THE BURNING AND SHINING LIGHTS
Jonathan Mayhew had only been enrolled at Harvard for a month when George Whitefield came to town. Like his peers, he had followed the reports of the English revivalist making his way to Massachusetts, and he was eager to take a break from his studies and watch him preach. Whitefield, too, was eager to visit the school, which he called “the chief college for training up the sons of the prophets in all New England,” after hearing of its divinity training and scholarship.
It was a rainy Wednesday when Whitefield spoke to 7,000 listeners, including Mayhew, and captivated the students with his oratory. “The Holy Spirit melted many hearts,” Whitefield wrote. “The Word was attended with manifest power.” After his sermon, he met the president and the leaders of the school and some of its students, toured the grounds, and perused the library. It was a gracious welcome for the Itinerant and one that any revivalist might have appreciated. But he found it lacking.
What Mayhew and the other students and faculty didn’t realize was that, while Whitefield was polite and respectful to them in person, in his Journals he showed another face. When his writings were published a short time later, they were stunned to read that he looked down on their institution: it was tiny compared to Oxford (his alma mater), its students were undisciplined (and possibly unconverted), their morals were suspect (despite their reputation), and its library contained numerous “Bad Books”—including the works of John Tillotson.
Whitefield’s censure of the school angered its faculty. Based on a short visit, he had judged the college harshly, dishonored its tutors, and insulted its students. He even condemned the books in its library, though the great majority had been penned by authors whose orthodoxy was above reproach. The Itinerant seemed to care more for attracting controversy than for offering a fair critique and showed a mean and peevish side that few had expected.
Still, while Whitefield’s attacks enraged the academics, they only enhanced his popularity on the revival circuit. Most of Whitefield’s listeners had not been to Harvard, or college of any kind, and either did not understand what it taught or thought it was a bastion of heresy. Whitefield was happy to encourage their distrust of the institution and the elites who sent their sons there, and to rouse their suspicions about the education of the mind instead of the heart.
Despite the controversy over Whitefield’s trip to Harvard, Mayhew found inspiration in his preaching. This was partly because he embraced a sense of Christian piety—he prayed daily with a small group of friends—and partly because he did not fit the stereotype Whitefield criticized. For one, he was almost twenty when he entered Harvard. Compared to his peers, he was both too old and too poor. Most of the other students were three or more years younger than him, the firstborn sons of local aristocrats or well-heeled merchants who had been groomed by their parents since childhood to attend the best college in New England. By contrast, Jonathan’s father, Experience Mayhew, could scarcely afford to pay for his studies. He had sacrificed for decades as a missionary and now struggled to provide for his family. He had managed to send his oldest son Nathan to Harvard to study for the ministry, but two years after the boy’s graduation, he met an untimely death—as did Experience’s first wife Thankful, his second wife Remembrance (Jonathan’s mother), and his daughter Reliance. Death had cut a swath through the Mayhew family, and financial troubles ensured the survivors would continue to face hardship.
The twice-widowed Experience had sold off much of the family’s land holdings to raise money, but it wasn’t enough. Now, for him to send Jonathan to school, he had to ask the General Court to grant him title to unappropriated lands that he could use to scrape together the funds for tuition. The court granted the request, awarding him six hundred acres of land and a small economic stipend, but it did not issue the grant from a sense of charity. Instead it acknowledged the sacrifices Experience had made as he worked for little reward to spread Protestantism in the hinterlands of New England, a thankless and exhausting task that he had labored at for decades.
The members of the court also realized that, though the Mayhews lacked money, their family name still carried a certain prestige. During the first great wave of Puritan migration to the Bay Colony in the 1630s, their ancestor Thomas Mayhew had used his business and political acumen to secure title to an obscure island that later became known as Martha’s Vineyard. He styled himself “Governour Mayhew,” and he and his grandson Matthew ruled over the island as “Joint Lords of the Manor of Tisbury”—a rare feudal estate permitted to exist in the British North America. Although the province of Massachusetts Bay eventually assumed control of their holdings, their land hierarchy persisted in token form until 1732. By this time, the power of the Mayhews had vanished, and their successors were mainly known for proselytizing to Indians on the colonial frontier.
Experience became one of the most successful missionaries, bringing the gospel to the Wampanoag people and Christianizing a number of them. He even composed a psalter that translated books of the Bible into Native languages. For his record of accomplishment, Harvard granted him a Master of Arts—one of the first honorary degrees it ever awarded. By 1740, Experience was still hard at work as a missionary, even though he had been doing it for nearly a half-century and was sixty-eight years old.
