Home  Classic Material George Whitefield George Whitefield - Bio
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George Whitefield - Bio |
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Written by Administrator
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Whitefield was the most effective pulpit orator of last century, and
perhaps of any century. He was thoroughly in earnest, and shrank from
none of the toils and privations incident to what he thought his path
of duty. His voice excelled both in melody and compass. e had a good
figure and a fine countenance, and his gestures were always appropriate
and full of grace. Franklin, who heard him frequently, learned to
distingiush easily between his sermons newly composed, and those which
he had often preached in the course of his travels. 'His delivery of
the latter,' he says, 'was so improved by frequent repetition, that
every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of the voice was so
perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interested
in the subject, one could not help being well pleased with the
discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind which one receives from an
excellent piece of music.'
Whitefield was born in 1714, at the Bell Inn, in the city of Gloucester. He gave his boyhood a very bad character after the common practice of eminent pietists. His mother was early left a widow, and as soon as George was able, he assisted her in the public-house, and in the end 'put on his blue apron and his snuffers [scoggers or sleeves], washed mops, cleaned rooms, and became a professed and common drawer.
This drudgery was a condition of necessity, not of choice. He had been at a grammar-school, his fine voice had been so praised that he had been tempted to try the stage, and his religious feelings impelled him to the service of the church. Hearing how cheaply a young man might live at Oxford as a servitor, he entered the university at the age of eighteen in that capacity. The students called Methodists, because they lived by rule and method, were then exciting great attention, and Whitefield's heart yearned towards them, and after a while he passed into their fellow-ship, and rivalled the most ardent in devotion and austerity.
'God only knows,' he writes, 'how many nights I have lain upon my bed groaning under what I felt. Whole days and weeks have I spent in lying prostrate on the ground in silent or vocal prayer.'
He chose the worst food, and affected mean apparel; he made himself remarkable by leaving off powder in his hair, when every one else was powdered, because he thought it unbecoming a penitent; and he wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes, as visible signs of humility. He would kneel under the trees in Christ's Church, walk in silent prayer, shivering the while with cold, till the great bell summoned him to his college for the night. He kept Lent so strictly that, except on Saturdays and Sundays, his only food was coarse bread and sage-tea, without sugar. The end was, that before the termination of the forty days, he had scarcely strength enough left to creep up stairs, and was under a physician for many weeks.
He was ordained deacon in 1736, and after several engagements as curate, sailed for Georgia at the invitation of Wesley. At the end of a year he returned to England, to solicit subscriptions for an orphan-house he had established in Savannah, and which continued to be one of the chief cares of his life. His eloquence was in nothing more apparent than in the ease with which he drew money from the unwilling and indifferent. From a London audience he once took a thousand pounds, then considered a prodigious subscription. Prudence in the person of Franklin could not resist his persuasive appeals. Franklin disapproved of the orphan-house at Sa
vannah, thinking Philadelphia the proper place for its erection, and he says:
'I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give the copper; another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably, that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all.'
Whitefield's life was spent as a travelling-preacher. He generally made a yearly round through England and Scotland, and went several times to Ireland. He repeatedly visited America, and traversed the whole extent of the British possessions there. Wherever he appeared, crowds flocked to listen to him. In London, he sometimes preached early in the morning, and in the dark and cold of winter the streets near the chapel used to be thronged with eager listeners bearing lanterns in their hands. When he took his departure from a place, he was usually followed by a troop of weeping disciples. In Bristol, especially, the fervour he awakened was extraordinary. There, the churches being closed against him, he commenced preaching in the fields to the savage colliers of Kingswood.
His first open-air sermon was preached on the afternoon of Saturday, 17th February 1739, upon a mount, in a place called Rose Green, to an audience of about two hundred. He repeated the experiment, and enormous congregations grew around him. The deep silence of his rude auditors was the first proof that he had impressed them, and soon he saw white gutters made by the tears which plentifully fell down their black cheeks—black as they came out of their coal-pits. 'The open firmament above me,' says he, 'the prospect of the adjacent fields, with the sight of thousands and thousands, some in coaches, some on horseback, and some in the trees, and at times all affected and drenched in tears together; to which sometimes was added the solemnity of the approaching evening, was almost too much. for, and quite overcame me.'
The triumphs of many popular preachers have been confined to the vulgar, but the cultivated, and even the sceptical, confessed Whitefield's power. Hume, Chesterfield, and Bolingbroke heard him with surprise and admiration; and the Countess of Huntingdon, who made him her chaplain, introduced him to the highest circles of rank and fashion. He cast his lot among the Methodists, but his aim was to preach the gospel, and not to build up a sect. With Wesley he differed on the question of freewill—Wesley being an Arminian, and White-field a Calvinist; but Whitefield, though steadfast in his opinions, was not disposed to waste his energy in wrangling with his able coadjutor. Whitefield by eminence was a preacher; Wesley was more than a preacher—he was a first-rate administrator, and the great religious organization which bears his name is the attestation of his peculiar genius.
Like Wesley, Whitefield entertained some odd notions about marriage, which, as little in the one case as the other, contributed to happiness. While he was in America in the spring of 1740, he applied to two of his friends, a Mr. D. and Mrs. D., to ask if they would give him their daughter to wife, at the same time telling them, that they need not be afraid of sending him a refusal, 'for I bless God,' said he, 'if I know anything of my own heart, I am free from that foolish passion which the world calls love. I write, only because I believe it is the will of God, that I should alter my state; but your denial will fully convince me that your daughter is not the person appointed by God for me. But I have sometimes thought Miss E. would be my helpmate, for she has often been impressed upon my heart.' The proposal came to nothing, and the following year he was married in England to Mrs. James of following year a widow, who was between thirty and forty, and, by his own account, neither rich nor
beautiful, but having once been gay, was now ' a despised follower of the Lamb.' They had one child, who died in infancy, and their union was not full of pleasantness. They did not live happily together, and 'her death in 1768 set his mind much at rest.'
Whitefield died in America, at Newbury Port, near Boston, on Sunday morning, 30th September 1770, at the age of fifty-six.
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