Justified True Belief

(●) The Anglican clergyman who was locked out of the churches, took the gospel into open fields, and carried the Great Awakening across two continents. + In the autumn of 1739 a printer in Philadelphia did an odd thing in the middle of a sermon. He walked away from it. A young English preacher was speaking from the courthouse steps, and the printer set off backwards down Market Street, listening as he went, until he reached the corner where the ordinary noise of the street finally drowned the voice out. The printer was Benjamin Franklin, and he believed very little of what he had been hearing. What he wanted to know was how far that voice carried. So he took the distance he had walked as the radius of a semicircle, allowed each listener two square feet of standing room, and did the arithmetic: the man could be heard, he decided, by more than thirty thousand people. Franklin went to another of those sermons with a pocket of coppers, silver dollars and gold, and a settled resolve to give none of it to the collection. He emptied the pocket into the dish instead, gold and all. That preacher was George Whitefield, and the scene is the whole man in miniature: the astonishing voice, the crowds nobody had ever assembled before for a sermon, the money going to an orphanage in Georgia, and a skeptic who never converted but stayed a friend for thirty years. For Christian readers he matters because he changed what preaching the gospel could look like. Before him, a sermon was something that happened inside a parish church to the people of that parish. After him, the field, the bowling green, the market cross and the mouth of a coal pit were all places where a preacher might stand, and the hearers came from every denomination and none. That wave of preaching and conversion, running through the 1730s and the 1740s, is what came to be called the Great Awakening. One figure fixes the scale. The memorial raised over his grave at Newburyport says that in a ministry of thirty-four years he crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached more than eighteen thousand sermons. The crossings can be counted; the sermon total is the monument’s own reckoning rather than a tally anyone kept at the time. Either way, he spent the better part of his adult life either speaking outdoors or at sea.

(●) 1714 AD: He was born in a Gloucester inn, and the taproom prepared him for Oxford better than the schoolroom did. + George Whitefield was born at Gloucester in December 1714, the youngest of seven children. "My father and mother kept the Bell Inn," he wrote years later. "The former died when I was two years old." His mother Elizabeth ran the house alone after that, and she told him often that she had expected more comfort from him than from any of her other children. He noticed early that being born in an inn put him in company he did not mind keeping: his Saviour, he liked to say, was born in a manger belonging to one. He went to the grammar school of St Mary de Crypt, a few streets away, where he discovered the one thing about himself that would matter most: he could hold a room. He was good at the school plays, good enough that the masters put him forward when the corporation wanted a speech. Then the money ran short, and school stopped. He came home to work, drawing ale and washing mops in the family inn, in a blue apron. He was about fifteen. When he was near eighteen, friends of the family got him a servitor’s place at Pembroke College, Oxford. A servitor was a poor student who paid his way by waiting on the wealthier ones: carrying their meals, running their errands, waking them in the morning. Whitefield arrived expecting the work to be humiliating and found it was the one thing he was already trained for. Many of the other servitors fell ill his first term, and by his own account his quickness at table won him so many gentlemen’s custom that his family paid out less than twenty-five pounds for his first three years. The taproom had made him useful.

(●) 1735 AD: A borrowed book told him that everything he had done for God was not yet Christianity. + Oxford in the 1730s contained a small band of students who were mocked for taking religion too seriously. They rose early. They fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, visited the prisons and the sick, received communion weekly, and kept written accounts of how they had spent their hours. The nicknames came as fast as anyone could think of them: the university called them the Godly Club, the Sacramentarians, the Bible-moths. The name that stuck was Methodists, and by John Wesley’s own account of it the word came from a young gentleman of Christ Church who said that a new set of Methodists had sprung up, in allusion to an ancient school of physicians who had treated every patient by rule and method. John and Charles Wesley were at the centre of it. Whitefield watched them for more than a year before he dared speak to any of them. The opening came sideways: a woman in the workhouse had tried to kill herself, and Whitefield sent a messenger to Charles Wesley asking him to visit her, with strict instructions not to say who had sent her. She said anyway. Charles invited him to breakfast, and Whitefield was in. Then came a harder year. He fasted through Lent on sage tea without sugar and coarse bread, walked out in the cold mornings until one of his hands went black, and at Passion week found he could barely creep upstairs. The illness that followed lasted seven weeks, and it was somewhere in that stretch, with nothing to do but lie there, that Charles Wesley lent him a small Scottish book called The Life of God in the Soul of Man, by Henry Scougal. Whitefield opened it and read that some people falsely place religion in going to church, doing nobody any harm, keeping up their private prayers and giving a little to the poor. He had just been handed a description of himself, and an accurate one. Alas, he thought, if that is not religion, what is? A few lines further on Scougal answered the question for him: true religion is a union of the soul with God, and Christ formed within us. That sentence went off in him like a light. From that moment, he wrote, but not till then, did he know that he must be a new creature.

