PERSONAL

He would not allow much merit to Whitefield's oratory. "His popularity, Sir (said he), is chiefly owing to the peculiarity of his manner. He would be followed by crowds were he to wear a nightcap in the pulpit, or were he to preach from a tree."-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1769, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. II, p. 91.

I did not disapprove of the design; but, as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen, and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expense, I thought it would have been better to have built the House here and brought the children to it. This I advised; but he was resolute in his first project, rejected my counsel, and I therefore refused to contribute. I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing. from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceded, I began to soften, and concluded to give the copper. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all. At this sermon there was also one of our club, who, being of my sentiments respecting the building in Georgia, and suspecting a collection might be intended, had by precaution emptied his pockets before he came from home. Towards the conclusion of the discourse, however, he felt a strong desire to give, and applied to a neighbour, who stood near him, to borrow some money for the purpose. The application was fortunately made to perhaps the only man in the company who had the firmness not to be affected by the preacher. His answer was, "At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely; but not now, for thee seems to be out of thy right senses."- FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN, 1790? Autobiography, ch. viii.

Mr. George Whitefield, of whom, though Dr. Johnson did not think very highly, it must be acknowledged that his eloquence was powerful, his views pious and charitable, his assiduity almost incredible; and, that since his death, the integrity of his

character has been fully vindicated.BOSWELL, JAMES, 1791-93, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill, vol. 1, p. 88.

His voice excelled both in melody and compass, and its fine modulations were happily accompanied by that grace of action which he possessed in an eminent degree, and which has been said to be the chief requisite of an orator. An ignorant man described his eloquence oddly but strikingly, when he said that Mr. Whitefield preached like a lion. So strange a comparison conveyed no unapt a notion of the force and vehemence and passion of that oratory which awed the hearers and made them tremble like Felix before the apostle.--SOUTHEY, ROBERT, 1820, Life of Wesley.

Whitfield's zealous spirit exhausted all its energies in preaching, and his full dedication to God was honoured by unbounded success. The effect produced by his sermons was indescribable, arising in a great degree from the most perfect forgetfulness of self, during the solemn moment of declaring the salvation that is in Christ Jesus. His evident sincerity impressed every hearer.-SIDNEY, EDWIN, 1834, Life of Rowland Hill.

Must have been a man with great things in his heart. He had many dark contests with the spirit of denial that lay about him before he called his genius forth into. action. All the logic in him was poor and trifling compared to the fire that was in him, unequalled since Peter the Hermit. First he went to Bristol, and preached to the neighboring coal miners, who were all heathens yet, but he preached to them till he saw, as he tells us, "their black cheeks seamed with white tears." He came to Scotland, and got money there to convert the heathen. This was a great thing to do, considering the hard, thrifty, cold character of the nation. He came to Glasgow and preached, and talked about the Indians and their perishing state; would they hesitate to contribute of their goods. to rescue this poor people? And thus he warmed the icy people into a flame, insomuch that, not having money enough by them, they ran home for more, and brought even blankets, farm stuff, hams, etc., to the church, and piled them in a heap there! This was a remarkable fact, whether it were the work of a good spirit, or of the devil. - CARLYLE, THOMAS,

1838, Lectures on the History of Literature, p. 175.

From the days of Paul of Tarsus and Martin Luther to our own, history records the career of no man who, with a less alloy of motives terminating in self, or of passions breaking loose from the control of reason, concentrated all the faculties of his soul with such intensity and perseverance for the accomplishment of one great design. Whitfield was a great

and a holy man; among the foremost of the heroes of philanthropy; and as a preacher, without a superior or a rival.STEPHEN, SIR JAMES, 1838, The Lives of Whitfield and Froude, Edinburgh Review, vol. 67, pp. 513, 514.

Often feeble, and assailed by violent disease threatening speedy dissolution, he was in perpetual journeyings, to which neither his wife nor his home seemed to have been regarded as the slightest obstacles. All his tastes and habits were itinerant, and, it must be confessed, they were necessary to one, whose field was the world, and who was conscious of gifts, for which not a single church but all christendom was the appropriate theatre. -PARKMAN, F., 1838, Whitefield in America, Christian Examiner, vol. 25, p. 102.

