12 An Uncommon Friendship

12 An Uncommon Friendship

Whitefield was between his triumphant tours of Scotland when he made the quiet announcement that on November 14, 1741, he had married the widow Mrs. Elizabeth James in Abergavenny, South Wales. For one as attuned to making news as Whitefield, the lack of fanfare is surprising. Within two weeks of the marriage, he was back in his usual pattern of preaching, traveling, and preparing for the great revival at Cambuslang, as if nothing had happened. And, in fact, little had. Judging from letters, memoirs, and Whitefield's own writings, Elizabeth Whitefield played no direct role in her husband's travels and ministries. Over the years, what little emotional content there may have been to the relationship diminished in the face of extended absences, infrequent communications, and public preoccupations. To all intents and purposes, Elizabeth Whitefield lived out her marriage as little more than one more treasured but distant ally in Whitefield's public ministry.

To a remarkable extent, Whitefield's nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographers have shared in his silence. One reads their work in vain for any direct attention to Elizabeth James or, for that matter, to the role women played more generally in Whitefield's life. Yet, there is an important story here that reveals both Whitefield's complex relationship to women and the role of women in the evangelical revival generally.

Historians have identified the mid-eighteenth century as the crucial point of transition in which a new culture of romantic love began to replace traditional matrimony determined by community and parental involvement. The same forces of mobility and marketplace anonymity that were transforming religion and creating an unprecedented focus on the self were transforming the family and relations between the sexes. "Falling in love" was becoming to marriage and the family what being "born again" was to religion and the church. In both cases, the experience was intensely subjective and personal, transcending understanding and rationality and appealing to the passions for corroboration and "assurance." Trends begun in the 1750s continued into the nineteenth century, leading to the triumph of Victorian sentimentalism in the family and of highly emotional "great revivals" in Anglo-American evangelical Protestantism. Both were expressions of the same transformations. With the public square increasingly devoid of extended family, community, and national churches, the private self and its experience became the locus of meaning.

Given the parallels between impassioned romantic love and the New Birth, methodists might be expected to have embraced both conversion in religion and romantic love in marriage. But, as in so many social transformations, changes in family and spirituality were uneven and inconsistent. In fact, methodists opposed impassioned love with the same hostility they directed toward the theater, and for many of the same reasons. Each represented an "idol" that competed with the self-contained and exclusive world of the New Birth. Romantic love, like the theater that did so much to promote it, was part of "the world" and, as such, entirely condemned.

To a considerable extent, Whitefield's world was shaped by methodist demands. His old attraction to the theater had to be redirected in light of the New Birth and the methodist code of behavior. His old attitudes and inclinations toward women and marriage had to be similarly reshaped. Central to the methodist code was the insistence that no passion or emotional commitment be stronger than the "spiritual marriage" to Christ and his church. In practice, this meant that impassioned feelings between the sexes had to be suppressed to prevent the possibility of idolatry. Instead of watching romantic passions carefully to keep them in rein or using them as an analogy for spiritual regeneration, methodists sought to annihilate them altogether. In this system, celibacy was the highest calling. If celibacy was not possible, then marriage was allowed, but only within carefully prescribed emotional and sexual limits. Sex existed primarily for procreation. Passions could not be given full play lest they destroy self-control and Christian discipleship.

Methodists did more to subvert the dawning Victorian morality than simply to renounce sentimental love. At the same time they suppressed human passion, they elevated women to major leadership roles in the movement. Here too, we see the unevenness of historical change. The same all-embracing counterculture that renounced romantic love and targeted attractive women for special criticism affirmed women in ministry. Methodism provided eighteenth-century women with outlets for leadership and influence outside of the home that would not be seen again in mainstream Protestant churches until the twentieth century.

Judging from the Methodist denomination's later rejection of women in ministry, it would appear that the earlier encouragement of female preaching stemmed less from an ongoing theological commitment to inclusive ministry than from the desperation of a "dispossessed" religious movement. It was this, along with the numerical dominance of women in the revivals, that led methodists to grant women a dominant position in the early period; in fact, they exercised power in dispro portionate numbers at all levels of organization. Some served as class and band leaders, "callers" on the sick and imprisoned, "exhorters" who prayed and preached in female societies, and, most significantly, as itinerant ministers throughout the English and Welsh countryside. Some of the powerful noblewomen who were drawn to the inclusiveness and spirituality of methodism such as Darcy, Lady Maxwell of Scotland, Lady Margaret, Lady Betty Hastings, Mary, Lady Fitzgerald, and, most importantly, Lady Selena, Countess of Huntington, served as essential supporters - and sometime exhorters - who opened chapels and underwrote many methodist expenses. Most of these methodist women gravitated toward the Wesleyan Arminian camp, but some could also be found among the Calvinist methodist "connexion," especially in Scotland and Wales.

Women preachers encountered opposition and persecution to an even greater extent than the men. As uneducated women speaking publicly, they were doubly offensive. Their crude delivery and manners were an offense to the studied oratory of the pulpit, and their gender was an offense to the implicit "rules" of public address and propriety. Methodist women not only spoke - and, by that act alone, challenged authority - but they often did so in loud, aggressive voices, with dramatic gestures that demonstrated an "unfeminine degree of boldness." Women were supposed to be timid and silent; methodist exhorters were neither.

A case in point was Sarah Crosby, who began an itinerant ministry in the 1760s and whose career paralleled Whitefield's in significant ways. Like Whitefield, she had both stamina and intensity, extending her itinerancies over twenty years and sometimes preaching to as many as four meetings a day. She was known and approved by both Whitefield and the Wesleys, who saw in her a "maternal pastor" who cared for nothing save her public ministry. Like them, she was a gifted extemporaneous speaker who often experienced "great liberty in speaking." In one year Crosby traveled 960 miles, preached 120 sermons, led 600 private band meetings, and composed over 100 letters to associates in the methodist network. As Whitefield grabbed international attention and the Wesleys founded an institution, exhorters like Crosby carried the mission of New Birth inland to the rural heartland of England, speaking in homes, fields, and cottages with great success. Revivals came and went, but the work Crosby and women like her established in homes and neighborhoods provided the enduring base on which the rising Methodist denomination would rest.

In other ways as well, methodist women participated as equals in the new evangelical world. When not actively preaching, they kept journals for circulation among their colleagues. Crosby's journals totaled over one thousand pages. In them appears the same systematic attention to devotion, service, and careful use of time found in the diaries of male methodist leaders. Anything that detracted from the movement or seemed worldly was repudiated. Another diarist, Hester Ann Roe Rogers, described her conversion and ensuing renunciation of such "ensnaring follies" as theater and dance. She also told of cutting her hair short and destroying her fine clothing and caps, limiting her attire to a plain homespun that effectively hid her sexuality.

As "maternal pastors," women preachers suppressed their sexuality and viewed themselves as "sisters" or "mothers" to the church. Most renounced the world, and to some extent this entailed a renunciation of private love and marriage. Insofar as the language of sexuality or love appeared at all, it tended to be as metaphor for the believer's "marriage" to Christ. Female methodists, no less than male, evidenced a loyalty to the cause of revival that was so monolithic as to place all private joys and affections - including the family - in a secondary role.

Not surprisingly, many marriages among early methodist leaders were unhappy and unfulfilled. John Wesley made a notoriously unsuccessful marriage to Grace Murray. Receiving no support from his wife, he often turned to other committed pastors, male and female, such as Hester Ann Roe Rogers, whose chief loyalty as a young methodist centered in the fiftyyear-old Wesley. When Elizabeth Ritchie, another Wesley admirer of particular beauty, turned down a proposal of marriage, she explained to Wesley that "to be wholly devoted to God seems to me all that is worth living for. This may be done in a married state, I make no doubt, but I cannot see that I have any call to change." Later Ritchie did change and, with her marriage, confirmed the itinerants' worst fears by leaving the ministry. Sarah Crosby, on the other hand, embarked on her long itinerant career only after her disapproving husband deserted her. With that, however, she discovered a lifelong public calling that took her out of the household and into the front ranks of methodist "disturbers."

In the absence of extensive families or fixed private relationships of their own, most of the traveling male and female itinerants concentrated their social activities within methodist "companies" whose primary function was devotion, prayer, confession, and mutual support. Rarely would male and female itinerants travel together, but wherever they stopped, they held protracted meetings for prayer and mutual encouragement. Powerful bonds developed among them that transcended more conventional attachments to husband, wife, or family.

In Whitefield, we find one who was very much a part of this male and female methodist network. Like the others, he held ambivalent attitudes toward women and marriage that inclined him toward women-in-ministry rather than womenin-love. Privately he renounced romantic passion and determined on a course of celibacy. Failing that, he resolved to marry only on the condition that he would not "preach one sermon or travel one day less, in a married than in a single state." Publicly, he welcomed female preachers as co-pastors and targeted women as his primary support group. While he made it a point never to travel with women, he did meet with them at every stop and relied heavily on their assistance. Throughout his writings, there is not so much as a hint of a theological scruple against women in ministry. Nor did he hesitate to solicit their help in whatever form it appeared. In the pages of his early Journals, he described no fewer than fifty women in a variety of roles ranging from matrons to hosts to supplicants and admirers. Many also appeared in his correspondence. In the three-volume set of collected letters preserved in his Works, over three hundred are addressed to women. He conveyed in all of them a sense of shared ministry and mutual concern. In fact, from the letters alone, it is often impossible to ascertain whether the correspondent is male or female.

Many women in Whitefield's journals and correspondence are reminiscent of his mother-older, spiritual, and liberal with their encouragement and financial support. Early in his career, he happily met with "that elect lady" Betty Hastings and gratefully "partook of her ladyship's bounty." Later, when orphan house finances sagged, he was pleased to report a gift for the "society Room": "Mrs. C gives it, and I believe, will make it fifty. This gentlewoman has been made instrumental in relieving me of my late distress." Through their gifts and support, maternal women supplied the emotional comfort that would constitute the central theme of Whitefield's message of redeeming grace.

But older women were not the only women in his life. As a young, charismatic itinerant, Whitefield soon discovered that young women -no matter how spiritual and committed - would not assist him in his vows of celibacy. So attractive women who were neither maternal benefactors nor field preachers had to be in spiritual distress before he would grant them his personal attention. And the number of such cases grew steadily. In Philadelphia, for example, he noted, "I was sent for to a young woman, who was carried home from meeting, and had continued almost speechless. I prayed with her, and heard afterwards she was in a more comfortable state." These women - and one suspects the numbers increased as they realized his concern - did receive Whitefield's attention, and, coincidentally, weakened his resolve for celibacy. As one who in his youth had evidenced all the normal interests in sex and passion, he simply could not maintain his resolve of celibacy. Marriage became necessary, in part to relieve his own sexual needs and, perhaps equally important, to eliminate the advances of eligible young women and so restore his full attention to the pulpit.

In confronting the necessity of marriage, Whitefield also confronted the passions that raged within. The extent of his attraction to women and sex - and his own fears of both - can be inferred from the virulent condemnations he leveled at attractive women. Where Jonathan Edwards concentrated his greatest attacks on the merchant "river gods" who threatened his Northampton pulpit, with their characteristic sins of male pride, covetousness, and greed, Whitefield focused his attacks on attractive women and the accompanying sins of "lust," "worldliness," and "idolatry." In Boston he praised the piety of the male ministers but complained of "much of the pride of life to be seen in their assemblies. Jewels, patches, and gay apparel are commonly worn by the female sex." At Newport, he observed "some foolish virgins" at church, "covered all over with the pride of life." Later he complained that "nothing gives me more offence than to see clergymen's wives dressed out in the pride of life.... From such a wife, good Lord, of thy Infinite mercy, deliver me!" If women-in-service gained high marks of praise, other women - particularly attractive women - received the harshest censure. Rarely did he level similar charges against young men.

Given the methodist code and his own sense of destiny, Whitefield somehow had to marry without sacrificing his passion for ministry. In his own mind, this meant that feelings of attraction and sexuality had to be ruthlessly suppressed, even as he searched for a compatible wife. The search occupied him for two years, through 1740 and 1741, and involved two proposals. His first proposal culminated an unacknowledged affair of the heart that virtually destroyed itself; the second, successful proposal was a product of sheer calculation.

