George Whitefield — Michael Haykin

The Long Eighteenth Century: Reason, Revival, and Renewal

Theme over the next five lectures, including that this evening, making six in total. And it's the long 18th century, the 18th century that begins in the very late 1600s and runs into the 1830s. And it's often a period that is described in survey histories of Western culture and Western civilization, it's often a period that is described as the age of reason, an age in which the contours and the shape of the modern world were laid, and the modern world view which prevailed up until the 1960s was hammered out.

And yet it was also, and this is the focus we want to look at, it was also an age of rapture, an age in which men and women were brought to a love for Christ, an adoration of him, and in which the church knew revival and expansion and blessing.

And in our six weeks together we want to think about a number of individuals and a number of themes that reflect those issues of revival and renewal and revival, blessing, and the growth of the church.

Tonight our theme is going to be George Whitefield, his ministry, and something of his spirituality. In two weeks, April the 17th, we'll be looking at Jonathan Edwards, and Edwards in many, many respects lays out for us the shape of what is genuine spirituality, a man who knew revival personally, and was one who wrote extensively on it, and can be of great blessing and help to us in our day.

And then in three weeks we want to think about the hymns of Charles Wesley, certainly one of the figures who has had the greatest effect on a long-term basis, and that, too, is hymns. The writer of probably around 6 ,000 hymns, of which it's estimated somewhere between 450, maybe as many as 600, are still being sung today.

It's an incredible, incredible number. And then as we move into May, we want to think about how did the church seek to respond to the age of reason, through the Enlightenment, because it is in the 18th century that you start to find the supernatural aspects of biblical Christianity challenged.

And we want to look at one man, Andrew Fuller, and his apologetic for Christianity in the face of a growing secularization. And then two other figures we need to touch on. We need to look at the growth of modern missions, the way in which the missionary movement starts in the 18th century, and the appropriate figure is William Carey, the so-called father of modern missions.

And then finally, we want to note how a revival also had profound social consequences. There was a social reordering of society and culture that took place in the 18th century. And so our final session, which will be on May the 29th, will be looking at William Wilberforce and his lifelong fight, first against the slave trade, and then against the institution of slavery.

George Whitefield’s Burial and Public Memory

But tonight, we want to think about the life and ministry of George Whitfield. In 1835, 65 years after the death of Whitfield, two prominent English Baptists, by the names of Francis Cox and James Holby, were on a visit to the United States.

They were actually in the New England area, and they made the decision to go off their route. They had a number of meetings that they were attending and so on, but they made the decision to take a by-route over to a town called Newburyport, Massachusetts.

For it was in Newburyport, in the first Presbyterian church there, a church known as Old South, that George Whitfield was buried. He was buried under the center aisle of the church. And Holby and Cox made then this detour, got to the church.

They were taken down, there were steps, you can still go to the church and you can still go down into the sepulcher where Whitfield is buried. But one thing you cannot do, that you could do then, you could not, you cannot today open the coffin.

You could then. What is amazing is that for the bulk of the 19th century into the 20th century, the coffin of George Whitfield was open. And Cox and Holby remembered, they wrote about this later, they remembered the deep expectant emotions that went through their hearts as they went down, and they watched as somebody opened the upper half of the lid of Whitfield's coffin to reveal the skeleton below.

And they actually took out, this is getting more and more bizarre, they took out the skull of Whitfield and reminisced about what God had done through this man and how God had blessed the church and they prayed.

What is even more bizarre is that not all of Whitfield's skeleton was there. About 15 years earlier, another Englishman had actually stolen part of his right forearm and had taken it back to England and it was seen there by a man named Phillips who wrote a biography of Whitfield, who urged this man, we never know, we do not know the man who stole it, his name, urged this man to return the forearm across the channel.

He didn't do so until the late 1840s, where it turned up in a little pine box at the church. In fact, if we could follow this further, in the 1860s, as Massachusetts soldiers were marching off to the Civil War, there were many who took a side trip like Cox and Hobie and went to the coffin of Whitfield and cut off portions of his ministerial gown, he was buried in his gown, to pin into their regimental suits, hopefully to protect themselves in battle.