(●) 1736 AD: Ordained at twenty-one, his first sermon was reported to the bishop for driving fifteen people mad. + Whitefield did not want to be ordained yet. He prayed against it, wrote to his Oxford friends asking them to pray against it too, and quoted Paul’s warning about putting a novice into office. What changed his mind was Martin Benson, bishop of Gloucester, who stopped him coming out of cathedral prayers one afternoon, said he had heard his character, and told him that although he had declared he would ordain nobody under twenty-three, he would make an exception. Then he pressed five guineas into his hand to buy a book. Whitefield was ordained deacon in Gloucester Cathedral on 20 June 1736, and made the first act of his ministry an act of charity: he read prayers to the prisoners in the city gaol. He had meant to write a hundred sermons before he began. He had one. He had lent it to a neighbouring clergyman to prove how unfit he was to preach, and the man had sliced it in two, preached both halves, and sent it back with a guinea. With that sermon Whitefield stood up in St Mary de Crypt, the church where he had been baptized, before a congregation drawn largely by curiosity. "Some few mocked," he wrote afterwards, "but most, for the present, seemed struck: and I have since heard, that a complaint had been made to the Bishop, that I drove fifteen mad the first sermon. The worthy prelate, as I am informed, wished that the madness might not be forgotten before next Sunday." He took his Oxford degree that year, and from there the pace of his life never really slackened again. Within two years he had crossed the Atlantic for the first time, spending the summer of 1738 in the new colony of Georgia, and returned to England to be ordained priest by Benson in January 1739. What he came back to was not what he had left. The London pulpits which had been thrown open to him were closing one by one.

(●) 1739 AD: Shut out of the churches, he climbed a mound at Kingswood and preached to two hundred coal miners. + Kingswood, outside Bristol, was a colliery district with no parish of its own. The colliers who dug coal there had a reputation for lawlessness and almost no contact with any church. Whitefield had been thinking about them for weeks. "My bowels have long since yearned toward the poor colliers," he wrote, "who, as far as I can find, are very numerous, and yet are as sheep, having no shepherd." On Saturday 17 February 1739 he rode out after dinner with two friends, walked up a mound, and spoke to whoever came. Upwards of two hundred did. Nothing in his ordination had prepared him for standing on a heap of earth in the open with no pulpit, no parish and no permission, and he went home elated. Three days later the chancellor of the diocese sent for him. A chancellor is the bishop’s legal officer, the man who runs the church courts, and what he read out to Whitefield were the canons, the church’s own body of law, which had a good deal to say about who might preach and where. Then he named the penalties. Preach anywhere in the diocese without a licence, and he would be suspended first and excommunicated after. Whitefield heard him out and went back to the same mount anyway, took as his text the third chapter of John, and preached for an hour to near two thousand people. Two days later four or five thousand stood round the mount in bright sunshine, and he closed that day blessing God "for such a plentiful harvest." By the following Sunday, at what he called a moderate computation, above ten thousand were in that field with the trees and hedges full. Within weeks the crowds at Rose Green were being counted in the tens of thousands. The habit, once formed, never left him. In London that spring, with the parish pulpits closing against him one by one, he went to Moorfields, a patch of open ground where the crowds gathered on holidays for puppet shows and mountebanks, the quack doctors who worked a crowd from a stage and sold it a cure. There he preached in direct competition with the entertainers, and he was still at it years afterwards. At Whit Monday in 1742, one of those holidays, he began there at six in the morning, with something like ten thousand people already assembled who had come for the showmen rather than for him, and by noon the entertainers were finding their audiences sadly thinned. All of that was still ahead of him. He handed the Bristol work to John Wesley, wrote in his journal that God would bless his friend’s ministry there, and sailed for America in August 1739 for the tour that would make him famous in thirteen colonies at once.

