for mimicry and memory for dialogue surprised those attending his imitations. So effective were his abilities that they came to the attention of the pastor of Southgate Independent Church, Thomas Cole, who found that the young lad was repeating his pulpit stories almost exactly as he had told them. Later in life Cole attended one of Whitefield's sermons and was heard to remark, "I find young Whitefield can tell stories as well as old Cole!"

Whitefield's talent for mimicry soon found other, more dramatic outlets as well. In fact, theater and play-reading soon became an irresistible outlet and preoccupation of his youth, comparable in importance to home and family. By the time he wrote his autobiography, he had become a mortal enemy of the stage and so did not dwell on such moments as when he read or acted his first play or what plays he found most enjoyable. But the very vehemence with which he renounced his play-reading youth as devil-inspired "folly" suggests that this pastime bordered on an obsession. Clearly he was born with dramatic urges and instincts that demanded expression. Indeed, they soon proved more powerful than schooling and nearly undid his college ambition.

To a boy bound for ministry, schooling always figured prominently. In pursuit of the family dream, a twelve-year-old George began grammar school training at the nearby parish school, St. Mary de Crypt on Southgate Street, near the inn. Any hope the young lad had for a university education depended on his mastering Latin and reading the classics of Greece and Rome. Yet he found this labor extremely difficult. His later confession that he was "so brutish as to hate instruction" was probably not an exaggeration. Throughout his life he remained indifferent or hostile to classical learning and sustained study. His late-life companion and chronicler Cornelius Winter recalled that Whitefield's sermon production involved great passion and practically no study: "He was never more in retirement on a Saturday than on another day.... I never met with any thing like the form of a skeleton of a sermon among his papers, with which I was permitted to be very familiar, nor did he ever give me any idea of the importance of being habituated to the planning of a sermon. It is not injustice to his great character to say, I believe he knew nothing about such a kind of exercise."

But if Whitefield was slow to pick up Latin grammar and rhetoric or to develop the habit of study, he quickly demonstrated a predictable genius for elocution and declamation. His memory for dialogue and gift for expression exceeded that of all his classmates and elicited the wonder of his tutors. In no time he was speaking before his classes and tutors, and by year's end he addressed the visiting members of the corporation.

As he developed his talents with speech and declamation, Whitefield discovered that he was a born actor. The young lad had undoubtedly encountered strolling actors at the inn and had accumulated a full range of characters there to observe and mimic. By the time he got to school, he was immediately given lead roles. So impressive were his performances that his tutor, Daniel Bond, composed dramas especially for him. In one uncomfortably memorable performance Bond cast him in the part of a girl - a role he had "often done" before, and which he played to perfection.

In eighteenth-century England, it was still common for males to play female parts; indeed, it was considered a supreme test of the actor's ability to take on the part of woman. Whitefield was no exception.

My master seeing how mine and my schoolfellows' vein ran, composed something of this kind for us himself, and caused me to dress myself in girls' clothes, which I had often done [in stage roles], to act a part before the corporation. The remembrance of this has often covered me with confusion of face, and I hope will do so, even to the end of my life.

In and of itself, there was nothing objectionable about acting women's parts. Yet in recollecting it, Whitefield registered extreme embarrassment and discomfort. Here we get the first intimation of a person uneasy with his own masculinity as it was defined in the eighteenth-century codes of virility and Spartan muscularity. Always protected by mother and elder siblings, Whitefield never possessed the physical courage and fearlessness so highly favored by the George Washingtons or British generals of his age. He made many male friends, but his dealings with them were always affectionate and cordial, never intimidating. Descriptions of young Whitefield's slight build, "comely" appearance, and "fair countenance" suggest one who adapted easily - perhaps too easily - to female parts. Later in life, he openly admitted his fears of physical confrontation, and, in moments of danger such as ship crossings or mob persecution, he confessed that his wife was braver than he. Only on the childhood stage or in the pulpit could he be fearless. There he could take on the bravest roles and the most courageous saints and play them to perfection.

The immediate result of Whitefield's early successes on the stage was his immersion in theater. Years later, when composing his autobiography, he would recall with regret how "during the time of my being at school, I was very fond of reading plays, and have kept from school for days together to prepare myself for acting in them." Here was an outlet that fit his personality and inborn talents as perfectly as the sermons he mimicked at home. Acting helped him to overcome his fears by "impersonating" greatness. But because acting and the stage existed in a nether world of questionable morality and inferior social class, George's mother could never recommend the stage for her child. On the other hand, she didn't have the dissenter's hatred for all theater as the "devil's workshop." So, receiving neither encouragement nor resistance from his mother, the young actor pursued the stage as his consuming avocation.

Whitefield's awakening interest in drama coincided with a great revival in English play writing that redefined the craft and won entirely new audiences among the middle and working classes. The young Whitefield undoubtedly encountered a broad spectrum of drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary comedy, historical tragedy, and biting political satire. He may have thrilled to the classical tragedy of Joseph Addison's Cato or such more contemporary tragedies as Ambrose Philips's The Distrest Mother, Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane, and Aaron Hill's The Fatal Vision. Romances and ribald comedies-which Whitefield later confessed were his "heart's delight" - included such favorites as Anthony Aston's Love in a Hurry, Colley Cibber's Love Makes a Man, George Farquhar's international hit The Recruiting Officer, and Richard Steele's The Funeral. And it is likely that Whitefield sampled the biting wit of Henry Fielding's burlesque Tom Thumb, seeing in it the power of satire and ridicule in confronting established institutions.

In addition to reading plays, Whitefield also studied acting. In the eighteenth century as in the twentieth, this involved analysis of the passions. While other aspiring clerics in the eighteenth century were reading their Bibles and studying doctrine, young Whitefield was working on the passions. Dramatic plots could be strained and implausible, but that didn't really matter. It was the passions evoked in the actor and audience that counted most. Aspiring actors were less interested in the arts of logic or rhetoric than in the fine arts of painting and sculpture that focused on the human face and body. They asked how the face and body registered emotion in times of great distress, happiness, or repose.

We cannot know for certain whether Whitefield actually read actors' manuals, though they were cheap and readily available. Considered as homiletical texts, they reveal a concentration and emphasis almost exactly opposed to the intellectually centered manuals of the Puritan stalwarts William Perkins and Cotton Mather. In Aaron Hill's classic eighteenthcentury manual The Art of Acting, actors learned that "the passions men are actuated by, must be the Objects they are most familiar with, and yet we find no Difficulty greater, than to represent 'em, in their due Distinctions." Beginning with the head, actors explored the full range of facial expressions and body language that would be matched with particular emotions in a spectrum of emotions ranging from sorrow and grief to fear or hatred, and ultimately to love.

Whether by theory or actual performance, aspiring actors learned to exercise their imaginations to recover passions. Their first mission, Hill insisted, was "to fix itself upon the clear Idea" of a passion and then "transmit" it to the face. To explain this "transmission," actors employed a science and epistemology every bit as comprehensive as that found in rhetoric and the liberal arts. Any idea or sentiment, Hill explained, acts "immediately behind the optic Nerves" and "stamps instantaneously upon the Eye and Eyebrow, a struck Image of [the] conceiv'd idea." The actor's face was the tableau on which he learned to sketch the passions of his part. In eighteenth-century theory, it was impossible to look one way and feel another: the face and body were a window into the passions of the soul. Actors began with the eyebrows, mastering a full range of expressions that in "progressive impulse" expanded outward to direct the face, neck, chest, and legs. In any performance the actor appeared to be assuming all the expressions simultaneously, though in practice he learned to break the passion down into all its body parts and master all the poses and inflections appropriate to that particular emotion.

Hill identified ten dramatic passions to which appropriate actions and facial expressions were attached: joy, grief, fear, anger, pity, scorn, hatred, jealousy, wonder, and love. With these ten tools the actor could play any part, for they encom passed the sum and substance of the human condition. Of Whitefield's great contemporary David Garrick it was said that he could entertain guests by "throwing his features into the representations of Love, Hatred, Terror, Pity, Jealousy, Desire, and Joy in so rapid and striking a manner [as to] astound the whole country." On stage, it was "no longer Garrick whom we heard: the change once effected, the actor disappeared and the hero was revealed, and the actor did not become his natural self until his task was done."

In place of thinking man the manuals substituted impassioned man and from there articulated a theory of selfpresentation in public settings that was every bit as comprehensive and self-contained as a preacher's manual or rhetorician's text. In time, Whitefield would desert the theater, leaving forever open the question of whether he would have been Garrick's equal. But the lessons he learned concerning passion, body, and character were never forgotten and were to find dramatic expression in the pulpit.

In the end, it was practical necessity that ended Whitefield's schoolboy career on the stage. Convinced by his bad marks and his family's declining fortunes that a clerical career was out of the question, he announced to his mother that he had withdrawn from his course of study in the classics and was learning "to write only" in preparation for the trades. Until then his mother had always shielded him resolutely "from intermeddling in the least with the public business" of the inn. But in 1729 that prohibition temporarily ceased. For a year and a half he assisted his mother in the inn, washing sheets, mopping floors, and serving food, all the while observing a procession of guests representing all walks of life.

As an eighteenth-century innkeeper, Whitefield must have encountered all sorts of characters, including drunks, politicians, prostitutes, "gamesters," pickpockets, and a tippling cleric or two. All of these were far removed from the pious household of faith common to a Jonathan Edwards or John Wesley, but they furnished him with a rich store of characters that he later brought to life in the pulpit. Where an Edwards or Wesley spent time in the company of respectful parishioners and polite supplicants, Whitefield inhabited the robust and vulgar world of everyday England.

In Whitefield's new world the passions reigned. All of his playgoing friends fell into the roles of the characters they saw, and soon Whitefield followed suit: "I began to reason as they did, and to ask why God had given me passions, and not permitted me to gratify them." With no one or no thing to provide an alternative answer, Whitefield's passions dictated a role that he would play around the inn: "I soon made great proficiency in the school of the devil. I affected to look rakish, and was in a fair way of being as infamous as the worst of them." Throughout his life, Whitefield sculpted roles out of his passions. In the beginning, the "rake" won out.

Besides playing a role in life as though it were an extension of the stage, Whitefield used his experience in the inn to master the art of ingratiation. Social class, drama, and the inn experience together taught him how to get along with all sorts of people. Without ever forgetting his place, he could relate to people of all classes. He became a raconteur of the first rank and a conversationalist as engaging in the parlor as in the pulpit. Far sooner than he imagined, he was to put to use the skills with people he learned in the inn.

The lesson Whitefield learned most clearly from his experience in the inn was that the trades were not for him. The job of "putting on the blue apron" appealed to neither his social ambition nor his sense of destiny. It was merely a way station on a journey barely begun. After his brother Richard took over management of the inn, George had an unhappy falling out with Richard's wife, and so he left. His mother had moved into a small cottage when she gave up control of the inn, and so for a time George went to live with his oldest brother in Bristol.

The Bristol experience was short-lived but immensely important in forming Whitefield's spiritual character. He arrived there out of work and out of sorts with his hoped-for destiny. For the first time he experienced a spiritual crisis that confronted him with the being of God and the reality of sin. He felt compelled to "look into my heart" and think about religion less in terms of calling and profession than in terms of experience and conscience. He began attending services regularly at St. John's Church and, through the "blessed sacrament" of the eucharist, began to think of salvation and damnation. Although throughout his ministry he was to transform the religious experience of others through the sermon, his own spiritual initiation came through the sacraments. At its deepest level, religious experience remained tied to ritual and symbol. In those Whitefield found the greatest religious meaning. The pomp, ceremony, and ritual of the Church of England never constituted an obstacle to his faith. As his religious interests assumed ever-deeper personal dimensions, his sense of the church, worship, prayer, and piety were fixed by Anglican dramaturgy.