Those sorts of stories, and they are true. Those sorts of stories are a very powerful reminder to us that of all of the great figures whom God raised up in the revivals of the 18th century, there was none that gripped the public imagination more than George Whitfield.

Usually it is John Wesley who is remembered, and that's because Wesley had a genius for organization and was able to bring many of those converts who were converted in the revival together in small groups, and then eventually issuing in the denomination which we know as Methodism.

And generally it's Wesley who is the figure who is remembered, but at the time, in the 18th century, it was the name of Whitfield that was on many people's lips. Here are the ways that some people remembered him.

Joseph Williams could describe him as the father of all of those seeking revival in the 18th century. Or this man, this man is an unbeliever, a man named Henry Singem. He said after he heard Whitfield preach, he said he was the most extraordinary man of our times, the most commanding eloquence, unquenchable zeal, unquestionable piety.

Augustus Toplady, the author of Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me, said he was the apostle of the British Empire. Or John Foster, writing from the next century, could say that with the doubtful exception of Whitcliffe, no man probably ever excited in this island, the British Isles, so profound a sensation in the public mind on the subject of religion.

Well, such is some of the ways in which Whitfield was remembered and became almost a mythic figure in his own day and in later days. He was born in fairly humble circumstances, born in Gloucester in 1714, the son of an inn owner, an owner of an inn called the Bell Inn.

And in that period of time in Gloucester was a fairly prestigious establishment, one that was well known and hosted many public gatherings and affairs. But his father died soon after his birth and he was raised really by his mother, Elizabeth.

Initially it appeared that George would spend his life running the inn. He was a servant during his early teen years for his older brother, who had taken over the running of the inn. But his mother had greater longings for her son.

She longed to see him go to university. And by scrimping and saving, and with the help of some friends, he eventually was able to go up to the University of Oxford in 1732. He went as what is called a servitor, S-P-R-V-I-T-O-R.

That is, he was a servant. He was a servant for the wealthier students at Oxford. And Oxford and Cambridge, the two universities in England at the time, basically had two classes of students, those who were wealthy enough to go and had no problems financing their way, and those who were not, and who therefore worked as servants for the wealthier students.

And so Whitfield went to the servitor. He would be up three or so in the morning to prepare the breakfast for the man he was serving, cleaning his clothes, etc. And then after breakfast, cleaning up, and if he had some spare time, going to classes, and then doing the same all over again for lunch, spare time maybe a bit in the afternoon, and then doing the same for dinner in the evening, although English, in the England of that period of time, the main meal of the day would be what we call lunch, then called dinner.

And so he found himself certainly with very, very little free time, but some of that free time he used to frequent a group called the Holy Club. One of the things that characterizes Whitfield from a very early age is a desire for piety, a desire to be for religion.

And the Holy Club had been founded by Charles Wesley about three years earlier, in 1729. And by the time that George arrived, its main figure was John, Charles's older brother. And it was a group of about a dozen men who were seeking to live godly lives.

And they would spend time together praying. Both John and Charles were ordained clergymen, and so they had the Lord's table together. They would visit prisons, they would visit the sick in hospitals, and so on.

And they were those who were seeking through works to win heaven. Very sincere, very devout, but knew nothing of the pre-grace that had characterized the Reformation, or that had characterized, say, the Puritans.

They believed, like Martin Luther did prior to his own conversion, that by fasting, praying, attending public worship, their ardency, their devotion, that God would grant them heaven. Of all those men, Whitfield was the last to join.

Whitefield’s Conversion Through The Life of God in the Soul of Man

He was the first to be converted. He was converted, or he set on the road to conversion, through a book. And it's very interesting that although Whitfield would be the vehicle for the conversion of thousands in his preaching, his own conversion did not come about through the preached word.

It came about through reading. Charles Wesley gave him a book called The Life of God in the Soul of Man. And this book was a book from the 1600s, written by a man named Henry Spoogle, S-C-O-U-G-A-L.

It's still in print, J .I. Packer has recently written the introduction for a recent edition of it. Whitfield would recall the book many years later this way, I must bear testimony to my old friend, Mr. Charles Wesley.

