WHITEFIELD, George, was born at the Bell Inn, in the city of Gloucester, on the 16th of December 1714. He received his education at the grammar-school of that city, where he made some progress in classical learning; and his talents for elocution enabled him to appear to advantage in the speeches which he delivered before the corporation on their annual visitation. He was taken from school before he was fifteen, and, as his mother’s circumstances were by this time much on the decline, he began to assist her in the business of the tavern. At the age of eighteen he was entered as a servitor at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he formed an acquaintance with Charles and John Wesley, and several other young men under religions impressions, who “lived by rule and method,” and were therefore called Methodists. Whitefield soon adopted their opinions and manners; and so far did his enthusiastic disposition carry their ascetic practices, that his health became seriously injured. After a severe illness, which brought him to the brink of the grave, he found it necessary to retire to Gloucester for the benefit of his native air. His general character there, his demeanour at church, his visiting the poor, and praying with the prisoners, attracted the notice of Dr Benson, bishop of Gloucester, who informed him, that although he had resolved to ordain none under three and twenty (and Whitefield was only twenty-one), he should think it his duty to ordain him whenever he applied for holy orders. This offer Whitefield accepted, and was made deacon in 1736. The week following he returned to Oxford, took his degree, and diligently employed himself in the instruction of the poor and the prisoners. During the two succeeding years, by his preaching in London, Bath, Bristol, and other places, the fame of his eloquence was widely diffused, and immense multitudes everywhere attended upon him. In the year 1736 he went to officiate as minister at Dummeer in Hampshire; but being invited to join the Wesleys and other friends, who had gone out as missionaries to a new colony in Georgia, he went to London to wait on the trustees for Georgia. During his residence in the metropolis, he preached with remarkable success to crowded assemblies; and so great was the fame of his eloquence, that on Sunday mornings, long before day, the strects were filled with people going to hear him, with lanterns in their hands. In the latter end of December 1737 he left London and embarked for Georgia, which he reached in May 1738. After a residence of three months there, he found it necessary to return to England, in order that he might receive priest’s orders, and that he might raise contributions for founding and supporting an orphan-house in the colony.

The separation of the Methodists, and their organization as a distinct sect, was daily becoming more inevitable; for after his return the clergy received him with great coldness, and excluded him from most of the parochial pulpits. He was therefore compelled to adopt some new method to preserve his usefulness. He accordingly went and preached in the open air to the colliers in the vicinity of Bristol; a numerous and lawless race, who had been totally neglected by the parochial clergy, and were as ignorant and savage as heathens. The second and third time of his preaching out of doors, his audience greatly increased, till it amounted to 20,000 persons. “The first discovery of their being affected,” says Whitefield, “was by seeing the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their black cheeks.”

In August 1739 he embarked a second time for America, where he remained nearly two years. During his absence, however, his popularity had sensibly declined at home. The Moravians had made inroads upon the society, and John Wesley had not only preached, but printed, a sermon in favour of sinless perfection and universal redemption, and had exerted himself still more earnestly against the Calvinistic doctrines, to which Whitefield was strongly attached. The latter earnestly desired to avoid all disputes, and exhorted Wesley to brotherly kindness and forbearance; but the conduct of injudicious partisans on both sides soon rendered a separation inevitable. Shortly after his separation from Wesley, Whitefield’s friends built a large shed for him near the Foundery (Wesley’s Church). As it was merely a temporary structure, to screen the audience from cold and rain, he called it the Tabernacle. A fresh excitement immediately began, immense congregations were formed, and new scenes of usefulness opened upon him daily. Having been earnestly invited to visit Scotland by Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, the founders of the Secession Church, he accepted the invitation in the year 1741, and commenced his labours in the Secession meeting-house in Dunfermline. Whitefield however was too liberal in his principles to limit the benefit of his services to any sect. “In every building,” he said, “there were outside and inside workmen, and the latter was his province.” And having differed from his new associates on this ground, he made a tour through the country, and with the greatest success preached in all the large towns to immense crowds. A large sum of money was contributed for the support of his orphan-school, and he was presented[7:21:875] with the freedom of the towns of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Stirling, Paisley, and Irvine.

From Scotland he went at the end of October into Wales, where he married Mrs James, a widow. His marriage, like Wesley’s, was not a happy one, and the death of his wife is said by one of his friends to have “set his mind much at liberty.” Whitefield was irritable, and impatient of contradiction; and even if his temper had been more happily constituted, his habits of life rendered him unfit for the duties of a husband and a father.