Filled with an unsettled and unsetthng religious conscience, and still without work, Whitefield returned to Gloucester and waited on his destiny. He soon fell back into the old activities: "Much of my time I spent in reading plays, and in sauntering from place to place." But these activities didn't satisfy. Like many urban youths of his day, Whitefield marked time, waiting for his moment to come and knowing full well that for many people such moments never materialized.

The answer Whitefield awaited appeared predictably in the form of an epiphany. He recorded the moment briefly in his journal: "One morning, as I was reading a play to my sister, said I, 'Sister, God intends something for me which we know not of.... I think God will provide for me some way or other that we cannot apprehend.' How I came to say these words I know not. God afterward showed me they came from Him."

Though the entry is brief, the moment was certainly pivotal in Whitefield's youth. The interrelationship of epiphany and play-reading is here obvious and testifies to the power drama exerted in his youth, beyond what he could have appreciated in describing the moment ten years later. In ways White field never fully realized or acknowledged, drama informed his sense of destiny. In recording this moment for pious readers, Whitefield no doubt intended the juxtaposition of epiphany and play-reading as ironic: of God taking an immoral act (playreading) and transforming it into a glorious alternative (mission). Yet at the time it occurred there was undoubtedly no sense of irony. His repudiation of the theater was still in the future; at this point, stage and pulpit naturally coincided in his mind. In the same way that he became a "rake" and sculpted a shape for his life from the romances he read, he also defined a destiny that would take him out of Gloucester and into a bigger, more significant world.

What made this epiphany so memorable was not its uniqueness but the fact that soon thereafter a life-shaping, seemingly providential, opportunity appeared. In talking with a Gloucester friend, Whitefield's mother learned how poor students could attend Oxford as "servitors" - servants to the wealthy gentlemen who left their private estates to study culture and the art of leadership in the colleges. Immediately Elizabeth determined that George would have such a place. She importuned Whitefield's grammar school master to intercede on the boy-actor's behalf and in that way won a servitor's place for him at Oxford's venerable Pembroke College. The news of his admission rang out like a bell from heaven. In recording the moment in his journal, Whitefield instinctively resorted to a dramatic dialogue: "Upon that my Mother immediately cried out, 'This will do for my son.' Then turning to me, she said, 'Will you go to Oxford, George?' I replied, 'With all my heart."'

With destiny in sight, Whitefield returned with renewed ambition to the painful study of Latin and the classics. Although still not stellar, his academic performance was acceptable. He continued also "seeing plays," but doubts began creeping in around the edges of his conscience, and he "began to have some scruples about it."

Now that a career in the church was becoming a reality with the Oxford acceptance, he turned to the life of the soul with a single-mindedness that bordered on the obsessive. The lengths he traveled to bring his soul into conformity with his awakened conscience and clerical destiny are reminiscent of the struggles of the young Luther. A great destiny required great trials and preparations.

At age seventeen, a more focused Whitefield embarked on the first in a long series of bodily mortifications and ensuing illness that accompanied him through his Oxford years and beyond. Simple piety was not enough. Following a particularly meaningful Christmas celebration of the eucharist, he recorded that "I began now to be more and more watchful over my thoughts, words, and actions." During the following season of Lent he engaged in a thirty-six-hour fast and filled his evenings with devotional readings to his mother and sister. Rare was the day he missed matins and evensong. And with increased devotion came steady improvement in school: "I learned much faster than I did before."

Throughout this formative period, the determinative influence of Whitefield's mother comes constantly to the fore. She played a central role as both the instigator of his ambition and his admiring audience. The combination was all-powerful in shaping Whitefield's youth. At some level this imposed destiny undoubtedly raised resentments in the young lad and drove the two apart in later years. But it also fed a powerful ambition and gave it scope when he was most impressionable.

During Whitefield's periods of fasting and mortification he experienced new epiphanies in the form of dreams that appeared stage-like in their direction. An older Whitefield regretted mentioning these dreams in his journals because his critics used them to document his "antinomianism," but they are indispensable windows into his late-adolescent experience. For one deeply sensitized by his mother to his destiny, dramatic by nature, and caught in a spiritual crisis, revelatory dreams seemed entirely natural. In one particularly graphic vision he saw God on Mount Sinai speaking to him. Upon conveying this dream to a pious "gentlewoman," he learned the dream was a "call" from God to pursue college and the ministry. Throughout that year as he readied for Oxford, he continued to have dreams and "impressions" during his waking hours that foretold stellar spiritual performances on his part. Invariably his dreams were cast in the general context of personal destiny and charismatic ministry. The dreams never featured others, nor were they in any generalized sense calls to mere morality. They were calls to a great destiny that Whitefield was certain belonged to him.

Fortified by revelation, he threw himself into an organized "round of duties" including monthly sacraments, public worship, and private prayers twice daily, and "fasting frequently." Scholarly preparation was necessary but not especially useful to his designs. He wanted to finish schooling as expeditiously as possible, for his calling was to "preach quickly."

With schooling complete, the most unlikely of pulpit giants embarked for his sojourn at mighty Pembroke College, Oxford. He fit no clear stereotype in Christian hagiography: he was religious but theatrical, Anglican but dissenter in spirit, poor but destined for greatness. His life was a series of tensions: he could not read enough plays and he could not get enough religion, he felt inferior and he felt famous, he lived by passions and he renounced passions. All of these conflicting strains would stay with him throughout his life. They would propel him to Oxford and, beyond that, to a career that had no precedent or parallel in the annals of English preaching.

In 1732 a determined but uncertain Whitefield arrived at Oxford to pursue his destiny. The experience would be both more and less than he anticipated. If Oxford was a ladder of success for aspiring gentlemen and clerics, it was also a microcosm of the larger society. This meant that not every student would begin on the same rung nor could every student aspire to the same heights. One's rung in the college hierarchy reflected one's rung in the social hierarchy of eighteenth-century England. For the socially insecure and inferior Whitefield, this did not bode well, for his rung was very low.

As one of the oldest and most respected Oxford colleges, Pembroke evidenced a deep respect for the prerogatives of wealth and social rank. Each rank afforded its own privileges and responsibilities, reflecting social realities beyond the college walls. At the top of Pembroke society were the "gentleman commoners" - the wealthiest, best connected students, who could count on the deference of their inferiors among both faculty and students. Many of these students endowed their college while still students and built it up through the remainder of their lives.

For gentlemen students like Whitefield's contemporary Sir Erasmus Phillips, life at Pembroke college was a social feast. Phillips kept a diary of everyday life at Pembroke during the period when Whitefield entered the college. His entries reveal a constant round of dinners with local and visiting dignitaries, evening balls and parties, weekend trips to London, gambling at the race track, fox hunting, and island fishing. Young Phillips also held political office at his home estate at Haverfordwest and conferred frequently on matters of local governance. The academic side of school receded into this rich social background, though ample time was reserved for meetings with tutors, readings in the classics, and practice in the art of declamation. Like others of his class, Phillips remembered Oxford for its social associations and as the place where he acquired the classical culture and vocabulary of national leadership. At the end of his college experience, a gracious Phillips displayed the magnanimity of his position by hosting parties and receptions and "treat[ing] Pembroke College in the Common Room."

Below the gentlemen commoners, but still selfsupporting, were the commoners. The most brilliant Pembroke commoner in Whitefield's era was the famed essayist and literary wit Samuel Johnson. Though students like Johnson paid their way, they always felt (and were treated) poor in contrast to the gentlemen commoners. For them, the academic side of college necessarily played a more central role - and it raised its share of resentments. Failure to attend lectures or meet with tutors was punishable by fines, leading an angry and impetuous Johnson to complain to his undistinguished tutor, "Sir, you have sconced [fined] me twopence for a lecture not worth a penny

As the gentleman commoner's life was grand and the commoner's life was common, the servitor's life was servile. From without all Oxford may have looked the same, but once inside Whitefield learned otherwise. Each year a limited num ber of servitors were admitted tuition free, less to reward working-class diligence than to provide necessary services for the gentlemen students and the college masters.

The servitor's work was hard and often demeaning. When not acting as errand boys for gentlemen, they were often required to perform such degrading tasks as cleaning clothes and rooms and serving at parties. They also worked for the college master and assumed the unenviable task of checking rooms at night and reporting students who were not in their quarters. This understandably did not win friends among the gentlemen students, who would retaliate by going "hunting." Late at night the servitors would be chased through the college halls by angry gentlemen clanging pots and candlesticks in imitation of a fox hunt. Such experiences bred a spirit of resentment, anger, and inferiority. Even a commoner like Samuel Johnson felt the sting of elitism and hierarchy and vowed to fight back. Of his Pembroke years he later recalled, "I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way [to respectability] by my literature and my wit."

While Johnson got angry, Whitefield sought to please. In part, this was the distinction between a commoner's and a servitor's response to social pretension. But in deeper measure it reflects two contrasting personalities. One reads the journal in vain for references to rage or anger at the abusive disdain a servitor suffered. When intimidated, Whitefield's first response was ingratiation and, failing that, complete withdrawal.

Whitefield's early years in the inn prepared him well for his role as servant. At first he adapted easily to his situation and picked up quickly on the art of the servitor. He well understood the rules of rank and deference and played his part to the full. Unlike the gentlemen who enjoyed their private quarters, Whitefield shared his room with several other servitors and found he was preferred above all: "I ingratiated myself into the gentlemen's favour so far, that many, who had it in their power, chose me to be their servitor."

But if Whitefield was frequently in demand, he was never included in the social rounds of his superiors, nor, in contrast to Johnson, did he attract the attention of his tutors for superior scholarship. He was thus doubly bereft. He was out of his old world and peripheral in his new. Despite the favors of the gentlemen, he was a very lonely young man. Later in life he recalled with poignancy how he came to Oxford "without a friend.... I had not a servant, I had not any one to introduce me." Left alone in an unfriendly place, Whitefield turned to religion and the "holy life" as his only solace. The male life of card playing, drinking, hunting, and fishing passed him by and he it. He was at Oxford to become a cleric, after all. So he withdrew into a life of study, regular prayer, and devotional reading. Once more he sculpted a role for himself, but one no longer even close to the romantic gentleman-to-be. He turned in anger on his supposed "benefactors." Because anger does not accord well with a life of devotion, he never recorded it in the journal. But the young student's frustrated rage is unmistakably evident in the fact that he abandoned the role of ingratiation and set out anew to be the antithesis of a secular Oxford gentleman. Instead of the youthful "rake," he now became a self-defined "odd fellow."

Now more alone than ever, Whitefield covered his loneliness in a series of self-imposed religious duties that occupied all his thoughts. The more alone he felt, the more he turned to spiritual exercises: "I now began to pray and sing psalms thrice every day, besides morning and evening [services], and to fast every Friday, and to receive the sacrament at a parish church near our college, and at the castle, where the despised Methodists used to receive [the sacrament] once a month."

The reference to "Methodists" is the first to appear in Whitefield's journal, but hardly the last. In fact, the young and miserable Whitefield was not alone at Oxford. In the midst of his loneliness he encountered another Oxonian, Charles Wesley, who persuaded Whitefield to join him in religious meetings with his brother John and several other pious students known derisively as the "Holy Club," the "Bible Moths," or, most generally, "Method-ists." Not all methodists were servitors like Whitefield. The Wesleys, for example, were commoners - impoverished and constantly in debt, but not servants. On the other hand, none were gentlemen. Indeed, insofar as gentlemen defined the essence of the institution, they came to represent the image methodists would subvert. In place of envy there would be unqualified - and unappreciated - disdain.

