The Life And Ministry Of George Whitefield

Boyhood

George Whitefield was born in the Bell Inn, Gloucester, on December 16th, 1714. His father, Thomas Whitefield, was at first a wine merchant in Bristol, but afterwards became an inn-keeper; his mother was Elizabeth Edwards, of Bristol. The surroundings of the boy were not calculated to make him religious, yet in his mother’s heart there was a thoughtful love which did all that was possible to shield him from the worst temptations of his lot. As his father died in 1716, George, the last-born of his seven children, fell exclusively to the mother’s care. His boyhood was a wild, merry, thoughtless, sin-stained time. He confesses to lying, evil speaking, and petty thefts from his mother’s pocket; he spent much money in plays and entertainments; his “heart’s delight” was playing at cards and reading romances; Sabbath-breaking was a common sin, and at public worship, when present, he was generally irreverent. He was so reckless as to rush into the Dissenting meeting-house, and shout out the name of the worthy old minister—“Old Cole! Old Cole! Old Cole!” Even at this early, willful period, however, some thought of his future calling had found its way into his heart. Asked one day by one of Mr. Cole’s congregation what business he meant to follow, he saucily replied: “A minister; but I would take care never to tell stories in the pulpit like Old Cole.” A great conflict went on in his mind. He would read his Bible, and also books of devotion, stolen for the purpose; part of the money taken from his mother was given to the poor.

At Oxford

It was in 1732 that Whitefield, hardly yet eighteen years old, was entered as a servitor of Pembroke College, Oxford, his mother’s faithful love being the means of this happy change in his circumstances. Some of his friends used their influence with the master of the College; another friend lent him ten pounds upon a bond, to defray the expense of entering; and the master admitted him as a servitor without delay. He justified all the confidence that was placed in him. He toiled at his classics, lightened the burdens of his friends who stood as his money-securities, adhered to the religious practices he had formed at his last school. Law’s “Serious Call to a Divine Life” made him think in earnest of religion; the same writer’s “Christian Perfection” stirred him still more deeply. A long, dark, terrible conflict followed. His thoughts were so troubled, that, for some weeks, he scarce slept above three hours at a time. “God only knows,” he says, “how many nights I have lain upon my bed groaning under the weight I felt, and bidding Satan depart from me in the name of Jesus. Whole days and weeks how I spent in lying prostrate on the ground, and begging freedom from those proud, hellish thoughts that used to crowd in upon and distract my soul. But God made Satan drive out Satan. For these thoughts created such a self-abhorrence within me, that I never ceased wrestling with God till He blessed me with a victory over them. Self-love, self-will, pride and envy buffeted me in their turns, that I was resolved either to die or conquer. I wanted to see sin as it was, but feared, at the same time, lest the sight of it should terrify me to death. Having nobody to show me a better way, I thought to get peace and purity by outward austerities, acts of charity, observance of times and seasons, fasting, and prayer.” Still no peace was found. He was failing in health; part of one of his hands was quite black with his “neglect of the body”; he could scarce creep up-stairs for weakness. His tutor wisely called in the doctor. Left alone in his sick room, and liberated from the stern rule under which he had placed himself; above all, freed from the supposed necessity of doing something to find peace with God, his mind could turn to God Himself, and be taught by Him. About the end of the seventh week, “after having undergone innumerable buffetings of Satan, and many months’ inexpressible trials by night and day under the spirit of bondage, God was pleased at length to remove the heavy load, to enable me to lay hold on His dear Son by a living faith, and by giving me the Spirit of adoption, to seal me, as I humbly hope, even to the everlasting day of redemption. But oh! with what joy, joy unspeakable, even joy that was full of and big with glory, was my soul filled, when the weight of sin went off; and an abiding sense of the pardoning love of God, and a full assurance of faith broke in upon my disconsolate soul!”

Ordination—First Sermon—Popularity

Although Whitefield had been accustomed to visit the prison at Oxford almost from the time of his entering Pembroke College, and reading to the prisoners, he yet shrank from being ordained when his friends urged him to take orders. The warning of Scripture against a “novice” being made a minister, filled him with grave concern. Bishop Benson asked him to an interview, at which he said: “Notwithstanding I have declared I would not ordain anyone under three-and-twenty, yet I shall think it my duty to ordain you whenever you come for holy orders.” His course he felt, was now clear. The solemn event was anticipated with humble and devout feelings. The day preceding it was spent in abstinence and prayer; in the evening he retired to a hill near the town, and prayed fervently for about two hours in behalf of himself and those who were to be ordained with him. Next morning he rose early, and prayed over St. Paul’s Epistle to Timothy, and more particularly over that precept, “Let no one despise thy youth.” The good of souls was before him as his only principle of action.