Whitefield had evidently made a deep impression on the imaginations of the men of his day; for, in every account they gave of his preaching, there was a distinct. image of the man, of his look, his action, his fervor, and some particular point was remembered, that he had made in his discourse. It seemed as if there was, every time, some new effect or uncommon incident, to fix the sermon in every memory, to be transmitted to at least one generation. We remember hearing two of our public men describe Whitefield many years ago. They were then aged, and disposed to value the solid more than the showy. They were of ripe years and judgment when they heard him, and, though of strong passions, yet good masters of themselves and disposed to see the whole of things. And the imagination of the one was filled with his preaching a farewell sermon on Boston Common at sunrise, and investing the newborn day with a glory the eye had never seen; it became a religious memorial. The other dwelt upon the flight of the dove towards heaven, and gave Whitefield's action as his soul

seemed to follow the waving of its wings. They had probably forgotten much of the doctrine, but the image was fixed forever. -FITCH, E. T., 1839, Philip's Life and Times of Whitefield, North American Review, vol. 48, p. 479.

The common impression is that Whitfield had revivalist rudeness and passion. On the contrary, he had extreme grace of manner. He had art as well as fervency, and the union made him irresistible to his hearers, to whatever parish they belonged. -HOLYOAKE, GEORGE JACOB, 1869-95, Public Speaking and Debate, p. 184.

He

Unlike Wesley, whose strongest enthusiasm was always curbed by a powerful will, and who manifested at all times and on all subjects an even exaggerated passion for reasoning, Whitefield was chiefly. a creature of impulse and emotion. had very little logical skill, no depth or range of knowledge, not much selfrestraint, nothing of the commanding and organising talent, and, it must be added, nothing of the arrogant and imperious. spirit so conspicuous in his colleague. At the same time a more zealous, a more single-minded, a more truly amiable, a more purely unselfish man it would be difficult to conceive.-LECKY, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE, 1878, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, ch. ix.

If one were asked who was the greatest pulpit orator that ever lived, it would be a nice question to determine, so various are the styles of sacred eloquence, and so different are the tastes of even the most competent judges. But if we were to judge by the effects produced, we should hardly need to hesitate in pronouncing George Whitefield the Demosthenes of the pulpit. . . . Not only the unlettered, but men of the highest culture, yielded to the fascination of his speech. The cold, skeptical Hume declared that he would go twenty miles on foot to hear Whitefield preach; and in his chapel might be seen the Duke of Grafton, not yet pierced by the arrows of Junius, the heartless George Selwyn, Lord North, Charles James Fox, William Pitt, and Soame Jenyns. John Newton, the friend of Cowper, used to get up at four in the morning to hear the great preacher at five; and he says that even at that early hour the Moorfields were as full of lanterns as the Haymarket

of flambeaux on an opera night.—MATHEWS, WILLIAM, 1878, Oratory and Orators, pp. 379, 382.

Wesley's fame as a preacher was somewhat obscured by the extraordinary power of Whitefield, whose dramatic eloquence attracted all classes.-BUCKLEY, JAMES M., 1898, A History of Methodism in the United States, p. 329.

His printed sermons by no means explain his reputation; it should be remembered that he preached over eighteen thousand sermons; only sixty-three were published by himself, forty-six of them before he was twenty-five years of age. Eighteen other sermons in print were published from shorthand notes, unrevised. The warmth of his expressions, and an incautious frankness of statement in his autobiographical writings, laid him open to ridicule and undeserved reproach. It was primarily against Whitefield that the more persistent attacks upon methodism were levelled. Apart from his evangelistic work he was in many ways a pioneer. With none of the administrative genius by which Wesley turned suggestions to account, he anticipated Wesley's lines of action to a remarkable extent.

