673 



WHITEF1ELD, REV. GEORGE. 



WHITEFIELD, REV. GEORGE. 



674 



He died in 1704. He was busily employed for forty years, and he had 

 amassed about 5000/. ; yet, says Walpolo, by misfortune or waste he 

 died indigent at last : in 1704 a printsellar however, in the Poultry, 

 who purchased his plates, made a fortune in a short time. Walpole 

 has given a list of about two hundred and fifty of White's heads, and 

 he acknowledges that it is not a complete catalogue of them. 



GEORGE WHITE, the son of Robert White, was also a clever mezzo- 

 tint engraver and a painter. He was instructed by his father, and ho 

 completed some plates left unfinished by him at his death. He 

 excelled his father in mezzotint, and the following heads in this style 

 are very good : the Duke of Ormond, Lord Clarendon, Sylvester 

 Petyt, Sir Richard Blackmore, Colonel Blood, who stole the crown, 

 and the notorious Jack Sheppard, after Sir James Thornhill. His last 

 plate is dated 1731, and he probably died a few years later. 



WHITEFIELD, REV. GEORGE, the founder of one of the two 

 great divisions of Methodism, was, as well as his fellow-labourer 

 Wesley, of clerical lineage, although his immediate progenitors were of 

 the laity. His great-grandfather, the Rev. Samuel Whitefield, was 

 rector of North Ledyard in Wilts, and afterwards of Rockhampton in 

 Gloucestershire ; in which latter charge he was succeeded by a son of 

 the same name, who died without issue. Another of his sons, Andrew, 

 probably his eldest, lived as a private gentleman on his estate. Thomas, 

 the eldest son of this Andrew, was bred a wine-merchant, and followed 

 that business for some time in Bristol, where he married Miss Elizabeth 

 Edwards, a lady respectably connected ; but afterwards, having pro- 

 bably been unfortunate, he transferred himself to Gloucester, and 

 there took an inn. He and his wife, besides a daughter, had six sons, 

 of whom George, the subject of the present notice, was the youngest. 

 " I was born in Gloucestershire," says Whitefield himself, " in the 

 month of December, 1714. My father and mother kept the Bell Inn." 

 It appears from one of his letters that his birthday was the 16th of 

 the month. 



His father died when he was two years old ; but his mother, who 

 continued to keep the inn, did her best, in the midst of declining 

 circumstances, to bring him. up creditably, having been used to say, 

 even when he was an infant, that she expected more comfort from him 

 than from any other of her children. "My mother," says Whitefield, 

 " was very careful of my education, and always kept me in my tender 

 years (for which I can never sufficiently thank her) from intermeddling 

 in the least with the tavern business." He has painted the perversity 

 of his youth in dark colours, but he appears to have been nothing 

 more than a lively and somewhat mischievous and wilful boy, with far 

 more promise of good in him than the reverse. Moreover, Whitefield 

 is compelled to acknowledge that he had his occasional religious 

 aspirations from his earliest years. He bad always in fact a good and 

 sensitive heart, and never was capable of any hardened or deliberate 

 wickedness. Even when he took, as he says he did, the halfpence or 

 other small change which his mother left carelessly in his way, he 

 used to give part of the money, he tells us, to the poor. By the time 

 he was ten years of age, too, he had formed the wish of entering the 

 church. " I was always," he says, " fond of being a clergyman, and 

 used frequently to imitate the minister's reading prayers," &c. Part of 

 this ambition no doubt was inspired by the pleasure he had already 

 begun to take in the exercise of his fine voice and power of declama- 

 tion, which were among the greatest of his personal gifts. 



He was placed at the grammar-school of St. Mary de Crypt in his 

 native city, when he was about twelve, and here he made considerable 

 progress in Latin, distinguishing himself besides in delivering the 

 speeches at the annual visits of the corporation, and also in acting 

 (often in girl's clothes) plays composed by the schoolmaster for the 

 gratification of the magistrates. But after a time he got tired of this. 

 " Before I was fifteen," he proceeds, " having, as I thought, made 

 sufficient progress in the classics, and at the bottom longing to be set 

 at liberty from the confinement of a school," he persuaded his mother 

 not to let him learn Latin any longer. " Hereupon, for some time I went 

 to learn to write only. But -my mother's circumstances being much 

 on the decline, and being tractable that way, I began to assist her 

 occasionally in the public-house, till at length I put on my blue apron 

 and my snuffers, washed mops, cleaned rooms, and in one word became 

 professed and common drawer for nigh a year and a half." After 

 about a year, his eldest brother having married, his mother left the 

 inn ; and Whitefield, finding that he could not agree with his sister- 

 in-law, followed his mother in a few months. But it appears that 

 neither mother nor son had given up the idf a of the latter yet making 

 his way to the university. " Having thus lived with my mother 

 for some considerable time," Whitefield goes on to state, " a young 

 student, who was oace my schoolfellow, and then a servitor of Pem- 

 broke College, Oxford, came to pay my mother a visit. Amongst 

 other conversation, he told her how he had discharged all college 

 expenses that quarter, and saved a penny. Upon that my mother 

 immediately cried out, ' That will do for my son ! ' Then, turning to 

 me, she said, 'Will you go to Oxford, George?' I replied, ' With all 

 my heart.' Whereupon, having the same friends that this young 

 student had, my mother without delay waited on them. They pro- 

 mised their interest to get me a servitor's place in the same college." 

