explicitly rejected a central element of high church covenant theology—the necessity of episcopal succession for a validly ordained ministry. In colony after colony, therefore, local clergy of the colonial Church of England began to criticize what they saw as Whitefield’s lack of regard for the basic elements of doctrine and liturgy.
Squabbles with clergy of his church were, therefore, a continuing element of Whitefield’s preaching tour. A meeting between Whitefield and a group of Church of England clergy in Boston that included Timothy Cutler and Commissary Roger Price (1696–1762) resulted in such wide disagreements that Whitefield did not even ask to preach in congregations of the Church of England in that city.3 Hearing of Whitefield’s New England tour, William Vesey (1674–1746), the commissary in New York, declined to invite him to preach at New York City’s Trinity Church. In Philadelphia, clergyman Richard Peters interrupted Whitefield’s preaching at Christ Church in order to point out what he believed to be doctrinal errors; soon afterwards Commissary Archibald Cummings (d. 1741) denied Whitefield any further access to Church of England pulpits in the area.4 In Charleston, Alexander Garden (1685–1756), the bishop’s commissary, refused communion to Whitefield and attempted to suspend him from the ministry. Only in Virginia, where Whitefield accepted James Blair’s invitation to preach at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg, did Whitefield remain on good terms with a commissary. Yet even Commissary Blair wrote to the Bishop of London soon afterwards to say that if, as he had since heard by rumor, Whitefield was “under any censure or prohibition to preach,” he would abide by it on future occasions.5
Whitefield, who always had an eye for the dramatic, discovered a way to use these disagreements to increase interest in his tour. On arriving in a community, he asked to preach at the local Church of England congregation. If given permission, he would then deliver a sermon in which he attacked what most of his fellow clergy regarded as basic doctrine of their denomination. Pamphlets by Whitefield published in 1740 gave some indication of the scope of his criticism; in them, he denounced Bishop Edmund Gibson of London and Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson, both highly respected by most eighteenth century members of the Church of England. When the local clergy responded to him with criticism or declined to issue further invitations to preach, Whitefield complained of persecution. The news of the church fight would spread, and Whitefield would soon be preaching to curious crowds, either outdoors or in the Congregational, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, to which he was increasingly invited.
Fig. 10 The portable pulpit that George Whitefield used for outdoor preaching.
Sentimentalist Preaching and the New Birth
Whitefield’s ability to capitalize on church fights may have won publicity in the short run. Taken by itself, however, it could not account for the sustained interest in and the continuing impact of his preaching. There was another cause for his popularity—something new both in his message and in the way in which he delivered it that met the needs of the people of his day. Those critics who detected in Whitefield a departure from the moderate enlightened faith that was the religious inheritance of early eighteenth century Christians were correct; they would have also been correct had they suggested that his new message would influence the form of tradition that would be passed on to later generations.
Most clergy of the colonial Church of England agreed with John Locke’s affirmation in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that the “Understanding” (i.e., the intellect) was “the most elevated faculty of the soul, … employed with greater and more constant delight than any other.”6 They recognized that short-term human actions were often the result of human passions, but they believed that in the long term it was the intellectual conviction of the wisdom of some courses of action and the folly of others that shaped human choices. The content and form of their sermons—intellectual treatises read from manuscripts without eye contact or dramatic flourish—were shaped, therefore, to educate the mind without exciting the passions.
As Whitefield and others came to recognize, however, logical demonstration did not always bring personal conviction or amendment of life. Indeed, skeptical thinkers, such as John Toland (1670–1722), had begun to suggest that rational argument might disprove, rather than confirm the central truths of the Christian faith. Toland and other skeptics forced more orthodox Christians to reexamine their premises. Some of these more orthodox believers concluded that rational discourse by itself was not a sufficient tool for Christian proclamation. The good news had to touch the affections as well as the mind.7 Those clergy who sought to follow this route could draw on the sentimentalist theories of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713) and of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), in which human affections played a more central role. Accepting the sentimentalist premise that human action did not always arise from dispassionate logic, such clergy abandoned the reading of sermons and adopted extemporaneous styles of delivery and broad dramatic gestures in the hope of reaching their parishioners on a more emotional level.8 When they did so, they found that their new emphasis provided one effective antidote to skepticism. Parishioners awaited their sermons with excitement, traveled long distances to hear particularly noted speakers, and began to express a new seriousness about religion.
The change in the form of preaching was accompanied by a corresponding change in content. Moderate enlightened clergy sought intellectual conviction on the part of their auditors (the eighteenth-century term for as those who listened to preaching). Sentimentalist clergy, in contrast, looked for signs of change in the affections; it was not enough to understand intellectually the basic Reformation doctrine of justification by faith; one had to “feel” that doctrine on a personal level. As sentimentalist clergy explained it, this usually involved despair at the realization that all human efforts ended in damnation, followed by a “new birth” in which the individual turned to a reliance on Jesus Christ.9
Whitefield was a particularly successful proponent of both the form and content of this new sentimentalist approach to preaching. His own life, about which he would write in a widely published journal, provided, moreover, a striking, concrete example of the new birth. He was the son of a widow who ran a tavern in Gloucester, England. As a child, he confessed, he had been addicted to “lying, filthy talking, and foolish jesting.” He stole from his mother, broke the Sabbath, played cards, read romances, and dropped out of school at fifteen. His mother remarried, however, and Whitefield was able to return to his studies. It was the beginning of a new chapter in his life. He completed grammar school and was admitted to Oxford as a scholarship student.10
At the university, Whitefield joined a prayer and study group led by John (1703–91) and Charles (1707–88) Wesley. Other university students referred to the group as the “the Reforming Club,” “the Holy Club,” or, for their systematic method of pursuing piety, “the Methodists.” Though, as his participation in the group indicated, Whitefield was concerned about the Christian faith and life, he was unable to overcome his own doubts until a dramatic and emotional conversion left him prostrate and