Whitefield first proposed marriage to a young and attractive convert named Elizabeth Delamotte. He had first met her through her brother Charles, who had traveled to Georgia with the Wesleys and stayed on through Whitefield's first visit. Through Charles, Whitefield gained entry into the well-to-do Delamotte home and preached there often. In the course of meeting with the family, he came to fall in love with "Betsy" - a fact that was never recognized for what it was. His diary entries simply note a newfound source of enthusiasm and vigor. While staying with the Delamottes, he rejoiced in his Journal, "Oh, the comforts of being all of one mind in a house! It begins our heaven upon earth." Later, after preaching at the Delamotte estate, an ebullient Whitefield proclaimed that "my mouth was ever filled with the Divine praise!" But he never specifically identified these enraptured feelings with Elizabeth.

Whitefield was clearly falling passionately in love but was unable to admit it to Delamotte or himself. Such feelings had no place in the heart of a famous itinerant bound for a New World ministry. At the very time he departed for his second great tour of the American colonies, he was in a romantic crisis. Yet at some level he neither articulated nor understood, the passions that created such conflicts within him also helped fire preaching performances unrivaled by any he had yet delivered in America. Whitefield's diary entries for this period are revealing. In between accounts of stunning triumphs, he makes frequent but unspecified references to "inward trials" that turned on his uncertain love. Also conspicuous in the diary entries is guilt - "a deeper sense of my own vileness, than I have felt for some time." Clearly, he was both obsessed with Delamotte and hating himself for the "vile" passions and potential ruin such love might bring to his public career. There was no middle ground. He could not think of a woman in sensuous terms as anything but a rival of Christ, a threat siphoning off passions that ought to be reserved exclusively for ministry.

The more Whitefield poured his frustrated love and loneliness into his preaching, the more spectacular were the results. But at the same time, he could not rid his mind of Delamotte. Finally, in desperation, he wrote Delamotte's brother William a letter obviously intended for her to read. In it, William became the surrogate for Whitefield's fears for Betty and himself. The letter warned William to be "kept from idolatry" and not to "be led into temptation." Such sentiments hardly seem appropriate with respect to William, but as a warning to Elizabeth and George they make perfect sense. Whitefield feared he was losing the battle against the idolatry of love, and if he lost that, his whole ministry could be lost with it. Understandably, he was in desperate straits. The letter does not reveal where Elizabeth stood in all of this, though she must have given strong encouragement at some point along the way. Ever the brave actor, Whitefield closed on a note of bravado that belied the rest of the letter: "my heart is quite free.... I endeavour to resign myself wholly to God."

In fact, Whitefield's heart was not free. The "inward trials" simply grew more trying, and at length he realized he must write Delamotte directly. On April 4, 1740, after "strong cryings" and "unspeakable troubles with my own heart," he penned her a letter that expressed his inner turmoils perfectly. The main tone of his letter to her, like the earlier letter to William, was one of dire warning. This love business was not at all enrapturing for a good methodist itinerant; it was terrifying. And so, to begin, Whitefield assumed a pastoral tone and admonished Delamotte to give all attention and passion to Christ, for "nothing else can preserve you from idols." That it was for himself that Whitefield feared idolatry, however, becomes apparent in the next sentence, where he confesses, "There is nothing I dread more than having my heart drawn away by earthly objects." The language here, though indirect, is unambiguous. As ministers, women might be "Mothers in Israel," but as lovers they were "objects" that represented "idols" like the golden calves of old. Nowhere did Whitefield acknowledge that a "sex object" might be solely in the eye of the beholder.

As the letter progressed, Whitefield abandoned direct address to Delamotte and focused on himself. In place of the superior pastoral tone came the impassioned self: "My blood runs cold," he exclaimed, at the thought of "a rival" taking Christ's place at the center of his heart. By this point, he was allowing Delamotte, as it were, a glimpse at the debate he had played out so often in his heart. Even as he felt overcome by a powerful love for Delamotte, his methodist-formed conscience told him that this was idolatry.

By the close of the letter, Whitefield was utterly caught up in himself, while reference to Delamotte appeared merely in the form of a third-person prayer. Only in closing did he allow his guard to slip, when, in a revealing juxtaposition to his prayer, he burst out: "My heart is now full. Writing [to you] quickens me. I could almost drop a tear, and wish myself, for a moment or two, in England. But hush nature: God here pours down His blessings on Your sincere Friend and servant in Christ, G. W."

If Whitefield thought the letter would purge his inner turmoils, he was wrong. The feelings persisted, and in desperation he turned 180 degrees and proposed marriage. On April 5, 1740, on the eve of his triumphant return to Philadelphia, he penned separate letters to Delamotte and her father proposing marriage. The letters were so devoid of love or affection that they seemed, consciously or not, virtually guaranteed to elicit a rejection. The impassioned man in him had to propose; the public minister had to do so in a manner utterly without feeling so that all his passion could be reserved for preaching. By proposing marriage without any confession of love, the tortured Whitefield believed he could both find a wife and remain true to his first love. Again he was wrong.

Whitefield opened his letter to Charles Delamotte with a dark description of the conditions Elizabeth could expect to encounter as matron of the Georgia orphan house. The climate was harsh and the heat oppressive. Only recently, he noted, several deaths had been brought on by the sweltering heat and difficult conditions. In addition, life was constantly threatened by the Spanish troops on Georgia's border. At any moment war could destroy all. From there, Whitefield went on to describe his intentions, which, by methodist standards, were entirely honorable. He assured Delamotte that his interest in marriage did not stem from any base love, but from the "absolute necessity" of securing a wife for his "increasing family" of orphans and hapless debtors. As for romance, Mr. Delamotte could be assured that Whitefield felt nothing but love for Christ: "you need not be afraid of sending me a refusal. For, I bless God, if I know anything of my own heart, I am free from that foolish passion which the world calls Love."

Amazingly, Whitefield assumed the same diffident pose in his accompanying proposal to Betsy. In this letter there were no slips in the affections or unwanted teardrops. The tone was cold and businesslike. Elizabeth could be sure that marriage to him would bring "fatigue," uprooting from home, the care of a "family" of one hundred, and all in an oppressively hot "foreign climate." Worse, she could count on no ongoing residential relationship with him. His duty to God would often compel him "to leave you behind." Lest there be any doubt about the earthiness of his proposal, he went on to assure her that his proposal was "not for lust." For one whose forte was passion in the pulpit (and in correspondence with adversaries), Whitefield penned a remarkably bland and passionless proposal. It closed, "the passionate expressions which carnal courtiers use, I think, ought to be avoided by those that would marry in the Lord.... I trust, I love you only for God, and desire to be joined to you only by His command and for His Sake."

Whether or not Whitefield got the response he wanted, he certainly got the response he deserved. The proposal was rejected, and he was back where he began. He still needed a wife. But never again would he go through the "inward trials" his love for Delamotte had elicited. He would select a wife who could be a Mother-in-Israel to his Bethesda children and who would not divert his inner passions. And his search would be a matter of cold, dispassionate public record.

Interestingly, through all of his letters and ruminations, Whitefield never evidenced a sense that he was making himself an object of desire, idolized by adoring crowds of females less for the gospel he proclaimed than for the embodied manner of his pulpit delivery. Throughout, his fears were one-way. If women fell in love with him, it was not he who had made himself the object, but they who had misperceived him.

At every stop on his American tour and into 1741, Whitefield was privately taken up with "secret prayer" to God that he might be directed to a wife. From New England Whitefield wrote William Seward, "I want a gracious woman that is dead to everything but Jesus." Despite the large number of women interested in him, Whitefield went on to assure Seward that God "will not permit me to fall by the hands of a woman." At this same time, while visiting the Edwardses, he observed their marriage closely: "a sweeter couple I have not yet seen." Sarah's ascetic communion with God together with her pious manner in the household epitomized what he sought in a wife:

Mrs. Edwards is adorned with a meek and quiet spirit; she talked solidly of the things of God, and seemed to be such a helpmeet for her husband, that she caused me to renew those prayers, which, for some months, I have put to God, that he would be pleased to send me a daughter of Abraham to be my wife.

Upon his return to England, Whitefield took stock of his needs and situation and considered "several tokens" - that is, women (again note the language of objects) - whom he discarded for one reason or another. At the same time he was clearly becoming distracted over the issue and disingenuously confessed to a friend, "I know not when my heart was more disengaged from earthly thoughts than now." Soon he publicized his needs. In February he confided to Ralph Erskine (whom he had not yet met) that "I believe it my duty to marry. You see, dear sir, how freely I open my heart to you, though I have never seen you face to face." So cavalierly did Whitefield dispense with his private life that he did not hesitate to make his most intimate needs known to strangers in the faith.

At the conclusion of his Scottish tour, Whitefield found Elizabeth James, or rather had her found for him by his close friend Howell Harris. In effect, Harris acted as Whitefield's agent, playing John Alden to Whitefield's Miles Standish. This time, however, love would not win out. Despite the fact that James felt drawn to Harris and felt nothing for Whitefield, Harris persuaded her to marry Whitefield. To Whitefield's mind, it was the perfect match. A widow and ten years his senior, James was neither attractive nor emotionally attracted to him. Yet she was a good methodist. She would not engender passionate feelings in Whitefield, nor would she grieve for unrequited love. In four brief days, Whitefield's courtship and proposal were completed. James confessed she loved Harris and "could not help it." Harris, feeling the same fear of passion as Whitefield, felt he could not marry her and instead urged her to marry Whitefield. Whitefield, completing the triangle, reiterated his desire to marry and assured James that "he would not love her the less or be jealous" of her love for Harris. He wanted a wife who could look after his household and support the Bethesda orphan house. He neither needed nor desired romantic love.

James was a better - or older - methodist than Elizabeth Delamotte and at length agreed to the terms. With that the negotiations were settled and, at a private and inconspicuous ceremony, Harris gave the bride away and wished the couple well. Immediately Whitefield and Harris resumed their friendship and travels as if nothing had changed. And in fact, little had.

Whitefield announced his marriage publicly with hardly a shred of passion. In a letter to Gilbert Tennent he rejoiced over the revivals in Scotland, which were "greater than at NewEngland." Then, as an aside, he announced that: "About eleven weeks ago I married, in the fear of God, one who was a widow, of about thirty-six years of age, and has been a housekeeper for many years; neither rich in fortune, nor beautiful as to her person, but, I believe, a true child of God." Most importantly, Whitefield concluded, she "would not, I think, attempt to hinder me in his [God's] work for the world." A more desirable or attractive woman might have distracted Whitefield, but James - neither beautiful nor in love with him - was no threat.

Immediately following the marriage, Whitefield announced in the press that he had "left her" for three weeks to preach in Wales, commenting at the time: "I hope God will never suffer me to say, 'I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot Come."' Readers of the Weekly History were informed of his marriage through a printed letter "from a gentleman at Edinburgh to his friend in London," which read as though it could have been written by Whitefield himself: "I am glad to hear our dear friend Mr. Whitefield is married, I hope she is such an one as will not interrupt him, but rather forward and encourage him, to go on in the good Work he has been now for some years so happily imployed in."

The gentleman's wish came true. In time, Whitefield developed a respect for his wife's courage and an admiration for her faith, but he showed no signs of passion or camaraderie. The couple had one child, John, two years after their marriage. At the time, Whitefield dared believe the boy would be blessed with a great ministry. He hoped to pass on the same destiny to his son that his mother had passed on to him. But then the child died at age four months. Whitefield blamed himself, fearing he had made an "idol" of his son. Ever the preacher, however, he delivered John's funeral oration and returned immediately thereafter to full-time preaching. As always, private failures, frustrations, and illness were best cured in the pulpit. In a letter to a friend he referred to John's death in the context of his favorite sermon: "Last night I was called to sacrifice my Isaac; I mean to bury my only child and son about four months old."

While never impassioned, Whitefield's marriage continued to be consummated. In all, Elizabeth suffered four miscarriages, leaving the couple childless. Whitefield compensated with his Bethesda "family." But Elizabeth never really felt connected to the orphan house and, in classic fashion, interpreted her emptiness as a personal failing. To a friend she confessed, "I have been nothing but a load and burden to him yet and pray that all our trials may be sanctified."

After her near death from a miscarriage in 1746, the fortytwo-year-old Elizabeth was left permanently weakened and unable to accompany Whitefield on his extended tours. From February 1747 to June 1749 she remained in America without him. After returning to London that June, she remained there for the rest of her life. She was often separated from Whitefield for months at a time. While away he wrote to her infrequently, and in matter-of-fact terms. His tone was concerned but never impassioned or deeply affectionate. In correspondence with others, he rarely mentioned her name. When he did, he would refer to her as his "yoke-fellow" - a term that perfectly expressed the businesslike nature of their relationship.

