Introduction
Introduction
Before there was an America, there was a voice.
The eighteenth century was an age of reason, refinement, and profound spiritual coldness. The churches of England had grown formal and lifeless. The colonies of British North America were drifting — prosperous in commerce, bankrupt in soul. Into this world stepped a young man from a Gloucester inn, armed with nothing but an open Bible, an unshakeable conviction, and a voice that would carry across oceans.
George Whitefield did not set out to change history. He set out to obey God.
Yet in the span of thirty-four years, preaching more than eighteen thousand sermons to perhaps ten million souls, crossing the Atlantic thirteen times, defying bishops, braving mobs, and sleeping in fields — he did both. He ignited the Great Awakening on two continents. He helped forge the spiritual identity of a nation that did not yet know it was a nation. He pioneered the open-air revival, the trans-denominational ministry, and the kind of preaching that grabs a man by the collar and will not let him go until he has faced his own soul.
His central message never changed, never softened, and never grew old. You must be born again.
This book is the story of that voice — where it came from, what it said, and why, more than two hundred and fifty years after it was finally silenced in a New England parsonage, it still echoes.
Dr. Michael H. Yeager
Contents