He put a book into my hands called The Life of God in the Soul of Man, whereby God showed me I must be born again or be damned. I know the place where I read that book. It may be superstitious perhaps, but whenever I go to Oxford, I cannot help running to the place where Jesus Christ first revealed himself to me and gave me the new birth.

As a good writer, Spoogle says, a man may go to church, say his prayers, receive the sacrament, the Lord's table, and yet, my brethren, not be a Christian. How did my heart rise? How did my heart shudder like a poor man that's afraid to look into his count books, lest he should find himself a bankrupt?

Yet, should I burn that book? Should I throw it down? Shall I put it by? Or shall I search it? I did search it. And holding the book in my hand, I addressed the God of heaven and earth, Lord, if I am not a Christian, if I am not a real one for Jesus Christ's sake, show me what Christianity is, that I may not be damned.

What the book did was it awakened him to the realisation that Christianity was more than the adherence to a set of doctrines intellectually. That Christianity was far more than the embrace of a system of morality and a seeking to live that system in one's own energy and strength.

That Christianity had as its foundation the new birth. And it is this that sets Whitefield on the road to conversion. When the conversion took place, we don't know in detail, in terms of the day, but it's somewhere around Easter 1735.

It's not surprising that that issued in a significant, obviously, change in Whitefield. He begins to be concerned about the new birth. He is training, by the way, for the Anglican ministry. He was ordained a deacon the year after his conversion and then became a priest.

Whitefield’s Preaching: The New Birth and Justification by Faith

And began to preach, as he was given opportunity, on two key themes. And both of them are going to be what we want to look at in the next hour as we think about something of Whitefield's spirituality.

He began to preach about the new birth. And he began to preach about justification by faith alone. Now, these two themes were subjects that were rarely heard in the pulpits of Anglican churches in Whitefield's day.

It would take us too far afield and too long to trace what had happened in the Church of England and how it had come to be that by the 1730s, most of the sermons that were heard were sermons that dealt with morality.

Sermons that dealt with Christian living. Sermons that encouraged you, this is the way you should live. And so on. But it would be true that the emphasis on the new birth and justification by faith, those key Reformation themes, had been lost in the Church of England.

Part of it certainly would deal with the fact that in the 1660s, the Puritans, who had sought to maintain and emphasize these themes, had all been expelled from the Church of England, and it ended up forming a number of denominations, Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Baptist.

But whatever the case, those themes were not heard generally in the 1700s, in the first three decades. Not surprisingly, Whitefield found doors shut to him. He found pulpits closed to him. Many of the bishops, if we look at the larger picture of the Church, many of the bishops were worldly men.

Let me read to you the words of an English historian named J .H. Plum, talking about the bishops in the Church of England. They were first and foremost politicians, not men of the spirit. There's a worldliness, he writes, about 18th century bishops, which no amount of apologetics can conceal.

One sees the worldliness in a variety of ways. Let me give you one example. Joseph Trelawney, Bishop of Winchester, had a foul mouth, swore regularly, swore like a trooper. I'm not sure why the analogy there is the troopers, but whatever.

He regularly disgusted many of his hearers. On one occasion, he was rebuked for his swearing. How can you, as a bishop, utter such language? Well, he said in reply, because he was a lord, he swore as a lord and baronet, not as a bishop.

Not surprisingly, such bishops had little time for Church renewal. Their time was taken up with political matters. Many of them were sitting in the House of Lords. They were not taken up with Church renewal.

Not surprisingly, the example set by those in the upper echelon of the Church of England filtered down among many of the ministers. Among the ministers in the Church of England at the time, prior to the revival, one finds a variety of categories.

You find some who basically had joined, become ministers, because their fathers had encouraged them to do so, so that they would not split up the family inheritance. Many of the wealthy in England during this period of time, if they were unfortunate enough, I put the word unfortunate in quotes, to have more than one son, one son that lived to adulthood, were faced with a difficult dilemma.

The dilemma was, if they divided their inheritance among the two or three or four sons, none of them would be able to live in the manner like the father. And so what many fathers did, instead of dividing the inheritance, they gave all of the inheritance to the eldest son, and the other sons had to, therefore, other occupations or professions had to be found for them.