His son Jonathan, however, did not follow in the steps of his father. Nor did he know what he wanted to do with his life. He loved to read and study the classics, he became fluent in Latin and conversant in Greek and had an interest in theology and other pursuits. Experience recognized how perceptive he was, and how anything less than an education at Harvard—with its broad curriculum that included rhetoric, geography, ethics, metaphysics, astronomy, and math—would do him a disservice. He secured his tuition with the help of the court and sent his son to Cambridge.
Jonathan entered Harvard in the late summer, after passing a rigorous entrance exam, and became part of a class that included such future worthies as Samuel Cooper, James Otis Jr., and James Warren, as well as Samuel Adams. Unlike his friends, though, Jonathan had to ask for grants and jobs from the college to make ends meet and always faced the danger of running out of money before he could graduate.
All of this made Jonathan a poor target for Whitefield’s accusations, but it didn’t keep him from becoming engaged in the revival. Soon after Whitefield’s visit, the spiritual climate began to change, and the college became consumed by the New Birth. The same sons of the elite who wanted to use their Harvard education as a stepping stone to a respectable career now found themselves overcome with piety, loudly praising God and worshipping with fervent devotion, including fasting. Many students asked the question, “What shall I do to be saved?” as did other converts who had been shaken by Whitefield’s message.
Anxiety spread on campus, too, as the students worried over the fate of their souls, and whether the scholarship they had been taught by their faculty would send them to hell. A climate of fear gripped many of the students and made them unreceptive to anything that carried a hint of heresy or seemed even vaguely unorthodox. As the disquiet increased along with the revival, the students’ concerns mounted until some of the faculty members worried, not about the students’ souls, but their mental health. One tutor reported that most suffered from “extravagances and errors of a weak and warm imagination.”
Whitefield contributed to their worries by blasting college life in his Journals. He accused institutions of higher learning of heretical thinking, and demanded they shun the philosophies of Tillotson and others that had drawn students toward rationalism and other menaces. “As for the universities,” he wrote, “I believe it may be said, their light is become darkness, darkness that may be felt, and is complained of by the most godly ministers.”
Jonathan knew about Whitefield’s criticisms, but remained interested in all spiritual ideas, whether they derived from champions of the New Birth or anti-Calvinist Anglicans. Within a year, though, he contracted a high fever from a dangerous illness and, upon his recovery, the ideas of the revival began to consume him. In 1741 he traveled seventy miles north of Boston to York, where a great religious upheaval was underway. This one featured the tears and moans and paralysis Whitefield had reported in his Journals, as well as new and even more enthusiastic outbursts. Some men and women writhed in pain as if cast into a furnace; others issued “hideous cryings and yellings, and all the distortions of body which the acutest torments could throw them into.” Some looked on the verge of death; others belted out quasi-Biblical incantations such as “Comfort me with applies, slay me with flagons, for I am sick of love—This is my beloved and this is my friend, O ye daughters of Jerusalem!”
This behavior was unusual, even for the most devout. It was also different from that found in most New England meetinghouses, and the shock was palpable to the outsiders who witnessed it. But Jonathan took no issue with such outpourings of feelings, however extreme they might have appeared. By this time he had begun to respect the power of the evangelists, and even commended them for their work. Encouraged by their example, he wrote, “May our souls be more and more enflamed with the love of Christ, and grow warmer and warmer in our devotions to him.”
Jonathan was smitten, his heart affected, if not yet melted. He tried to convert his brother Zachariah to the cause, but found little success. His father was even more resistant to Jonathan’s newfound piety. Experience had proven true to his name and revealed to his son the checkered legacy of his own proselytizing, including his mission to the Wampanoag. He told Jonathan that the fervor of revivals could be short-lived and, without ongoing study and deepening faith, zealotry could lead to disappointment or even disbelief.
Experience also had little respect for Whitefield, calling him a “miserable enthusiast” laboring “under the power of Satanical delusions.” Instead of studying scripture closely, the Itinerant used theatrical antics to force his audience into convulsions and false revelations, which could lead them astray. The tutors and faculty and president of Harvard, too, became bitter in their contempt for Whitefield, calling him “young, poorly educated, heedless of ecclesiastical order, intolerant, scornful of reason, dependent on histrionics”—the opposite of the kind of model they wanted the students to embrace.
Still, despite their criticisms, Jonathan remained under the influence of Whitefield and the revivalists. His heart was torn between the passion for Christ that he saw in the New Birth and the commitment to his father and his tutors who professed a more rational and analytical version of the gospel. He would ultimately have to choose one side of the argument, for this spiritual battle allowed for hardly any middle ground. Both factions thought they had God as an ally.