His first sermon was preached on June 27th, 1736, in St. Mary de Crypt, Gloucester, to a large congregation. A complaint was made to good Bishop Benson that it had driven fifteen persons mad; the Bishop replied that he hoped the madness might not be forgotten before another Sunday. Soon afterwards he was asked to take the place of the curate of the Tower Chapel, London, for a short time. He went with fear and trembling, and preached his first sermon to a London audience in Bishopsgate Church on Sunday afternoon, August 8th. His youthful appearance as he went up the pulpit stairs provoked, he thought, a general sneer; but there was solemn seriousness when he got into his sermon. He conquered himself and his congregation; and the people, on his descending from the pulpit, showed him every respect, and blessed him as he passed along. No one could answer the question which was now on every one’s lips: “Who was the preacher today?” The Tower Chapel was crowded every Sunday for the next two months. His activity during that time was characteristic of the loving zeal with which he laboured to the close.

Whitefield crossed the Atlantic thirteen times. His life there exemplified the earnestness and sincerity of his desire for the salvation of men; its comparative quietness rested him between his times of tremendous exertion. His voyages were his vacations. Not always without peril and hardship, but sometimes full of restorative power to his shattered health, and offering him opportunities for doing a kind of work not possible to him amid his activities on shore. Letter-writing and reading occupied a great deal of his time, and enabled him both to follow up the good he had done, and to prepare for future work. 

But he took a full share in the life of the ship. On his first voyage he began his seafaring life with great prudence and kindness. He attended the men in sickness, and taught and catechised them. To the officers who were on board, both naval and military, he showed marked deference, and did not allow his zeal to carry him into any unwise attempts to force religion upon their attention. The difficulties and troubles of men were employed as an opportunity for doing the men good by serving them in any way within his power. At night he would walk on the decks that he might have an opportunity of speaking quietly to some officers whom he wanted to win for Christ; or he would go down into the steerage where the sailors were congregated, that he might be as one of them. He soon made himself a favourite. The captain of the ship gave him the free use of his cabin, the military captain who was on board was friendly, and so were the rest of the officers. He got leave to read prayers in the great cabin. In the Bay of Biscay they had some rough experiences. One night, about twelve o’clock, a gale arose, and increased so much by four in the morning that the waves raged horrible, and broke in like a great river on many of the soldiers, who lay near the main hatchway. Creeping on his knees between decks, he went with a friend to sing psalms and comfort the poor wet people. The gale spent itself and left beautiful weather behind. At the close of one of the services the captain asked the soldiers to stop whilst he informed them that, to his great shame, he had been a notorious swearer himself; but, by the instrumentality of that gentleman, pointing to Whitefield, he had now left it off, and exhorted them, for Christ’s sake, that they would go and do likewise. The men began to remark, “What a change in our captain!”

On his return to England from his first visit to Georgia, he encountered coldness and opposition from some of the heads of the English Church; but these also ministered to the furtherance of the Gospel. Out of them, coupled with the great size of his congregations, sprang field-preaching. The first thought of resorting to the open air was suggested to him one Sunday afternoon by the sight of a congregation of a thousand persons who failed to gain admission to Bermondsey church. It met with no encouragement from his friends; they thought it was “a mad notion.” He cherished it, however, and soon afterwards, when he was denied the use of churches at Bristol, he put it into practice. These field congregations rapidly grew in numbers, the second of them, assembled two days after the first, being four or five thousand persons; and presently as many as twenty thousand came together. The effect of the Gospel upon them is thus described in his own words: “Having no righteousness of their own to renounce, the colliers were glad to hear of a Jesus who was a Friend to publicans, and came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. The first discovery of their being affected was to see the white gutter made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their black cheeks, as they came out of their coal-pits. Hundreds and hundreds of them were soon brought under deep convictions, which (as the event proved) happily ended in a sound and thorough conversion. The change was visible to all, though numbers chose to impute it to anything rather than the finger of God. As the scene was quite new, and I had just begun to be an extempore preacher, it often occasioned many inward conflicts. Sometimes, when twenty thousand people were before me, I had not, in my own apprehension, a word to say, either to God or them. But I was never totally deserted, and was frequently (for to deny it would be lying against God) so assisted, that I knew by happy experience what our Lord meant by saying, ‘Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.’ The open firmament above me, the prospect of the adjacent fields, with the sight of thousands and thousands, some in coaches, some on horseback, and some in the trees, and, at times, all affected and drenched in tears together, to which sometimes was added the solemnity of the approaching evening, was almost too much for, and quite overcame, me.”