All methodist students were dissatisfied with the laxity and worldliness of Oxford, and they spurned rowdy comradeship with other students. Instead, they met daily for prayers and self-examination. They sought to govern every waking hour of their lives according to sacred rule or method - in its own way, another powerful "script." Many methodists kept diaries of their activities, noting spiritual exercises by the hour of the day. In stark - and no doubt deliberate - contrast to the journal of an Erasmus Phillips, their diaries contained no references to leisure activities. In their inverted campus ethic, the methodists sought to fill every waking moment with spiritual contemplation and good deeds. Like the young Ben Franklin pursuing his "Art of Virtue" and recording every activity in the day, the methodists felt that all of life had to be "useful." Social pastimes disappeared, and so to a considerable extent did academics. Like the seventeenth-century Puritan movement, the methodists originated as a purifying element within a compromised Church of England. But unlike the Puritans, they evidenced little interest in the arts curriculum or in technologia - the organization of all knowledge as divine emanation. In the dawning age of Enlightenment, they gave learning up to the universities and pursued their own anti-intellectual faith.

On a personal level, methodism offered these alienated students an element of control and meaning in a rapidly changing world. Their strict discipline spoke to the enduring Protestant need to discover meaning in the transaction between God and the self, and to impose that discipline on a chaotic world. If the world ignored or reviled them, they would ignore the world and appeal to a higher destiny. In Whitefield, the powerful inclination toward spiritual fame coincided with a rebellious methodist impetus against the world and its mores. As the eighteenth-century theater poked fun at elite morality and manners on the English stage, so methodism assaulted polite pastimes and preoccupations from the pulpit. Each in its own way was a powerful counterculture, standing apart from traditional order and proud of its defiance.

Whitefield immediately gravitated to his new "spiritual friends" and threw himself into their structured discipline. Fueled with a contradictory combination of humble piety and mounting ambition, he soon tried to out-methodize the methodists. At first he found the rule of morning and evening devotion and daily acts of charity to the poor and imprisoned almost insurmountably "difficult." But eventually he mastered their pious exercises and surpassed them in strenuousness and devotion. With the leader John Wesley, he "determined to be all devoted to God, to give Him all my soul, my body, and my substance." To attain this new Oxford identity, he drove himself so hard that he experienced "fits of illness" that plagued him throughout his Oxford career.

Whitefield's commitment to methodism became so allembracing that it utterly supplanted not only academics but his old rakishness as well. Even thoughts of marriage and family were postponed indefinitely when supernatural "impressions" convinced him of the duty of celibacy: "our Lord, by His spirit, soon convinced me that I must know no one after the flesh; and I soon found that promise literally fulfilled." Whitefield did not elaborate any further on the nature of this "literal fulfillment," though he was clearly referring to a foiled love affair.

At the same time that he renounced the world, Whitefield made sure the world knew he renounced it. In a pattern he would follow throughout his early preaching career, he publicized his difference, incurred reproach, and then used that reproach as divine confirmation. Countercultures require pub lic demonstrations, else they become merely a private piety or devotion, known only to the self and to God. Instead of avoiding the derision and persecution of other students, he actively sought it out, discovering in persecution a confirmation of calling: "These, though little, were useful trials. They inured me to contempt, lessened self-love, and taught me to die daily."

Of greatest moment for Whitefield in this period of wholesale repudiation and withdrawal was his renunciation of the stage. At an unspecified time in the first year of heightened spirituality, a single-minded Whitefield read his last play. His account is tantalizingly brief: "All this while I was not fully satisfied of the sin of playing at cards and reading plays, till God upon a fast-day was pleased to convince me." Soon thereafter, while reading a portion of a play to a friend, "God struck my heart with such power that I was obliged to lay it down again; and, blessed be His Name, I have not read any such book since."

For Whitefield, there could be no stronger symbolic statement of his movement away from the established church to the methodist counterculture than to renounce the stage. Behind his decision was a well-articulated and long-established body of dissenting thought that repudiated modem theater in its entirety, such as William Law's Christian Perfection and William Prynne's Histriomastix, the Players Scourge (1633). The same process of revelation and inward prompting that drove him to celibacy, mortification, and methodist rule now targeted his former love. Unable to reconcile the theater with his religious passion and sense of destiny, he resolved not simply to abandon the theater but to declare war on it. In repudiating the stage utterly, Whitefield took his place among nonconformist religious purists who had throughout the centuries denounced theater as sin. Unlike eighteenth-century Anglican critics of the theater who opposed the bawdiness and "tastelessness" of the contemporary stage while accepting its redemptive possibilities, the nonconformists rejected it in toto as intrinsically evil and incapable of redemptive applications. Theater was not a separate institution and pastime but a competing church. From Law's treatise, Whitefield learned that "though the Devil be not professedly worshipped by Hymns directed to him, yet most that is there sung is to his Service; he is there obey'd and pleas'd in as certain a manner, as God is worshipped and honoured in the Church."

As a church of Satan, the theater did its greatest evil in promoting immorality. As audiences observed sinful practices in the passionate atmosphere of the theater, they were encouraged to participate themselves. By the sheer fact of representing immorality and showcasing it in all its alluring essence, the theater in effect legitimated it and encouraged it. As the Puritan William Prynne pointed out, if "the casual sight of Bathsheba was sufficient to provoke even regenerate David to an adulterous act ... will not then the premeditated voluntary delightful beholding of an unchast adulterous Play, much more contaminate a voluptuous, carnall, gracelesse Play-haunter, who lies rotting in the sinke of his most beastly lusts?" Prynne's objections were echoed in countless other tracts and treatises that in their sheer fury and intensity revealed a deep-seated fear of the theater as competitor.

As well as encouraging immorality, play-going was held to be an inducement to idle "amusements" that would draw attention away from the true object of passionate loyalty: unceasing Christian service. Play-going headed the list of a whole set of worldly distractions, among which Prynne and other purists included "effeminate mixt Dancing, Dicing, lascivious Pictures, wanton Fashions, Face-Painting, Health-drinking, Long haire, Love-lockes, Periwigs, women's [hair] curling," and even "excessive laughter." Most of these offensive pastimes were associated with sex and the passions.

Time and again nonconformist critiques of theater railed against the "effeminacy" of the theater. Men in dresses, men in women's roles, men with high voices - all of these came under attack and derision. Behind Puritan and Methodist attacks on the theater was the fear of a loss of self-control - the very badge of their manly, and godly, identity. Theatrical effeminacy threatened to impose directionless and chaotic "feeling" over "intellect" and "understanding." While feelings were acceptable and unavoidable, they had to be governed by intellect. Where godly passions were subordinated to the dictates of law and doctrine, profane passions governed the self and destroyed all control. At heart, methodist repudiations of the world were repudiations of feelings and a competing, passion-driven existence. A passion-driven self was an uncontrolled and uncontrollable self. Selves governed by worldly passions were like a raging sea overflowing its banks and disrupting all order. Or, in another metaphor of the time, they were like a woman.

To Whitefield these charges must have been especially intimidating. His very manner and personality exhibited precisely these qualities of passion and timidity. Clearly if he was to be a methodist and, by extension, a godly man, he must renounce all traces of the effeminate and passion-driven self within or at least rechannel them in appropriate outlets. By blaming the theater for his past excesses and renouncing it entirely, he could play the man for the methodist movement and transfer theatrical passions into the pulpit.

Most methodists had nothing to lose in giving up the theater. Many came from dissenting backgrounds where it was never a factor anyway. Whitefield, on the other hand, had a good deal to lose. And in the end, he couldn't rid himself of it. His antitheatrical theology and manly methodized living obscured but never managed to annihilate an inner personality that was impassioned, effeminate, and dramatic. In the end, theater won the contest for Whitefield's personality, even as methodism won the contest for his soul.

With rejection and otherworldly ascetic renunciation came increased illness. Throughout his career Whitefield was plagued by a series of physical and nervous ailments that led him to question his strength, and again, his masculinity. Perhaps they also expressed some unconscious resistance to a life of role-playing. But, as he had with persecution and derision, he turned these afflictions into confirmation of his calling. In the midst of trials, the young student was learning to make his anxieties work for him. When the nineteen-year-old Whitefield experienced bouts of insomnia and illness throughout 1734, he convinced himself that Satan was out to wrest his soul. Constant fasting, works of piety, and confrontation with students brought him to the edge of a breakdown: "All power of meditating, or even thinking, was taken from me. My memory quite failed me. My whole Soul was barren and dry, and I could fancy myself to be like nothing so much as a man locked up in iron armour."

Whitefield's condition, though pathetic, was a necessary step in his spiritual odyssey. In fact, alongside his forlorn character as "odd fellow," he was fashioning an education (and a role) of his own making. It was classical and liberal only in appearance - and that only faintly. Whitefield's real inspiration lay in the dramatic accounts of renunciation and conversion recorded in the New Testament. If one were to construct an archetypal script from Pauline accounts of "dying to self" in order to "live for Christ," it would correspond closely to Whitefield's condition in these years. While others were mastering the classics and the habit of command or the theology of Paul, Whitefield was living through the travails of the Pauline "New Birth" so convincingly that he could feel every stage from the depths of despair to the heights of supernatural deliverance.

In fact, Whitefield's self-portrait of the Oxford years seems caricatured from the lives of earlier saints he had read and internalized. Having abandoned "dry sciences" and "books" (save such books "as entered into the heart of religion"), he proceeded to live out a part: "Afterwards, by degrees, I always chose the worst sort of food.... I fasted twice a week. My apparel was mean.... I wore woolen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes." Thus emerges Whitefield's forlorn self-portrait, much like an eighteenth-century version of Bunyan's Christian carrying a lopsided burden and looking utterly out of keeping with his world. Whitefield had, in fact, read and admired Pilgrim's Progress, seeing at its core the story of a character he could embody. Soon the odd fellow became the laughingstock of his fellow students. Having intentionally destroyed his "fair reputation," he was now "set up as a mark for all the polite students ... to shoot at."

Later Whitefield learned to label this phase of his preparation a "legal obedience" that sought to placate God through good works. Like Martin Luther and the Puritans before him, he found that the more he threw himself into acts of piety and deprivation, the further from God he felt. During Lent, for example, he accelerated his fastings to the point of endangering his health: "I constantly walked out in the cold mornings till part of one of my hands was quite black.... I could scarce creep upstairs, I was obliged to inform my kind tutor ... who immediately sent for a physician to me."

At length, Whitefield's dour condition and avoidance of books came to the attention of unsympathetic college authorities. When Master Matthew Panting threatened him with expulsion, Whitefield interpreted the threat as "persecution" for the sake of the gospel. In fact, it probably represented a timely and well-deserved reminder that college was, after all, at least to some extent, even in eighteenth-century Oxford, about books and science. If the lad did not soon return to his senses, he would not only be out of school but out of health as well. When called to account by his tutor for repeatedly missing classes and failing to complete assignments, a frightened and insecure Whitefield "burst into tears, and assured him that it was not out of contempt of authority, but that I could not act otherwise. Then, at length, he said, he believed I could not; and when he left me, told a friend, as he very well might, that he took me to be really mad."

In fact, Whitefield was not mad. Nor could he "act" otherwise. He was going through a powerful, renovative spiritual experience that was shaping his life and career. His personality may have dictated the extremes of abasement and anxiety, but the experience itself was common to countless saints in the Puritan mode who first had to be humbled and brought low before they could be exalted and purged. In conventional Puritan terminology, he was going through a period of "preparation" antecedent to saving grace. His spiritual experience was at once real and scripted in countless spiritual autobiographies and testimonies.