(●) 1740 AD: He laid the first brick of an orphan house in Georgia, and never stopped raising money for it as long as he lived. + Georgia had been settled with debtors and broken shopkeepers rather than farmers, and Franklin, who watched the colony from a distance, wrote bluntly that numbers of them had perished, leaving many helpless children unprovided for. Whitefield had seen it for himself in 1738. On 25 March 1740, on five hundred acres about ten miles from Savannah, he laid the first brick of a house he named Bethesda, which means a house of mercy. Nearly forty children were already in his care, in a rented house, and counting the workmen he had about a hundred mouths to feed daily with very little money in the bank. He admitted later that he had gone about it backwards. The prudent course was to clear the land, build the house, and then take in orphans; he found their condition so pitiable that he opened an infirmary and took them in first. "But had I received more, and ventured less," he wrote, "I should have suffered less, and others more." Bethesda shaped everything that came after it. The house had to be paid for, and the money was wherever the crowds were, which is part of why he kept crossing the ocean, why almost every sermon on his American tours ended with a collection, and why he sat down with Franklin to discuss turning the place into a college. It is also what drew him, in the end, into the decision that stains his record, the campaign to legalize slavery in Georgia. The collections themselves could be extraordinary. In the autumn of 1740 he went north through New England, and at Northampton in Massachusetts he preached for Jonathan Edwards, reminding a congregation of what God had once done among them. Gillies, his first biographer, says it was like putting fire to tinder. His farewell sermon on Boston Common drew a crowd he put, at a moderate computation, at twenty-three thousand, and the collections for the orphans in town and country came to near five hundred pounds sterling.

(●) 1741 AD: He took the Calvinist side against John Wesley over predestination, and the friendship survived the break. + The quarrel was about election: whether God chooses who will be saved, or whether Christ died for everyone and each person decides. Whitefield had come to hold the first, in the tradition called Calvinism after the Genevan reformer. Wesley held the second, the position usually called Arminianism after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, and in 1739 he preached a sermon called Free Grace against predestination and, against Whitefield’s pleading, printed it. Whitefield answered from Bethesda on 24 December 1740, and the letter is worth reading for its misery as much as its argument. "Jonah could not go with more reluctance against Nineveh," he began, "than I now take pen in hand to write against you. Was nature to speak, I had rather die than do it." He put at the head of it the verse about Paul withstanding Peter to his face, and he begged in his preface that those who held election would not triumph or make a party of it, "for I detest any such thing." What is remarkable is Wesley’s reply, written months before, which Whitefield printed alongside his own letter so that readers could see both. "There are bigots both for predestination and against it," Wesley wrote. "God is sending a message to those on either side. But neither will receive it, unless from one who is of their own opinion. Therefore, for a time you are suffered to be of one opinion, and I of another. But when his time is come, God will do what man cannot, namely, make us both of one mind." They never did agree. The revival ran in two streams from then on, the Calvinistic Methodists around Whitefield and the Wesleyan Methodists around Wesley, and each man went on with his own work and his own life. In November 1741 Whitefield married Elizabeth James, a widow of Abergavenny. Their only child, a son, died at four months. In 1748 Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, made him one of her chaplains, which gave him a hearing among the aristocracy and a network of chapels that outlived him. The friendship did break for a season. Whitefield told Wesley to his face in the spring of 1741 that the two of them preached different gospels, and would not give him the hand of fellowship; then the letters began again in October 1742, and what was left of it held to the end. When a friend asked Whitefield who should preach his funeral sermon if he died abroad, and suggested his old friend John Wesley, the answer was always the same: "He is the man."