On his return to London, his enthusiasm led him to engage in a singular contest with the showmen and others who then exhibited in Moorfields during the Whitsun holidays, when, he said, Satan’s children kept up their annual rendezvous. “This,” says Mr Southey, “was a sort of pitched battle with Satan, and Whitefield displayed some generalship upon the occasion.” Attended by a large congregation of “praying people,” he began at six o’clock in the morning. Thousands who were waiting there for the usual sports all flocked around him. “Glad was I to find,” says he, “that I had for once as it were got the start of the devil. Being thus encouraged, I ventured out again at noon, when the fields seemed all white, ready, not for the Redeemer’s, but Beelzebub’s harvest.” Thinking that, like St Paul, he should now, in a metaphorical sense, be called to fight with wild beasts, he took for his text, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” “I could scarce help smiling,” says he, “to see thousands, when one of the choicest servants of Satan was trumpeting to them, upon observing me in my black robes and my pulpit, all to a man deserting him, and flocking to hear the gospel. But this, together with a complaint that they had taken many pounds less that day than usual, so enraged the owners of the booths, that when I came to preach a third time in the evening, in the midst of the sermon a Merry-Andrew got upon a man’s shoulders, and advancing near the pulpit, attempted to slash me with a long heavy whip several times. Soon afterwards they got a recruiting sergeant with his drums and fifes to pass through the congregation; but I desired the people to make way for the king’s officer, which was quietly done.” When the uproar became, as it sometimes did, so great as to overpower his single voice, he called the voices of all his people to his aid and began singing; and thus, what with singing, praying, and preaching, he continued upon the ground till the darkness made it time to break up. So great was the impression produced in this extraordinary scene, that he received 1000 notes from persons under conviction, and soon after about 350 persons were received into the society in one day.

In August 1744 he embarked a third time for America, where he continued his usual course of itinerant preaching for upwards of three years. On returning to England, after an absence of nearly four years, with a constitution shattered by his incessant labours and the unfavourable climate, he found his congregation at the Tabernacle nearly dispersed; and such was the depression of his own circumstances, that he was obliged to sell his household furniture to pay his orphan-house debts. But he now obtained an important accession to his cause, and a zealous propagator of his sentiments, from a quarter whence it was least expected, in the person of the countess of Huntingdon. That noble lady, who was, in will at least, as munificent a patron to the followers of Whitefield as the Countess Matilda was to the papacy, invited him to her house at Chelsea as soon as he landed; and after he had twice officiated there, she wrote to him inviting him again, that some of the nobility might hear him. A large circle attended, among whom were Lords Chesterfield and Bolingbroke. The former complimented the preacher with his usual courtliness; the latter is said to have been much moved at the discourse. The countess appointed Whitefield one of her chaplains; and gave most efficient support to the Calvinistic Methodists, by building and endowing chapels in various parts of the country, and by erecting a college for training up young men for the ministry. The remaining years of Whitefield’s life were spent in the same incessant labours. He made several voyages to America; he visited Scotland thrice; he made a laborious excursion through the west and north of England, preaching, as usual, to immense multitudes; he visited Ireland twice, and on the second expedition narrowly escaped with his life from the fury of a Roman Catholic mob. It is stated by one who knew him well, that, “in the compass of a single week, and that for years, he spoke in general forty hours, and in very many sixty, and that to thousands.” These unremitting labours at length exhausted his vigour. On his return from America to England for the last time, Wesley was struck with the change in his appearance. “He seemed,” says he in his Journal, “to be an old man, being fairly worn out in his Master’s service, though he had hardly seen fifty years.” In 1769 he returned to America for the seventh and last time. His career was now drawing rapidly to a close. An asthmatic complaint had for some time been making inroads upon his constitution. When it first seized him, one of his friends expressed a wish that he would not preach so often, and his reply was, “I had rather wear out than rust out.” His death was at last somewhat sudden and unexpected. He arrived at Newbury in New England on the evening of 29th September 1770, with the intention of preaching there the next morning. On retiring to rest, however, he was much disturbed, and complained heavily of an oppression on his lungs. The symptom was fatal, for he expired on the following morning, in the fifty-sixth year of his age. According to his own desire, he was buried before the pulpit, in the presbyterian church of the town where he died.

The character of this zealous and enthusiastic divine, like most others possessing warm friends and bitter enemies, has been represented in very different lights. That he had much enthusiasm and some fanaticism in his disposition, is obvious both from his journals and letters. Like Wesley, he magnified the most trifling incidents into miraculous interpositions in his favour, and lent a ready faith to whatever marvels had a tendency to designate him as the favourite of God, or the peculiar object of Satan’s fury. But in spite of these defects, it cannot be denied that his unwearied diligence in doing good, his zeal for the truth, his piety, his self-denial, his benevolence and boundless charity, justly entitle him to a place among the most distinguished men of his age. Whitefield had neither the inclination nor the abilities to render himself, like Wesley, the head and absolute ruler of a party; but he was as superior to his distinguished coadjutor in openness and simplicity of character, and in the absence of vanity and personal ambition, as he was inferior to him in intellect and learning. Franklin has justly observed, that it would have been fortunate for his reputation if he had left no written works, for his writings of every kind are below mediocrity; they afford the measure of his knowledge and of his intellect, but not of his genius as a preacher. Whitefield’s great talent, in fact, was popular oratory; and though occasionally alloyed with some improprieties, both of language and manner, yet there was in all his discourses a force and vehemence and passion, a fervent and melting charity, and an earnestness of persuasion, which produced the most extraordinary effect upon all ranks and descriptions of people. Hume pronounced him the most ingenious preacher he had ever heard, and said it was worth while to go twenty miles to hear him. But perhaps the greatest proof of his persuasive powers was when he drew from Benjamin Franklin’s pocket the money which that clear, cool reasoner had determined not to give: it was for the orphan-house at Savannah. “I did not,” says the American philosopher, [7:21:876]“disapprove of the design; but as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen, and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expense, I thought it would have been better to have built the house at Philadelphia, and brought the children to it. This I advised, but he was resolute in his first project, rejected my counsel, and I therefore refused to contribute. I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and 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 of 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.” (b. q.)