A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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intellectual conviction of the wisdom of some courses of action and the folly of others that shaped human choices. The content and form of their sermons—intellectual treatises read from manuscripts without eye contact or dramatic flourish—were shaped, therefore, to educate the mind without exciting the passions.
As Whitefield and others came to recognize, however, logical demonstration did not always bring personal conviction or amendment of life. Indeed, skeptical thinkers, such as John Toland (1670–1722), had begun to suggest that rational argument might disprove, rather than confirm the central truths of the Christian faith. Toland and other skeptics forced more orthodox Christians to reexamine their premises. Some of these more orthodox believers concluded that rational discourse by itself was not a sufficient tool for Christian proclamation. The good news had to touch the affections as well as the mind.7 Those clergy who sought to follow this route could draw on the sentimentalist theories of the third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1671–1713) and of Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), in which human affections played a more central role. Accepting the sentimentalist premise that human action did not always arise from dispassionate logic, such clergy abandoned the reading of sermons and adopted extemporaneous styles of delivery and broad dramatic gestures in the hope of reaching their parishioners on a more emotional level.8 When they did so, they found that their new emphasis provided one effective antidote to skepticism. Parishioners awaited their sermons with excitement, traveled long distances to hear particularly noted speakers, and began to express a new seriousness about religion.
The change in the form of preaching was accompanied by a corresponding change in content. Moderate enlightened clergy sought intellectual conviction on the part of their auditors (the eighteenth-century term for as those who listened to preaching). Sentimentalist clergy, in contrast, looked for signs of change in the affections; it was not enough to understand intellectually the basic Reformation doctrine of justification by faith; one had to “feel” that doctrine on a personal level. As sentimentalist clergy explained it, this usually involved despair at the realization that all human efforts ended in damnation, followed by a “new birth” in which the individual turned to a reliance on Jesus Christ.9
Whitefield was a particularly successful proponent of both the form and content of this new sentimentalist approach to preaching. His own life, about which he would write in a widely published journal, provided, moreover, a striking, concrete example of the new birth. He was the son of a widow who ran a tavern in Gloucester, England. As a child, he confessed, he had been addicted to “lying, filthy talking, and foolish jesting.” He stole from his mother, broke the Sabbath, played cards, read romances, and dropped out of school at fifteen. His mother remarried, however, and Whitefield was able to return to his studies. It was the beginning of a new chapter in his life. He completed grammar school and was admitted to Oxford as a scholarship student.10
At the university, Whitefield joined a prayer and study group led by John (1703–91) and Charles (1707–88) Wesley. Other university students referred to the group as the “the Reforming Club,” “the Holy Club,” or, for their systematic method of pursuing piety, “the Methodists.” Though, as his participation in the group indicated, Whitefield was concerned about the Christian faith and life, he was unable to overcome his own doubts until a dramatic and emotional conversion left him prostrate and weeping.11 On a doctor’s suggestion, he withdrew from school for a time, but he never after doubted his Christian faith.
The events of the following years reinforced Whitefield’s conviction that the conversion had been a turning point in his life. The Bishop of Gloucester, Martin Benson (1689–1752), sought him out, gave him a small scholarship for the purchase of books, and offered to ordain him before the canonical age of twenty-three. Once he began preaching, Whitefield found that people responded to his message, whether he spoke in London churches, in the American colonies (which, on the advice of the Wesleys, he first visited in 1737), or in fields (as he began to do in 1739).12 Before his life ended, he would deliver an approximate total of eighteen thousand sermons in England, Scotland (fourteen visits), Ireland (two visits), and America (seven visits). Supporters said that his voice was so rich that he could bring people to tears with the mere saying of the word Mesopotamia. He could be heard by thirty thousand and yet speak intimately to a small prayer group.13
While he recognized that not all would have—or needed—conversion experiences as dramatic as his own, he was absolutely convinced that, without some experience of new birth, salvation was impossible. That experience had to involve, moreover, real personal struggle:
My dear friends, there must be a principle wrought in the heart by the Spirit of the Living God. … If I were to ask how long it is since you loved God, you would say, As long as you can remember; you never hated God, you know no time when there was enmity in your heart against God. Then, unless you were sanctified very early, you never loved God in your life. My dear friends, I am more particular in this, because it is a most deceitful delusion, whereby so many people are carried away, that they believe already. … It is the peculiar work of the Spirit of God to convince us of our unbelief—that we have got no faith. … Now, my dear friends, did God ever show to you that you have no faith? Were you ever made to bewail a hard heart of unbelief? Was it ever the language of your heart, Lord, enable me to call thee my Lord and my God? Did Jesus Christ ever convince you in this manner? Did he ever convince you of your inability to be close with Christ, and make you to cry out to God to give you faith? If not, do not speak peace to your heart.14
Fig. 11 John Wesley and his Friends at Oxford
Whitefield’s reference to peace was an allusion to Jeremiah 6:14 (“They have healed the wounds of my people lightly, saying ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”).15 Converted Christians could not find peace until after they had first experienced what supporters of the Awakening came to call “legal fear”—the knowledge that one’s own efforts always fell short of fulfilling the Law of God.16
Whitefield had even stronger words for those “false doctors” who suggested that the New Testament concept of the new birth did not imply personal conversion:
Suppose any of these doctors were to come to any woman when her travailing pains were upon her, and she were crying out, and labour pains came on faster and faster, and they should stand preaching at the door, and say, Good woman, these are only metaphorical pains, this is only a bold expression of the Easterns, it is only metaphorical; I question whether the woman would not wish the doctor some of these metaphorical pains for talking so, which he would find real ones. … I am of an odd temper, and of such a temper, that I heartily wish they may be put under the pangs of the new birth, and know what it is by their own experience, know that there is nothing in nature more real than the new birth.17
Whitefield explained that the new birth created “a new understanding, a new will, … new affections, a renewed conscience, a renewed memory, [and] a renewed body.”18
Whitefield had rejected the high church argument that a valid ministry required