Cornelius Winter lived with the couple in their last years and probably understood their relationship as well as anyone. He later described the marriage in sterile terms:

He was not happy in his wife, but I fear some, who had not all the religion they professed, contributed to his infelicity. He did not intentionally make his wife unhappy. He always preserved great decency and decorum in his conduct towards her. Her death set his mind much at liberty. She certainly did not behave in all respects as she ought. She could be under no temptation from his conduct towards the sex, for he was a very pure man, a strict example of the chastity he inculcated upon others.

That about summed it up. Always courteous, always faithful, always proper, but never impassioned. Winter's point that she did "not behave in all respects as she ought" suggests some tension over the attention other women paid to Whitefield, but not so much that it changed his course of action. Through the rest of his life, women would continue to figure prominently in his life, though passion and love would not.

Over the course of his life, Whitefield's closest relationship with a female would not be with Elizabeth but with the methodist noblewoman Lady Selina, Countess of Huntington. Like Elizabeth, Selina was somewhat older than Whitefield, and utterly taken up with the methodist cause. In other circumstances she might have been the wife he never had: wealthy, committed to Christ, and eager to share in his ministry. But the timing was bad. When he first met her in the London revivals of 1739, she was married. Her husband died in 1748, leaving her free to dedicate herself and her fortune to the Calvinist methodist cause. But by then Whitefield was married. Beyond that it seems likely his servitor status would never really have fit with her nobility.

Instead of a romantic relationship, the two engaged in a lifelong working partnership of mutual support and edification. In 1747, Huntington named Whitefield her chaplain, and from that point on he would proudly add to his title "A.B.," that of "Chaplain to the Countess of Huntington." In 1748 he began a preaching mission to the wealthy in her home. He also began to write her weekly letters that for frequency and passion exceeded any to his absent wife, who would not return to England until the summer of 1749.

In all, ninety-three letters to Huntington survive in the collected Works - a total far outdistancing those to any other correspondent, male or female. In most of them Whitefield is both extremely deferential, befitting the old servitor, and deeply concerned. After receiving two letters from Huntington sharing an unspecified "concern" in 1750, for example, Whitefield wrote back,

[the letters] both led me nearer to, and laid me lower before Him, at whose throne I am daily pleading for the welfare of your Ladyship, both in temporals and spirituals. . . . I have confidence with you that your ladyship shall have all the deliverance you long for. By divine grace, I will let the Lord have no rest, till he fulfills all your desires. I quite forget myself, when I think of your Ladyship. Ever honoured Madam, the Lord as yet hath but begun to bless you; you shall, you shall, you will be made a greater blessing indeed.

The subject matter of this, as of the other letters, is utterly taken up with the methodist cause and the Lord's work. Neither in this letter nor anywhere else is there the slightest hint of an impropriety. Nevertheless, in tone, if not in substance, the feeling expressed in the letter comes much closer to Whitefield's earlier letters to Elizabeth Delamotte than to his wife Elizabeth.

Did Whitefield feel any romantic passion for Huntington? If he did, he probably would not have recognized it or admitted it even to himself. After his experience with Delamotte, Whitefield's private feelings were undoubtedly suppressed and never again recognized as anything other than Christian zeal and mutual encouragement. The same methodist culture that opened Whitefield up to personal experience in religion closed his eyes to it in human love and marriage. The very passion that brought stunning successes in public remained closed off and unexpressed in private. In this he proved himself a true methodist.

In a remarkably short period of time Whitefield had become the evangelical "wonder of the age." While still in his twenties, he was more widely known across two continents than any save royalty. His radical innovations and unique style had won him international acclaim. The resiliency of youth had carried him through rigorous travels despite a callous disregard for his own health. As a young outsider he had cajoled, inspired, and berated without fear of social or ecclesiastical reprisals. Success had come easy - too easy, as it turned out.

In 1745 Whitefield at last had to face the results of his meteoric rise to celebrity. Words spoken in the impetuosity of youth reaped unanticipated consequences. Popularity had also bred a nasty competitiveness among rivals. In fact, Whitefield was discovering what all celebrities eventually discover - that unprecedented popularity brings unprecedented conflict and confrontation. The orphan house, the Tabernacle, and his own life were threatened, and the future of the Calvinist and Wesleyan Methodist movement came into doubt. Finally, his health did not hold up to the demands he placed on it. Now in his thirties, Whitefield discovered that creating a name and a reputation was far easier than preserving it. Circumstances from without and within now compelled the boy preacher to grow up.

Hostility and obstructionism from the Anglican bishops, for one thing, continued unabated. Both sides now had their parts down pat and routinely hurled charges back and forth. Whitefield still insisted that many of the bishops were unconverted and therefore opposed to his evangelistic messages. The bishops still viewed Whitefield as an alien presence who did not complement their ministry but actively competed with it and drew followers (and offerings) away from the church and into the fields. Throughout the controversy neither side had shown any desire to mute its censure. But in Whitefield's view, things took an ominous turn for the worse when bishops began tolerating or, worse yet, actually inciting mob violence.

In the 1730s, field preaching had still been both novel and impermanent enough that other marketplace entrepreneurs did not recognize it for the competitive threat that it was. Whether Whitefield would be a permanent fixture in the marketplace or a passing fad had been unclear. By the 1740s, any lingering uncertainties were gone. Vendors, peddlers, spirit sellers, and strolling actors now recognized in Whitefield, and to a lesser extent other methodist exhorters, a competitor draining away valued customers and cash. Methodist itinerants, led by Whitefield, had served notice to the new entrepreneurs of the marketplace that "worldly" activities would no longer enjoy a monopoly in their venues of trade. Religion would take its place alongside them and compete for the loyalties - and royalties - of the people. In response, the threatened parties gradually began to join forces with the bishops in opposition to Whitefield and his associates.

When he committed himself to an outdoor ministry, Whitefield had understood that he entered a no-man's-land of opportunities and dangers beyond the protected walls of churches and meetinghouses. The rules of the marketplace were fuzzy, and the enforcers few. Fluid social boundaries meant that the restraints of class, neighborhood, and personal familiarity generally did not prevail. The swirls of humanity that gathered for market day or holiday could become ungovernable and dangerous. Preachers entered at their own risk.

Instances of mob violence against Whitefield and his methodist allies grew increasingly serious as the movement grew increasingly popular. Upon returning from America, Whitefield learned the tragic news that William Seward was killed by an unruly mob in October 1740. Whitefield's Tabernacle associate John Cennick told the chilling tale of an armed mob in Wiltshire, where Whitefield was preaching with Howell Harris. The mob fell upon the assembly and fired guns "over our heads, holding the muzzles so near to our faces that Howell Harris and myself were both made as black as tinkers with the powder." The assailants continued by dousing the speakers with fire pumps "filled out of the stinking ditches." When Harris and Cennick sought refuge in the house of a friend, the mob "broke all of his windows with stones, cut and wounded four of his family, and knocked down one of his daughters."

Sometimes the mob would target the speakers; other times they would wade into the crowd and simply assault without regard to gender or age. Three months after the Wiltshire incident, Cennick was preaching in Swindon when he was again assaulted by a mob bent on general mayhem: "they knocked down all who stood in their way, so that some had blood streaming down their faces, and others were taken up almost beaten and trampled to death. Many of our dear friends were cut and bruised sadly; and I got many severe blows myself." Many of the victims were women. Charles Wesley reported an assault at St. Ives, where the mob moved from Wesley to his female supporters: "they beat and dragged the women about, particularly one of great age." At Essex the violence was explicitly sexual. Rioters forced their way into the meetinghouse, and then proceeded to assault the preacher and abuse the women: Some were stripped quite naked. Others, notwithstanding their most piercing cries ... were forcibly held by some ruffians, while others turned their petticoats over their heads and forced them to remain in that condition.... One of the mob forced a woman up into the gallery, and attempted other outrages three different times. After many struggles she freed herself, leapt over the gallery and made her escape.

Inevitably the violence reached Whitefield. The more he condemned peddlers, entertainers, dancers, jugglers, and actors, the more they, along with their usual customers, responded with disturbances and violence aimed at forcing him back indoors where religion belonged. Often his preaching would draw crowds away from vendors and entertainers, for which, as he reported, "I was honored with having a few stones, dirt, rotten eggs and pieces of dead cats thrown at me." At Moorfields, he was routinely interrupted by hecklers and rioters bent on outshouting him and frightening his listeners. "Drummers, trumpeters, merry andrews" all ready "not for the Redeemer's but Beelzebub's harvest" would raise a din that even his voice could not overcome. Sometimes it got worse. At Mary Le Bon Fields, a "young rake" tried to stab Whitefield but was prevented by Whitefield's inner circle of supporters, who themselves made an uncharacteristic show of violence and had to be restrained by Whitefield from assaulting the wouldbe assassin.

When Whitefield was most successful, the mob was most determined to silence him. They beat drums, shouted, and mimicked him in ways designed to expose and disrupt his own dramatic style. On several occasions, rioters climbed into trees behind his pulpit to "shamefully expose" themselves or urinate in his direction. Yet Whitefield rarely ceased preaching under these pressures. Instead he would patiently wait the rioters out, sometimes singing, sometimes praying, until they grew bored or tired, and then he would pick up where he left off. Eventually, he reduced his tactics to a science. Sometimes he preached over the disturbance with his powerful voice. Sometimes he led his listeners in songs so loud they drowned out the opposition. In the process, he sent the message to the marketplaces and open fields that public religion in its highly experiential, evangelical form had come to stay. Services might last three hours while they rode out disturbances, but they were invariably completed.

Persecution simply fueled Whitefield's determination to continue. The pulpit had always been the place where he discovered his courage, and now he put it to the test. Along with his magazine readers, Whitefield took comfort from such accounts as Howell Harris's heroic report that while he was being beaten, his "voice [was] lifted up, and though by the power going with the words my head almost went to pieces, such was my zeal that I cried, 'I'll preach of Christ till to pieces I fall."' In this and other similar accounts, readers found the words that gave them the strength and resolve to surmount all opposition.

Yet, the anger and fear Whitefield and his associates felt at the hands of the mob paled beside their fury at the thought that outdoor disturbances were legitimated - and even instigated - by nefarious churchmen who were pleased to let the mob do their dirty work for them. Conspiratorial thinking was at this time common throughout Britain and the colonies. It grew directly out of a highly personalized sense of history as a contest between good and evil and permeated all sides on any given issue. As Whitefield was certain that a plot against his ministry was being conceived by the bishops and executed by the mob, so the clerics were certain that Whitefield was plotting a secret "party" to deprive them of their livings. How else to explain the evil and immorality in the world?

Plots or no, violence was increasing, and the church showed little initiative in stopping it. If there was exaggeration in methodist accounts of violence, there was also substance. Following Cennick's mugging in Wiltshire, Whitefield appealed to the bishop to rebuke his clergy for not condemning the mob's violence. In an open letter to the Bishop of London, Whitefield pleaded for help in stopping the violence. This could be done, he asserted, if the priests were discouraged from collusion with the mob. In addition, the bishop could speak out: "I should be glad if you could mention the cruelty of the ministers ... to their Bishop of Sarum. Indeed, their doings are inhuman." Whitefield had little hope that his letters would persuade the bishop, but he was astute enough politically to print them widely, along with firsthand accounts of mob violence, so that others might learn of the methodists' plight and act against it.

In addition to printing letters, Whitefield invoked the power of the courts and the press to justify the methodists' right to exist and to condemn their attackers. A particularly nasty incident at Hampton furnished him with the materials he needed to take his case to the courts. In July 1743, a mob "one hundred strong" stormed a methodist meeting and threw the minister Thomas Adams into a lime pit, "wounding him severely." Whitefield hurried to Hampton to support Adams and preach in his place. The results were predictable: "no sooner had I entered the town than I heard the signals, such as the blowing of horns and the ringing of bells, for gathering the mob." Though frightened badly, Whitefield began preaching and was soon invaded by the mob. On no side did help appear, and a terrified Whitefield made his escape by leaping down a set of stairs. A female follower was not so fortunate and had her arm broken in two places.

