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The Library Of Religious Biography is a series of original biographies on important religious figures throughout American and British history.

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The Divine Dramatist

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Foreword, by Nathan O. Hatch.....................ixAcknowledgments..................................xiIntroduction.....................................xiii1 The Young Rake.................................12 Oxford Odd Fellow..............................163 London Boy Preacher............................304 Colonial Missionary............................495 London Field Preacher..........................666 American Awakener..............................877 A New Religious History........................1138 Scottish Stranger Preacher.....................1339 Women and Marriage.............................15610 Growing Up....................................17411 Revivals in a New Key.........................20112 An Uncommon Friendship........................22013 Dr. Squintum..................................23414 American Icon.................................24915 Final Scene...................................269A Note on the Sources............................288Index............................................297

Chapter One

I was born in Gloucester, in the month of December, 1714. My father and Mother kept the Bell Inn. The former died when I was two years old; the latter is now alive, and has often told me how she endured fourteen weeks' sickness after she brought me into the world but was used to say, even when I was an infant, that she expected more comfort from me than any other of her children. This, with the circumstance of my being born in an inn, has been often of service to me in exciting my endeavors to make good my mother's expectation, and so follow the example of my dear Saviour, who was born in a manger belonging to an inn.

So begins George Whitefield's gospel-sounding account of his nativity. The passage was written at age 26, by which time he had already established himself as the most sensational and controversial preacher in the great London metropolis. For one who had risen so far so fast, the analogy to Jesus in the manger was both terribly egocentric and, at the same time, perfectly natural. It expressed exactly the conflicting impulses that raged in the young evangelist, pitting a deep-set piety against a determined ambition to be "somebody" in the cause of Christ.

Besides offering an unequaled window into the psyche of the young evangelist, Whitefield's Journal remains the only source of information we have about his youth. When the didactic and self-promoting aims are stripped away from the text, several critical facts emerge that help to locate the formative influences of Whitefield's youth. Taken together, they provide indispensable clues to the character and qualities of the future evangelist.

First is family. Whitefield was born December 16, 1714, in the Bell Inn on Southgate Street, Bristol, the youngest of seven children. If his circumstances were not as bleak as the analogy to Bethlehem suggests, neither were they the usual stuff of which an Oxford gentleman was made. In the sharply stratified and hierarchical society of eighteenth-century England, Whitefield's family circumstances could best be summarized as one of declining status. His great-grandfather Samuel Whitefield was an Oxford graduate and rector of Rockhampton in Gloucestershire, and his grandfather Andrew succeeded Samuel at the family estate as a "private gentleman of means." But there the upward climb seems to have stopped. George's father, Thomas, began his career as an apprentice wine merchant in Bristol and eventually took over the ownership of the Bell Inn. Although a respectable establishment, the inn was not especially lucrative or prestigious. From the edge of gentility, the family had declined at a time when many other mercantile families were moving in the opposite direction.

The slide grew even sharper when George's father died suddenly at age 35, leaving a widow, Elizabeth, and seven children. In 1724 Elizabeth sought to recoup some losses by marrying an ironmonger named Capel Longden. The marriage proved disastrous. After failing to wrest control of the inn from Elizabeth, Longden took what he could, deserted the family, and eventually filed for divorce. Of the marriage itself, Whitefield says practically nothing except that Longden's departure was a godsend to his "troubled Mother." It was undoubtedly a relief to young George as well. As a result, however, Whitefield would grow up without a strong father figure in his life.

George's older brothers helped to run the inn and eventually owned it. But it was George's mother who exercised the major influence on his childhood. From earliest memory he recalled her singling him out as the son who would make something of himself and the family. As long as she ran the inn she refused to let him work there. Both mother and elder siblings protected George from the world and held out high hopes for him. Inasmuch as earlier generations had made their mark in the Church of England, Elizabeth pointed George in that direction too. A clerical career would recapture the family's lost distinction and reestablish it on the fringes of English polite society.

Though Whitefield linked himself to Bethlehem, his mother was no Mary, nor — her name notwithstanding — was she a New Testament Elizabeth. Her vision for George was probably more social than spiritual. There was certainly no deep spiritual concern or biblical instruction in Elizabeth comparable to that of a Susannah Wesley or an Esther Edwards. Nor did it ever occur to her to depart from the established church or to plumb the depths of religious experience for herself. In fact, Whitefield wrote to his mother in later life urging her to move beyond her nominal faith and examine her heart for evidence of the "New Birth."

The religious career that Elizabeth Whitefield encouraged was powerful, but more in terms of a lost status than any of the internal calling or character formation for ministry found in many dissenters' homes. In contrast to Baptist, Congregational, and Presbyterian dissenters, George grew up with no alienation from the established church, without even a nonconformist's sense that some "truer" or more "faithful" recovery lay outside the state church. Recovering lost status was as significant as kindling spirituality as far as the family and young George were concerned.

The psychological effect of declining status engendered a deep sense of inferiority in Whitefield. This sense, moreover, was not simply subjective; in the context of eighteenth-century society, it was a social fact. In the finely gradated society of eighteenth-century England, the only distinction that really mattered was that between "gentleman" and commoner. In George, this reality kindled a mounting ambition. He could not claim gentility, but he could reclaim it and win back the respect due his family and himself. Yet even while he continued to covet respectability and status, he nonetheless dismissed the trappings of the world, including the church. This love/hate relationship with the world, status, and achievement was evident throughout his life.

In part through his mother's influence, and in part through his own fertile imagination, Whitefield resolved this inferiority-based tension through an all-compelling sense of personal destiny. Unlike the...