At the urging of his physician and the college authorities, Whitefield took a temporary leave of absence from Oxford and returned to his boyhood environs in Gloucester and Bristol. By then his situation was desperate. And, as with countless saints before him, it was when the darkness was utterly complete that light finally shone on Whitefield's horizon. Convinced of his own unworthiness and inability to find God, he cast himself on divine mercy, and God found him. While working with the poor and imprisoned in Gloucester and Bristol, he gradually came to "feel" as well as to "see" that grace was free and unconditional. As the denouement of that transition, he experienced the "New Birth." Like Bunyan's Christian before the open sepulcher, he could at last proclaim, "I was delivered from the burden that so heavily oppressed me."

While in many ways Whitefield's conversion was typical of English pietists, it also revealed some distinctive qualities. His outer manifestations of mortification and deprivation were extreme even by Puritan or methodist standards. Whether consciously or not, Whitefield was expressing soul distress and agony through his body with an uncommon directness. In some sense he was preparing himself for a different sort of ministry in which body would be employed to express the agonies of the lost. Later, in enacting the miseries of the damned, he called on his own physical experiences to communicate a lost state.

Also distinctive in Whitefield's spiritual odyssey was the permanence and irreversibility of the conversion experience. Having gone through the pangs and travail of a "New Birth" once, he was to experience no backsliding or loss of assurance. Unlike countless Puritans before him, beset by ongoing doubts and experiencing "renewed conversion," Whitefield seems never to have doubted. Amazingly, the entire course of selfexamination so prominent in his youth virtually disappeared. Henceforth, there were only "casual intermissions" of anxiety that hardly bore mentioning. In place of self-examination and self-doubt, he projected his new self outward in countless performances, enacting for others the convulsive experience of his Oxford years.

During the Gloucester interlude when Whitefield experienced the New Birth, he coincidentally preached his first sermons. Indeed, the two experiences were closely enough related to suggest more than a simple coincidence. For several weeks he preached at the Gloucester county jail, noting with satisfaction that his messages were "well received." At the same time, he found that in addition to benefiting the prisoners, preaching proved the best remedy for his own ills. Gradually he felt restored in body and soul to the point that he could begin thinking about returning to school. Ever thereafter, the combination of crisis, anxiety, and release-through-preaching marked his career. He made illness, anxiety, and persecution work for him in preaching. Inner and outer torment compelled him to place his reliance utterly on God, and with that act of release, he regularly discovered the power to open his mouth in bold proclamation.

Just prior to returning to Oxford, Whitefield addressed the townspeople on the evils of attending plays. Upon hearing that "the strollers were coming to town," he read Law's "excellent treatise" condemning the theater and proceeded to give "a public testimony of my repentance as to seeing and acting plays." By then the new character was complete and the new counterculture publicly demonstrated. Whitefield was ready to complete his studies with the career goal of promoting the New Birth in others, even as he had experienced it in himself. Instead of "acting plays" he would enact the mysteries of the New Birth.

A physically recovered and spiritually regenerated Whitefield returned to Oxford and quickly completed his studies. The odd fellow in woolen gloves and patched gown walking the campus in a spiritual daze disappeared as completely as the young rake. Henceforth he would always dress with dignity and care. The odd-fellow persona had died and was to reappear only in pulpit reenactments of lost souls.

In the spring of 1736 Whitefield graduated from Oxford. At last his schooling was done. The college he had hated as a student, he would later proudly claim in memory. Henceforward, he would sign all letters and publications: "George Whitefield, A.B., late of Pembroke College, Oxford." In fact, Whitefield's campaign to restore his family's lost status had never disappeared, and he reaped a well-deserved triumph to that end on graduation day. Throughout the spring he prepared, by private study, for ordination as a deacon in the Church of England. With unconcealed pride he recorded his new status, "from a servitor to a Bachelor of Arts -from a common drawer to a clergyman."

Exactly where the new clergyman would exercise his gifts and talents was still unclear. One possibility was Gloucester, but that seemed too small. Another was Oxford, but ongoing work with the students there seemed more an interlude than a career. Finally, and most tantalizingly, was the prospect of foreign missions and perhaps persecution in the service of Christ. This much bigger stage engaged his imagination to the fullest extent. The work would be dangerous and call for the strongest masculine virtues. Already the Wesleys had journeyed to the unsettled wilderness of Georgia and written back exciting stories, along with calls for additional laborers. With all of this in mind, a newly ordained Whitefield looked to the future, certain that "God is preparing me for some great work."

By the time Whitefield was ordained in June 1736, all traces of the Oxford odd fellow had disappeared. A new, more focused and composed Whitefield appeared, with a presence beyond his years and youthful appearance. Where others generally waited until age 24 or 25 for ordination, Whitefield's piety and works of mercy and exhortation had readied him by the age of 22. With ordination, career decisions had to be made, including choices of location and vocation. It was now time for adult decisions - and destinations - that would determine the course of his life.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1736 Whitefield ministered to prisoners in Oxford and awaited his destiny. His boyhood sense of supernatural direction had not disappeared; to the contrary, it had grown even stronger. Like many in his methodist circle, he believed that beyond the simple call to salvation that all Christians shared, there came more particular and immediate callings - especially to the leaders - that had less to do with salvation than with vocation and career. Often these callings assumed supernatural or extranormal forms such as dreams, impressions, or significant coincidences. The key here was experience. Callings, like conversions, had to be tangible and palpable in their immediacy. Without that confirmation, he would act prematurely and miss his moment of destiny.

In fact, Whitefield believed he already knew his destiny and only lacked a sign. From the time the Wesleys first embarked for the "end of the world" in Georgia, the New World mission had captivated his imagination. Georgia was doubly attractive. Besides the mission opportunities for charity and preaching, it represented a great, and potentially dangerous, adventure. The colony was new (founded in 1733) and stood as a barrier against the Spanish. Georgia could prove something to him that no mere pulpit in England could match. Georgia was no place for boys, and it was no place for women. It was romantic, dangerous, and above all manly. There were families - and orphans - to be sure, and these would become increasingly important. But more importantly there was adventure.

Throughout the summer and early fall of 1736, Whitefield and the Oxford methodists received periodic letters from the Wesleys that fired their imaginations. Whitefield longed to join John Wesley, but, "having no outward call" and being "too weak in body," he postponed a commitment.

Finally providence intervened with the needed sign. In July, after returning from an arduous - and not entirely successful - five-month stay in Georgia, Charles Wesley visited Whitefield. The needs were great, said Wesley, and he was sent to "procure labourers" for the New World. Whitefield was his first choice. This seemed to be the direct call that Whitefield sought, and it was sealed several months later when John sent a letter apprising Whitefield of the great needs of Georgia. The message concluded with a dramatic challenge:

Only Mr. Delamotte is with me, till God shall stir up the hearts of some of His servants, who, putting their lives in His hands, shall come over and help us, where the harvest is so great and the labourers so few. What if thou art the man, Mr. Whitefield?

Wesley clearly knew what appealed to his correspondent. The dramatic mode, so reminiscent of Whitefield's own earlier decision to attend Oxford, had an immediate effect. No sooner was it read, Whitefield recorded, than "my heart leaped within me, and, as it were, echoed to the call." Here was the sign. Now the only question was when.

Through an unforeseen series of delays and postponements, Whitefield was prevented from embarking for a full year after his decision to become a missionary. In fact, these delays proved as significant (though in this case unacknowledged) to his call as the letter from Wesley. They provided a critical period in which he preached freely and regularly before diverse audiences, discovering the true extent of his prowess. During this period he also discovered the value of newspapers and, for the first time, applied the psychology of public relations to his preaching. In a series of increasingly stiff tests that culminated in London, he learned that he was a dramatic preacher without peer. And he learned that preaching, unlike any other charitable activity or mission, gave him that sense of power that had so far eluded him.

On Sunday, June 27, 1736, the day following his ordination, Whitefield preached his first sermon. There, before admiring family, friends, and local officials, he climbed the pulpit of St. Mary de Crypt, where he had worshiped as a youth, and began to preach on the methodist theme of "The Nature and Necessity of Society in General and Religious Society in Particular." Later, with all the exuberance of triumph, he described the event in his journal:

Curiosity, as you may easily guess, drew a large congregation. The sight at first a little awed me, but I was comforted with a heartfelt sense of the Divine presence and soon found the unspeakable advantage of having been accustomed to public speaking when a boy at school, and of exhorting and teaching the prisoners and poor people at their private houses whilst at the University.... As I proceeded, I perceived the fire kindled. . . . Some few mocked, but most of those present seemed struck, and I have since heard that a complaint has been made to the Bishop that I drove fifteen mad the first sermon.

The language he used to describe his first sermon is instructive. Later the terms would become formulaic, but in the beginning they were the words of discovery. In this account, he did not simply "instruct" or "edify" or "please" his congregation: he "struck" listeners with a divine "presence" and an "authority" that drove some stark raving "mad." Clearly what impressed him was the power he possessed in the pulpit, in contrast to the powerlessness and inferiority he often experienced in society. All this was heady for one so young, and all the more for one who wanted power and respect so badly.

Whitefield continued to preach and to describe his efforts to any and all who would listen. Repeatedly he called attention to his youthfulness and to his "infant childish" appearance. Then he described the transformed expressions on people's faces as they beheld him in the pulpit. First at Gloucester, then at Oxford and Dummer in Hampshire, he preached to the students, the poor, the prisoners, and the illiterate. All of these engagements were gratifying, and all confirmed his abilities. But the sternest test of his mettle still awaited him in the London metropolis. Once again he waited for the call he had already determined was his.

In August 1736, the call sounded. Whitefield's methodist friend Thomas Broughton invited him to supply his Tower pulpit in London. With some trepidation and an uncontrollable anticipation, he accepted.

Perhaps at no other time in its long and noble history had London represented a more ideal site to launch a preaching revolution. It had grown to be Europe's largest city, leaving Amsterdam and Paris far behind. Within the city limits, it housed one in seven English men and women. And contained in its widely diverse population were the heights of aristocratic privilege and the depths of urban poverty.

Equally important for Whitefield's career, London was the center of commerce and the exporter of culture throughout the British empire. As never before, culture had become a product. London was awash in its goods and services, as were the provinces as far away as Scotland and America. The middle class was expanding rapidly, and with its growth came the rise of a market economy. Suddenly the idea of "fashion" took hold of a vast new segment of society. An ever-growing number of middle-class wage earners consumed an ever-growing number of goods. People flocked to buy their own ceramics and pottery, to include knives with their forks, and to add meat to their daily diet. Hacks and quacks advertised miracle cures and tonics in the newspapers and attracted nearly as many sufferers as did licensed doctors. Hair fashions for men and women as well as for children's dolls all became part of the burgeoning eighteenth-century market economy.

Twentieth-century historians have demonstrated that Whitefield's eighteenth-century London was in the midst of a great consumer revolution that transformed ideas and institutions apparently unrelated to commerce and materials. In fact, London was becoming, in Neil McKendrick's apt phrase, "the shopwindow for the whole country." The effect of this consumer revolution was to insert ever greater numbers of middleclass and even working-class English people into a marketplace world premised on consumption and free-market spending.

Beyond simple economic exchange, the marketplace came increasingly to define social reality and dictate the terms by which society and various subcultures came into existence. The urban marketplace occupied a place apart from traditional institutions and centers of power such as church, state, military, or nobility. It evolved into a morally neutral arena of goods exchanged and services governed by impersonal rules of supply and demand. No one had any special claims on its considerable rewards. Success depended on hustle, and hustle required offering appropriate goods and services in response to particular demands.