(●) 1770 AD: He preached in a New Hampshire field when he was fit only for bed, and died before morning. + He was fifty-five and asthmatic, on his seventh and last American journey, and he had been preaching daily at Portsmouth for a week when he set out for Boston on Saturday 29 September 1770. On the road he was pressed to stop at Exeter, where a crowd had gathered too large for any building. A Mr Clarkson, seeing the state of him, said plainly: "Sir, you are more fit to go to bed than to preach." Whitefield agreed with him, then turned aside, clasped his hands and looked up. "Lord Jesus, I am weary in thy work, but not of thy work. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for thee once more in the fields, seal thy truth, and come home and die." He preached in the open air for nearly two hours, on Paul’s charge to examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith (2 Corinthians 13:5). Then he rode on to Newburyport, ate a little supper, prayed with the family, and went up to bed. His travelling companion Richard Smith, who wrote the account, was woken at two by his panting. Whitefield said the asthma was coming on, that two or three days’ riding without preaching would set him up again. Smith said he wished he would not preach so often. "I had rather wear out than rust out," Whitefield told him. He sat up in the bed and prayed for the places he had preached in, for Bethesda and the children there, for his London congregations, and lay down again. At five he went to the open window for air, and told Smith twice, "I am dying." He died about six on the Lord’s day morning, 30 September 1770, and was buried in the crypt beneath the pulpit of the Presbyterian church at Newburyport, where he lies still. The news reached London early in November. Robert Keen, the friend who had asked him the question about the funeral sermon, was one of the executors who went to John Wesley, and on Sunday 18 November Wesley preached it at Tottenham Court Road and again at the Tabernacle, the two London meeting houses of Whitefield’s own congregations, to an immense multitude, he wrote, gathered together from all corners of the town.

What He Taught

(T1) A person can keep every religious duty and still need to be born again. + Think of a man who has been a member of the same church for forty years. He is on the flower rota, he has never missed a Christmas, his children were baptized there and so were theirs. Ask him whether he is a Christian and he will be puzzled by the question, because the answer is obviously yes, look at the record. Whitefield had been that man, with a stricter record than most, and his whole ministry came out of the morning he discovered the record proved nothing. The doctrine he preached for it is called regeneration, or the new birth: the claim that becoming a Christian is not an improvement of the old self but the beginning of a new one, worked by God rather than achieved by effort. Jesus states it to Nicodemus, a respectable teacher who had every credential Israel could issue: "You must be born again" (John 3:7). Paul puts the same thing in different words, that anyone in Christ is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17), and that text is where Whitefield’s sermon on the subject starts. He was careful about what this does and does not say. It does not say the sacraments are nothing; he was an Anglican priest who kept the Book of Common Prayer to the end. It says that the outward sign and the inward reality can come apart. "Many are baptized with water," he preached, "which were never baptized with the Holy Ghost." And the line that made him enemies among the clergy: "all are not real Christians that are nominally such." He was not aiming that at the irreligious. He was aiming it at the pews, and at himself at twenty. Whitefield would have granted two cautions, and they matter. Christians have long disagreed about how the new birth relates to baptism and to the ordinary nurture of a Christian household, and a child raised in the faith who cannot name a day of conversion is not thereby unconverted. What Whitefield insisted on is narrower than either of those disputes, and harder to evade: a life may be entirely respectable, entirely churched, and entirely untouched.

(Q) "A ray of divine light was instantaneously darted in upon my soul, and from that moment, but not till then, did I know that I must be a new creature." + Source: Whitefield, A Short Account of God’s Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (his own narrative of his infancy to his ordination, first published 1740), on the seven weeks’ illness at Oxford in 1735. He is describing the sentence in Henry Scougal’s The Life of God in the Soul of Man that undid him: that true religion is a union of the soul with God, and Christ formed within us. A few lines earlier in the same paragraph he takes stock of what his religion had amounted to until then: "though I had fasted, watched and prayed, and received the Sacrament so long, yet I never knew what true religion was."

(T2) The righteousness a sinner stands on before God is Christ’s, and never his own. + Whitefield’s favourite text for this was a name out of Jeremiah, the name given to the coming king: the Lord is our righteousness (Jeremiah 23:6). Righteousness, in a sentence like that, means the standing a person has before God, the verdict passed on a life. And Whitefield’s claim, with the Reformers behind him, is that a Christian’s standing is a borrowed one. Paul says it plainly: to be found in Christ, "not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ" (Philippians 3:9). Theologians call this imputed righteousness. Imputed means credited, the way a sum paid by one person is written into another person’s account: Christ’s record is entered on the sinner’s account, and a debt can be paid by somebody other than the debtor. He thought the natural human instinct runs the other way and never quite stops running. Sermon after sermon returns to it. We cry out against popery, he told one congregation, and justly, but we are all of us self-justifiers by nature; we are ashamed to say outright that we deserve anything from God, so we fetch a circuit and establish a righteousness of our own by a longer road. The picture he used for this was old and physical. He pointed at the coats of skins God made for Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Beasts were not yet food, so the animals whose skins those were had been killed for something else, and what covered the first pair’s shame was a covering they had not made. That is the whole argument in one image: the clothing comes from outside, and it costs a life. This is where he and his critics collided hardest. Anglican clergy of the period accused him of undercutting morality, since if a person’s standing is Christ’s and not his own, why bother being good? Whitefield’s answer was that he had never met anyone made lazy by being forgiven, and that the doctrine which humbles a man most is the one that moves him most. He wrote to Wesley that it was election, of all doctrines, which pressed him hardest to abound in good works.