You could always put one or two of them in the army or the navy, and then if they didn't have a liking to the military, put them into the church. And so you would find a number of fairly wealthy individuals who became ministers simply because their elder brother had taken the inheritance, and something had to be found for them.

And so many of these men found themselves interested in all kinds of things, but spiritual ministry. You find many of them, as they came into the church, realizing that their loss was not too bad, I'm thinking from their point of view, all they had to do was get together a little homily once a week, ten minutes, twelve minutes, rattle it off.

If they were lucky, quote unquote, they didn't have any other demands on their time, there might be a burial, or a marriage, but beyond that, the rest of the week was theirs. I'm serious. And so you find many of these ministers becoming experts in philosophy, biology, chemistry, literature, law, politics, fox hunting, drinking, anything but spiritual ministry.

And please let me emphasize that the picture I'm painting is not overly gloomy. You can read it again and again and again. Thomas Scott, one of the great evangelical preachers at the end of the 18th century, converted through the witness of John Newton.

He had become a minister because it gave him oodles of free time. He couldn't figure out when he watched Newton, who was in the neighboring Paris, why on earth, Newton, do you go and visit people during the week?

He couldn't figure it out, and Newton's response was this was part of his commitment as a minister of the gospel. The spiritual welfare of the parish was his responsibility, and God one day would hold him accountable for it.

That went home to Scott, and got him thinking, and in due time was converted. William Grimshaw, and Grimshaw is one of my heroes, and up in Yorkshire, again joined the Church of England for worldly motives.

Spent most of his week, he was a minister in a place called Todd Morton in Yorkshire, a little village. Spent most of the week drinking and carousing and playing cards. He tried to keep it hidden from the parish, most of his congregation, reckoning that they wouldn't be too impressed if they knew their minister was a bit of a rake.

But that's what he did most of the time until his wife suddenly died, and he was confronted with eternity. And not long after that, a couple in the congregation, their child died, and they came to him for help, for spiritual help, and all he could tell them was go out and have a good time and you'll soon forget about it.

And he began to think about it, and God converted him. That's typical of much of the clergy in the Church of England in the first three decades of the 18th century. The others who were serious about the ministry, and there were some, I don't want to give the impression that there were none, there were others who were serious about the ministry.

Unfortunately, their preaching dwelt primarily on morality. It lacked, very often, passion. It emphasized decency. It lacked... This is one writer, a man named Horton Davies, talking about the preaching of the early 18th century in the Church of England.

It lacked any holy excitement. It lacked passionate pleading. It lacked heroic challenge. And it's in this context, then, that Whitefield begins his preaching and begins to preach on the new birth. Preaching that is regarded as enthusiasm or fanatical.

And if there's a theme that runs through much of the 18th century, is that we need to be people of moderation and decorum and order. Not ardor, but order. It's well summed up by a tombstone of the period.

And the woman had written on her tombstone that she was pious without enthusiasm. Think about that. But Whitefield was not to be deterred. He found a perfect guard to him. And eventually, on the advice of a Welsh Anglican minister, a man named Griffith Jones, Griffith Jones urged him.

He said, If the pulpits are closed to you, go where the people are. Go and preach out in the open air. And so it is. In February of 1739, Whitefield took a step which would produce a radical change in preaching.

Open-Air Preaching and the Kingswood Revival

And it would be one of the key turning points in the history of evangelicalism. He went to Bristol, to an area called Kingswood. Now, I've been in that area today. It doesn't look at all what it did then.

There's a beautiful housing survey there. But in those days, it was an area of colliers, coal miners. Men and women, the bulk of whom had never been in the church. We talk today about the unchurched. England, in the 18th century, was filled with them.

How surprisingly, if you've got ministers who've got no interest in encouraging men and women to come and hear them preach. And there were thousands upon thousands of men and women in England who were unchurched.

And these men and women who Whitefield went to preach to had never, many of them, never darkened the door of a church. They had lived their lives in, almost totally in coal mines, as it were. Their spare time was spent in drinking, squalid violence, and degrading immorality.