Now outraged, Whitefield acquired the names of the chief rioters and took them to court. Much hung on the outcome. Methodists were literally fighting for their survival. Without the support of the courts and due process, their prospects would indeed be bleak. After heated testimony in the courtroom, where Whitefield identified his attackers, the courts found them guilty of a breach of the peace. The decision was widely noted. Until then, rioters had lived with the illusion (perhaps fostered by some clergy) that they could attack with impunity. The courts now taught them otherwise. Having made his point, a conciliatory Whitefield dropped the charges against the rioters and - very much in character - invited them to attend his meetings.

Besides using the courts, Whitefield worked through the press to uphold the embattled methodists. No one on either side of the controversy recognized the value of publicity as did Whitefield. Between 1741 and 1745 he issued a barrage of pamphlets defending the methodists and his own preaching on both religious and political grounds. The political defense was increasingly important, because the national loyalties of methodists were being called into question. Both a looming war with France and rumors that Prince Charles Stuart, the "young Pretender," was planning to invade England fed xenophobic fears that targeted methodists for charges of disloyalty to their country. If left unanswered, such accusations could feed a legal and political witch-hunt.

One especially pejorative charge demanded an instant response. A pamphlet entitled "Observations upon the Conduct and Behaviour of a Certain Sect, Usually Distinguished by the Name of Methodists" was published anonymously in 1744 (it was thought to come from an Anglican bishop). It accused Whitefield personally of disloyalty and said that he had "set the government at defiance" like the hated seventeenth-century radicals who had beheaded Charles I. It further charged that Whitefield "worked the body of the people into a national madness and frenzy in matters of religion." Unless suppressed, this frenzy would soon spill over into politics and threaten a violent overthrow of government.

Until then Whitefield had been largely silent on the subject of politics. His concern had been exclusively with the New Birth. He knew himself to be extremely loyal and deferential to government dignitaries and assumed that his refusal to criticize government would leave his loyalty unquestioned. But now, in the particularly paranoid atmosphere of war and invasion, the charges could no longer go unanswered. He would have to declare his political loyalties. In the process, he would learn that public figures - and movements - were inevitably political. Either they spoke up for the government and its authority or they were its enemies.

In fact, Whitefield had no problem with strong assertions of political loyalty. He had never been a social or a political radical bent on overturning an existing order. Neither was he a seventeenth-century Puritan eager to reform the nation. In his widely circulated "Answer to the First Part of an Anonymous Pamphlet," he pointed this out. Indeed, far from being a threat, he argued, his revivals were actually a public service. Anyone who had ever attended knew this; and if people thought otherwise, it was owing to the subterfuge of the church's bishops, who, he darkly hinted, had probably authored the anonymous libel sheet in the first place. For all their differences, methodists "all agree" on one point: to "Love and honour the king." As for himself, "I profess myself a zealous Friend to his present Majesty King George.... May the Crown long flourish on his Royal Head, and a Popish Pretender never be permitted to sit upon the English throne!"

This more mature Whitefield had discovered that his words - or silences - had national consequences. He could sidestep denominational differences in his preaching, but he could no longer ignore politics. Henceforth he would step up his pronouncements of loyalty to the crown and lend his voice to the success of military engagements.

While he was defending his loyalty, Whitefield also defended the right of nonseditious speakers to preach out-ofdoors. Many churchmen were unwilling to grant preaching a market status, declaring that such a practice opposed both state and canon law. This too required an immediate response. Field preaching, Whitefield wrote, was not illegal or anarchical per se. It was perfectly allowable by civil and canon law, the only exception being "seditious conventicles" that sought to "contrive Insurrection." Such was hardly the case with his orderly services. Whenever preaching out-of-doors, he wrote, "I think it my Duty to pray for and preach up Obedience to [the crown]." And, in regard to the church, he was no separatist: "neither would I persuade the Methodists to leave their own parish churches when the sacrament is administered there." For this reason, Whitefield concluded, he always scheduled outdoor meetings before or after regular worship hours and urged his listeners to support their local churches. In fact, a youthful Whitefield had not always urged support of local churches as urgently as he now claimed, and there was a fine line between damning bishops and praising their services of worship. But for the rest of his career he would increasingly distance himself from separations and schism in Scotland, England, and America.

During all the controversy and mayhem in London, Whitefield longed to return to America. He planned to leave in 1744, but before he could do so there was one more great and unpleasant surprise. In June he traveled to Plymouth, there to await a naval escort to America. While working in his quarters late one night, Whitefield was visited by a naval officer posing as a religious seeker. Upon entering Whitefield's room, the officer soon fell into a murderous rage and "beat me most unmercifully with his gold-headed cane." Soon a second attacker appeared with clear intent to kill. Only Whitefield's voice saved him as he screamed "murder!" It reverberated throughout the neighborhood and frightened the would-be assassins away, but not before they had left the preacher badly wounded.

This savage farewell was the first real physical persecution Whitefield had personally experienced. He never ascertained a motive for the assault, nor were the assailants ever caught. But the incident reminded him of the reality of persecution and the danger of methodist itinerancy. It also left him badly weakened for his return to America, at a time when he needed all his strength.

It took six weeks for Whitefield to recover from his injuries to the point where he could travel. Finally, in October 1744, an exhausted and still convalescent Whitefield arrived in York, Maine, hoping to pick up where he had left off on his previous visit. Instead, he encountered unprecedented controversy and contention. Once again, the height of his popularity was associated with the height of his offenses, and there was a predictably harsh backlash. Never in New England's century-old history had clergy and laity been so badly divided as they were in 1744. Many, including Whitefield's friends, were asking whether his new revivals had not caused more harm than good.

In America, it is true, there would be no mob. The conditions that encouraged urban disturbances, with all the sharp edges they manifested in England, did not exist in the colonies. There was no national church to suppress Whitefield from above, nor the bitter extremes of inequality in this "Best Poor Man's Country" to create havoc in the common citizenry. And Whitefield's greatest competitors in England - theaters, dance halls, pugilists, strolling actors, and Sunday entertainments - were illegal in most of Calvinist America. But conflict and bitter acrimony followed him nevertheless, and this from within the supposedly friendly and Calvinist Congregational and Presbyterian churches. The evangelical movement was, to put it bluntly, in a shambles.

All of the bright spots of 1740 were tarnished. Gilbert Tennent made one trip to New England in the winter of 1741 and went home with a bad ear and permanent disability, never to return. However, his sermon "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry" continued to be read widely and encouraged separations. Even though Tennent later repudiated the divisive tone of his pamphlet, others picked it up. Once unleashed, the rhetoric of an unconverted ministry would not disappear and came to be directed at one-time friends of the revivals. Radical separates such as New England's Andrew Croswell and the Long Island Dutch pietist John Henry Goetschius modeled their preaching on this rhetoric, which had first been sounded on Whitefield's earlier tour.

The most infamous disturbance centered on Whitefield's youthful colleague and native imitator James Davenport. In 1741 and 1742, Davenport traveled widely throughout New England, reporting conversions in numbers that exceeded those of Whitefield or Tennent. His center of operations was New London, Connecticut, where a separatist group of admirers had broken away from the Congregational church and announced the creation of a new congregation as well as a new home-grown college called the "Shepherd's Tent." From New London, Davenport traveled widely throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts, urging separations and labeling local ministers "unconverted" sight unseen. Twice he was arrested and dismissed for being non compos mentis. But by 1743 his campaign had exceeded all restraints.

With great fanfare and innumerable witnesses, Davenport's ministry burned itself out in New London, where it had begun, when his followers built a bonfire and cast into it items representing "the world." Included among these items were books by the respected Boston ministers Increase Mather and Benjamin Colman, and eventually Davenport's "britches." Immediately a ministerial council led by Jonathan Edwards and Eleazar Wheelock (later the founder of Dartmouth College) condemned the whole affair and brought Davenport to a church trial. Davenport was ashamed and issued a public retraction, but the damage was done. Opponents of the revivals such as Boston's Charles Chauncy were delighted by it all, for it "proved" that mass revivals were inevitably schismatic, disorderly, and ultimately insane. Supporters were embarrassed and confused.

The "New London affair" cast the whole transatlantic revival into question and raised fears on the part of clerical proponents as well their detractors. While Whitefield was preaching in Scotland and London, many Americans, including his friends, wondered if the opponents were right and Whitefield really was the source of the present disorders. Most conceded that the rhetoric of an unconverted ministry had begun with him. His friendship with Tennent and Davenport was well known, and word of his break with the Scottish Seceders had not yet reached American revivalists. Upon his arrival, the tide began to shift ominously. In the face of the separatist threat, former sympathizers became less worried about reviving their churches than about simply keeping the churches together. Again Whitefield had to face the consequences of his youthful indiscretions.

Before Whitefield could resume his New World mission, he first had to restore these broken or at best badly eroded relationships. In the wake of his previous tour, he had heard rumors of disturbances and excesses that were dividing churches in New England, but he had not realized the extent and virulence of the rift. Many ministers who had initially been curious or supportive of Whitefield now turned against him and organized petitions to exclude him from their pulpits. In this they were supported by the colleges in Cambridge and New Haven and by some of the newspapers. The faculty of Harvard College was particularly hostile, having never forgiven the brash evangelist for intimating that their lux had become darkness. In retaliation they issued a "testimony" against Whitefield's censorious preaching that was widely reprinted and circulated throughout New England. Every week, the presses of Boston's Thomas Fleet cranked out pamphlets by Congregational clerics who denounced Whitefield's intrusive ministry and warned the people that he was a "dangerous man," conducting his ministry "under the Frowns of the Church of England." His preaching, the Reverend Nathanael Henchman exclaimed, was an example of "insufferable pride and vanity" that had instigated the "strolling Itinerants, and swarms of mean Animals called Exhorters" who threatened to overturn the established churches and all social order.

The leading intellect behind the ministerial campaign against Whitefield was Boston's young and aggressive Charles Chauncy, who matched Whitefield's energy and traveled nearly as widely throughout New England cataloguing errors in doctrine and emotional excesses. Already in 1743 he had penned a massive critique of the revivals entitled Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England that was directed largely at Whitefield's Journal and Edwards's supportive Thoughts concerning the Revival of Religion in New England. Chauncy cited excesses and aberrations gathered from his exhaustive tour of colonial churches and went on to argue that the revivals were not a work of God but of the Old Deluder, Satan. Edwards's defense of revivalism, he charged, was a mistaken concession to "enthusiasm" - literally, a disease of uncontrollable passions. Unless duly checked and reined in by reason and by clergy of superior intellect, the movement would upset all order in churches and society.

Historians have generally considered Chauncy the loser in this debate, and so he was, at least as far as Edwards was concerned. By carefully distinguishing intellectually informed "affections" from base "passions," Edwards could draw on the rich intellectual heritage of "voluntarist" philosophy epitomized by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the new Lockean psychology to defuse Chauncy's critique and even make it seem old-fashioned. For Edwards, the New Birth was essentially a supernaturally infused "new sense" that bypassed both the natural understanding and the passions. Everything hung on precise definition and scholarly discrimination. By properly distinguishing supernaturally infused affections from the natural passions, Edwards could defend emotional preaching without defending the passions.

But Whitefield would not find it so easy to escape Chauncy's grasp. Whitefield had no interest in aesthetics or divine epistemology, nor did he have much interest in Edwards beyond the account of the Northampton revival. By "affections" he meant passions - feelings in the ordinary sense of the term. His whole ministry depended on his capacity to enlist body and pathos in the cause of passion. He preached exactly as Chauncy accused the revivalists generally of preaching: from the passions up.

If Edwards was something of an enigma to Chauncy, Whitefield was not, and it was Whitefield he targeted in the next round. In January 1745, Chauncy greeted Whitefield's return to America with a pamphlet printed in the form of a public letter urging him to go back where he came from. The churches, Chauncy asserted, had been in much better shape before Whitefield arrived; his impassioned preaching had encouraged scores of enthusiastic "ranters" of whom Davenport was merely the most notorious. In tone and vituperation, Chauncy's letter fell considerably short of the character assassination Whitefield had encountered in London, but it still exceeded anything he had seen in America. If anything, the more reasonable style carried greater weight. According to Chauncy, Whitefield's unsubstantiated accusations of an "unconverted ministry" throughout New England, his censure of Harvard and Yale, and his encouragement of itinerant exhorters had all worked "great injury to the Church of God." In addition, his highly impassioned oratory had infected New England with the disease of "enthusiasm," which, among other things, encouraged people to desist from their daily labors and separate from their local, established churches. In America, where there was little leisure time or unemployment, the threat to labor was a more common complaint.