 The result was, that he went back to school, where, he states, he now 

 spared uo pains to get forward in his book; and that he was admitted 

 a servitor of Pembroke College in 1733. Before he had left school, 



B10G. DIV. VOL. VI. 



the religious element in his character had been strongly developed. 

 His own account is that for a twelvemonth he had gone on in a round 

 of duties, "receiving the sacrament monthly, fasting frequently, 

 attending constantly on public worship, and praying often more than 

 twice a day in private." He was thus in the fittest temper of mind 

 for joining the Wesleys and their associates, who had been already 

 for some years known in the University by the name of Methodists, 

 and of whose proceedings he had heard before he came up. He was 

 introduced to them after he had been about a year at college, and 

 soon showed that he was to be outrun in zeal by no one. It had 

 happened that, before he and the Wesleys met, Whitefield had been 

 nourishing his devotional temperament by the same books to which 

 they had devoted themselves those of Thomas a Kempis, Scougal, 

 and Law. 



Whitefield was ordained deacon by Bishop Benson, of Gloucester, 

 20th June 1736. Soon after, he returned to Oxford, and took his 

 degree of B.A. From the first his preaching made an extraordinary 

 impression. Even the doctrine he delivered was not so novel and 

 arousing as the manner in which he delivered it. Such earnestness, 

 such passionate enthusiasm, had not before been heard from the 

 pulpit in England by that generation. But even this vehemence lay 

 quite as much in the voice and action as in the language of the 

 preacher. Whitefield's voice, which is affirmed to have been so 

 powerful as to be audible at the distance of a mile, appears by 

 general testimony to have been in all other respects one of the most 

 effective for the purposes of elocution ever possessed by man : capable 

 of taking every various tone of emotion, and, whether poured forth 

 in thunder or in softer music, making its way to the heart with irre- 

 sistible force and effect. Then he gesticulated, he stamped, he wept 

 with a tempestuous abandonment to which the most successful efforts 

 of the counterfeit passion of the stage seemed tame and poor. He 

 first came up to London in 1737, to officiate for a time in the chapel 

 of the Tower ; but hia first sermon in the metropolis was preached in 

 Bishopsgate church. He then officiated for a few months as curate 

 at Dummer, in Hampshire. While he was here he received from his 

 friends the Wesleys, who were then in Georgia, in North America, an 

 urgent invitation to follow them to that settlement. With this he 

 immediately resolved to comply, but before leaving England he went 

 to pay a farewell visit to his friends in Gloucester ; and in that city 

 and Bristol, and afterwards in London, he preached to such over- 

 flowing audiences, and with such extraordinary effect, as made the 

 whole country ring with his name. Breaking away however from all 

 the inducements that were held out to keep him at home, he em- 

 barked for Georgia on the 23rd of December 1737, although it was 

 not till the end of January following that, owing to contrary winds, 

 the vessel got fairly under weigh, about the very time that the ship 

 which brought Wesley back to England was getting into the port 

 from which Whitefield had sailed. 



Whitefield remained in America till towards the close of the year. 

 He then returned to England, mainly with the view of raising sub- 

 scriptions for an orphan-house which he had established in Georgia, 

 and which continued to be a principal object of attention with him 

 during his life. Now began that course of preaching in association 

 with Wesley, which may be said to have blown into a flame the 

 sparks kindled by their previous separate exertions, and to have 

 established Methodism as a popular faith. It was Whitefield who set 

 the first example of preaching in the open air, which he did on the 

 afternoon of Saturday, the 17th of February 1739, on Hannam Mount, 

 at Rose Green, to the colliers of Kingswood, near Bristol. 



ifVom this time forward his life was spent in incessant movement 

 from place to place, and exercise of his wonderful power of exciting 

 and swaying the feelings of all orders of persons by his peculiar pulpit 

 oratory. He repeatedly revisited America, and traversed the whole 

 extent of the British possessions there ; when on this side of the 

 Atlantic he generally made a yearly round through England and 

 Scotland ; he was several times in Ireland ; and in 1754, on one of 

 his voyages to America, he spent a short time at Lisbon. To the end 

 of his life his popularity as a preacher remained almost unimpaired; 

 multitudes, at least, continued to crowd to him whenever he appeared, 

 and to hang with absorbed attention on his lips, although, as in the 

 case of Wesley also, the more extravagant effects which his appeals 

 had at first in many instances produced soon ceased to be commonly 

 exhibited. Nor was it only the unlettered that he interested and 

 delighted. It was in the year 1748 that he became known to Selina, 

 countess of Huntingdon, who made him one of her chaplains. This 

 connection introduced him to the highest circles both of rank and 

 literature in the metropolis ; and among his admirers and frequent 

 hearers were now to be found not only numbers of court beauties and 

 persons of both sexes of the first distinction in the world of fashion, but 

 such men as Chesterfield, Bolingbroke, and Hume. So also in America 

 he was listened to with wonder and complacency by Benjamin Franklin. 



Whitefield and Wesley were in various respects very unlike one 

 another, and, as is well known, they did not long continue to co-ope- 

 rate. They quarrelled, so early as in 1741, about the great question 

 of predestination ; Wesley declaring for the Arminiau theology, the 

 milder nature of Whitefield, contrary to what might have been 

 expected, standing up for the Calvinistic system of irresistible fate 

 and eternal decrees of election and reprobation. They never came to 



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