Commonly acknowledged as Anglo-America's most popular eighteenth-century preacher, George Whitefield commanded mass audiences across two continents through his personal charisma. Harry Stout draws on a number of sources, including the newspapers of Whitefield's day, to outline his subject's spectacular career as a public figure. Although Whitefield here emerges as very much a modern figure, given to shameless self-promotion and extravagant theatricality, Stout also shows that he was from first to last a Calvinist, earnest in his support of orthodox theological tenets and sincere in his concern for the spiritual welfare of the thousands to whom he preached.

The Divine Dramatist

George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern EvangelicalismBy Harry S. Stout

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 1991 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-0154-8

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

The Young Rake

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 destiny that many eighteenth-century gentlemen sought — personal fame and virtue, achieved through their own superior will, efforts, and abilities — Whitefield's sense of destiny was invariably tied up with a supernatural deliverer who would pick him up out of his lowly situation and catapult him to apostle-like status. Whitefield lived in an imaginary world of destiny derived from the humble saints of old who did not choose but were chosen from above to be luminaries of the faith. Such a destiny did not require class and social rank. The beauty of a divine sense of destiny was its social inversion. God often took the humble to instruct the great.

Along with his dreams of sacred destiny, Whitefield instinctively took on the words and language of the apostles — particularly Paul — for his own speech. While his mother's ambitions pointed to an administrative niche in the church, his personal ambitions transcended institutions in more personal, charismatic ways. As the church would be his arena, so Christ would be his deliverer.

Perhaps because he knew early on his mother's expectations of something great for him in the church, Whitefield seems to have attended Anglican and Presbyterian services regularly. Long before spiritual crises welled up within his conscience and transformed his life, he practiced the moves and mannerisms of the preachers he observed. While still a child, he repeated before his family sermons he had heard, and on occasion he recited some that he had composed himself. The interest seems to have been dramatic and imitative rather than spiritual.

Invariably the young boy's knack for mimicry and memory for dialogue surprised those attending his imitations. So effective were his abilities that they came to the attention of the pastor of Southgate Independent Church, Thomas Cole, who found that the young lad was repeating his pulpit stories almost exactly as he had told them. Later in life Cole attended one of Whitefield's sermons and was heard to remark, "I find young Whitefield can tell stories as well as old Cole!"

Whitefield's talent for mimicry soon found other, more dramatic outlets as well. In fact, theater and play-reading soon became an irresistible outlet and preoccupation of his youth, comparable in importance to home and family. By the time he wrote his autobiography, he had become a mortal enemy of the stage and so did not dwell on such moments as when he read or acted his first play or what plays he found most enjoyable. But the very vehemence with which he renounced his play-reading youth as devil-inspired "folly" suggests that this pastime bordered on an obsession. Clearly he was born with dramatic urges and instincts that demanded expression. Indeed, they soon proved more powerful than schooling and nearly undid his college ambition.

To a boy bound for ministry, schooling always figured prominently. In pursuit of the family dream, a twelve-year-old George began grammar school training at the nearby parish school, St. Mary de Crypt on Southgate Street, near the inn. Any hope the young lad had for a university education depended on his mastering Latin and reading the classics of Greece and Rome. Yet he found this labor extremely difficult. His later confession that he was "so brutish as to hate instruction" was probably not an exaggeration. Throughout his life he remained indifferent or hostile to classical learning and sustained study. His late-life companion and chronicler Cornelius Winter recalled that Whitefield's sermon production involved great passion and practically no study: "He was never more in retirement on a Saturday than on another day.... I never met with any thing like the form of a skeleton of a sermon among his papers, with which I was permitted to be very familiar, nor did he ever give me any idea of the importance of being habituated to the planning of a sermon. It is not injustice to his great character to say, I believe he knew nothing about such a kind of exercise."

But if Whitefield was slow to pick up Latin grammar and rhetoric or to develop the habit of study, he quickly demonstrated a predictable genius for elocution and declamation. His memory for dialogue and gift for expression exceeded that of all his classmates and elicited the wonder of his tutors. In no time he was speaking before his classes and tutors, and by year's end he addressed the visiting members of the corporation.

As he developed his talents with speech and declamation, Whitefield discovered that he was a born actor. The young lad had undoubtedly encountered strolling actors at the inn and had accumulated a full range of characters there to observe and mimic. By the time he got to school, he was immediately given lead roles. So impressive were his performances that his tutor, Daniel Bond, composed dramas especially for him. In one uncomfortably memorable performance Bond cast him in the part of a girl — a role he had "often done" before, and which he played to perfection.