Following the example of such business entrepreneurs as Josiah Wedgwood, cultural entrepreneurs began marketing their skills and products to growing networks of paying customers. Increasingly the old patron-client economy gave way to the buyer-seller economy of the marketplace. Books, magazines, and newspapers proliferated and were eagerly purchased by private subscription at lending libraries and London's two thousand coffee houses and taverns. The marketing of the theater was no less impressive. David Garrick, who first played London within a year of Whitefield's first sermons, discovered there an exciting world of unprecedented possibilities. Drury Lane soon generated revenues in excess of £300 a performance, including after-hour performances at cheaper rates for working-class audiences. In 1732 London theaters were attracting fourteen thousand customers per week - a stupendous increase over the Restoration era. Similar successes were enjoyed by artists of other sorts. Music halls proliferated in Piccadilly as well as in smaller inns and taverns throughout the provinces. The effect of all this rigorous commercialization was to create the idea of leisure activity and apply that concept to ever-expanding sectors of the English population. Objects and pursuits that had once been the exclusive domain of the aristocracy now came within the reach of great new numbers of people. Even the working class was not exempt from the spending revolution and could be increasingly found at market days and public events. Along with the commercialization of leisure grew the habit of social outings and public events staged for paying customers.

In this dynamic arena it was only a matter of time before religion was marketed alongside these other cultural endeavors. The transition would not become complete for another century, but the seeds were planted by 1730. In economic terms, religion increasingly represented a product that could be marketed. In turn, the public supported its marketers, together with the charitable and religious causes they championed, lib erated from past patriarchal relations and freely responsible for making their own choice. This process of commercialization necessarily transformed concepts of religion and religious experience generally: they came to be viewed in more individualistic and subjective terms. "Experience," "taste," and "attraction" became sufficient criteria for purchase.

Before religion could become a marketplace phenomenon, however, it required an entrepreneur - a Wedgwood or Garrick who could offer it in public settings during the week for the general public. Someone needed to conceive of religion, in effect, as another leisure-time activity that could attract customers in the marketplace and promote itself through a full spectrum of advertising and media coverage. Whitefield soon became that entrepreneur, but only after he had familiarized himself with London and its market possibilities.

On August 4, with "fear and trembling," he took the stage coach to London. Later he recalled his excitement at the prospect of preaching "at a place to which, not many years ago, I would have given much money ... to have gone up and seen a play." Upon arrival he met with several methodist worthies and spent time walking the streets "in a gown and cassock," listening with concealed delight to people commenting on the "boy parson." Then his moment arrived. On Sunday, August 8, Whitefield preached to a large audience at Bishopgate Church. As he surveyed the congregation, he viewed a scene he had enacted countless times in his imagination. At first he suffered some stage fright that "a little dazed me," but then he found his voice and "was enabled to preach with power." Once again, power was the overriding self-perception: "The effect was immediate and visible to all; for as I went up the stairs almost all seemed to sneer at me on account of my youth; but they soon grew serious and exceedingly attentive, and after I came down, showed me great tokens of respect." Once the sermon was completed, much the self-satisfied hero, he "speedily slipped through the crowd."

Here, at last, was the respect and power he had craved and defined for his destiny. Preaching could do what missions and charity could not: it could make him an unrivaled somebody in the cause of Christ. For two months Whitefield lingered in London building on his successes. He delivered sermons at Ludgate Prison on Tuesdays and at Wapping Chapel on Sundays. All the while his reputation grew, allowing an understated confession in the journal that "I began to grow a little popular." Elsewhere Whitefield strained to find language that would accurately reflect his experience. In his assessment, audiences no longer simply "benefited" from the performance or "improved" the message in their life; now they were "startled" at the power so young a preacher could impose through the sheer passion of his preaching.

Whitefield responded to the new audiences and gave the performances of his life. What seemed to him in retrospect intuition or providence was, in fact, also a response to acclaim he had already rehearsed endlessly in his imagination. No stage could provide the sense of power and legitimacy he derived from the pulpit. And no other minister could match his achievement. He was an Oxford-educated Anglican priest who, through the force of his presence and personality, was building a vast following from the bottom up.

Wherever he traveled, news of him spread by word of mouth and crowds materialized out of nowhere. For the first time, religious assemblies became almost frightening in their intensity and enthusiasm. Crowds began to grow, invariably prompting fears of a mob. At St. John's Church in Bristol, the audience was so large that he had to schedule an additional meeting the next day to accommodate the unseated crowd outside. The following day, Whitefield reports, was a repeat of the day before. "I again complied; and the alarm given here was so general, that, on the following Lord's Day, many of all denominations were obliged to return from the churches, where I preached, for want of room.... The Word ... was sharper than a two-edged sword. The doctrine of the New Birth ... made its way like lightning into the hearers' consciences."

Excited language, irrepressible (if regrettable) pride, surprise, and wonderment punctuate Whitefield's recollection of these years in his journal. He never explored the reasons for his success beyond simple acknowledgments of Providence. Yet alongside Providence was certainly a starthng talent, the makings of which can be inferred through an examination of surviving sermon texts and observer's comments.

Whitefield's first published sermon, "The Nature and Necessity of Our Regeneration or New Birth in Christ Jesus," which appeared in London in 1737, contains the all-consuming theme of the New Birth that was featured in one way or another in virtually every sermon he preached. In terms of text (2 Cor. 5:17) and doctrine, the sermon contains nothing exceptional. Sermons on the necessity of a New Birth had abounded in the regular preaching of nonconformist ministers since the seventeenth century and were becoming a staple of the Wesleys' methodism. Whitefield's unique contribution lay in his impassioned manner of presentation and in his single-minded emphasis on experience.

In analyzing Whitefield's novel manner, two considerations immediately present themselves. The first is thematic emphasis. Earlier treatments of the New Birth tended to present the subject in a theological context before turning to personal applications. That context, in brief, was the acknowledgment or recognition of regeneration as a new spiritual and ontological status. Where once sinners had stood alienated from God, after the New Birth they took on the mantle of Christ and became-in God's eyes - new creatures. Left unspecified in Puritan sermons was whether and to what extent the new creatures became new in their own eyes. Personal experience was subordinated to considerations of the new status before God. It mattered less that individuals felt this new position before God than that they understood what had happened in the spiritual realm and responded to that new status with appropriate acts of praise and thanksgiving.

In Whitefield's sermon, the personal experience was im mediate and overwhelming. He preached as though there might be no tomorrow, to an audience who might never again assemble in its present configuration. Throughout, he showed no interest in theology. Instead of doctrine, he explored the feelings of New Birth and through his exploration invited hearers to experience it for themselves. Imagination was central to his presentation of feelings. Repeatedly he asked his listeners to imagine a different state of being, to imagine being birthed into a new creature. What would happen, he asked, if one were consciously to live through "a thorough, real, inward change of heart"? On the level of belief, little might change, since many already had a "head knowledge" of salvation. But in terms of feelings and passions, the effects would be overwhelming.

Puritans, of course, conceded this point emphatically. It was on the level of emphasis that the differences appeared. Whitefield addressed neither the understanding nor the theologically informed and properly aligned "affections"; he spoke simply and overwhelmingly to the passions of the heart. The new creation of which he spoke was not a "mere metaphor"; it was as self-evident and palpable as a "tasteless palate" suddenly brought alive at a sumptuous feast. Salvation was preeminently a personal affair of the heart:

Every one that has but the least concern for the salvation of his precious, his immortal soul, having such promises, such an hope, such an eternity of happiness set before him, should never cease watching, praying, and striving till he find a real inward, saving change wrought in his heart, and thereby knows of a truth that he dwells in Christ and Christ in him.

To understand the novelty of Whitefield's experiential preaching, we must move beyond the text to the context. And here the most salient point is Whitefield's insertion of the body into his discourse. Even though his first sermons were written out in classic Anglican fashion, his body did not - could not - remain still in the prescribed fashion. From the start of his preaching, apparently without premeditation or guile, he evidenced a dramatic manner that remained a hallmark of his preaching style throughout his career. A sarcastic account of his sermon on the New Birth printed in the Anglican Weekly Miscellany called attention less to Whitefield's theme than his bodily manner: "Hark! he talks of a Sensible New Birth - then belike he is in Labour, and the good Women around him are come to his assistance. He dilates himself, cries out [and] is at last delivered." Such histrionics, the account complained, were an affront to good taste and privacy. Moreover, they were an affront to manliness. Again Whitefield played the woman, this time from the pulpit rather than the stage. And again, the results were striking. To a far greater extent than most of his clerical peers, Whitefield took on female as well as male characters from Scripture, finding in them subjects apt for dramatic recreation.

Whitefield was not content simply to talk about the New Birth; he had to sell it with all the dramatic artifice of a huckster. Any churchgoer could understand the theological status of a new creation, but to see a preacher travailing in labor as the new birth took place was to encounter an unprecedented and shocking demonstration. Whitefield not only asserted that the new creation was more than mere metaphor, he embodied it.

To appreciate Whitefield's printed sermons fully, we have to read them less as lectures or treatises than as dramatic scripts, each with a series of verbal cues that released improvised body language and pathos. Words or phrases such as "Hark!" "Behold!" "Alas!" and "Oh!" invariably signaled the pathos Whitefield dramatically recreated with his whole body. The words were the scaffolding over which the body climbed, stomped, cavorted, and kneeled, all in an attempt - as much intuitive as contrived - to startle and completely overtake his listeners. Reading Whitefield's popular London sermon "The Eternity of Hell-Torments" as a script, one can easily picture him moving to the following lines, recreating a sinner's arrival in hell:

O wretched Man that I am, who shall deliver me from the Body of Death! Are all the Grand Deceiver's inviting Promises come to this? 0 Damned Apostate! Oh that I had never hearkened to his beguiling Insinuations! Oh that I had rejected his very first Suggestions with the utmost Detestation and Abhorrence! Oh that I had taken up my cross and followed Christ! But alas! These reflections come now too late. But must I live for ever tormented in these Flames? Oh, Eternity! That thought fills me with Despair. I cannot, will not, yet I must be miserable for ever.

Whitefield's effective use of his body was accentuated by his cross-eyed stare, the result of a childhood case of measles. It appears in virtually every portrait, and often drew attention in the press. To modern viewers, the cross-eyed stare may appear distracting and unattractive, but, as historian Jon Butler points out, many ordinary eighteenth-century viewers saw in this a sign of power and supernatural presence.

Along with body movement came tears. Tears became Whitefield's homiletical trademark or characteristic psychological gesture. In general, Whitefield was prone to cry often. But to his surprise, tears in public signified something entirely different from tears in private. In private, tears signified weakness and effeminacy. Before his tutors, his tears were pathetic. In public, however, they commanded power. They brought listeners into his world. Cornelius Winter recalled that

I hardly ever knew him go through a sermon without weeping, more or less, and I truly believe his were the tears of sincerity.... I could hardly bear such unreserved use of tears, and the scope he gave to his feelings, for sometimes he exceedingly wept, stamped loudly and passionately, and was frequently so overcome, that, for a few seconds, you would suspect he never could recover; and when he did, nature required some little time to compose himself.

Winter's description is valuable for the picture it gives of a consummate actor able to express his vulnerable inner self in the pulpit. In Whitefield's sermons, private thoughts and raptures became public renditions. Whereas Puritan preachers were often overwhelmed by passions in their diaries yet composed in public, Whitefield saved his impassioned reflections for enactment in the pulpit. He did not hesitate to employ the personal pronoun in a manner reminiscent more of the diarist than the preacher. Nor did he hesitate to blurt out the feelings he was immediately experiencing. When preaching on grace, he would often interject with "alas" and sympathy: "Oh, who can avoid crying out at the Consideration of this Mystery of Godliness?"