Farther west in Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards looked to make a friend of George Whitefield. Months before, he had responded to the Grand Itinerant’s introductory letter by inviting him to come preach in the church in Northampton where he was pastor. He happily blessed his success, “with an irresistible power bearing down all opposition! And may the gales of Hell never be able to prevail upon you!” He thought a great revival was overdue, and if Whitefield could bring it on his tour of New England, so much the better.
He lamented how the faith of his forefathers had declined. How the 17th-century heritage of John Winthrop, Increase and Cotton Mather, and the legendary Puritan divines had gone into eclipse. Religion had become rigid and institutional, its ministers dull and legalistic, and rationality of the mind held sway over devotion of the heart. Even within Calvinism, the great mass of people found their sins “no cause for anxiety nor any hindrance to social respectability.” This was religion used to advance one’s fortunes, and to succor the mind with abstract philosophies, and Edwards would have none of it.
Some considered Edwards the greatest theologian in America, as well as its most persuasive intellectual. But while he had gained acclaim for his writing, in his ministry he was riddled with vexations. It galled him that the morals of his congregants had decayed, since he had built his reputation on his evangelical triumphs. But that reputation now felt hollow, many of his conversions had failed, and he yearned to try again. He found in Whitefield a man who could bring back the holy fire.
Ever since he was an adolescent, Reverend Edwards had been involved with revivals in New England. He had witnessed several of them in the company of his grandfather, the renowned pastor Solomon Stoddard. Under his grandfather’s tutelage, he had graduated from Yale College at seventeen and learned how to assist conversions and lead spiritual upheavals that could uplift communities and wash away sin and the workings of the devil.
He saw the transformation of the heart, not the mind, as the key to redemption. God worked on a person’s higher emotions, or the “affections,” as Edwards called them. He could reach down to the miserable life of a sinner and extend his grace and give that poor soul a chance to be redeemed. Edwards himself had experienced this transformation as a young man. But his conversion was not full of agony and terror. God did not pound him into jelly or melt him down or trample over him. Instead, God offered him pleasure and delight, and an irresistible “inward sweetness.”
The appearance of every thing was altered: there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every thing. God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in every thing; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water, and all nature.
When Edwards was thinking about the divine, and that ethereal world of perfect harmony and beauty, he found transcendence. Yet when he thought about his fellow human beings, he bristled with disgust. And he didn’t need to look far to find examples of what he found wrong with his peers and the lives they led.
In Northampton, and in countless towns larger than it, he saw how farmers and merchants who had found material success reveled in their decadence: copious amounts of food and drink, elegant clothing, assorted luxuries, all the things necessary for “fashionable living.” Even as they basked in their abundance, Edwards saw the other members of the congregation suffering, wearing tattered garments, eating meager fare, reduced to hunger and penury. And this sort of greed wasn’t merely sinful in the biblical sense, it was destructive to the health of the community. Indeed, a “commercial frenzy” caused men to lust after wealth and consumer goods, allowing dishonesty and deceit to run rampant, and spiritual health to weaken.
In the prior century, the Puritan divines had established an oasis of godliness in America, but the vices of the outside world had now corroded it. Edwards saw Britain, in particular, as the root of “wickedness of almost every kind”: its imported goods corrupted people’s hearts; its selfish, secular philosophies did the same to their souls; and its economic practices exploited their land and debased their spirit. He thought that wealthy aristocrats were so lazy they “cease to any way be beneficial members to human society.” And he imagined that, with their example, people might reject all faith and scruples of conduct, harm their neighbors for profit, aggressively lie and cheat and scheme, and behave “like wolves one to another,” for “beastly lusts . . . will make men of a beastly disposition.”
In 1734 he had tried to change the behavior of his neighbors before it was too late. Like other Congregational ministers, Edwards used the skill he had acquired from his grandfather to speak vividly to his congregants of hellfire and damnation. Solomon Stoddard was something of a legend for using terrible imagery of souls roasting in hell and the everlasting torment of sinners. Edwards adopted these techniques to make his parishioners aware of their sins and their helplessness before God. He preached the terrors to break them down to despair, so they could accept heavenly grace and follow a path to redemption.
Edwards’s strategy had a galvanizing effect in his Northampton parish. He noticed more of his parishioners taking his message to heart and telling their friends to attend his sermons. Yet what they heard was nothing like a theatrical performance. Edwards spoke quietly and carefully, rarely raised his voice, and called attention to well-known sinners whose lives had been upended by the Holy Spirit and irresistibly changed for the better.
Edwards did not play out biblical roles or shout at full volume. He didn’t insult other ministers or spit bile at a lengthy set of enemies. He kept his preaching simple and direct; even in all its fearsome power, he found that having a strong message persuaded many more people than delivering it with sideshow antics. Before long, the conversions in his parish increased and news spread of his powerful evangelism, which “seemed almost like a flash of lightning, upon the hearts of young people, all over the town, and upon many others.”