Chauncy's charges were reinforced in the pages of Fleet's Boston Evening Post. More than any other New England newspaper, the Post sought to emulate English periodicals and aimed its essays at Boston's "polite" readership. Edwards, with his theological rigor and philosophical acumen, did not present much of a target, but Whitefield was a different story. Not only was he impassioned, but he was English, and well known to London society. Where Chauncy focused on theology and the primacy of reason, the Post targeted Whitefield's clownish manner and ridiculed the "Methodist" characters who were caught up in his madness. Most ridiculous, charged the Post, were the women. In a satiric letter "from a gentleman" reprinted from the London Spectator, the Post described the response any aspiring gentleman should have to the news that his wife was caught up in the revivals:

I am one of those unhappy men that are plagued with a gospel-gossip. Lectures in the morning, church-meetings at Noon, and Preparation-Sermons at Night, take up so much of her time, tis very rare she knows what we have for Dinner, unless when the Preacher is to be at it. With him comes a Tribe, all Brothers and Sisters, it seems.... If any time I have her company alone, she is a meer sermon pop-gun, repeating and discharging Texts, Proofs, and Applications so perpetually that however weary I may go to bed, the Noise in my Head will not let me sleep.

Behind the theological critiques and bitter social parodies were real social fears. The colonists' distance from the center of power made them even more susceptible to fears of conspiracy than the English. Many voiced the suspicion that Whitefield was not what he appeared. In fact, they suspected, his religious crusade and apparent lack of interest in denomination covered up a deeper conspiracy to create a "party" - a self-serving clique of corrupting evil forces. This conspiracy would be no small local affair, but a vast transatlantic campaign carefully orchestrated to abolish traditional authority, both social and ecclesiastical. A "Letter to a Gentleman" printed in the Post expressed the fear that, while Whitefield "put on a shew of meekness," he hid underneath it a plot to found a faction: "In some places he has been bold, if not insolent, in thrusting himself in to preach, contrary to the endless Remonstrances of the People.... These proceedings convince me more and more, that he has a Design to divide, and utterly to subvert the churches in the land." Unless due care was taken and pulpits resolutely closed, Whitefield would emerge as the "Head of a Religious Party," and should that happen, "the Destruction of all our Churches is the certain consequence."

The hysterical language of anti-Whitefield tracts and polemics is revealing. This was not mere rhetoric or hyperbole. The very urgency of the language confirms how, in the minds of Whitefield's critics, a real plot was afoot to destroy New England's glorious tradition and, with it, its glorious destiny. This same mentality would surface twenty years later when New England "patriots" became convinced of a British plot to destroy their liberties. In both cases the inflated language of conspiracy was neither calculated upper-class propaganda nor irrational paranoia but rather an inherited rhetoric that seemed to make sense of rapid changes taking place in church and society.

Although weakened by his still-healing wounds and high fevers, Whitefield well understood the pressing dangers that the language of "plot," "Party," and "subversion" posed to his ministry. Having just defended himself against charges of faction in England, he recognized that if he did not respond immediately, his entire New World mission would be jeopardized. In the early days of 1745, this meant acting simultaneously on all fronts to restore his tarnished reputation and counter the charges that were gaining a dangerous momentum. Few in America knew of his conflict with the Scottish Seceders or his own increased suspicions of separatism. But they soon learned of the latter, for Whitefield wasted no time in lining up solidly on the side of hierarchy and order in the American churches. With that, his brief flirtation with separatism came to an end once and for all. As in Scotland, this stance would play a major role in limiting the growth of hyperCalvinist dissent.

Before defending himself before his critics, however, Whitefield first had to reestablish connections with his clerical allies, who had been left badly shaken by popular defections and the prospect of a Separatist takeover. They needed to know where Whitefield stood. On November 27, a still-ailing Whitefield met in Boston with his core supporters, Joseph Sewall, Ebenezer Pemberton, Thomas Prince, Thomas Foxcroft, and, most importantly, the patriarchal Benjamin Colman. While still in England, Whitefield had written Colman a letter bemoaning the Davenport affair and regretting that "wild fire will necessarily blend itself with the pure fire that comes from God's alter." Now he repeated those regrets publicly. Again he repudiated separations and told all he was "sorry if anything I wrote had been a means of promoting separations, for I was of no separating principles." He was not competing with churches, he declared, but with "worldliness," and his loyalties would forever remain with all established clergy who welcomed his ministry and mission.

Satisfied by his account, the Boston allies reaffirmed their support for him and opened their pulpits to his ministry. Following the meeting, Whitefield immediately released an announcement for the press that "Dr. Colman invited me to preach the next day at his Meeting house." John Webb soon followed suit with an invitation to preach at the New North meetinghouse, and so the near-breach was healed. With at least some pulpits open to him, Whitefield had the entree he needed to ensure that his preaching tour would go on despite continued opposition. He would deliver his impassioned presentation of the New Birth as always, but with it he would now invariably promote the cause of established churches as well.

Having solidified his clerical supporters, Whitefield turned to his critics. If, as he suspected, he could never convince them to endorse his impassioned preaching of the New Birth, he could at least allay their social fears - and for many, the social fears were primary. He proceeded to make repeated and unabashed apologies for the indiscretions and rash censures of his younger ministry. In a widely printed letter, he confessed,

Being fond of Scripture Language, I have often us'd a stile too Apostolical, and at the same Time I have been too bitter in my zeal.... I have likewise too much made Impressions my Rule of acting, and too soon and too explicitely published what had better been kept in longer, or left to be told after my Death.

Here, and elsewhere, readers and witnesses were presented with a more mature, socially responsible Whitefield, who, given the choice of radical or mainstream, unhesitatingly preferred the latter. His goal was the largest possible audience.

Opponents were expecting the George Whitefield of 1740. Instead they met a chastened Whitefield who owned up to his excesses and condemned separations. Whenever confronted with blame for earlier separations, he apologized profusely, thus establishing his credibility in the rhetorically persuasive and self-deprecating code of Puritan discourse. In place of the familiar combatant, a tempered, more mature Whitefield appeared ready to withdraw some of his more aggressive statements.

Much had happened between his second and third visits to America, both in Whitefield's own development and in the churches. The egocentrism that had dominated his early journals he now saw for what it was - the inflated prose of a young preacher whose heart had all along been in the right place but whose immaturity had encouraged regrettable pretensions to inspiration and discernment. He was now convinced by the more extreme actions of the Seceders in Scotland, the Moravians and Methodists in England, and the Separatists in America that pious reform had gone too far in contesting all order and authority. And he recognized that his rash censure of ministers was reaping a tragic whirlwind in which, as Chauncy claimed, many good and godly men were abused simply because they lacked charisma or a willingness to preach nothing but the New Birth week after week.

From general apologies, Whitefield turned to particular antagonists. First on his list was Harvard College. On January 23, 1745, he penned a public letter of apology to the faculty of the college. His former condemnation, he now saw, had been unfounded but unfortunately effective in encouraging defections. Again he repeated his denunciation of separatist principles and, in the strongest possible terms, disassociated himself from any attempt to found a clique: "I have no intention of setting up a party for myself, or to stir up people against their pastors." Nor, he added, did he wish to upset the rich legacy of the college: "I profess my self a Calvinist as to Principle, and preach no other Doctrines than those which your pious Ancestors and the Founders of Harvard College preached long before I was born."

Whitefield's apology was widely printed and encouraged other ministers and newspapers to come out in support of his itinerant ministry. Once assured that he would not lead a Separatist uprising, Whitefield's friends returned to the fold and hastened into print to counter the testimonies prepared against him. In retrospect, what was most remarkable about the American phase of his 1745 "paper war" was not the virulence of the opposition but the wave of support from the press and from the established Presbyterian and Congregational clergy. For every testimony against him, there was another for him that endorsed his ministry and claimed his revivals as a work of God.

In Boston, where genteel opponents were centered, proWhitefield clerics won outright control of three churches and shared control in three others, including the venerable Old South and North churches and the wealthy Brattle Street Church. When Boston's opposing clergy garnered thirty-eight signatures against Whitefield and other revivalists, supporters countered with sixty-eight signatures endorsing his ministry. Opposing clergy could complain about Whitefield's tactics and character, but, unlike their Anglican counterparts, they could not mount a united front. Whitefield had simply become too close to the American soul to be dislodged.

Not surprisingly, additional support for Whitefield's ministry came from the press. Since 1743, Thomas Prince, Jr., son of the eminent Old South pastor and historian, had been printing a religious news magazine called The Christian History, modeled exactly on Whitefield's Weekly History. Like its English parent, The Christian History gave ordinary people a sense that they were making "news" through their participation in the religious revivals. These revivals, moreover, were not merely local but international in scope, bringing together Calvinist evangelicals from Scotland, England, Wales, and the American colonies. American readers learned of the Cambuslang revivals, where, as in America, the central characters in the drama had been ordinary people. More importantly, readers learned of the central role that Whitefield had played.

Letters from Edinburgh and Glasgow affirmed his character. As one correspondent put it, Whitefield "is really the most assiduous fervent Preacher of the Gospel I ever knew, and has something extremely uncommon about him." Another writer, the Reverend James Ogilvie of Aberdeen, reassured American readers that "his attachment to no Party but to Christ and true Grace alone, has long appeared to me a peculiar Excellency in him."

Soon other newspapers carried letters and essays endorsing Whitefield's character and defending his nondenominational evangelical intentions. In a widely circulated letter, William Hobby of Reading, Massachusetts, pointed out that instead of pocketing money from his New England collections, Whitefield had taken out only £35 for personal expenses at a time when pastors of small parishes could count on at least £100 per annum. Throughout the winter of 1745, Rogers and Fowle published a steady stream of pro-Whitefield letters from ministerial associations and clergy outside Boston, all echoing the support of the Boston clergy. Equally prolific was Samuel Kneeland and Thomas Green's Boston Gazette, which, during Whitefield's time in New England, became virtually a religious magazine. Throughout the colonial era the Gazette was clearly attached to the cause of "the people," and in 1745 that meant the cause of revival. Without fail the paper printed the schedule of Whitefield's travels, together with character endorsements that denied such charges against Whitefield as the embezzlement of funds and the founding of a party.

Whitefield's alignment with the established churches over against the Separatists did nothing to dampen his popularity. In fact, the established clergy had regained much of their losses and so had stemmed the tide of separations. Whitefield accelerated that trend. Wherever he preached, he attracted mass audiences and moved many to tears and conversion. Unlike his first tour, however, there was no rhetoric of an unconverted ministry, censure of the colleges, or suggestion that spiritually starved souls might leave their parishes in search of greener pastures.

In his spring tour outside Boston, the symbolic moment of truth came when Whitefield spoke from Benjamin Adams's New London pulpit. Two years earlier, Davenport had branded Adams "unconverted" and urged good Christians to leave his church and found their own separate congregation. Now Whitefield preached a conciliatory sermon on the New Birth and at the same time condemned the earlier separation and all other defections from established churches. The Gazette, in its coverage of the event, noted that Whitefield preached three sermons to overflow audiences at New London praising the beauty of union and love of godly ministers. Throughout his sermons, the Gazette noted, he was "very explicit against the separations and some erroneous wild notions which were propagating in those parts."

Once again, Whitefield's timing was perfect. His conciliatory sermons fit with a broader pattern of clerical rapprochement that sought to put party divisions behind and to move ahead despite differences in style and emphasis. Matters that had once been choices between truth or heresy came instead to be seen as matters of personal preference and taste. In fact, all Congregational ministers proclaimed the New Birth, though not all in the same style or with the same regularity. Asserting that common foundation, Whitefield could, and did, reach out to audiences inclusively without raising the specter of defection or separation.

Following the New London sermons, criticism continued to sound against Whitefield, but without the bite and conviction of earlier disputes. In no sense did the criticism approach the bitter invective of London journalists and bishops. Nor did Whitefield give back in his customarily aggressive London style. With Whitefield himself conceding the errors his earlier ministry had propagated, the opposition lost its advantage. The Grand Itinerant had apologized, and that was that. In a letter to a friend in England, Whitefield described the harsh criticism he had first received but then went on to note a wave of clerical and popular sympathy: "amidst all, the word runs and is glorified and many are so enraged at the treatment I meet with, that they come to me lately, assuring me, that if I'll consent, they will erect in a few weeks time, the outside of the largest place of worship that was ever seen in America: but you know ceiled houses were never my aim."

