A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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but not given responsibility for washing the surplice) and 1737 (when her salary was raised and she was given the added responsibility of washing the surplice.) See Chamberlayne, ed., Vestry Book of Stratton Major Parish, 6, 30.
69. Parent, Foul Means, 257.
70. Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practices in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-century Virginia (New Haven: Yale, 2010), 35–36, 139–40; Joan R. Gundersen, “The Non-institutional Church: The Religious Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church (December 1982): 347–57. See Nelson, Blessed Company, 214–17 on the difficulty of interpreting evidence about the location of baptism.
71. John Wall, ed., George Herbert: the Country Parson, the Temple (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 66–74.
72. Park Rouse, Jr., James Blair of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 24.
In the fall of 1740 and the winter of 1741, a shock wave ran through the English colonies in North America. George Whitefield (1714–70), a young English priest who had come to the colonies for the second time in order to support the Bethesda Orphanage in Savannah, ventured north on a preaching tour. He arrived by ship in New England in mid-September. After forty-five days of itinerant preaching, he went on to the middle colonies, where he would spend two months, almost half of them in the cities of New York and Philadelphia.1 From there he headed south, passing through Maryland and Virginia and arriving in Savannah in December of 1740. He devoted a month to preaching in the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia and returned to England in January 1741. As he traveled, particularly in New England and the middle colonies, he drew huge crowds, at times as many as fifteen thousand. He became the first true American celebrity, and his death (in the midst of his seventh and final visit to America) was the first to be noted in newspapers throughout the colonies.2 Though a clergyman of the Church of England, he soon established ties of friendship with revivalistic preachers of other denominations—Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), Presbyterian Gilbert Tennant (1703–64), and Reformed pastor Theodore Frelinghuysen (1691–1748)—knitting together their local revivals into a general and “Great Awakening” in the American colonies.
Whitefield’s participation in the Awakening was initially a cause of pride for the colonial Church of England. He was a leading preacher, a magnet for large crowds, who was a member of their denomination. They welcomed him to their pulpits. Yet almost from the moment he began to speak, Church of England clergy had misgivings. They learned that he used extemporaneous prayer, rather than confining himself to the fixed forms of the Book of Common Prayer. In conversations with them, moreover, Whitefield explicitly rejected a central element of high church covenant theology—the necessity of episcopal succession for a validly ordained ministry. In colony after colony, therefore, local clergy of the colonial Church of England began to criticize what they saw as Whitefield’s lack of regard for the basic elements of doctrine and liturgy.
Squabbles with clergy of his church were, therefore, a continuing element of Whitefield’s preaching tour. A meeting between Whitefield and a group of Church of England clergy in Boston that included Timothy Cutler and Commissary Roger Price (1696–1762) resulted in such wide disagreements that Whitefield did not even ask to preach in congregations of the Church of England in that city.3 Hearing of Whitefield’s New England tour, William Vesey (1674–1746), the commissary in New York, declined to invite him to preach at New York City’s Trinity Church. In Philadelphia, clergyman Richard Peters interrupted Whitefield’s preaching at Christ Church in order to point out what he believed to be doctrinal errors; soon afterwards Commissary Archibald Cummings (d. 1741) denied Whitefield any further access to Church of England pulpits in the area.4 In Charleston, Alexander Garden (1685–1756), the bishop’s commissary, refused communion to Whitefield and attempted to suspend him from the ministry. Only in Virginia, where Whitefield accepted James Blair’s invitation to preach at Bruton Parish in Williamsburg, did Whitefield remain on good terms with a commissary. Yet even Commissary Blair wrote to the Bishop of London soon afterwards to say that if, as he had since heard by rumor, Whitefield was “under any censure or prohibition to preach,” he would abide by it on future occasions.5
Whitefield, who always had an eye for the dramatic, discovered a way to use these disagreements to increase interest in his tour. On arriving in a community, he asked to preach at the local Church of England congregation. If given permission, he would then deliver a sermon in which he attacked what most of his fellow clergy regarded as basic doctrine of their denomination. Pamphlets by Whitefield published in 1740 gave some indication of the scope of his criticism; in them, he denounced Bishop Edmund Gibson of London and Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson, both highly respected by most eighteenth century members of the Church of England. When the local clergy responded to him with criticism or declined to issue further invitations to preach, Whitefield complained of persecution. The news of the church fight would spread, and Whitefield would soon be preaching to curious crowds, either outdoors or in the Congregational, Reformed, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, to which he was increasingly invited.
Fig. 10 The portable pulpit that George Whitefield used for outdoor preaching.
Sentimentalist Preaching and the New Birth
Whitefield’s ability to capitalize on church fights may have won publicity in the short run. Taken by itself, however, it could not account for the sustained interest in and the continuing impact of his preaching. There was another cause for his popularity—something new both in his message and in the way in which he delivered it that met the needs of the people of his day. Those critics who detected in Whitefield a departure from the moderate enlightened faith that was the religious inheritance of early eighteenth century Christians were correct; they would have also been correct had they suggested that his new message would influence the form of tradition that would be passed on to later generations.
Most clergy of the colonial Church of England agreed with John Locke’s affirmation in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that the “Understanding” (i.e., the intellect) was “the most elevated faculty of the soul, … employed with greater and more constant delight than any other.”6 They recognized that short-term human actions were