A great outpouring of the spirit began to consume Northampton, as ideas of rebirth filled the conversations of the town folk, and outsiders came to learn more about the revival. Even those who visited to ridicule the events seemed stunned by them and underwent their own transformations. Edwards delighted in the success of his preaching and estimated that 300 souls had been saved through God’s mercy—and that was only in Northampton. Later in the year, the revival traveled through the Connecticut River Valley and affected many of the towns and hamlets alongside the river—from Suffield and South Hadley—to more distant cities like New Haven and down into the Middle Colonies.
Edwards learned similar revivals were taking place in New Jersey from its dissenting clergymen, “especially the Rev. William Tennent [Jr.], a minister who seemed to have such things much at heart” and he discovered a “very considerable revival of religion in another place under the ministry of his brother the Rev. Mr. Gilbert Tennent.” Thus, the Northampton revival paralleled and overlapped with other upheavals of the time, even though Edwards belonged to a different sect than the Tennents, and his methods were very different from theirs.
He saw the revival having universal consequences. It touched men and women equally, young and old, white and black, poor and rich, and crossed different regions and classes and boundaries with ease. Some of the reborn experienced the investment of the Holy Spirit like wildfire, writhing in pain or shrieking with delight, overcome with agony and remorse or inexpressible joy. Edwards also witnessed things he didn’t understand. He saw people talking about spirits, visitations, emanations of the divine presence. In their visions, hell exploded in terror and sinners burned in everlasting torture, Christ bled on the cross and the blood ran richly from his wounds, and other revelations caused great excitement to those who experienced them.
Edwards tried to grasp what such visions meant. They seemed like the work of the Holy Spirit, but their extravagance troubled him. All he could do was try “to teach persons the difference between what is spiritual and what is merely imaginary.” He would come to learn the line between the two could be very thin indeed.
He published his account of the revival in London in 1737, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Word of God, and described the manner in which the events had started at Northampton and the way they had spread. In his view, the eruption of the spirit was unexpected, it was wondrous, and it was welcome—but it wasn’t unprecedented. As a minister, Edwards had seen revivals take place in many of the same regions, and he was hardly shocked by them. This one, though, seemed particularly heartfelt, and it gave him hope for a wider revival that would make God favor America once again as a beacon of piety.
Edwards’s book became a sensation in both America and Britain. Some readers thought the events he described would lead to a new reformation. Others saw his work as a template for spiritual uprisings throughout the colonies. Yet even though his book became an inspiration to countless evangelicals and made its author well-known among dissenters, the one thing it could not do was keep its original participants converted. As declension set in, most drifted away from the light and returned to their previous sinful ways. Edwards knew it, and it crushed him. As he wrote in a letter to Benjamin Colman, “it is a great damp to that joy to consider how we decline, and what decays that lively spirit in religion suffers amongst us.” The irony was cruel and bitter: He had found universal praise for spreading the fire of revival at the same time that fire had faded into embers.
He told private groups of his parishioners their hearts were “immensely harder than the hearts of idolaters, harlots, whoremongers, murderers, and sodomites,” because at least some of those sinners might truly repent, whereas he had no hopes left in Northampton. He added that he would “rather go to Sodom and preach to the men of Sodom, than preach to you.” He could only hope the next revival, whenever it came, would lead to a much greater reformation, a long-standing awakening for Christ, instead of the lightning flashes that had made his reputation.
George Whitefield had no illusions about the demise of the Northampton revival. In a neighboring town he saw how “people of God have complained of deadness and losing their first love” after years of falling away from faith. But Whitefield thought he could improve on Jonathan Edwards’s work and quicken the pulse of the people in the name of Christ. If he could lead Boston and Philadelphia to holiness—among the largest and most worldly cities in British North America—then surely he could do the same for a minor colonial hamlet.
Over the course of four sermons, Whitefield enchanted Northampton. Parishioners cried openly and “were filled, as it were, with new wine.” Jonathan Edwards too sat in the pews, stunned by the effect of Whitefield’s ministry on his wayward congregants, and he felt the emotions pouring out of him in a way they hadn’t in many years. He wept continuously, unable to contain himself in the same way he did as a minister. And he realized the visiting Englishman might very well be blessed with a holy gift and lead an awakening that would be a godsend.
He gushed to his wife Sarah that he hoped the Itinerant’s example could make him a better Christian, and that he might be imbued with passion and thus “become fervent, as a flame of fire in my work.” Whitefield enjoyed the effect he had on Edwards, seeing him initially as “weak in body” but later appreciating the reverend’s full heart and commitment to the revival. It was a joy to meet his family, too. He ministered to the Edwards children, and became quite taken with Edwards’s wife Sarah, whom he saw as an ideal mate. In fact, Whitefield was so impressed with this “daughter of Abraham” that he desperately asked God to make the same gift to him, “that he would be pleased to send me a daughter of Abraham as my wife. . . . Lord, hear me, Lord, let my cry come unto thee.”