(Q) "Self-righteousness is the last idol that is rooted out of the heart." + Source: Whitefield, sermon "The Lord Our Righteousness," on Jeremiah 23:6, opening paragraph (Works, 1771; text as printed in the 1830 collection Sermons on Important Subjects). The sentence opens the sermon, before he has said anything about Christ at all. He is describing the order in which a person lets go of things: the drink, the gambling, the temper, and last of all the quiet conviction that one is basically a decent sort (T2).

(T3) If the church doors are shut, the preacher goes to the people rather than waiting for them. + This sounds obvious now, which is the measure of how completely he won the argument. In 1739 it was close to scandalous. The parish system assumed that a clergyman preached in his own parish, to his own parishioners, inside his own church, and a man who preached somewhere else was poaching. Field preaching, which means standing in the open air and addressing whoever came, broke all three of those assumptions at once. So did itinerancy, the practice of travelling from place to place instead of settling in one cure of souls, which is the old phrase for a parish and the people in it that a clergyman answers for. Three days after Whitefield first stood on the mount at Kingswood, the chancellor of the diocese of Bristol had him in and quoted the canons at him, with suspension and then excommunication at the end of them. He went back to the mount anyway. His reasons were not theoretical. They were the colliers, who lived outside any parish and had nobody. He came back from that first afternoon and wrote that the ice was broken, and that he had never felt more acceptable to his Master than standing in a field. "Some may censure me," he added, "but if I thus pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ." Two texts carried the practice for him. One is the master’s order in the parable of the great supper, to go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in (Luke 14:23); the other is the commission to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation (Mark 16:15). Preaching of that kind leaves something behind it, and in time the question of what to do with it came up between him and Wesley. Converts gathered in every town into societies, the local groups that a preacher was expected to keep an eye on, and somebody had to hold them together. Should the two men join theirs into one united body? Whitefield stood aside, and the letter he wrote Wesley about it in 1748 says what he thought he was for. An external union was impracticable, he said. Wesley’s sermons had shown him that they differed in principles more than he had thought, and the two of them were upon two different plans; his attachment to America would never let him stay in England long enough to hold societies together, so that he would only be weaving Penelope’s web if he formed any; and he had no proper assistants to take care of them if he did. (Penelope, in the Odyssey, wove a shroud by day and unpicked it by night to put off her suitors, so that the work was never finished.) "I intend, therefore, to go about preaching the gospel to every creature." Within a year he had let go of the oversight of the Calvinistic Methodist societies altogether. Wesley built. Whitefield went. That choice cost him something, and the cost is easy to see. Wesley’s societies survived him and became a worldwide church. Whitefield’s converts were scattered among a dozen denominations, and the movement he did as much as anyone to start carries Wesley’s name and not his. He seems to have expected that, and not to have minded.

(Q) "Blessed be God that I have now broke the ice! I believe I never was more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields." + Source: Whitefield’s Journal, entry for Saturday 17 February 1739, in A Continuation of the Reverend Mr. Whitefield’s Journal, from his Arrival at London to his Departure from thence on his Way to Georgia (1739). Written the same evening as the first open-air sermon at Kingswood, to upwards of two hundred colliers. He had ridden out after preaching the parable of the prodigal son to the prisoners in Newgate that morning (T3).