Besides pathos and tears, Whitefield frequently appealed to his listeners' imaginations as he enacted the agonies of damnation and the ecstasy of salvation. Here the leading cue was the word methinks. In a sermon on the new heaven and the new earth he invited his hearers to engage their imagination and to

lift up your Hearts frequently towards the Mansions of eternal Bliss, and with an Eye of Faith, like the great St. Stephen, see the Heavens opened, and the Son of Man with his glorious retinue of departed saints sitting and solacing themselves in eternal Joys, and with unspeakable Comfort looking back on their past sufferings and selfdenials, as so many glorious Means which exalted them to such a Crown. Hark! methinks I hear them chanting their everlasting Hallelujahs, and spending an eternal Day in echoing forth triumphant Songs of Joy. And do you not long, my Brethren, to join this heavenly Choir?

Tears, passions, and consolation fused in Whitefield's sermons to produce a new and powerful form of preaching. Although endowed with a voice that was often likened to the "roar of a lion," Whitefield offered a message not primarily of fear and hell-fire but of compassion, suffering, and comfort. At heart, Whitefield's preaching was maternal in tone. The same consolation and comfort he had received from his mother he directed out to his hearers with powerful results. In a sense, Whitefield learned to let the woman in him speak in a lion-like voice that startled hearers everywhere.

As Whitefield's popularity increased, he grew in selfconfidence and daring. His career unfolded in a series of dramatic moments of self-discovery that revealed ever-greater talents in the area of dramatic improvisation. But to be wholly freed to exploit his talents, Whitefield needed to be freed from the written sermon text. There could be no document standing between his body and his audience. Like an actor memorizing his script, he had to internalize his text and articulate his message with apparent spontaneity and effortless improvisation.

Extemporaneous preaching had become an accepted innovation among the Oxford methodists during Whitefield's tenure there. In 1735 John Wesley discovered the method by accident, having once forgotten his notes. The ensuing extempore sermon was so powerful that he recommended it to all who could muster the courage. Sometimes the speaker would not even know his text until he rose to preach. Such preaching established a unique bond between speaker and hearer and released the full range of improvisation and inspiration. For dramatic speakers like Whitefield it was the perfect release.

Whitefield's extemporaneous debut came on December 28, 1737, on the eve of his departure for Georgia:

It happened providentially that a lecture was to be preached that evening at Deptford, and several importuned me to preach it; at first I was fearful (0 me of little faith), having no notes. But afterwards (having got consent of the minister), I went up, depending on the promise, 'Lo! I am with you always even unto the end of the world,' and was enabled to preach to a large congregation without the least hesitation.

With that, Whitefield's pulpit arsenal was complete. Where others felt hesitant or at a loss, he discovered release. The longer his voyage was postponed, the more he experimented with extemporaneous preaching. His prodigious memory for character and dialogue enabled him to transform the pulpit into a sacred theater that vitally re-presented the lives of biblical saints and sinners to his captivated listeners.

And as he had mastered the London pulpit, Whitefield eventually mastered the London press. In advance of virtually all his clerical peers, he sensed the potential of the press and exploited it fully. "Whitefield stories" began to circulate in print, quickly assuming the status of legend. Many of these stories were contributed by Whitefield himself and reported in his journal. Self-promotion did not come easily to most clerics, whose sense of self and career was shaped by the local parish and a public reserve befitting their station as venerable prophets and social superiors. But it came naturally to Whitefield. Where more timid souls would leave the descriptions of adoring crowds to others, Whitefield intuitively grasped the emerging science of public relations and never missed an opportunity to promote the "gospel successes" he enjoyed. Such was the extent of his popularity that while speaking in Bristol he reported that "multitudes came on foot, and many in coaches a mile without the city, to meet me; and almost all saluted and blessed me as I went along the street." Besides news of large congregations, Whitefield revealed several "large offers" to remain in Bristol. All of this was grist for a publicity mill that the young preacher did not hesitate to exploit by word of mouth and print. He promoted religion with the same public notice and puffery that others devoted to more mundane products and services.

Mass media and mass consumption were inseparable, and Whitefield took full advantage of both in promoting the cause of religion - and himself. A long and checkered career with the press began in these months of waiting. He noted with satisfaction how his sermon "Regeneration" was published and "sold well to persons of all denominations ... at home and abroad." Advertisements for his sermons appeared every where, including the hostile Weekly Miscellany. Soon the offices of Whitefield's publishing friend and fellow Methodist James Hutton were strained to meet the demands. New sermons were called for, and Whitefield eagerly complied. "The Almost Christian" and "The Nature and Necessity of Society" were advertised widely and sold well. Whitefield knew that many Anglicans begrudged his successes, but instead of keeping silence he openly gloated. Appropriating the words of Christ's ancient critics, Whitefield imagined his current critics asking about him "Can any good come out of Nazareth?"

Before leaving for Georgia, Whitefield rushed into print with everything he had. Most of his published sermons date from this period, the early years of his career, before he was twenty-five. Of sixty-three printed sermons, forty-six originated in this period and were reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic throughout his lifetime and after.

Beyond learning the power of advertising his work, Whitefield learned to make himself news. In part this was a simple function of his popularity. By September 1737 he noted with satisfaction how "my name was first put into the public papers." Later, following a fund-raising sermon series at St. Swithin's in London, the press recorded the astounding success of a "young gentleman going volunteer to Georgia" who had raised the staggering offering of £28, most of which was collected "in half-pence" from innumerable working-class supporters. Although professing unhappiness that the press dwelt on money instead of message and "would not lose two shillings for anybody," Whitefield was nevertheless pleased. He had made the news.

Whitefield discovered that the press built audiences as effectively as word of mouth. From this point forward, he used the press as much as it used him, to promote and stage his preaching performances. For the first time in the eighteenth century, a preacher joined the ranks of generals, governors, and actors as a news event. "The tide of popularity," Whitefield gloated, "now began to run very high." The obligatory humility required of his profession could not suppress the exhilarating fact that "I could no longer walk on foot as usual, but was constrained to go in a coach, from place to place, to avoid the hosannas of the multitude." So enamored was he of his own successes that contemporaries and later readers had trouble accepting his accompanying methodist codicil that God "gave me to see the vanity of all commendations but His own."

But Whitefield also learned that popularity was only part of the secret for becoming news in a news-starved society. Equally important was controversy and public confrontation with traditional authority. Whitefield was no social radical bent on overturning society, nor was he in the habit of challenging civil authority - indeed, the crown always elicited his highest praise. But bishops were another matter. Whitefield could challenge them on religious grounds without calling the establishment itself into question. And in doing so, he could demonstrate his pulpit power. In fact, he had not gotten over the anger he felt at Oxford, and in his self-righteous contest with the bishops he found a vent for the anger that was both cathartic and, in his eyes, utterly legitimate.

Invariably, Whitefield set his successes alongside the perceived failures of the established church. With controversy and the press in mind, he was learning to stage preaching events in ways that vaulted him to the forefront of public attention. He grasped intuitively the potential for fame whether the notices were praising or damning. In either case, he saw his name set before the public eye, and, as he noted in his journal, "peoples curiosity was stirred up more and more."

In response to Whitefield's criticisms, clerics condemned him for promoting his fame at their expense. They complained that he was not on the mission field winning new souls to the gospel but robbing parish priests of their congregations and offerings. His services competed with theirs, and badly needed offerings were piling up in his coffers while the poor at home suffered.

Soon Whitefield came to the attention of the Bishop of London. The resulting exchange initiated a round of controversy that was to follow him for the rest of his career. In his journal account, Whitefield created the picture of a young soldier for Christ boldly entering the bishop's chamber, asserting his right to the Georgia mission, and remaining until the bishop "gave me a satisfactory answer, and I took my leave." The language is triumphalist and self-righteous, and was certain to appeal to readers who themselves chafed under the yoke of authority.

The more this controversy was played out in the press, the more Whitefield emerged as the heroic victim. In a technique that would reap endless rewards, Whitefield portrayed any public criticism as "persecution" from on high, fueling popular antagonism to authority and identifying himself as the beleaguered underdog. Throughout it all, one could easily forget that he was a twenty-three-year-old deacon defining his career to his superiors. Through clever manipulation of the press he assumed for himself the best of both worlds: an ordained insider attacking authority as if he was an outsider.

Though vitriolic, the controversy with the bishops was a public relations dream come true. By fall of 1737, with his voyage still postponed, Whitefield reported that "thousands and thousands came to hear. My sermons were everywhere called for." Soon the engravers got into the public act. Like the newspapers, visual arts were moving rapidly into consumer markets with caricatures and satiric renderings identified most dramatically with William Hogarth. A print began circulating showing an ambitious Whitefield "leaning on a cushion, with a bishop looking very enviously over my Shoulder." Whitefield immediately dismissed the print as another attempt at character assassination. Yet, in light of the young preacher's growing but still undefined ambition, it may not have been so far from the mark. In a letter to John Wesley complaining of the bishop, he added the heady note that "I tremble to tell you how I have been continually disturbed with thoughts, that I, a worm taken from a common public-house should ere I die, be one myself." Aware that his confession exceeded all bounds of Christian humility, he quickly closed with the request that "your earnest prayers, surely, will not be wanting for me, that I may not split on that most dangerous of all rocks -worldly ambition."

Whitefield neglected no art or medium as he began the steep climb of self-promotion. To counter the satiric caricaturing circulated widely in the woodcuts, Whitefield sat for a portrait, supposedly for his mother, noting, "if I would not let her have the substance, I would leave her at least the shadow." Portraits were not in themselves out of the ordinary, except in the case of a subject so young. Whitefield was neither an aristocrat nor a politician, yet the portrait placed him in the important category of public figures.

By the eve of his departure, Whitefield had become a bona fide sensation. He had preached to thousands, and his printed sermons could not keep up with popular demand. In freewill offerings and donations for the impending Georgia mission he had raised the extraordinary sum of £1,300 - a figure exceeding the annual incomes of all but the wealthiest bishops. In part he had been helped by others, but mostly he had helped himself, validating Poor Richard's aphorism long before it was written. There had been no models on which to draw. Rather, through intuition and boundless self-confidence, Whitefield had created new conceptions of preaching, ministry, and public relations that others would follow and that he would carry with him to the ends of the earth.

No eighteenth-century religious figure lived out more roles more quickly than the young Whitefield. Characters that had once resided in plays, Scriptures, and his imagination now regularly took on reality in his life. The boy preacher no sooner established his reputation as a preacher than he traded it in for that of the aspiring missionary-to-be, loaded with energy and offerings for the orphans and debtors who inhabited the Georgia colony. When Whitefield at last departed on February 2, 1738, he reenacted an adventure English men and women had been staging for over a century of American colonization.

Sailing with Whitefield on the Whitaker was General James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony and commander of a regiment of soldiers sent to protect English interests on the southern border shared with Spain. The soldiers served notice that the New World was dangerous. They also represented a group Whitefield intended to reach for the gospel.

Although the American colonies were over a century old, Georgia was barely five and offered, in many ways, the same primitive environment Europeans had earlier encountered in Jamestown and Plymouth Colony. Whitefield understood the harshness of the conditions he was facing. At best the voyage would take two and a half months in a vessel under fifty tons. The winter departure date meant additional discomforts and insecurities. A contemporary travel account painted a bleak picture of Atlantic crossings: "smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused by the age and the highly-salted state of the food, especially of the meat, as well as by the very bad and filthy water.... There are so many lice, especially on the sick people, that they have to be scraped off the bodies." Added to the problems of hygiene and health were the everpresent threats of war with France or Spain and the possibilities of privateering. Such a voyage required youth, stamina, and the strongest motivation. Whitefield did not inherit the strongest constitution, but the adventuresome spirit was there, together with a compelling sense of personal calling and destiny.