Edwards brought Whitefield to East Windsor, his birthplace, where Whitefield preached in the church of Edwards’s father Timothy. Along the way, Edwards saw Whitefield’s sermons having a galvanic effect on his listeners—bringing them to extremes of ecstasy and agony, and summoning tears and laughter and other strong reactions. The crowd became a magnet for his passions: They praised God and newborn pious souls with the same intensity he did and condemned the devil and his works with the same aggression.
Edwards also heard the Itinerant denounce unconverted ministers with a ferocity that had only been building since he first met Gilbert Tennent. Whitefield called such men “the bane of the Christian church,” and even extended his criticism to Edwards’s own beloved grandfather, Solomon Stoddard. While Whitefield recognized the late minister’s greatness, “I think he is much to be blamed for endeavoring to prove that unconverted men might be admitted into the ministry. . . . I think no solid arguments can be brought to defend such a cause.”
Hearing Whitefield’s latest criticisms, Edwards began to wonder if his fire burned a bit too hot. Were all of these scabrous words necessary to convert people to Christ? Perhaps unconverted ministers were merely sinners like everyone else, not worthy of special scorn. And perhaps faith guided by biblical study could be just as valuable as faith fueled by sudden emotions. The appeal to the heart did not mean reason had to be rejected, and Whitefield in all his theatrics sometimes threatened to do just that. So Edwards tried to correct some of his worst tendencies.
As Edwards later wrote, he “took an opportunity to talk with Mr. Whitefield alone about impulses . . . [and] I told him some reasons I had to think he gave too great heed to such things.” Whitefield listened passively to him without making an argument in return. But Edwards knew his admonition had offended him: “I thought Mr. Whitefield liked me not so well, for my opposing these things.”
Edwards returned home troubled by the encounter, wondering what to make of the English preacher’s crusade. Whitefield doubtless had marked effects on his listeners and had sparked revival throughout the colonies in many places where he went. Yet Edwards could not quash his suspicions, and he had cause to worry.
He remembered how the decline of the Northampton revival had begun, and how the once-noble outpourings of spirit became sour and corrupted. Some people with pious reputations claimed they were divinely guided and tried to advise others on the condition of their souls, but they were really false prophets driven by their own bizarre delusions. Even worse, extreme and frightening behavior began to overcome people, as “Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner. The first instance wherein it appeared, was a person’s putting an end to his own life, by cutting his throat.” This was a man who became so obsessed by the state of his soul, “[h]e was kept awake nights, meditating terror . . . he was scarcely well capable of managing his ordinary business, and was judged delirious by the coroner’s inquest.”
The suicide stunned the community and encouraged more parishioners to consider ending their own lives, “as if somebody had spoken to them, Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now, now!” One of them was Edwards’s own uncle, who became so ridden with terror over the fate of his soul that he decided to slash his throat and perish rather than face any more agonizing fears. Shortly after this, instances of conversion in Northampton came to an end and “the Spirit of God not long after this time, appeared very sensibly withdrawing from all parts of the country.”
Edwards meditated over this, and in November made his feelings known to his congregation. In a series of sermons based on the parable of the sower in the book of Matthew, he explained how certain preachers could attract great attention with the novelty of their subject matter, or the power of their presentation, or the loudness of their voice. But the emotions aroused by such techniques “produce not genuine convictions of conscience but greater hardness of heart.” When the revival fades, such converts would return to their old ways, more embittered and sinful than ever. The process only accelerated when itinerant preachers left town after their fiery sermons, leaving it up to others (like Edwards) to carry the revival forward, or to pick up the broken pieces.
In the sermons of such preachers, Edwards wondered whether an outpouring of tears was worth anything. Even though he had cried fervently a month before in the pews, he now questioned such emotion. He said deceptive ministers were skilled at shedding tears and adept at exhibiting false joy. In fact, people “may shed a great many tears and yet be wholly ignorant” of a personal conversion to Christ. Rather than being the mark of a godly man, crying was simply the badge of a hypocrite.
Moreover, a preacher of the emotions could bring out the worst hypocrisy in his listeners, too, encouraging them to have a passionate, superficial reaction rather than a full understanding of faith. He might bludgeon his audience with “a very earnest and forceable manner” and an “air of sincerity and fervency,” only to lead them toward false ecstasy and spiritual emptiness. Even worse, that preacher might lead congregants to think he is the divine leader instead of God, and to blindly obey his commands, “almost ready to follow the preacher to the ends of the earth.” In this way the converts were not worshipping Christ, but the preacher himself. Such a demagogue of the spirit could lead only to wickedness and blasphemy.