He preceded him in making Bristol a centre of methodist effort; he was beforehand with him in publishing journals, in founding schools, in practicing open-air preaching, and in calling his preachers to a conference. His religious periodical, "The Christian History" (begun in 1740), may be looked upon as a predecessor of the "Arminian Magazine" (1778). Whitefield's complexion was fair, his eyes dark blue and small; originally slender, he became corpulent from his fortieth year, though his diet was spare, and a cow-heel his favourite luxury. Like

Wesley, he rose at four; his punctuality was rigid, his love of order extreme; "he did not think he should die easy, if he thought his gloves were out of their place" (WINTER, p. 82). He was "irritable, but soon appeased" (ib. p. 81); his beneficence was the outcome of the generous glow of his affections.-GORDON, ALEXANDER, 1900, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LXI, p. 91.

GENERAL

Whitefield never drew as much attention as a mountebank does; he did not

draw attention by doing better than others, but by doing what was strange. Were Astley to preach a sermon standing upon his head on a horse's back, he would collect a multitude to hear him; but no wise man would say he had made a better sermon for that. I never treated Whitefield's Ministry with contempt; I believe he did good. He had devoted himself to the lower classes of mankind, and among them he was of use. But when familiarity and noise claim the praise due to knowledge, art, and elegance, we must bear down such pretensions.-JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1779, Life by Boswell, ed. Hill, vol. III, p. 465

It is clear fact, admitting of no manner of question, that Whitefield's writing, nay, that those specimens of his public addresses which were written down during this powerful delivery, bear but

exceedingly slender marks of anything we are accustomed to denominate talent, in the intellectual sense. His reasoning is no more than just a common propriety in putting thoughts generally common together. His devotional sentiment is fervent, but not of elevated conception. His figures, as far as we recollect, are seldom new, or what critics mean when they speak of "felicity;" their analogy is the broad and obvious. one, such as that between medicine and the gospel, considered as a remedical dispensation. The diction is quite plain, and does not appear to partake of eloquence, further than any easy freedom, and the genuine expression of sincerity and earnestness. The collection of letters, con

stituting about one-half of his printed. works, must have exceedingly disappointed those who sought from them any other instruction, than that which may be imparted by one general emanation of pious zeal, undistinguished by any discriminative particularity of thought, or any but the most obvious kind of reflections, often repeated and in the same words, on the successive incidents and scenes of his life and labours. There are none of those pointed observations, either on human. nature or individual character, which might have been suggested by the masses. and the particles of the human kind so variously brought under his view, and which would have been made by such a sagacious man, for instance, as John Knox. And

even the disclosures of the movements and principles of his own mind, on which subject there is no appearance of reserve, are, with a singular uniformity, for a man stimulated by the circumstances of so extraordinary a career, in the strain of pious commonplace. The reader's interest would soon subside in an irresistible sense of insipidity, but for the strong and constant indications of a genuine religious zeal, and the train of references proving an unremitted and most wonderful course of exertions. In short, there can be no hazard in asserting, that his collective writings would, in the minds of all cultivated and impartial readers, leave the marvellous of his successes to be accounted for on the ground of causes quite distinct from talent, in the intellectual sense of the term.-FOSTER, JOHN, 1812, George Whitefield, Critical Essays, ed. Ryland, vol. II, p. 64.

I never read a line of Whitfield's sermons which did not appear to me within the reach of the most ordinary capacity. But he addressed himsef to the sensitive rather than to the rational nature of the sensitivo-rational beings to whom he spoke. I take him to be one of the great examples of the truth, that the quantity of motion may compensate for the deficiency of matter in producing momentum in the moral as well as in the physical world. STEPHEN, SIR JAMES, 1838, Selection from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, Letter, May 9.

The sermons of Whitfield have come down to us in a very imperfect form. They are, for the most part, mere notes of what he said. It has often been remarked that his sermons are strangely destitute of vigorous or original thought. Though it is certain they have greatly suffered from the mutilated form in which they have reached us, we must confess it does not appear to us that the sermons are very deficient in those qualities of thought or expression which we have represented as so essential to popular eloquence. It is true they often want method and arrangement, are disfigured by repetitions, extravagancies, and frequent and gross violations of taste. These are to be attributed partly to the cause above specified; that is, the imperfect manner in which his sermons have been preserved, partly to the character of his

own mind, and partly to the age. If, indeed, any one look for profound speculation or continuous and subtle reasoning in these sermons, he will be disappointed; but so far from wondering on that account that they should have produced such an effect, he will feel, if he know any thing of the philosophy of popular eloquence, that they could not have produced such an effect, if they had been characterised by these qualities. But they could not have been destitute of the principal qualities, whether of thought or of style, which constitute popular eloquence; and we think that even now, amidst great deformities, those qualities may still be not obscurely traced in them.-ROGERS, HENRY, 1840, The British Pulpit, Edinburgh Review, vol. 72, p. 77, note.