Compounding the young missionary's problems was the fact that both Wesley brothers had returned prematurely from America -but not before giving the word methodist a bad name. Charles Wesley had come back after only five months in Georgia, ostensibly to raise additional support and volunteers for the Georgia mission, though in fact he was exhausted and disillusioned. John Wesley had returned in December, as Whitefield was departing, the victim of an unhappy love affair that had run him afoul of local authorities. Both Wesleys had denounced slavery in the harshest terms. They had insisted that foreign nationals conform to their methodist liturgy in worship. Neither of these demands had won friends among the inhabitants and, in fact, neither Wesley would ever return to America. One methodist of wealthy background, Charles Delamotte, had been left behind, but his vocation was teaching, not preaching. Clearly, the future of the mission now rested with Whitefield.

With the Oxford odd fellow forever abandoned, Whitefield threw himself into the Georgia mission. To assist him in the work of missions and the possible establishment of an orphan house, Whitefield brought several assistants, of whom the most important was James Habersham, a methodist convert and close friend of the young missionary. Throughout his career, Whitefield proved to be a master at winning friends. The same intensity that had taken him to the brink in confrontation with bishops could, when turned to friendship, win followers and associates whose loyalty and devotion would be lifelong. Habersham was among the first of Whitefield's close friends; he would administer methodist affairs in Whitefield's frequent absences from Georgia and in time become Georgia's leading merchant.

Where others of less determined personality often employed a long voyage to rest and gather resources, Whitefield set about immediately to transform the Whitaker into a voyaging mission. Before the ship embarked, he wasted no time appointing Habersham as teacher and himself as chaplain to the crew and soldiers. Certain that there would be shipboard adventures, he also prepared a journal that could be sent back to England like the Wesley's earlier journals, possibly to be published alongside his sermons. For his first entry, he intended to convert the soldiers.

Unlike John Wesley and other methodists who separated private diary from public journal, Whitefield abolished the distinction in ways that anticipated the artful autobiography of his soon-to-be friend and publisher Benjamin Franklin. In the same way he translated inner feelings spontaneously to the pulpit, Whitefield used the journal to move directly from pen to public. In the process, the private Whitefield became lost both to the public and to himself. But to the public Whitefield represented a new religious character that would fire popular imagination and generate unprecedented demands for autobiographical literature.

The Georgia diary and the subsequently written autobiography were Whitefield's first attempts at journalistic self promotion and, in their own context, were pioneering works of genius. Earlier than most, Whitefield perceived that the journal - once confined to the private and inner world of the diarist - could become an ideal vehicle for creating a public image. One could carefully select entries with a view toward constructing a persona - the person one wanted to be or the person one thought would edify unknown readers -rather than presenting oneself as one "really was." In fact, a journal writer could sketch into his entries any character he wished to be, and that character would become the person an unsuspecting public would see in the document, reading it as if it were a private self-revelation or an open letter to close friends. The writer could even fool himself.

As a teller of tales the young Whitefield had few equals. He had an ear for language and, though never a scholar or polite essayist, he produced colloquial prose ideally suited to the popular press. Reports on weather, course headings, and winds he deftly interspersed with nail-biting accounts of storms at sea, cascading waves, split sails, and imminent danger. Something in the sea released Whitefield's deepest imaginative and descriptive powers, and the repose of the journey gave him time to write. In fact, he could never get enough of the sea, whether motionless in languid winds or racing along "as it were on the wings of the wind." He confessed that often instead of visiting the sick "I stood upon deck, and admired the wonders of God in the deep." As for Puritan writers before him, the ocean crossing became a metaphor for Whitefield of the Christian's spiritual pilgrimage across a dangerous sea to a strange new world. In his journal, it emerged in the language of providence and power.

Throughout the travel portions of his journals, Whitefield invited his reading public to become fellow travelers and colaborers in the great adventure, friends who shared his terrors and excitements. Most dramatic in Whitefield's accounts were reports of the storms that threatened the lives of all aboard. Readers could easily imagine the situation when "the sea was very boisterous indeed, and the waves rose mountains high; but God was pleased to give Mr. H[abersham] and me an unusual degree of faith, and we went on singing psalms and praising God, the water dashing in our faces all the way." On another occasion, "I went on deck; but surely a more noble, awful sight my eyes never beheld! For the waves rose mountain high, and sometimes came on the quarter-deck. I endeavored all the while to magnify God, for thus making His power to be known. Then creeping on my knees (for I knew not how to go otherwise), I followed my friend H. between decks, and sang songs and comforted the poor wet people."

The picture here of heroic Whitefield magnifying God in the teeth of a gale does not fit comfortably alongside his oftconfessed timidity in the face of physical danger. But for his readers it did create a vivid sense of adventure in which he was at the center. In the account of another storm, readers learned that, "though things were tumbling, the ship rocking, persons falling down unable to stand, and sick about me, I never was more cheerful in my life, and was enabled, though in the midst of company, to finish a sermon before I went to bed." Action was the common theme throughout, whether nature's action erupting in all its savage fury and malevolence or Whitefield's action of praising God and doing acts of mercy. In his journal, Whitefield described no moments of idleness, boredom, self-censure, or passivity, though surely such occurred. Intuitively he knew what common readers liked both in stories and characters, and he did not disappoint them. He sculpted of himself a heroic character whose secret strength was faith in God and whose life testified to the truths he proclaimed.

Whitefield carried both his heroic persona and his theme of action into an accompanying story of even greater excitement and personal legend: the conversion of the crew and soldiers. In fact, ocean, storm, and calm acted in his journal to provide the pace and background for his ongoing efforts to silence and eventually becalm a fierce band of soldiers. The jagged progress of the ship in winter voyage became a meta phor for Whitefield's progress with the soldiers. Engaged readers soon learned that the real drama in the journal was not natural but supernatural.

In the rough-and-tumble world of eighteenth-century Anglo-America, soldiers and sailors were the ultimate men. The shipboard life of "Jack Tar" was notorious for its brutality and the harshness of shipboard conditions. Few fates were more dreaded than impressment into the British navy. Renowned for their violence as well as their profanity, they were, in Whitefield's eyes, the supreme challenge. Himself youthful and somewhat effeminate, he had to believe that nothing would be more impressive than his successful witness to the crew. Certainly nothing would more impress him. At the same time, he desperately wanted God "magnified" in all he did. Through his faith and the power of his ministry, he determined to take the sailors on, and in the end he succeed in winning many to the manly cause of the gospel.

The ongoing saga with the ship's crew occupies the largest portion of Whitefield's journal. It takes up even more space than the New World mission. As ship's chaplain, Whitefield had responsibility for overseeing the spiritual exercises of the ship's captain and crew. As missionary, he assumed for himself responsibility for changing their behavior. He began his ministrations to the sailors with ringing remonstrances against swearing and vain oaths - long the currency of simple discourse among men at sea. He followed this up with an even less popular denunciation of "the heinous sin of drunkenness." Predictably, his words floated aimlessly through the air like so much sea mist. Instead of reforming their behavior, the sailors seemed only to swear more whenever they saw the young parson approaching.

But the missionary-to-be would not be discouraged or silenced. Undaunted and unintimidated, he continued his remonstrances. "Persecution" was fuel that fed his determination and drew forth his greatest exertions. Few words occur with greater frequency in Whitefield's journal than persecution, and apparently no other circumstances so tested his manhood. The more the soldiers scoffed and heaped abuse on him, the more determined he was to win them to Christ - and to himself.

In fact, he succeeded. And the path to that success was less his words than his actions. He knew how to make friends by following a lifelong credo to "be servant-like, but not servile." The shipboard crew soon learned that this included them. In Whitefield they discovered a friend and comforter as well as a rebuker. Alongside his admonitions he filled his time with acts of mercy and compassion that expressed the sentiments of divine love and mercy he proclaimed in his preaching. Morning and evening he visited the sick sailors and shared food from his considerable stores of supplies collected for Georgia. Through sheer will power and determined charity, he broke down the walls of hostility and gradually won a grudging respect.

Throughout the harsh winter voyage he preached daily to the ship's crew and passengers. When not reading from the prayerbook, he preached extemporaneously and sharpened the skills he would bring with him to America. Passions remained at the center of his repertoire. Never one to soften words, he exploited the most frightening passions to achieve the desired effect. A text on John rebuking Herod gave Whitefield the opportunity to proclaim "that great men should not be angry if ministers should reprove them out of love." Two days later he noted that "my subject was, the eternity of hell torments" - a theme he had already developed to great effect in London.

As the voyage progressed ever closer to the New World destination, Whitefield's readers found him moving ever closer to converting his captive audience through the tools of mercy and comfort. He described a gradual alteration in the attitudes and actions of the troops: "I perceived the soldiers were attentive to hear me, when I applied myself to those around the sick persons." If this added to Whitefield's egotism, it also developed a genuine public concern that gave his words meaning. As more of the ship's passengers succumbed to seasickness and other maladies, he was genuinely touched, and busied himself with "furnishing them with sage-tea, sugar, broth etc." His response was direct and compassionate: "At the sight of so many objects of piety, I was sensibly touched with a fellow feeling of their miseries.... I had a most comfortable sense of the Divine Presence with me in many particulars, and in the evening joined in intercession with my other companions on deck, in behalf of absent friends and all mankind." In many ways, the young Whitefield was a prisoner to his feelings; apparently the only outlets he could tolerate were either acts of mercy or impassioned preaching that had as its central theme comfort and consolation.

In reading through the journal, it is clear that no one was more aware of Whitefield's heroism than Whitefield himself. Equally clear is the fact that his heroic model was taken from scriptural narratives. In a dramatic rather than literary or exegetical sense, biblical characters became "types" or models that provided a pattern for his own image. His description of the acts of charity and witness he performed outside of the pulpit suggests that in a sense he became the apostles he embodied. His actions were not mere "act" but reality. Of the biblical types, none was more important than the apostle Paul. Whitefield probably knew the character and words of Paul as well as he knew himself. The theme of persecution, so ubiquitous in Whitefield's writings, was almost invariably discussed in terms borrowed from Paul's writings. So ingrained was the influence of the apostle's language and peripatetic lifestyle on Whitefield's imagination that he virtually adopted Paul's persona for his own. When rations ran short on board, Whitefield used the occasion to record in his journal how this happened, "so that I can say, with the Apostle [Paul], I am 'in hunger and thirst, cold and fastings often.' Hereafter, perhaps, I may add, moreover in bonds and imprisonment." In fact Whitefield would never be imprisoned like the apostles of old, but he spoke of it often and may have been, one suspects, a little disappointed that the arrests never materialized.

In late February the Whitaker stopped over in the military outpost of Gibraltar, giving the young missionary an opportunity to display his preaching talents to a larger audience. Upon landing, he confided to Habersham (and his readers) how "I had reason to think ... that God had some work for me to do at Gibraltar." His premonitions were soon confirmed when he "preached in the morning ... before such a congregation of officers and soldiers as I never before saw. The church, though very large, was quite thronged, and God was pleased to shew me, that He had given extraordinary success to my sermon."

In addition to providing an outlet for preaching, Gibraltar presented the young traveler with an unforgettable look at a variety of cultures and peoples. The ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of Gibraltar dazzled him. His cultural observations were often as astute as his observations and descriptions of nature. He developed as well an incipient sense of cultural relativism. In observing the diversity of paper currencies in circulation, for example, he was led to reflect "on the stupidity of those who place their happiness in that which has no intrinsic worth in itself, but only so much as we arbitrarily put upon it."

While in Gibraltar Whitefield also encountered a variety of religions. Following a visit to a Roman Catholic chapel he had nothing but lament and repressed hostility: "Oh! who hath bewitched this people, that they should thus depart from the simplicity of Christ, and go a whoring after their own inventions." Like most of his generation, he was to harbor anti-Catholic sentiments throughout his career.