(T4) Christ divides the world into two kinds of people, and the dividing line is not denomination. + Whitefield preached to congregations no single church could have gathered. Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers and the entirely unchurched stood in the same field, and he was not going to spend the hour sorting them. He had a favourite image for the absurdity of doing so, taken from the exchange in London where merchants of every persuasion did business side by side: is there a Presbyterian walk there, he asked, and an Independent walk, and separate rooms for churchmen to trade in? The theology under the joke is simple and serious. When Jesus describes the last judgment he separates people as a shepherd separates sheep from goats (Matthew 25:32), and when he describes his own he says only that they hear his voice and follow him (John 10:27). Neither picture has a column for denomination. Whitefield drew the conclusion out loud from the pulpit, which in the eighteenth century took some doing, and he drew it in both directions: he would not unchurch the Presbyterians for being Presbyterian, and he would not let a fellow Anglican rest on being Anglican. This is not indifference about doctrine, and he is a bad witness for anyone who wants it to be. He fell out with Wesley in print over predestination, argued with Count Zinzendorf about the Moravians, the Protestant exiles from Moravia whom Zinzendorf had settled on his Saxon estate and then led, answered the bishop of London in successive pamphlets, and took on Bishop Warburton in print when he was nearly fifty. He held the differences to be real and worth arguing. What he refused was to make them the test of who belongs to Christ. Sheep and goats, he said: those are the two classes, and the Lord give us to see which we are in.

(Q) "It does not say that the Baptists and Independents, nor the Methodists and Presbyterians; no, Jesus Christ divides the whole world into but two classes, sheep and goats." + Source: Whitefield, sermon "The Good Shepherd," on John 10:27-28, taken down in shorthand by Joseph Gurney and published in Eighteen Sermons (1771). It is his farewell sermon, preached in London on 30 August 1769 before he sailed for America for the last time. The Gurney sermons are the closest thing we have to a recording of Whitefield preaching, transcribed live rather than written out beforehand, which is why they sound like a man talking (T4). The line comes as he sets out who the sheep in his text are.

(Q) "I had rather wear out than rust out." + Source: Richard Smith’s eyewitness account of Whitefield’s last night, printed in John Gillies, Memoirs of the Rev. George Whitefield (1772). Smith, his travelling companion, had just told him he wished he would not preach so often. It was about two in the morning on 30 September 1770, at Newburyport; Whitefield was dead before seven. The reply is a proverb older than he was, and he had lived by it for thirty-four years.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He gave thirteen separate colonies one shared experience, years before they had a country. + The revival that ran through the American colonies between roughly 1735 and 1745 is called the Great Awakening. It did not begin with Whitefield; Jonathan Edwards had seen a remarkable work at Northampton before Whitefield ever landed, and Theodore Frelinghuysen among the Dutch of New Jersey and Gilbert Tennent among the Presbyterians were at it already. What Whitefield did was tie the local fires together. He travelled from Georgia to Maine, preached to everyone who came, was reported in colonial newspapers up and down the coast, and gave people in Charleston and Boston the sense that the same thing was happening to them. Its effects outlasted the excitement. Franklin was a deist, which is to say he believed in a God who had made the world and then left it to run, and he never accepted a word of the preaching. He still described the change in Philadelphia with an observer’s eye: from being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street. His friends built Whitefield a great hall there, a hundred feet by seventy, vested in trustees of no single sect, open to any preacher who wanted the pulpit, "so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service." Some years later that building became the first home of Franklin’s academy, which grew into the University of Pennsylvania. Franklin gave one other verdict, and few men were better placed to give it. He printed Whitefield’s sermons and journals, made money from him, watched the collections for years, and heard the accusation that the preacher was pocketing them. "I, who was intimately acquainted with him," he wrote, "never had the least suspicion of his integrity, but am to this day decidedly of opinion that he was in all his conduct a perfectly honest man." Whitefield used to pray for Franklin’s conversion and never got it. They stayed friends until he died.