I have taken some pains to examine the series of texts preached on by Whitefield and Wesley: few of them are odd, or even uncommon, they are the familiar, evangelical, everlasting verses, which God has owned in all ages.-ALEXANDER, JAMES W., 1844, Familiar Letters, Jan. 25, ed. Hall, vol. 1, p. 387.

Of all the spiritual heroes of a hundred years ago none saw so soon as Whitefield what the times demanded, and none were so forward in the great work of spiritual aggression. I should think I committed an act of injustice if I placed any name before his. RYLE, J. C., 1868, The Christian Leaders of the Last Century, p. 31.

His published sermons are far from equal to his reputation; the charm seems to have been in his voice, elocution, and gesture. MINTO, WILLIAM, 1872-80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 429.

One of Whitefield's assistants, Cornelius Winter, tells us that Whitefield wept profusely during his sermons, that he stamped and was overcome by his feelings, and that the physical effort was frequently followed by a loss of blood. But the printed sermons, which appear indeed to have been imperfectly reported, will draw no tears from the most emotional nature. In fact, they are the most striking proof that can be given of the familiar fact that oratory depends for its instantaneous effect upon the dramatic, rather than upon the intellectual, power of the orator. Here and there, there are

passages of which we can believe that their defects of thought and language would not necessarily destroy our pleasure in a voice and manner of extraordinary excellence. There are apostrophes to God or to the sinner or to the Devil, in which, if we attend only to the situation and abstract our minds resolutely from the actual words, we can believe that a great effect might be produced. But nothing except the unequivocal testimony of facts could convince us that the greatest oratorical capacity could inform those tattered shreds of sensational rhetoric which are strung together to form the bulk of Whitefield's published sermons. It is, we know, the strength of the arm, not of the weapon, which gives force to the arrows of eloquence; and when Whitefield smote men to the heart with such blunt and brittle weapons, the secret of his success must have lain as much in the hearers as in the orator.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 425.

His failings were chiefly those of a somewhat weak nature, of overstrung nerves, and of a half-educated and very defective taste. He was a little irritable and occasionally a little vain. His theological opinions betrayed him into much narrowness of judgment, and his impulsive disposition into constant indiscretion and exaggeration of language. His letters, and indeed most of his writings, are intolerably tedious, and sometimes not a little repulsive. They are written for the most part with that exaggeration of sentiment, in that maudlin, ecstatic, effusive, and meretricious style which is so common among his co-religionists, and which

appears to most cultivated minds to denote much vulgarity, not only of taste, but of feeling. It is a style crowded with ejaculations, interrogations, and quotations from Scripture, in which the simplest subject is expressed in strained Biblical language, in which the inmost and deepest feelings of the soul are ostentatiously paraded, and the most sacred subjects and the holiest names are treated with coarse familiarity.-LECKY, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE, 1878, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, ch. ix.

There is little in his printed sermons now extant to repay the trouble of perusing them; his literary remains do not entitle him to the consideration due even to a respectable mediocrity; and his Journals are a wearisome monotony of unmeaning rhapsodies, which could not be read by anyone less enthusiastic than himself without a feeling strongly akin to disgust. Yet to this man it was given, without the aid of worldly wisdom or the resources of extensive knowledge, to sway multitudes with a power to which Tully was a stranger, and for which we search in vain for a parallel, even in the greatest ages of Athenian eloquence. MYALL, WILLIAM, 1880, George Whitefield, International Review, vol. 9, p. 270.

While destitute of Wesley's marvellous power of organisation, he was without rival as the pulpit orator of the century in which he lived. Men of the most varied orders of mind bore witness to the profound impression he produced. Those who listened to him were not only interested and convinced, but quickened with a new kind of life.-BROWN, J., 1896, Social England, ed. Traill, vol. v, p. 238.