The Jews were a different story. They posed no immediate threat to English Protestants, and in fact represented a mission rather than an adversary. In visiting his first synagogue, Whitefield replaced the language of hatred with that of wonder and evangelical warmth. It certainly helped that the rabbi of the synagogue had heard Whitefield preach in Gibraltar. When the young evangelist visited, the rabbi placed him "in one of their chiefest seats." Whitefield's account gave readers insights both into the outer scene of the Jewish service and the inner scene of his own emotions. Ever the soul winner, he overlayed his description of the service with his internal state "in secret prayer to God that the veil might be taken from their hearts, and that blessed time might come when His chosen people should again be engrafted into their own Olive Tree and all Israel be saved."

Along with preaching and sightseeing, Whitefield enjoyed the company of the ship's captain and governor. Throughout his career Whitefield challenged the bishops and religious critics without ever challenging the idea of social hierarchy or deference. He invariably singled out meetings with important magistrates and dignitaries and recorded them in his journal. If fearless witness to soldiers confirmed his manhood, moments with elites confirmed his social status. In daily luncheons with the governor and military officers he was happy to commend "the regular behaviour of the officers at table."

By the time of his departure, Whitefield was attracting audiences of unprecedented size, among some of the roughest characters in the world. Of the many affected by his preaching, he was most observant of the soldiers, who were generally "the more unlikely to be wrought upon." But wrought upon they were, so that when the time came for farewell, "many wept." This account he followed with a prayer for humility in the face of all his triumphs: "0 grant I may, like a pure crystal, transmit all the light Thou pourest over me, and never claim as my own what is Thy sole property!"

Once the voyage resumed, Whitefield encountered more opportunities to minister than he could handle. A fever raged through the ship, draining the young missionary's strength and eventually felling him. In describing his illness he adopted a Pauline sense of "to die is gain" that would recur throughout his ministry: "I earnestly desired to be dissolved and go to Christ; but God was pleased to order it otherwise, and I am resigned, though I can scarce be reconciled to come back again into this vale of misery."

By the conclusion of the New World voyage, Whitefield had a remarkable tale to tell. The transformation of the soldiers was, in many instances, almost complete. These tough men had become softened to the gospel. Many had attended prayers and sermons with miraculous results: "more of the sailors are convinced of sin and others send notes to be prayed for." Once on shore, an emboldened Whitefield could report, "I have no reason to complain of them, for they come very regularly twice a day to prayer, and an oath seems to be a strange thing amongst most of them. Many marks of a sound conversion appear in several on board, and we live in perfect harmony and peace, loving and beloved by one another."

The good relationships Whitefield had developed on board were not immediately replicated in Georgia. John Wesley's scrape with the law and his refusal to bend rules to tolerate other faiths and nationalities had not eased the way for later methodists. Nothing of the Wesleys' work remained, with the exception of Charles Delamotte. Instead of a hero's welcome to match his hero's farewell from the Whitaker, Whitefield faced another in a long succession of challenges.

Though weakened by the voyage and a nagging fever, Whitefield immediately set about seeking out "pious souls" around whom he could build a ministry. The task proved more difficult than he had imagined. Here was neither urban population nor captive shipboard audience. He found no busthng streets, no thriving theater, no crowded market stalls. Rather, the Georgia he encountered was literally at the end of the English world. Its largest "city," Savannah, was little more than a trading outpost with a scant population of five hundred. Its only public buildings included a jail, a wharf, and a courthouse that doubled as a church. Whitefield found a total of 140 small frame houses built on creaky pilings that quickly rotted in the termite-infested soil. Georgia was still twenty years away from replacing such impermanent wood structures with more durable brick buildings. In short, everyday life in Georgia was transitory and isolated. Sandy roads often became impassable, so settlement and travel had to focus on the streams and rivers. Beyond the sheer physical demands of the wilderness was the vulnerability to Spanish attack from the south. All that stood between the English colonists and the warlike Spanish "papists" was a small military outpost at Frederica, one hundred miles to the south of Savannah.

In Georgia Whitefield found a polyglot population that included English soldiers, debtors freed from English prisons, German-speaking Moravians, Swiss Lutherans, French Huguenots, and Scottish Highlanders. These inhabitants shared a hardscrabble life far removed from England's consumer revolution. They considered themselves fortunate if they had pewter dishes, one fork, and a roof over their heads. Their "marketplace," in Savannah, consisted of a series of stalls offering a meager selection of imported goods. They could readily purchase wine and beer, but rum was outlawed by the trustee government and had to be smuggled in from South Carolina.

If Whitefield was disappointed with this primitive Georgia, he was careful not to let it show. The fact that Georgians had never heard of the great evangelist and so displayed a lack of enthusiasm about his arrival did not deter him. With typical exuberance, he threw himself into the tasks of ministry and charity. Homes and small chapels replaced crowded cathedrals and massive pulpits, and Whitefield instinctively adapted his ministry to suit the small groups. In fact, he proved himself a born raconteur, at ease in any social situation. He moved from door to door enlisting worshipers and learning about the country's customs and faiths. In a letter to Gloucester he summarized his activities as follows: "I visit from house to house, catechise, read prayers twice and expound the two second lessons every day; read to a houseful of people three times a week; expound the two lessons at five in the morning, read prayers and preach twice, and expound the catechism to servants, etc., at seven in the evening every Sunday."

Whitefield's social skills and his determination not to offend local standards soon won him a much warmer reception than the Wesleys had received. To the evident satisfaction of all the planters, he repudiated the Wesleys' denunciation of slavery in Georgia and in fact urged its legalization. He also petitioned for the importation of rum. In deference to local customs, he did not demand that German, Swiss, or French inhabitants conform to Anglican rituals of baptism but instead incorporated their national traditions into the Anglican liturgy. Here we see the first signs of the ecumenicity and inclusiveness that would come to be such a notable feature of his ministry throughout the transatlantic world.

In addition to engaging in nonstop preaching and prayer, Whitefield addressed himself to the great problems of poverty and deprivation. Like all new colonies, Georgia was inadequately funded and poorly managed. The visionary ideals and philanthropic concerns of the trustees had not been backed up with hard currency. Churches were few, and schools and other charitable institutions simply did not exist. Immediately Whitefield recognized that charity was as needed as evangelism. Everywhere he dispensed supplies and charity to the sick and poor. He carried boxes of food, clothing, and devotional books through Georgia, often door to door, establishing widespread welcome and goodwill among most of the inhabitants. In words that he knew contrasted greatly with the Wesleys' earlier reports, he declared that "I looked for persecution, but lo! I am received as an angel of God."

With an adventurer's taste for travel and an evangelist's hunger for souls, Whitefield wasted no time visiting every settlement in the colony. Along the way he organized schools, supervised the cutting of lumber for church construction, and visited a small orphan house at Ebenezer, which confirmed the need for another that would be open to children throughout America and England.

At the same time, he realized that this small, struggling colony, while beloved, was much too small a canvas on which to paint his life's work. The needs of the people pulled at his heart as had those of the sailors on the Whitaker, but neither compelled his will. Like Paul, he needed many places and above all many cities like London, Bristol, Gibraltar, or, in the New World, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. So, even while he was traveling and ministering, he was thinking. How could he reconcile his Anglican orders and the requirement that he have a particular home base assignment or "living" with the life of travel and evangelism he desired?

In the course of visiting families and orphans an idea began to germinate in Whitefield's mind that would bloom rapidly into a full-fledged plan. Instead of a career in the pulpit or on the mission field, he could take responsibility for a charitable institution that required external funding and support to survive. And what more perfect institution than the orphan house charity first conceived by Charles Wesley? The orphan house would provide Whitefield's home base, while the fundraising needs would require substantial travel to any and every locale that offered potential donors.

The idea for a Georgian orphan house that could be more inclusive than the small Moravian mission had circulated before Whitefield's arrival in 1738. Already in 1737, Charles Wesley, acting as Gov. Oglethorpe's secretary, had outhned preliminary plans for an orphanage modeled on institutions created by Herman Francke, leader of the pietistic movement in Halle, Germany. In Wesley's mind such an institution would serve the cause of both charity and piety. It would be a place that redeemed young orphans in body and soul.

Whitefield took this idea and ran with it for the rest of his life. If Georgia could absorb adult indigents from England, he reasoned, it could also absorb orphan children teeming in England's cities and in the American colonies, and give them a new start. He would found the institution and, through his travels and evident power to raise offerings, would support it with preaching and fund-raising missions throughout London and abroad. The more he tried the idea on, the better it fit. To devote his life to the Georgia orphan house would allow him to develop each of the characters he embodied. It would be located on a far-flung mission field peopled by adventurers and desperados, it would free him up time to be an itinerant "planter" or "pilgrim" like Paul, and it would provide a "family" without the demands of a fixed residence.

By August Whitefield's supplies had run out, and he prepared to return to England. Yet in that remarkably brief period of three months, he had established his reputation and restored goodwill to the name methodist. He had provided badly needed supplies of food, medicine, and pious literature; he had encouraged the founding of schools and churches; he had ministered to the sick and needy; and he had announced his interests in founding a charitable orphan house. He had seen the people's needs and realized that further assistance would require outside funding of the sort he knew he could raise in England and abroad.

In a farewell meeting with the Georgia trustees, Whitefield shared his vision for the orphan house and received an enthusiastic endorsement. Already he was loved, and the trustees saw no hint of trouble from the methodist side of his character. He was willing to assume responsibility for establishing an orphan house and mission in Georgia without requesting financial aid or a salary from the trustees. At the same time, he would need to travel widely as an ambassador for the Georgia orphan house. The advantages were thus mutual. The trustees would not have to shoulder the burden of supplying funds and teachers, and Whitefield would have to travel to raise support in urban centers. In short, he could be of more use to Georgia away than at home, which suited him perfectly.

Thus began a lifelong commitment for Whitefield. Though Georgia would never be his permanent residence, it would be the only locale he would routinely refer to as home, and he would come to refer to the orphan house as his family.

On September 9, Whitefield left many small groups of friends behind and returned to England. The ocean crossing provided the "retirement" needed to crystallize his plans. His target was the cities because of their potential for great audiences, but from prior experience he knew that he would encounter difficulties and obstacles. He knew, for example, that rival priests and bishops would not take kindly to his invasion of their parishes. And he had some concerns about how he was to preach to the already churched. How was he to transcend traditionally defined parish boundaries to speak to the people at large? In contemplating these problems of access, he recognized the dual advantage of the orphan house: it not only represented a legitimate act of charity in its own right and a "home" of record but also served as a pretext for itinerant preaching. If England was not a mission field open to traveling exhorters, it was a "Christian" nation committed to charity that extended beyond parish boundaries. Here was the entree Whitefield could exploit in the interest of his urban ministry.

In addition to developing plans for his orphan house, Whitefield used the return voyage to compose sermons for print and to complete his journal entries. While still in Savannah, he had learned that the journal record of his visit to Gibraltar was not only being read by his methodist friends but was being distributed by two publishers, one of whom was his friend Hutton. The news did not disturb him, though he wrote that such publications ought to be "deferred till after my death, or written by some other persons." In fact, he had invented a new use for the medium that broke with convention and created an immediate best seller. The journal went through six printings in the first six months.

Unlike some overnight sensations that are forgotten as quickly as they arise, Whitefield's legend grew with his absence. With nothing but the persona of the journal to fill the public imagination, he became more beloved to his friends and more despised by his foes. As the orphan house would be his vehicle for travel, so the journals would be the medium for building his reputation, maintaining his presence among reading audiences throughout England and abroad. Charity, preaching, and journalism came together in Whitefield to create a potent configuration - a religious celebrity capable of creat ing a new market for religion. The returning missionary had a sense of what he was to achieve in the ensuing years, and he closed his Georgia journal with a prayer of certain expectation: "He who preserved Daniel in the den of lions ... will, I hope, preserve me from the fiery trial of popularity, and from the misguided zeal of those, who, without cause, are my enemies."

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