WHITEFIELD, George, Sylvester Hassell George Whitefield (1714-1770), a native of Gloucester, England, was, probably, the most persuasive preacher since the days of the Apostles. After years of early dissipation and then years of rigid Pharisaism, which was so excessive as almost to carry him to his grave, he experienced a hope in Christ in 1735, before the conversion of either of the Wesleys or any other member of the Methodist “Holy Club” at Oxford. He began to preach in 1736, and, at the solicitation of the Wesleys, he embarked for Georgia in December, 1737.
Excluded from the pulpits of the Established “Church of England,” he began open field-preaching in 1739. On preaching tours he visited Scotland twelve times, Ireland three times, and America seven times; and he preached in almost every important district in England and Wales. His audiences sometimes numbered ten, twenty or even thirty thousand. He had a rich and powerful voice. In the thirty-four years of his active ministry it is estimated that he preached eighteen thousand sermons, or, on an average, ten a week, often in the open air, and with great vehemence of voice and gesture.
His style was severely simple, and his language that of the common people. He made no display of human learning or reasoning. He spoke most fervently from his heart, and what he said went to the hearts of his hearer. Even such unspiritual persons as Hume and Franklin, Bolingbroke and Chesterfield, were naturally overwhelmed by his resistless eloquence.
But the glory of Whitefield’s preaching was its heart-kindled and heart-melting gospel. So simple was his nature that glory to God and good will to man had so filled it that there was room for little more. Having no church to found, no family to enrich, and no memory to immortalize, he was simply the ambassador of God, and inspired with its genial, piteous spirit, he soon became himself a living gospel.” “Of no other preacher,” remarks Mr. Lecky, “could it be more truly said that he preached ‘as a dying man to dying men.’ His favorite maxim was that a preacher, whenever he entered the pulpit, should look upon it as the last time he might preach, and the last time his people might hear.
To his vivid imagination Heaven and Hell, death and judgment, appeared palpably present. His voice was sometimes choked with tears; he stamped vehemently on the pulpit floor; every nerve was strained; his whole frame was convulsed with emotion. He had nothing of the arrogant and imperious spirit of Wesley. A more zealous, a more single-minded, a more truly amiable , a more purely unselfish man, it would be difficult to conceive.
Very few men have passed through so much obloquy with a heart so entirely unsoured, and have retained amid so much adulation so large a measure of deep and genuine humility. There was, indeed, not a trace of jealousy, ambition or rancor in his nature. With almost childish simplicity he was always ready to make a public confession of his faults.
On the question of predestination and election, there was, after Wesley preached and printed his “Sermon of Free Grace,” in 1740, a temporary alienation between him and Whitefield, and, after the latter’s death, an entire separation between their respective Societies. After the publication of Wesley’s “Sermon,” in consequence of drawing a lot, as already mentioned, Whitefield wrote him: “I have often questioned whether in so doing you did not tempt the Lord. A due exercise of religious prudence without a lot would have directed you in that matter. Besides, I never heard that you inquired of God whether or not election was a gospel doctrine. But I fear, taking it for granted it was not, you only inquired whether you should be silent or preach and print against it. I am apt to think one reason why God should so suffer you to be deceived was, that hereby a special obligation should be laid upon me faithfully to declare the Scripture doctrine of election, that thus the Lord might give me a fresh opportunity of seeing what was in my heart, and whether I would be true to his cause or not. Perhaps God has laid this difficult task upon me, even to see whether I am willing to forsake all for him or not.” He reminded Wesley of the latter’s own confession that the Lord had once before given him a wrong lot.
Under the Holy Spirit’s effectual blessing of his own eternal truth reached by Edwards and Whitefield, there was, for some twenty-five years, a great revival of spiritual life in the British American Colonies, from 1734 to 1760; and it was, as the learned and accurate Professor Henry Boynton Smith shows, like all the genuine reformations of the church in modern times, a staying of the prevailing Arminianism, and a revival of scriptural predestinarianism, of the great Bible truths of God’s sovereignty, and of salvation by grace alone, and justification by faith alone.
Generally throughout the Colonies there were large in gatherings into the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist communions. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, three-fourths of all the American churches were predestinarian; and the people of this country were more honest, earnest, sincere, truthful, serious, solemn and reverential than they have ver been since (see Prof. J.L. Diman’s “Religion in America, 1776-1876,” published in the Centennial Number of the North American Review, January, 1876).
After the demoralizing influences of the Revolutionary War had, to a considerable extent, passed away (for the demoralization of the people is much the worst result of wars), there was, at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, under similar predestinarian preaching and similar Divine blessing, another extensive spiritual revival in the United States. (Hassell’s History ppg 549- 551)