Whatever doubts New England leaders may still have harbored concerning Whitefield were finally and conclusively resolved when, toward the end of his New England tour, he agreed to support publicly the all-colonial military expedition to Louisbourg, the French-built fortress in Nova Scotia. Whitefield had recently learned the value and necessity of political commentary, and, after a brief hesitation, agreed to the American commander George Pepperell's request to preach an enlistment sermon. The commander convinced him that "if I did not encourage it, many of the serious people would not inlist." Never one to act half-heartedly, Whitefield threw himself into the task of recruitment and by February 1745 could point with pride to the role he had played in raising the largest expeditionary force ever assembled in North America. On the eve of embarkation, he supplied the apprehensive troops with their motto, Nil desperandum Christo duce (If Christ leads, never fear), and preached a sermon promising that, if Christ was truly king, "we should receive good news from Cape Breton."

On June 16, the unthinkable happened. The "Gibraltar of America" fell to the invading colonial forces, sparking celebrations throughout the colonies and in England. In New England, General Pepperell (now dubbed baronet) and Whitefield enjoyed universal praise and adulation. From that point on, through subsequent wars with France and England, Whitefield was associated with American military success. Soldiers through the Revolution would take his motto to heart, believing also that if Whitefield was for them, they need never fear.

War had always been a unifying force in New England's history, and on this occasion it completed a unification as former clerical antagonists commonly dwelt on the joys of victory. While Chauncy delivered a thanksgiving sermon in Boston and Edwards in Northampton, Whitefield added his voice with a thanksgiving oration on the traditional Puritan thanksgiving text: "By this I know that thou favourest me, since thou hast not permitted mine enemies to triumph over me." In oratory, if not on the battlefield, Whitefield "played the man" for his American hearers and enacted for them the brave and pious sentiments that would render the colonial militia unconquerable.

Following the expedition, Whitefield traveled south and realized the same conciliatory successes he had won in New England. Along with clerical endorsements and invitations came unanimous journalistic support from the Bradfords' American Weekly and Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette, both in Philadelphia. Of the two, Franklin's was more important. His glowing endorsement of Whitefield's character and integrity was particularly persuasive, coming as it did from such an avowed skeptic and critic of established denominations. Franklin had no reason to applaud Whitefield's character unless he sincerely believed it.

In Philadelphia, Whitefield received a hero's welcome at the "New Building" constructed especially for his mass ministry. As always, women and blacks remained conspicuous among his most vocal supporters. Female adherents found a cause through Whitefield's ministry that could take them out of their homes and into a new religious freedom. In a letter to the Boston Evening Post (printed, ironically, in an attempt to discredit Whitefield's ministry), Deborah Sherman raised the banner of female support, noting:

Fair would they discourage the women, who you know are your best friends, if they fall off all is gone, by telling them that St. Paul would have all the women ... to keep at home and mind their families. But I am sure St. Paul did not mean this when dear Mr. Whitefield preached. But if he did - Ay, ay, let the hard hearted wretches say what they will, we will go to hear you preach, we will follow you, we will come to all your lectures, have as many as you will, the more the better; and for my own part, I would go with you with all my Heart to Georgia, and I know a great many more would do so too.

Blacks too found in Whitefield's open sympathy and attention the beginnings of an evangelical Christianity that they would, in time, take over for themselves. Wherever slaves attended, Whitefield addressed them particularly and often met with them in private. When preaching at Raynham, he noted that "after sermon, five or six Negroes desired to speak to me. One seemed to be filled with love of God, two had been Backsliders, and the other was slightly wounded. I was much helped in discoursing with them." Through his highly publicized attention to blacks, Whitefield both supplied them with an evangelical vocabulary they later adapted to their own purposes and he served notice to white Americans that the souls of their slaves could be ignored only at the cost of divine wrath.

Whitefield's love for the slaves was genuine and invariably reciprocated. Once when gravely ill, he reported, "a poor Negro woman" visited him and "sat down upon the ground, looking earnestly in my face, and said 'Master, you just go to heaven's gate; but Jesus Christ said, Get you down, get you down; you must not come here yet. Go first, and call more poor Negroes."'

From the middle colonies, Whitefield continued south and realized greater gains there than ever before. In Hampton County, Virginia, he planted the seeds of evangelical revival that eventually led to a "Great Awakening" there. For the first time, he added Maryland to his circuit and, as in Boston and Philadelphia earlier, he received the offer of "a large living" amounting to hundreds of pounds and requiring residence for only six months out of the year. He turned this offer down as he had turned them all down, though not without letting readers know of his sacrifice in the cause of itinerant ministry.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1747, he traveled by horse and canoe a circuit of four hundred miles, addressing "thousands and thousands ... who ... are ready to hear the gospel from my mouth." Even the tidewater aristocracy conceded honors to the famed itinerant. From Charleston, Josiah Smith wrote in the Boston Gazette that

Whitefield shows so much of the Orator in the Pulpit, and so happily unites the gentleman and the Christian in his polite, prudent and serious conversation, that he has triumph'd over a thousand Prejudices, and become the Admiration of several who had before conceived the worst Idea of him imaginable ... as a further expression of our great esteem, [his admirers] have subscribed and given him much above Two hundred pounds sterling.

To this, Smith added the ominous note that the offerings would be used "to purchase and improve with Negroes a very good plantation."

Smith's reference to the slaves confirms the limits of evangelical "liberation" in eighteenth-century America. In fact, Whitefield spent much of his time in the South actively promoting the legalization of slavery in Georgia. In a revealing but seldom-cited letter to the trustees in 1748, he enumerated the expenses of the orphan house and its precarious existence. Then he pointed to the solution: "Had a negroe been allowed, I should now have had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans, without expending above half the sum which hath been laid out." From there he went on to actually threaten the trustees if they did not admit slavery:

Georgia never can or will be a flourishing province without negroes are allowed.... I am as willing as ever to do all I can for Georgia and the Orphan-house, if either a limited use of negroes is approved of, or some more indented servants sent over. If not, I cannot promise to keep any large family, or cultivate the plantation in any considerable manner.

Recognizing that the legalization of slavery in Georgia might require years, Whitefield pursued other alternatives. With his friend James Habersham retiring from the orphan house to pursue a career in private business, Whitefield looked increasingly to slaves in South Carolina as his salvation. With financial backing from Habersham and Hugh Bryan, Whitefield purchased a plantation and rejoiced that immediately "one Negroe has been given me" to begin working the 840-acre plantation and "support Bethesda."

The same Whitefield who brashly had censured all slave owners in his youth had now joined their ranks. This too was a mark of his maturity, though one that later biographers have preferred to ignore. Tragically, the very eighteenth-century evangelicalism that had opened his eyes to the spiritual needs of the slaves also blinded him to their inhuman temporal and cultural conditions. His new popularity among the southern gentry was, in fact, directly proportional to his endorsement of slavery. And like those planters who would lead America's campaign for independence, he was incapable of seeing the contradictions between a rhetoric of freedom and the reality of slavery.

In June 1747, Whitefield's years of nonstop preaching and controversy caught up with him. The heat that summer was especially punishing, and in June he collapsed with high fevers and recurrent convulsions. Many, including himself, thought he would soon die. The prospect did not terrify him. Indeed, he seemed almost to relish it as his last triumphant act, confiding to one, "I hope yet to die in the pulpit, or soon after I come out of it. Dying is exceeding pleasant to me; for though my body is so weak, the Lord causes my soul to rejoice exceedingly."

Whitefield did not realize his wish - yet. Instead, he recovered sufficiently to return to Philadelphia and Boston once more before a recuperative visit to the Bermuda colony. The return visits were satisfying in all regards. In contrast to the bitter controversy that had greeted him in 1745, he could now point to renewed public enthusiasm that was "near the same as when the work began seven years ago." In Philadelphia, Franklin observed that "he was never so generally well esteemed by persons of all ranks among us; nor did he ever leave us attended with so many ardent wishes for his happy journey and a safe return to this place."

By the time of his departure for Bermuda, Whitefield had turned the tide of opposition and become once more a colonial hero - indeed, America's first intercolonial hero. And he would also be America's last universally recognized religious hero. The years of controversy were passed. Never again would he encounter the sort of resistance in America that would plague him to his dying days in England. Scotland and America would remain his home of preference as well as the nerve centers for "revivals" that only he could replicate in every community on every tour.

When Whitefield returned from his Bermuda convalescence in July 1748, he had no more worlds to conquer. He was thirty years old, grown up, and married. It was time to start thinking about setthng down. This meant it was time to decide whether he would settle in England. His London Tabernacle clearly needed his presence if it was to flourish. In his absence, many, including his two chief assistants, John Cennick and John Syms, had converted to the Moravian camp. Others had left to follow the Wesleys. But for Whitefield, permanence seemed to require institutional identification either with Anglicans, Methodists, or perhaps a movement of his own making. Was that the destiny awaiting him?

It was not. When offered a role within the Wesleyan Methodist fellowship, he declined, noting that despite his ongoing friendship with the Wesleys, "we differ in principles more than I thought." Whitefield could not tolerate John Wesley's widely publicized Arminianism. Besides that, both were dominant personalities. Even with a common theology, it was unlikely that either could have submitted to the other's dominance.

Another option for Whitefield was to start a new, rival Calvinist-Methodist denomination. But he dismissed that idea with equal finality. In fact, at the same time he turned down the Wesleys' offer, he assured them that he had no intention of founding a movement of his own. His official excuse was the Georgia orphan house: "My attachment to America will not permit me to abide very long in England; consequently I should weave a Penelope's web if I formed Societies; and if I should form them I have not proper assistants to take care of them."

Certainly the orphan house mission was a valid reason not to settle permanently in England. But Whitefield's decision depended on far more than that well-established work. Other considerations had to do with more personal factors, including his Anglican upbringing, his own dramatic personality, and, perhaps most importantly, his novel vision of a religious culture in which denominations were subordinated to larger unities.

Though he seldom admitted it in a loud voice, Whitefield was a loyal Anglican. This was the church of his youth and family heritage, the church that had reclaimed his family's lost status. It was his spiritual home as well. He genuinely valued the church's liturgy and sacramental piety, finding in it a familiar source of comfort and solace. Historical accounts of his ministry focus on his activities in the fields and nonconformist meetinghouses, but such records fail to appreciate the amount of time Whitefield spent in Anglican services. The very pomp and ritual that dissenters found so offensive and "papist" were to Whitefield, in light of both childhood experience and a theatrical eye, consistent with the gospel he proclaimed. He had seen enough Roman Catholic ritual to know the difference and did not hesitate to praise the Anglican liturgy as a true expression of Reformation doctrine. In a letter written later in life to the Bishop of Bristol, he declared his loyalties:

For near these twenty years last past, I have conscientious ly defended her homilies and articles, and upon all occasions spoken well of her liturgy. Either of these, together with her discipline, I am so far from renouncing, much less from throwing aside all regard to, that I earnestly pray for the due restoration of the one, and daily lament the wanton departure of too, too many from the other.

The same dramatic personality that remained drawn to Anglican ritual and ceremony, however, also fed an actor's desire to attract the largest possible audience. All great figures seek out a destiny and fame. But most eighteenth-century religious luminaries, such as Edwards, Bishop George Berkeley, and the Wesleys, found this fame in traditional outlets of theology or church leadership. Whitefield's achievement lay in neither theology nor polity but in novel proclamation to heterogeneous audiences. He was an actor-preacher, and like all actors he desired a standing-room-only audience. This meant he could align himself with no single movement so exclusively that others would turn away in rejection. It meant as well that he could give no enduring commitment to one place or one audience.

Alongside Whitefield's Anglican loyalties and his need for a broad-based appeal, he also had an anti-institutional bias that redefined his deepest understanding of the nature and meaning of religious assembly. Negatively, he expressed his bias as often-repeated contempt for the tiny ambitions of clerics and nonconformists who had no greater object in mind than their self-perpetuation: "But what is Calvin, or what is Luther? Let us look above the names and parties; let Jesus be our all in all.... I care not who is uppermost. I know my place ... even to be the servant of all. I want not to have a people called after my name."

Positively, Whitefield had in mind an alternative religious vision that drove his ministry from the start and gained in clarity as time went on. His itinerant ministry taught him the invaluable lesson that rival churches with visions of national hegemony could be a thing of the past: they could be made old history - the history of a traditional, localistic, and coercive culture. A new history would be transdenominational and revival-centered. In such a system, existing churches would not be supplanted so much as sidestepped in the interest of creating larger, translocal associations. These associations would be purely voluntary and would allow people to remain in their favorite denomination even as they bound themselves to larger association with international significance. The new forms would succeed or fail in direct relation to their ability to attract religious consumers.