Even though Edwards spoke in a parable, everyone knew who he was talking about.
George Whitefield left New England at the end of October, and though he had only been there for a month and a half, he managed to deliver 175 sermons, nearly four a day. He enjoyed his travels and wrote that the region “exceeds all other provinces in America, and, for the establishment of religion, perhaps all other parts of the world.” But his congenial frame of mind did not last. As soon as he entered New York, he learned of the latest smear campaigns against him.
From South Carolina, his old nemesis Commissary Alexander Garden had been busy penning increasingly hateful letters that denounced him and everything he stood for. In the form of six letters bound in a pamphlet, Garden called him a poor theologian and a rabid enthusiast, an inciter of trouble within the Church of England, an antinomian who despised good works, and a fanatic who reveled in discord, disobedience, and slander. Whitefield’s attacks on Archbishop Tillotson especially rankled Garden, and he wrote, “In your mountebank way you have David-like, as you fancy, slain your Goliath, but his works and memory will long survive after you and your dirty pamphlets are sunk into oblivion.” He mocked his concern for the welfare of slaves, even as children in his own orphanage labored under his cruel hand, starving and subject to overlords who punished and abused them. And in a fresh swipe, Garden added that Whitefield’s sermons were no more than “a medley of truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense, served up with pride and virulence, and other like saucy ingredients.”
Whitefield did not reply directly, but his allies in the South answered the charges. He faced a much graver threat, however, from an anonymous document called The Querists. Published through the New Castle presbytery, it was the latest salvo from the Old Side Presbyterians against the revivalists. They took aim at the Itinerant because he had promoted Gilbert Tennent’s baleful views, and “looked upon Whitefield no longer as an Anglican cleric, but as a cohort of the Log College men.” They picked apart his Journals for every error and deviation from orthodoxy they could find, and interrogated him over his dodgy theology, his ecumenism, his extemporaneous preaching, his thoughts on “impulses” and enthusiasm, and his threats of church schism, which he seemed to encourage.
Amazingly, these sorts of attacks had almost become routine. Whitefield had only been in America for a little over a year, and he had already split the colonists into mutually hostile camps with his brand of experimental piety. He had aroused popular feeling against one church (Anglicanism), helped divide another (Presbyterianism), and threatened to do the same to a third (Congregationalism). He was as polarizing and loved and hated a figure as colonial America had ever seen, yet his understanding of the country was thin, and his life experience was short. He had polished himself into a brilliant lightning rod and enjoyed all the electric currents he channeled in society, but he had only a dim understanding of the force of the energy he wielded or what to properly do with it.
The Querists struck a nerve in a way few other polemics against Whitefield did, and the pamphlet had to be answered. First, Charles Tennent, Gilbert’s brother, came to his defense with a short reply, then Whitefield himself answered the charges. Surprisingly, he admitted his errors and apologized for his lack of understanding about the finer points of Calvinism. He said, “I think it no dishonor to retract some expressions that have formerly dropped from my pen.” But he rejected the charge of being divisive, and he defended how he preached spontaneously and welcomed all faiths to hear his message. His words were humble, his tone mild, and he gave the impression of being a properly chastened sinner. But however penitent he might have appeared, he had no intention of changing his ways. If anything, The Querists only fueled his emotions and made him burn all the hotter.
On November 2, he delivered an impassioned oracle to New Yorkers before the wedding of a local couple. He unleashed a mass catharsis among his listeners, who felt the Lord’s spirit arrive “like a mighty rushing wind, and carried all before it. Immediately the whole congregation was alarmed. Shrieking, crying, weeping, and wailing were to be heard in every corner. Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and many falling into the arms of their friends.” Even Whitefield was struck speechless after his spellbinding performance, and he collapsed after returning to bed. But he was called back to the wedding ceremony where “divine manifestations flowed in so fast, that my frail tabernacle was scarce able to sustain them.” Stunned and overjoyed, he could only thank his enemies for bracing his spirit in this way: “God has remarkably revealed himself to my soul, ever since I have seen the pamphlet published by the Presbyterians against me.”
This was only a foretaste of what was to come. Whitefield soon accrued a band of allies that may have been the most formidable collection of preaching talent the colonies had ever seen. From New England, a Harvard tutor named Daniel Rogers decided to leave his preparation for a Boston pulpit and join the Itinerant on his travels. He realized he was unconverted and waited for a sign of the grace of God. When it arrived at King’s Bridge (later called the Bronx), he felt the presence of the Lord enrich his soul “with such joy in the Holy Ghost as I never experienced before.”
