At once the "weight of sin" was lifted, the "Spirit of mourning" was taken away, and his soul was filled with the "pardoning love of God." Hour on end afterward he could not cease from singing psalms. Gradually his joy became "more settled" but it "abode and increased" throughout the rest of his life. While convalescing at Gloucester from the effects of his spiritual struggle, Whitefield read and prayed over the Scriptures, line by line, word by word, laying the doctrinal foundations of his whole preaching thesis. First there was "free grace"; second, the necessity for being "justified only by faith in the sight of God"; third, the "new birth" through conversion, and fourth, the exclusive saving of the "elect," the point which later divided him from John Wesley. IV Thus fortified, George Whitefield began. He prayed with the poor in the byways, he prayed with the prisoners in jail and he prayed alone. Word of his faith and works came to Bishop Benson of Gloucester who offered to ordain him a deacon though at the age of twenty-one he was two years under the usual requirement. It was on June 20, 1736, a year after Jonathan Edwards had started stoking to steam up religion in New England, that the Bishop laid his hands upon the new disciple who was to travel farther in the name of his Lord than any other throughout all time. "I gave myself up to be a martyr for Him who hung upon the Cross for me," Whitefield said of his ordination. "When I went up to the altar, I could think of nothing but Samuel's standing, as a little child, before the Lord, with a linen ephod." The very next Sunday he preached his first sermon in the Church of St. Mary de Crypt at Gloucester where he had been baptized. It was on "The Necessity and Benefits of a Religious Society," reciting the blessings of mutual exhortation as against "revellings and banquetings," all in severely logical firstly to thirdly style. Whitefield says "some mocked yet most seemed struck and fifteen were driven mad." A perusal of his manuscript, however, discloses neither cause for ridicule nor provocation to insanity. It was quite regular and many a substantial churchman could sleep through it in any age. After receiving his bachelor's degree at Oxford, Whitefield preached in various charges from the Tower chapel in London to a rural parish in Hampshire, with a progressive growth in the number and fervor of his auditory till the name of the young divine of twenty-two had so spread that when he determined to go to Georgia on an errand of the Lord in 1737 weeping multitudes accorded him a triumphant farewell, the first of seven that marked each of his embarkations for the New World. It seems that the Wesleys had invited him to Georgia. Charles wrote an impassioned poem to him beginning: "Servant of God, thy summons hear!" and John asked: "What if thou art the man to come over and help us?" John had been having his troubles with magistrates after barring from the communion table the former Sophia Christina Hopkey, whose troth with him had been broken and who now was the wife of another man. The call across the sea thrilled religious England as much as it did Whitefield himself. From Gloucester to Bristol the people thronged the churches and followed him through the streets. The "enthusiasm" pained the staid regular clergy, who branded Whitefield a "spiritual pickpocket" and closed their doors to him. But his star kept on rising and was riding high when he preached his valedictory, solemnly adjuring the sobbing penitents that they "might see him no more." He never forgot this postscript upon subsequent departures for America and it was always effective. While Whitefield's ship lay off the Downs awaiting a favorable wind, John Wesley's vessel came in from America. The departure of Whitefield weighed on Wesley's soul. He prayed and sought Scriptural guidance and finally resorted to the casting of a lot under divine blessing-a measure by which he made many of his momentous life decisions—and the drawing was against Whitefield's setting forth. Wesley sent word. Then it was Whitefield's turn at supplication. He sensed an answer to his prayer and determined to sail on. It was not till the end of January, 1738, that the evangel craft cleared and then she had to call at Gibraltar with troops, Whitefield's shipboard "redcoat parish." Those troopers ceased from swearing, listened to preaching and even allowed themselves to be catechized. On the open Atlantic the skipper was converted and all "bad books and playing cards were cast into the sea." A contagious malignant fever scourged many into serious reflection and Whitefield, though himself stricken, crept over the decks administering medicine and saving both souls and bodies. Whitefield landed at Savannah on May 5, taking leave of the ship's company in a flood of tears. He received respectful treatment from the magistrates who had been at odds with Wesley and promptly plunged into his work. It was a torrid summer. The sun-baked earth burned his feet and in the comparative cool of the nights he inured himself to future hardships by learning to sleep on the ground. The while he was preaching about the colony and exhorting from door to door, he developed his plan for the Orphan House that was first conceived by Gov ernor Oglethorpe and Charles Wesley. He made it his own project and it proved to be his talking point to the end of his days. The redeemed were provided with a conscience fund and surely the breadwinner of the fatherless was worthy of his own pittance wherewithal to be sheltered, clothed and fed on his holy mission. Anxious to complete his own preparations, Whitefield sailed back to England on September 6 and, on January 14, 1739, he was ordained a priest of the Established Church. The Georgia Trustees offered him the "living" at Savannah. He refused it but accepted a grant of five hundred acres for his beloved Orphan House. His eyes were fixed on America. He had no patience with settling down. in a comfortable pastorate. He had the primal apostolic call. That is what took him to Fetter Lane and thence to preach in the fields. Those Fetter Lane meetings with the Wesleys and the others were to Whitefield what "third heavens" were to Paul, one commentator says, and became the "school of his spirit in which he caught the holy and heroic impulse to challenge the Scribes and Pharisees." Church doors swung shut in his face. Bishops turned cold to his "enthusiasm.” And then Whitefield forsook the righteous and went out among sinners. "I thought it might be doing the service of my Creator," said Whitefield, "Who had a mountain for his pulpit and the heavens for a sounding board and Who, when His gospel was refused by the Jews, sent His servants into the highways and hedges." So he went out from Bristol into barbaric Kingswood, the habitat of savage miners, brutalized by unmitigated toil, despised outcasts who had never known the amenities of church-going and who had stones and staves as well as jeers and gibes for the first preacher to dare to come among them. Barred from the sanctuary, he raised a cross upon a hillside in the midst of a glowering mob. Thus of him it was written: Whitefield preached to colliers grim- "The Ballad of Beau Brocade." From a scant ten score of surly ruffians the Kingswood congregation grew to twenty thousand singing souls. The swelling chorus of their hymns could be heard for two miles and the voice bearing the tidings to them is said to have carried almost half as far. "Having no righteousness of their own to renounce," Whitefield wrote of them, "they were glad to hear of a Jesus Who came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." He told of the "white gutters made by their tears which fell plentifully down their black cheeks as they came out of their coal pits" and rejoiced that "hundreds and hundreds were brought to full conversion." John Wesley, with the power that was to inspire the Methodist militants to go out to "make the world his parish," took up the battle of the Lord on the Bristol front while Whitefield swept on to greater and yet greater triumphs at Moorfields, Kennington Common and Black |