Whitefield's vision was profound not in its theological depth but in its very popularity. His revivals were not really a church, nor were they connected to local communities and congregations. The appearance of Whitefield's audiences as religious congregations defied the traditional sense of the term. The audiences changed with every meeting, evidencing no permanent structure or leadership aside from Whitefield's own charismatic ministry. In addition, they were routinely enjoined to support their local congregations and parishes, even as they were assured of bigger things afoot. In reality, Whitefield's audiences and loyal supporters represented powerful new "parachurches" -voluntary religious associations based on a marketplace organization and destined to characterize panProtestant "evangelical" organizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In an ironic process that Whitefield could not have foreseen and may not have realized, his revivals had become, in effect, an institution. He brought new meaning to the term revival and, in so doing, achieved an unanticipated social respectability.

As institutions, revivals could be staged at will and enlisted as engines of enormously powerful social and religious organization. Sometimes, as in the case of the Wesleys, Moravians, and a host of nineteenth-century "Christian" movements, they were instrumental in the formation of new denominations. At other times they remained centered in the charismatic min istries of transdenominational revivalists and so stayed autonomous. In either case, they represented a force entirely new and "evangelical" - a force that defined the future for much of modern Protestantism in England and America.

In one sense, Whitefield's vision of a revival-driven transatlantic parachurch committed to the individual experience of the New Birth was nontheological. By not calling the participants in his revivals a denomination, he got away from having to craft creedal statements of faith or establish doctrinal requirements for membership that would set one group of Christians off from another. Yet in another sense, Whitefield's conception was profoundly theological. He avoided creeds and denominations in the revivals, but at the same time presented a new theological perspective contained less in his own Calvinist convictions than in the radical new significance ascribed to religious experience and spiritual legitimacy. In answer to the question of what makes for membership in the true Church of Christ, Whitefield implicitly set forth an alternative model that fit with the modern circumstances of his revivals.

In the evangelical parachurch, individual experience became the ultimate arbiter of authentic religious faith. Experience - or, in the terms of John Locke, "sensation" - came to be the legitimating mark of religion over and against family, communal covenants, traditional memberships, baptisms, or sacraments. As sensation represented the only avenue for natural knowledge in Lockean epistemology, so the supernatural experience of the New Birth became the sole authentic means to spiritual knowledge in the evangelical revivals. Both were of a piece with the eighteenth-century world in which they emerged.

The parachurch was not a school for communal nurture and theological indoctrination so much as it was a context for individual experience. In it the conversion experience engulfed all else. Revivalists might argue about the means of the New Birth and the respective roles of human will and supernatural grace in regeneration, but the experience itself ruled supreme. If there was no new denomination with a capital letter reflecting its establishment, the New Birth itself assumed capital letters as the institutional and theological embodiment of a new religious movement.

Experience. It all came back, in every revival, to this. Seventeenth-century dissenters had spoken often of regeneration and the New Birth, but always in the context of local congregations and weekly education in the sermon. When pressed, they had denied that true conversion could be experienced by those who were ignorant of the theological terms on which it rested. This meant that the teaching function of the church had always received primary emphasis. In a subtle but profound way, Whitefield reversed this emphasis. Instead of theological indoctrination being the foundation of spiritual experience, individual experience became the ground for a shared theology of revival. As long as the foundation was individual experience and the sensation of grace, whatever - or whoever - created it received theological legitimacy at once. Whitefield's stated theological preferences were, of course, Calvinistic and predestinarian. But other revivalists could, and did, build quite different theological frameworks that enjoyed the same experiential legitimation. In the end the revivals were simply not about theology but about experience. Calvinists, Moravians, Methodists, Whitefield - and their evangelical heirs in later generations - would all discover legitimation in the experiences they produced. All would ask the same question: Would God bless a counterfeit movement with true saving grace? The answer would always be No. By their experiential fruits they would be known.

Clearly Whitefield's vision was audacious and far outranged that of his London audiences. But while at home in London, he had no intention of losing those audiences that had first brought him international attention. If he would not found a denomination, he would continue to preach at the Tabernacle and rebuild the crowds that had been badly weakened by de fections. And in fact Whitefield soon did restore the Tabernacle ministry, with a regimen of daily preaching and three sermons on Sunday. By the end of the summer of 1748, he looked out with satisfaction on audiences that equaled his predeparture crowds and exceeded any others in England, including those of the Wesleys. With this ministry as the hub, he continued his mission of revival in England.

From the Tabernacle Whitefield traveled throughout all the old familiar spots in Bristol, Gloucester, and surrounding towns. Everywhere people flocked to hear him preach, and everywhere appeared the same unmistakable signs of revival that had first marked his previous itinerant tours. After a particularly successful stint of sermons around London, he commented, "I have not known a more considerable awakening for a long time. The Lord comes down as in the days of old, and the shout of a king is amongst us." With London again secured, he was ready to plan for the provinces.

By now Whitefield had reduced his revival schedule to a science. Spring or fall he would devote to tours of Scotland and, on occasion, Ireland or Wales that lasted five or six weeks each. Winter and summer he would spend in and around London. Whenever possible, he would undertake additional voyages to America. When he was not in America, he left the management of orphan-house affairs to assistants, overseeing them through a steady stream of correspondence.

Whitefield's letters through these travels read much like accounts of his earlier experiences. Audiences in Scotland continued to grow in their love of him as time went on. Next to America, Scotland was his favorite stop, the place to which he returned most often. And, as always, Whitefield's health and spirits improved while on tour, soaring with the response of every enthusiastic audience. Each new visit was a new challenge that, once successfully confronted, rejuvenated and inspired.

Invariably, Whitefield's audiences received him with enthusiasm. He had no peer in the pulpit, and he was careful never to overstay his welcome. Whether from the familiar perch by the Orphan Hospital Park in Edinburgh, the courtyards in Glasgow, or the open fields in Cambuslang, the results were the same. In a letter penned from Edinburgh in July 1751, he rejoiced that "the congregations morning and evening amount to many thousands. People flock more than ever, and are desirous of my longer stay."

For the most part, Whitefield's Scottish itinerations now took place without incident. During his 1748 visit, when one presbyter tried to prohibit Whitefield from preaching in the synod of Glasgow because he was not Presbyterian, Whitefield's friends and supporters easily overcame the objection. All who knew him, they explained, knew that Whitefield had no interest in denominations. His objectives were larger. As Whitefield later reported, "two synods and one Presbytery brought me upon the carpet; but all has worked for good."

After 1748 there was no sustained or organized opposition to his ministry in Scotland. As in America, no anti-Whitefield mobs gathered. At Glasgow he was reconciled with Ralph Erskine and cemented an enduring friendship with John Gillies. Following one especially powerful sermon on Peter's denial of Christ, Gillies marveled how "the whole multitude stood fixed, and hung upon his lips." Crowds grew steadily "larger than ever." Indeed, Whitefield had the run of the Scottish lowlands and the cities. In a letter to his partner in the faith and supporter Lady Huntington, he exulted,

Oh Edinburgh! Edinburgh! Surely thou must never be forgotten by me! The longer I stayed, the more eagerly both rich and poor attended on the word preached. Perhaps for near twenty-eight days together in Glasgow and Edinburgh, I preached to near ten thousand souls every day. It would have melted your Ladyship's heart to have seen us part. Ninety four pounds were collected for the Edinburgh orphans.

The same could not be said for Ireland. Of all his speaking tours, the only prominent exception to his enthusiastic receptions was Ireland, and even there the opposition was episodic, with some enthusiastic audiences mixed in. Whitefield's wellknown blasts against "pretenders" and "papists" were not likely to win the friends in Ireland that it had in Scotland and America. Earlier the Wesleys had paid dearly at the hands of Irish mobs for their attempts to revive Ireland. In the spring of 1751, Whitefield attempted the same. All went well in Dublin, where Whitefield addressed audiences he estimated in the range of ten thousand. But in Cork, where the Roman Catholic presence loomed great, support was more restrained. Still, he attracted audiences estimated at three thousand and hoped there had "been a stirring among the dry bones."

On a subsequent visit, however, Whitefield felt the wrath of the Irish mob at the hands of the "Ormond Boys." This gang of youths favored the Catholic Prince Charles whom Whitefield had so stridently attacked. While preaching at Oxmanton Green, Whitefield became separated from his friends. Soon he was victimized by an assault of "perfect cruelty":

Vollies of hard stones came from all quarters, and every step I took, a few stones struck, and made me reel backwards and forwards, till I was almost breathless, and was covered all over with blood.... Providentially, a minister's house stood next to the Green. With great difficulty I staggered to the door, which was kindly opened to, and shut upon me. Some of the mob, in the meantime, broke part of the boards of the pulpit into splinters, and beat and wounded my servant grievously in his head and arms.

Whitefield would carry a deep scar on his forehead as a permanent reminder of this event, and he never again returned to Ireland. Although he was willing to absorb punishment in the cause of revival, unlike Harris or Seward, he did not seek it out. Martyrdom for Whitefield was more a figure of speech than a crown to be actively pursued at the hands of the mobs.

But Whitefield would always pursue revival. Besides his work in London and Scotland, he continued to visit America. By 1751 he was back in the New World, picking up where he had left off on his earlier tours. As in Scotland, he was welcomed with the enthusiasm usually reserved for royalty or high dignitaries. The Boston Evening Post offered token resistance to Whitefield's "shocking" and backward Calvinist belief that "man by nature is half brute, and half devil," but in colonial America, attacking Calvinism was tilting at windmills. Americans of all stripes now welcomed Whitefield and flocked to hear him preach.

From Whitefield's perspective, nothing had changed from the first dramatic itinerations in 1740. In his written reports covering the years 1748-1751 there are few evident differences in the visits. Such phrases as "a more considerable awakening," "stirring among dry bones," and "great work" show up again and again, together with audience estimates invariably numbering "many thousands" and "larger than ever." To read Whitefield, it would appear that the awakening was still in full flush, with all the promise of transformation contained in the first revivals. Everything remained the same.

Well, almost everything. Conspicuous by their absence were the great conflicts and battles that had marked Whitefield's first tours of the colonies. Expecting "persecution" everywhere, he now encountered only praise and adulation. With much of the old antagonism gone, much of the fear that he had once engendered was gone as well.

In the absence of conflict and controversy there emerged confirmation of a remarkable transformation in the meaning of the word revival. What had initially been a convulsive and mysterious force upsetting ordinary life and catching participants by surprise had become something different - a familiar event that could be planned in advance, executed flawlessly, and then repeated at the next stop. Gone was the sense of religious crisis that had earlier generated inflated hopes and fears on the parts of friends and enemies.

The full implications of Whitefield's radical redefinition of revival were never clear to him. He was a visionary, not a thinker, and he acted in an intuitive manner. He could not see beyond the numbers and the enthusiasm he attracted, could not see the great changes taking place around him after a decade of itinerant ministry. And even as he had changed the meaning of revival, so the revivals were changing him from social firebrand to culture hero.

Culture heroes always emerge after the crisis has passed and the transformation is successfully completed. By 1750, the interests of most Americans were moving away from religion to concerns of war and politics. While "religion" was as thriving a concern as ever in audience size and emotional response, the fire was gone, or rather redirected to other more pressing concerns. "Revival" had disappeared in the awakening sense of an all-encompassing phenomenon dominating communal consciousness and erasing all other conversations. In fact, the "Great Awakening" had moved throughout most of the colonies and, with the exception of southern revivals in the 1760s and similar activity in Nova Scotia in the 1770s, they did not reappear widely again until after the American Revolution.

Yet to read Whitefield, nothing had changed. And for him, nothing had. Crowds remained robust, audiences wept, offerings were bountiful, and conversions palpable - all of which confirmed in his mind a continuous and ongoing revival. For him, revivals were as regular and recurrent as the seasons of the year. This could have been the case only insofar as the new revivals he spawned had evolved from outsider events to acceptable - and unexceptionable - additions to the marketplace. Defined by the traditional criteria of communal awakening, mass enthusiasm, obsession with religion in public discussions, and heated controversy, the revivals had died. But defined more functionally as a mass event in an open setting orchestrated by a skilled performer and geared to raising individual experience and passion, "revivals" persisted as strongly as ever. Whitefield came to associate the latter meaning with the term.