Whitefield then encountered another ally, “my dear brother [James] Davenport from Long Island, by whose hands the blessed Jesus has of late done great things.” Davenport had already preached with Whitefield in various outdoor venues in the Middle Colonies, though his methods of conversion were quite different from Whitefield’s. He didn’t amuse or entertain his parishioners. Instead he blasted them, gesticulating aggressively and distorting his body wildly to make a point. Some thought he was a holy man, not least for his strange behavior and unprecedented feats of preaching. A few months before, he had testified to the power of God for twenty-four hours before he collapsed. Another of his techniques was to split his parishioners into groups that he deemed either spiritually worthy or unworthy. To the former he gave all the benefits of church membership, while he denied the latter communion and refused to baptize their children.
These methods had made him notorious on Long Island, but when he came to other parishes to preach as an itinerant, his following only grew, along with the controversy. In recent days, he had been experimenting with taking Gilbert Tennent’s attacks on unconverted ministers a step further, invading their parishes and accusing them by name of being wicked and unregenerate. He impelled them to submit to his inquiries about their spiritual condition. If found lacking, he demanded their congregants find a new minister to follow, such as himself.
Like Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent thought highly of Davenport and called him “one of the most heavenly men” he knew. All three preachers crossed paths on Staten Island, and they were joined by yet another minister named John Cross, a New Side Presbyterian who had led fervent revivals of his own. His congregation was in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, which became the troupe’s destination, since Cross thought would be an excellent site for lighting the next spiritual fires.
When they arrived, Cross was proven correct: They witnessed some of the most intense mass conversions anyone had ever seen in the region. In the morning, Davenport proclaimed the gospel to 3,000 people and spoke with such fury that people cried out in the crowd and broke down in tears. One eight-year-old boy became so overwhelmed with piteous weeping (“as though his little heart would break”) that Cross urged him to preach to the crowd. The child responded by praising the divine power, which only increased the passion of the worshippers, who now cried out louder in their own exhortations.
In the evening, the crowd retired to a barn where the revival continued. First Gilbert gave a sermon, then Whitefield. The Itinerant had barely spoken for six minutes before people began shouting at him—“He is come! He is come!” and “I have found him!”—and then the evening took an even more tumultuous turn. Daniel Rogers was stunned to witness the mass of worshippers now “weeping, sighing, groaning, sobbing, screeching, crying out” until many doubled over from exhaustion. The power of God’s grace, and the spontaneous redemption of sinners, seemed forceful, alive, irresistible, and agonizing. Even after Whitefield retired to sleep, the event did not end. The tireless Davenport and Rogers kept it going nearly until dawn, and they led more outbreaks of the Holy Spirit to anyone still standing.
Whitefield couldn’t have been more pleased with the blazing success of the day, and despite his fatigue, he felt a note of triumph. The troupe of evangelists returned to New Brunswick, New Jersey, site of Gilbert Tennent’s presbytery. Whitefield knew they all had to part and he would soon have to return to Britain. His heart swelled with love for Gilbert, of whom he wrote, “May I follow him as he does Christ. . . . [He is] our Mouth to God. He prayed in the Holy Ghost.” The Itinerant knew how critical the Tennents had been to the success of the revival in America, and he persuaded Gilbert to carry on his work in New England over the winter, knowing “he will be a burning and a shining light.”
Whitefield also wrote to Jonathan Belcher, governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony. He informed Belcher that Gilbert would soon be on his way to his region “to blow up the divine fire,” and he asked for Belcher’s support. For he knew that much depended on the success of the revival in New England, the birthplace of American dissent. He wrote, “the welfare of dear Boston people, especially the welfare of your own soul, lies upon me night and day.” Whitefield saw himself as an agent of God’s will on earth, and he accepted the weight of that cosmic responsibility.
His alliance with the Lord would soon be tested by earthly matters. After stopping in Philadelphia to visit the commodious New Building, which had been erected for his preaching, Whitefield encountered several people who had accepted Christ into their hearts after hearing his preaching, but now threatened to lapse back into sin. Some fell into misery or madness, such as one woman who wanted his counsel and asked him to baptize her child. Whitefield did not make time do so, and she became consumed by terror, and went home, “and there the devil would fain have persuaded her to cut the child’s throat with a pair of scissors.” In the end, she called on Christ to help her, and she did not commit the murder. However, the incident showed that even the most ardent converts could slip back into depravity without ongoing spiritual counsel—something Jonathan Edwards knew from his experience in Northampton, but Whitefield hadn’t learned yet.