The denial of the use of Islington church determined Whitefield to do in London as he had done at Bristol; he preached in the churchyard, and announced that he would preach the next Sunday at Moorfields, “The Word of the Lord,” he says, ”runs and is glorified. People’s hearts seem quite broken. God strengthens me exceedingly. I preach till I sweat through and through.” When the news of his intended visit to Moorfields spread through the city, which it soon did, many said that if he entered into that domain of the rabble he would never come out alive. It was, indeed, a perilous step to take. The place was the favourite resort of the roughest and most profane of the people, but love drew him to them. “An exceeding great multitude” came together on Sunday morning, April 29th, 1739, some of whom amused themselves by breaking to pieces a table which had been placed for his pulpit. He came accompanied by a friend on either side, and tried to force his way through the crowd. His friends were soon detached from him, but as soon as he was alone, his congregation parted, and left an open course for him, first to the place where his demolished pulpit ought to have been standing, and thence to the wall which divided the upper from the lower fields, upon which he took his stand.

A far worse congregation of 10,000 persons was gathered on a Whit-Monday morning at six o’clock for the sports and abominations of a fair. Whitefield, with a company of praying people, appeared on the scene, and preached on Jesus being lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. The people gazed, and listened, and wept; many were stung with deep conviction for their past sins. All was hushed and solemn. He and his friends went again at noon; the scene was wild beyond description. Yet when he preached the crowds were so drawn away from the places; of amusement that the showmen and others, fired with anger and vexation, pelted him with stones, dirt, rotten eggs, and dead cat. At six o’clock he went again to a wilder scene, and was met by a fiercer, firmer opposition; but again God gave him the victory. He continued in praying, preaching, and singing—“for the noise was too great at times to preach”—about three hours. He retired with his friends to the Tabernacle (his wooden chapel close by), with “his pockets full of notes from persons brought under concern, and read them amidst the praises and spiritual acclamations of thousands who joined with the holy angels in rejoicing that so many sinners were snatched in such an unexpected, unlikely place and manner, out of the very jaws of the hell. This was the beginning of the Tabernacle Society. Three hundred and fifty awakened souls were received in one day; and the number of notes, he believed, exceeded a thousand.

Some of Whitefield’s sayings are well worth remembering. “The only Methodism,” he exclaims, “I desire to know is a holy method of dying to ourselves, and of living to God.” To students he said, “I hope you will enter into your studies, not to get a parish, nor to be polite preachers, but to be great saints.” To ministers he used to say, “Beware of nestling.” The secret of his labours is in this word: ‘ I do not preach for life, but from life.” “Like a pure crystal, I would transmit all the glory that God is pleased to pour upon me, and never claim as my own what is His sole property.” “I have always found awakening times like spring times: many blossoms, but not always so much fruit.” “I find a love of power sometimes intoxicates even God’s own dear children, and makes them to mistake passion for zeal, and an overbearing spirit for an authority given them from above.” “Let the name of Whitefield die, so that the cause of Jesus Christ may live.”

Last Days—Death

In his last days Whitefield, who had been thin and active, became corpulent and heavy. His tremendous exertions brought on repeated attacks of serious illness from his young manhood to the end. He sometimes rose up from what seemed to be almost death to go and preach. Asthma was his constant affliction. John Wesley, speaking of one of their last interviews, says: “I breakfasted with Mr. Whitefield, who seemed to be an old, old man, being fairly worn out in his Master’s service, though he has hardly seen fifty years.” His last sermon was preached in the fields at Exeter in Massachusetts; and before going out to preach it, he clasped his hands together, and looking up, said: “Lord Jesus, I am weary in Thy work, but not of Thy work. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for Thee once more in the fields, seal Thy truth, and come home and die.” After this sermon he rode forward to Newburyport, to the house of the Presbyterian minister. At night, as he was going to bed, he addressed from the stairs, with his bedroom candle in his hand, a crowd that had gathered round the door; he spoke till the candle went out. At six o’clock next morning, Sunday, September 30th, 1770, the asthma choked him. He had expected to die silent; he said, ”It has pleased God to enable me to bear so many testimonies for Him during my life, that He will require none from me when I die.” And so it was.

J. P . Glendstone

The Sower 1895