His own sincerity and spiritual commitment remained constant throughout. Yet his revivals had become, in effect, a form of entertainment. As one could leave a theater profoundly moved by the passions evoked, so one could leave a Whitefield revival transformed by the New Birth. While the New Birth was undoubtedly meaningful in a personal, devotional sense, the social consequences were minimal. In his fateful decision to side against the separatists in Scotland and America, Whitefield had also determined that his revivals would not become social threats.

Entertainment, of course, was not Whitefield's intent. His intent was the salvation of lost souls. But inadvertently he had helped to push revivals in the direction of entertainment. In this sense, he was undone by his very success. Deprived of the corrective tonic of failure and social confrontation, "revival" had become a predictable, known quantity of little threat or consequence. The only real surprise for Whitefield now would have come had he gone out to preach and found no one there to listen. This never happened.

In fact, Whitefield's moment of creative and critical innovation had passed with his youth. With no denomination bearing his name, he had become less a fixed planet in a revived universe than a meteor - a metaphor he frequently favored in describing itinerant preachers - that flashed across the sky, dazzled all with its brilliance, and then receded from view. Though brilliant, the "gospel meteors" were apt to be ephemeral. The passions they released were real and the lessons unforgettable, but other movements and events would capture the momentum released by Whitefield's innovations and push it in new directions.

As Whitefield's revivals became routine, they - and he - became less threatening. His gifts were extraordinary. But without the fear they had formerly engendered, they were as apt to entertain and edify the gentle as the disinherited. Even in England many of the old fears had receded. By 1747 a socially respectable Whitefield was even ready to play to the English aristocracy. John Wesley seldom appealed to the wealthy and insisted that "the poor are the Christians. I am quite out of conceit with almost all those who have this world's goods." But Whitefield felt no such constraints. If he would not discriminate against denominations, neither would he discriminate against classes. His own climb to reclaimed status and his fascination with the wealthy were ongoing. Given an opening, he was glad to preach before new, more respectable audiences.

His opening appeared in the form of his friend and sponsor Lady Huntington. Throughout 1747, he saw her regularly and worked with her to establish a number of methodist chapels. On August 22, 1748, he was appointed her chaplain and agreed to preach at her estate. In a letter he wrote to her that month, he revealed his great desire to reach the wealthy, employing the familiar Pauline identity: "Paul preached privately to those that were of reputation. This must be the way I presume of dealing with the nobility, who yet know not the Lord. 0 that I may be enabled, when called to preach to any of them, so to preach as to win their Souls to the blessed Jesus!"

With the change of audience, the character of the Oxford servitor returned, though now with an Oxford degree and the additional title "chaplain to the Countess of Huntington." Whitefield deferred to his aristocratic betters with all the old ingratiating skills he had learned at the Inn. When addressed once by Huntington as co-worker and "friend," Whitefield confessed that "when your Ladyship stiled me 'your friend,' I was amazed at your condecension. I am ashamed to think your Ladyship will admit me under your roof, much more am I amazed that the Lord Jesus will make use of such a creature as I am." To modern eyes, such exaggerated deference and groveling seems almost pitiable. Yet it was one with Whitefield's highly ambivalent love/hate relationship with privilege and class.

In short order Whitefield became a hit with the aristocracy. Always the conversationalist, he soon regaled this highbrow company with dramatic stories spanning several continents and cultures. Few full-time adventurers had seen as much of the world as Whitefield had seen, and he had a storyteller's gift for describing it. Combine this with his knack of ingratiation and he was almost guaranteed to please, if not to persuade.

With Huntington's patronage, Whitefield added another "field" to his ministry outside of the established church, this time in the posh drawing rooms and parlors of the English aristocracy. With barely concealed enthusiasm, he wrote a friend that he was preaching twice weekly "among great company" at Huntington's London estate. Included among the frequent guests and visitors were such luminaries of polite society as Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bolingbroke, the Earl of Burlington, Lord Melcombe, the Earl of Aberdeen, and William Pitt the First Earl of Chatham.

Although he did not convert many noblemen to the methodist discipline, he did garner rave reviews from the highest quarters. In a letter to Lady Selina, Lord Bolingbroke marveled at the performance: "He has the most commanding eloquence I ever heard in any person; his abilities are very considerable; his zeal unquenchable; and his piety and excellence genuine - unquestionable." In similar terms Lord Chesterfield remarked that "Mr. Whitefield's eloquence is unrivalled -his zeal inexhaustable; and not to admire both would argue a total absence of taste."

If Whitefield converted few noblemen, the same could not be said of the noblewomen who flocked to hear his message and then took up the cause. Included among the noblewomen Whitefield counted as "lasting converts" were Lady Fanny Shirley, Lady Anne Frankland, Lady Gertrude Botham, the Countess DeLitz, Lady Rockingham, Lady Hyndford, Lady Chesterfield, and Lady Betty Germain. Many of these women gave liberally to the causes of the Tabernacle and the chapels, and others worked in other ways to continue the good work. The Countess DeLitz followed Huntington's example and opened her home to Whitefield's preaching. In a letter to Lady Huntington he remarked, "on Saturday I had the honour of being almost all the day long with Lady F, Lady H, Lady C, and the Countess of D. Lady F. and the Countess received the blessed sacrament before the others came, and I think they both grow."

Whitefield's relationship with Huntington and company stood in stark contrast to his relationship with his family. The close ties that the Wesleys had with their mother Susannah, or Jonathan Edwards with his wife Sarah, had no equivalent in Whitefield's life. Like other male and female methodist itinerants, he sought sustenance and meaning from within the methodist fellowship. Throughout this period there was little correspondence to suggest close connections to his wife or mother. Only a handful of letters to his mother survive, and their tone is cool. Instead of sounding like a grateful son, Whitefield tended to take on the tone of pastor, concerned more for his mother's spiritual estate than her more immediate temporal and emotional needs. This was, after all, the destiny she had given him, and it was what he gave back to her.

Upon returning from his American tour in 1752, he learned that his mother had died. The news did little to interrupt his ministry or plans for the funding and construction of a new tabernacle at Moorfields. The woman who had done so much to shape his destiny had not elicited warm affections later in life, nor much comment in death. Few - including many of Whitefield's later biographers - even took notice of the event. Perhaps on a level Whitefield could never have recognized, alongside public praise came private resentment for a mother who had so definitively carved his destiny without consultation. In any case, her death did nothing to interrupt his regular preaching in the Tabernacle, around London, and among the London nobility.

Following a winter at the Tabernacle, a restless Whitefield prepared again in the spring of 1753 for travel. He wrote once more to Lady Selina from Scotland confirming that "people flock more than ever, and earnestly entreat me not to leave them soon." From Edinburgh, he took the now well-worn road to Glasgow, again addressing crowds "larger than ever." He also retained the interest and support of the Scottish aristocracy. Then in the summer he went to Bristol and Wales, preaching twenty times in two weeks and over a course of three hundred miles - this at a time when England had almost no reliable roads, in the modern sense of firm, dry highways secure from flooding and thieves.

With all his newfound respectability and interest in the English aristocracy, Whitefield never lost interest in the American colonies. They dominated his conversations outside the pulpit and engaged his deepest loyalties. Alongside regular correspondence and offerings for the orphan house, Whitefield looked to assist other American causes. When his friend Governor Joseph Belcher moved from the Massachusetts to New Jersey, he sought Whitefield's help in promoting the Log College (which eventually settled in Princeton, New Jersey). Whitefield was happy to oblige, seeing in that college the best pattern for a revival-centered "school of the prophets." While in Scotland, Whitefield urged William McCulloch and Gillies to support the New Jersey college, noting its strategic value for the revival: "the spreading of the gospel in Maryland and Virginia, in great measure depends on it." Through his efforts, substantial contributions were raised at a critical time in the history of what would later become Princeton University.

American guests were always welcomed in Whitefield's London home, and he continued to promote their interests on the Old World side of the Atlantic. In January 1754, on the eve of his fifth visit to America, he entertained the Presbyterian revivalist Gilbert Tennent and his young associate Samuel Davies as they visited the isles on a fund-raising mission for the College of New Jersey. In the course of the visit, Davies heard Whitefield preach for the first time. In technical terms, he observed, "the Discourse was incoherent." There was little of the text-doctrine-application schema taught in the schools. But the effects were unparalleled and, on reflection, wrote Davies, the dramatic manner "seemed to me better calculated to do good to mankind than all the accurate, languid Discourses I have heard." The lessons Davies learned were unforgettable and would find expression in the young minister's own evangelical preaching in the American South.

By March 1754, Whitefield was again en route to America. A brief stopover in Lisbon allowed him the opportunity to visit many Catholic churches and observe their services. Nothing in what he saw persuaded him that Catholicism was anything other than papist "superstition," but the dramatist in him could not help but recognize the power of the ritual. On one occasion he described a reenactment of the crucifixion replete with a stage, cross, and wooden statue of Jesus surrounded by weeping disciples. At length the "corpse" was taken down and placed in an open sepulcher amidst the grieving disciples: "John and Magdalen attended the obsequies; but the image of the Virgin Mary was placed upon the front of the stage, in order to be kissed, adored, and worshipped by the people. Thus ended the Good Friday's tragic-comical, superstitious, idolatrous farce."

Another exhibit made his blood run cold, as he indicated in a letter to a friend:

As I stood near the altar, over against the great door, I must confess my very inmost soul was struck with a secret horror, when, upon looking up, I saw over the front of the great window of the Church, the heads of many hundred Jews, painted on canvas, who had been condemned by what they call the Holy Inquisition, and carried out from the church to be burnt - Strange way this, of compelling people to come in! Such was not thy method, O meek and compassionate Lamb of God! Thou camest not to destroy men's lives, but to save them - But bigotry is as cruel as the grave. - It knows no remorse.

Age had done nothing to dampen Whitefield's harsh censures of Catholicism on religious and political grounds. And as war with France was again looming on the horizon, he was prompted to remind his correspondents that "never did civil and religious liberty appear to me in such a light as now.... 0 happy England! 0 happy Methodists!"

Once in America, Whitefield worked in his usual tireless fashion to shore up past connections and forge new alliances. Georgia having been reestablished as a royal colony in 1752, slavery was now allowed, and there was no longer a need for the South Carolina plantation. All resources were transferred to Bethesda, including a force of slaves for whom, Whitefield rejoiced, "nothing seems to be wanted but a good overseer, to instruct the negroes in sowing and planting." He also instructed them in Christianity. Together with evangelical planters such as Jonathan Bryan, James Habersham, and William Knox, Whitefield became notable for his efforts to Christianize the slaves. Beginning with the work of these men, slaves were given the resources for constructing their own slave religion in evangelical terms that eventually led to the creation of an autonomous black church.

Throughout the summer, Whitefield traveled widely through the middle colonies and New England with undiminished zeal and unsurpassed public adulation. At Princeton, the college repaid his constant support with the award of an honorary M.A. degree. At the Old North meetinghouse in Boston the audience was so large that he had to enter the church through a window, in a move reminiscent of his first triumphant tour of New England. Elsewhere the results were the same, leading a rejuvenated Whitefield to write John Gillies that "my reception has been far superior to that of fourteen years ago."

In ways that Whitefield never fully understood, he had become an American hero whose life and words reflected the yawning ambitions and libertarian rhetoric of the young colonies. If he no longer generated controversy, it was not so much because his message had changed as because the American people had. The spiritual and social lessons they had learned in the outdoor revivals were irreversible. Rich and poor alike now conceded the legitimacy of open-air, popularly sanctioned mass assemblies. Even more, they acknowledged that the people had a right to judge what was best for their religious and civil lives. When a writer to the Boston Gazette complained that Whitefield had no right to speak in the marketplace or public buildings, a respondent stated that such places belonged to "the people" and could be used in any manner the people saw fit: "they are Englishmen and have a Right to meet in them when they judge they have occasion for it, either for Civil or Religious purposes."

Whitefield knew little of the "Commonwealthman Ideology" that celebrated the rights of Englishmen, but he understood the rhetoric perfectly. It was as much his creation as anyone's. In time this libertarian rhetoric would grow to a revolutionary pitch. But from its first expression it was identified with Whitefield. As Americans moved ever forward in their great "experiment in liberty" the name Whitefield would continue to lead them and be identified with their quest.

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