Whitefield spent several more weeks traveling in the Middle Colonies until he departed for the South in December. This was the final leg of his American journey, and he wished to end it with a visit to his Bethesda orphanage. He brought Jonathan Barber with him to administer the institution, and he spent Christmas in the company of his allies. However, life in Georgia remained grim, with few resources and much hardship. He wrote that the colony remained “in a very declining and piteous state” and almost met his death there after a worker accidentally fired a gun in his direction. This put the Itinerant in a morbid mood, but he reasoned “in the midst of life we are in death.”
Even before he stopped in Savannah, he visited what was left of Charles Town, South Carolina, where a fire on November 18 had wiped out three hundred houses and a fair amount of the town’s material infrastructure at a cost of 200,000 pounds. Whitefield felt pity for the victims of the fire, but also suspected it had come from a divine source. In the devastated town he preached to its people about the reasons for their misery: “I endeavored to show what were the sins which provoked God to punish the Israelites in that manner. I drew a parallel between them and the Charles-Town people.”
Whitefield’s friends struck an even more militant tone, demanding their listeners see the fire as an act of judgment by the Lord. Dissenting minister Josiah Smith preached a sermon entitled The Burning of Sodom, which echoed Whitefield’s feelings about the destruction being justified because of the vices of South Carolinians. And Hugh Bryan, the plantation-owning convert and ally of Whitefield, claimed in a letter to his brother that the fire wasn’t only justified, it was a warning that God was angry and might follow the conflagration “with more severe strokes of his displeasure.” He castigated the Anglican clergy who had criticized Whitefield and predicted they would surely be condemned to hell for leading their parishioners astray. He broadened his attack to include not just the churchmen, but the civil authorities of the colony—and the king.
To publicize his feelings, Bryan thought it would be a good idea to have the letter published in the South Carolina Gazette. Whitefield reviewed the letter at Bethesda, editing it to increase its potency, and Bryan arranged for its publication. The newspaper printed it just a few days after Whitefield returned to Charles Town to take a ship back to Britain. Outrage ensued.
Alexander Garden condemned it as a “scurrilous libel,” and the civil authorities treated it as a threat—not only as a sacrilege to God, but as a danger to the colony and the rule of law. They arrested Hugh Bryan and forced him to account for his writings. He in turn blamed Whitefield for editing and changing the document beyond what he had written. Soon the authorities arrested the Itinerant too, charging him with composing “a false, malicious, scandalous, and infamous libel against the clergy of this province, in contempt of His Majesty and his laws, and against the King’s peace.” Brought before magistrates for the second time in six months, Whitefield tried to explain himself before the court, then made bail and promised to appear again at the tribunal.
But though he had recanted his words, Whitefield made sure his followers knew he would not relent. His sermons became filled with invective against civil authorities and clergymen like Garden who persecuted him. He preached from the book of Kings, describing how Naboth had been falsely accused of blasphemy against God and the monarch, then was carried away to be stoned and killed. He compared Naboth to himself and hinted at the growing wickedness of earthly powers. He charged the “men in authority” with “the heinous sin of abusing the power which God had put into their hands.” While Whitefield had previously directed his ire against unconverted churchmen and Anglican authorities, now he targeted colonial magistrates and rulers—a dangerous and potentially seditious turn for him.
Before any more controversy could erupt, he boarded the ship Minerva on January 16 and sailed home, still reeling from the chaotic final days of his trip. As North America began to disappear from view, he asked “God of the sea and the dry land [to] be with us on our voyage, and prepare me for the many perils and mercies that await me amongst my own countrymen.”
It would be more than four years before Whitefield would return to the colonies. But his American tour was not forgotten, and the fires he had set would only burn hotter and expand in his absence. His attacks on the clergy, and his suffering for it, became especially influential to young revivalists. A budding minister named Andrew Croswell even wrote a response to Alexander Garden’s Six Letters that not only defended the Grand Itinerant from his slanders, but accused the commissary of being a “meritmonger” and a liar, a slanderer with “virulent and unorthodox” doctrine whose “heart seemed full of choler and resentment.” And he added a new twist, especially timely in light of Whitefield’s recent arrest. He claimed these sins weren’t just inherent to Garden, they were endemic to all the religious authorities who came from the Old World. For while average people in Europe were bound to that antique hierarchy, and “are generally so ignorant and weak as to hug the chains of the clergy,” in the New World it was different.
[T]he AMERICANS live in a freer air, more generally taste the sweets of liberty, and being nearer an equality of birth and wealth, there being land enough for every industrious person, there are fewer among them in dependence on others, they are generally more knowing than the common people of EUROPE, and are not like for several ages, or as long as this near equality remains, to desire the dominion of the clergy over them.
Thus Andrew Croswell became one of the first of his kind to proclaim religious and political liberty, economic equality and personal industry, as hallmarks of a new American way, circa 1741.