In eighteenth-century England, it was still common for males to play female parts; indeed, it was considered a supreme test of the actor's ability to take on the part of woman. Whitefield was no exception.

My master seeing how mine and my schoolfellows' vein ran, composed something of this kind for us himself, and caused me to dress myself in girls' clothes, which I had often done [in stage roles], to act a part before the corporation. The remembrance of this has often covered me with confusion of face, and I hope will do so, even to the end of my life.

In and of itself, there was nothing objectionable about acting women's parts. Yet in recollecting it, Whitefield registered extreme embarrassment and discomfort. Here we get the first intimation of a person uneasy with his own masculinity as it was defined in the eighteenth-century codes of virility and Spartan muscularity. Always protected by mother and elder siblings, Whitefield never possessed the physical courage and fearlessness so highly favored by the George Washingtons or British generals of his age. He made many male friends, but his dealings with them were always affectionate and cordial, never intimidating. Descriptions of young Whitefield's slight build, "comely" appearance, and "fair countenance" suggest one who adapted easily — perhaps too easily — to female parts. Later in life, he openly admitted his fears of physical confrontation, and, in moments of danger such as ship crossings or mob persecution, he confessed that his wife was braver than he. Only on the childhood stage or in the pulpit could he be fearless. There he could take on the bravest roles and the most courageous saints and play them to perfection.

The immediate result of Whitefield's early successes on the stage was his immersion in theater. Years later, when composing his autobiography, he would recall with regret how "during the time of my being at school, I was very fond of reading plays, and have kept from school for days together to prepare myself for acting in them." Here was an outlet that fit his personality and inborn talents as perfectly as the sermons he mimicked at home. Acting helped him to overcome his fears by "impersonating" greatness. But because acting and the stage existed in a nether world of questionable morality and inferior social class, George's mother could never recommend the stage for her child. On the other hand, she didn't have the dissenter's hatred for all theater as the "devil's workshop." So, receiving neither encouragement nor resistance from his mother, the young actor pursued the stage as his consuming avocation.

Whitefield's awakening interest in drama coincided with a great revival in English play writing that redefined the craft and won entirely new audiences among the middle and working classes. The young Whitefield undoubtedly encountered a broad spectrum of drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary comedy, historical tragedy, and biting political satire. He may have thrilled to the classical tragedy of Joseph Addison's Cato or such more contemporary tragedies as Ambrose Philips's The Distrest Mother, Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane, and Aaron Hill's The Fatal Vision. Romances and ribald comedies — which Whitefield later confessed were his "heart's delight" — included such favorites as Anthony Aston's Love in a Hurry, Colley Cibber's Love Makes a Man, George Farquhar's international hit The Recruiting Officer, and Richard Steele's The Funeral. And it is likely that Whitefield sampled the biting wit of Henry Fielding's burlesque Tom Thumb, seeing in it the power of satire and ridicule in confronting established institutions.

In addition to reading plays, Whitefield also studied acting. In the eighteenth century as in the twentieth, this involved analysis of the passions. While other aspiring clerics in the eighteenth century were reading their Bibles and studying doctrine, young Whitefield was working on the passions. Dramatic plots could be strained and implausible, but that didn't really matter. It was the passions evoked in the actor and audience that counted most. Aspiring actors were less interested in the arts of logic or rhetoric than in the fine arts of painting and sculpture that focused on the human face and body. They asked how the face and body registered emotion in times of great distress, happiness, or repose.

We cannot know for certain whether Whitefield actually read actors' manuals, though they were cheap and readily available. Considered as homiletical texts, they reveal a concentration and emphasis almost exactly opposed to the intellectually centered manuals of the Puritan stalwarts William Perkins and Cotton Mather. In Aaron Hill's classic eighteenth-century manual The Art of Acting, actors learned that "the passions men are actuated by, must be the Objects they are most familiar with, and yet we find no Difficulty greater, than to represent 'em, in their due Distinctions." Beginning with the head, actors explored the full range of facial expressions and body language that would be matched with particular emotions in a spectrum of emotions ranging from sorrow and grief to fear or hatred, and ultimately to love.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Divine Dramatistby Harry S. Stout Copyright © 1991 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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