(†) Evangelical preaching has been imitating him ever since, and the Wesleys honoured him without agreeing with him. + Almost everything that now looks normal in evangelical practice was unusual before Whitefield and ordinary after him. Preaching outside a church building. Preaching to a crowd that belongs to no one congregation. An itinerant ministry funded by collections, a direct appeal to the hearer to close with Christ before the sermon ends, a printed journal that lets readers follow the work while it is happening, and newspapers carrying advance notice of where the preacher will be next. He did not invent all of it. What he did was make it a pattern, and the pattern held. The nineteenth-century evangelicals went back to him constantly. Charles Spurgeon, who filled a London tabernacle of his own, read Whitefield’s life over and over and told the students of his college that Whitefield was the model he was trying to follow. J. C. Ryle, the bishop of Liverpool, gave him the first of the biographical chapters in Christian Leaders of the Last Century, ahead of Wesley. In Wales, Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland had been at the same work before he crossed the border, and in January 1743 he sat as moderator, which is to say in the chair, at their first association at Watford near Caerphilly, with the hymn writer William Williams among those present. The church that grew out of those societies, the Calvinistic Methodists of Wales, traces itself to that connexion, which is the old word for a group of societies bound together under one preacher. In England, Lady Huntingdon’s chapels carried it on. The most eloquent testimony came from the man he had fought with. Wesley preached the funeral sermon on 18 November 1770, as Whitefield had asked. He had not changed his mind about predestination and never did. What he told that crowded Tabernacle was that the fundamental doctrines Whitefield everywhere insisted on could be summed up in two words, the new birth and justification by faith, and he set beside them the man’s unparalleled zeal, his indefatigable activity, his tender-heartedness to the afflicted and his charity to the poor. The two streams of Methodism stayed apart. The two men did not. One voice came from a quarter that had every reason to stay silent. Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved young woman in Boston, published an elegy on Whitefield in October 1770 that was reprinted in Boston, Newport, Philadelphia and London and carried her name across the Atlantic; three years later she became the first African American to publish a book of poems. That a woman held in slavery in the town he had preached in wrote his elegy is a fact worth holding alongside his own record on slavery rather than in place of it.

(†) Where he fell short: he campaigned to bring slavery into Georgia, and defended it from Scripture. + This is not a charge later generations invented for him. It is in his own letters, and the arc of it is worse than a single lapse. It begins well. Riding south through the plantation colonies in the winter of 1739, Whitefield reached Savannah and wrote, on 23 January 1740, an open letter to the inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas that took his life in his hands. "I must inform you, in the meekness and gentleness of Christ, that I think God has a quarrel with you, for your abuse of and cruelty to the poor negroes." He set out the case in detail: the enslaved worked as hard, if not harder, than the horses their owners rode, and they were used worse than the dogs fondled at their masters’ tables. He demanded that they be taught the faith, and he answered the standard excuse for withholding it in a sentence that cut the ground from under the whole system: "Blacks are just as much, and no more, conceived and born in sin, as white men are." Slaveholders were furious, and the letter was still being quoted against him years later. Eleven years on, he wrote a private letter from Bristol, dated 22 March 1751, that reverses himself. Georgia had been founded with slavery prohibited; Whitefield had come to think the prohibition was ruining the colony and starving Bethesda, and he lobbied the trustees to lift it. "As for the lawfulness of keeping slaves," he wrote, "I have no doubt, since I hear of some that were bought with Abraham’s money, and some that were born in his house." He argued that the Gibeonites, the people Israel put to cutting wood and drawing water, were doomed to perpetual slavery, that servants in the apostles’ letters had probably been slaves, that liberty is sweet to those born free but perhaps less irksome to those who never tasted it, and that it was plain to a demonstration that hot countries could not be cultivated without African labour. He granted that the traffic was a trade not to be approved of, then said it would be carried on whether or not he approved, so he might as well buy a good number and treat them well. The prohibition was lifted in 1751, and Bethesda was worked by enslaved people thereafter. He was answered in his own century by Christians reading the same Bible. The law he appealed to condemns the trade that supplied him at the point of capture: "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:16), and Paul puts enslavers in a list of the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10). Where Paul does address a real slaveholder, he tells him to receive the man back "no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother" (Philemon 1:16), which is not a charter for the plantations. And the verse Whitefield himself preached from as freely as anyone leaves no room for a permanent caste: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). John Wesley, who differed with him on predestination, drew the opposite conclusion from the same Scripture and published Thoughts upon Slavery in 1774, refusing to allow that any necessity whatever could excuse what he called villainy. What makes the failure instructive is that Whitefield could see the cruelty and not the institution. He knew the enslaved were made in God’s image and said so in print when it was dangerous to. He then let the needs of a charity, and the convenience of a colony, persuade him that the thing itself was lawful. A man who taught a generation that self-righteousness is the last idol to go was not exempt from the rule.