And Whitefield went and stood on a little hill, and you can still go there, a place called Hannah Mount. There's a little pulpit set up and a plaque which says that on this spot in February 1739, George Whitefield, and then later John and Charles Wesley, began field preaching.

And Whitefield stood on that mound and about 200 gathered to hear him preach. It must have been a strange sight to see a Church of England clergyman in his gown, which he wore, stood standing on the site and announcing and preaching the gospel.

From this point on, I'm going to come back to that scene in a minute. From this point on, Whitefield would relish field preaching or open air preaching. He preached in fields and brickyards and ships on top of coffins.

A number of times he actually accompanied a condemned criminal to the gallows. The man would be hung and Whitefield would ask if he could stand on top of the coffin before they took it away and preach to the crowd because hangings were always a time for public gatherings and people would come out of curiosity to see.

He preached in pubs, on top of horses, on walls, balconies, windmills, staircases. Anywhere he got a hearing, he would preach. 1768, two years before his death, he could say, I love open, bracing air.

What he meant was he loved to be preaching out in the open air. The following year, the year before his death, it's good to go out into the highways and hedges. Field preaching forever. I should note, and I'm going to come back to that scene in 1739, I should note, Whitefield felt constrained and I hope in my indicating this, you don't feel that this binds you because I don't believe it should, but it gives you a sense of the man.

Whitefield felt constrained. If he was with somebody for more than 15 minutes to speak to them about Christ, I don't think that necessarily is a model that we emulate. It can get you into bondage, I think, if you feel every time you're with somebody for 15 minutes you've never met, you have to talk to them about Christ.

Whitefield felt that. There's a famous story as well along this line of one occasion when Whitefield was staying in a home in New England with people who were very wealthy, outwardly Christian, but as Whitefield saw their lives, very worldly, he didn't get an opportunity to speak to them verbally and so what he did, he wrote on one of the panes of the windows in the room in which he was staying.

Apparently he had a diamond with him. To the shock of those people, they came up after Whitefield had left that day and they found written with this diamond into the window pane, one thing is needful.

Thinking about that story of Mary and Martha. Martha running around, Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus. One thing is needful. At that first open air service in 1739 there were about 200. Within six weeks or so, Whitefield was preaching to thousands.

It's extraordinary. Men and women initially drawn from the lower classes of society coming to hear him preach and then the wealthy coming out from Bristol and Bath. Not far away was Bath, the famous seaside resort.

Well, it's not really a seaside resort, it's a famous spa where a lot of the wealthy in Britain used to go. And many of them heard about this young preacher among whom thousands were going to hear. So they would come out, they'd keep their distance, they didn't mingle with the lower class, but they'd stand back well on the edge of the circle or sit in their carriages and listen to Whitefield preach.

Here's Whitefield's description of one of those occasions where he describes the coal miners having no righteousness of their own to renounce, they were glad to hear of a Jesus who was a friend of publicans and came not to call to righteousness, but sinners to repentance.

The first discovery of their being affected was to see white gutters made by their tears which plentifully fell down their black cheeks as they came out of their coal pits. Hundreds and hundreds of them were soon brought under deep conviction which as the event proved happily ended in a sound and thorough conversion.

Revival, Evangelicalism, and Whitefield’s Ministry

Revival had come to England. It had come through quite extraordinary means. It had come through a Church of England clergyman. Many of those who were the children of the Puritans who had been longing for revival, who had been praying for revival, who had found themselves thrust out of the Church of England, going into the ranks of the Presbyterians and Baptists and Congregationalists, found themselves forced into becoming second class citizens in England.

Laws were put on the books that made anybody of the Church of England members basically second class citizens in every sense of the term. These men and women had prayed, many of them, for revival. But it didn't come through their ranks.

It came through the Church of England. It came through God raising up initially Whitefield and then the Wesley's and then Newton and Grimshaw and Henry Venn and Samuel Walker and William Remain, all of the first generation leaders in the revival between 1735 and the late 1760s were all Anglicans.

Between 1736 when Whitefield first began preaching and his death in 1770 and he was buried in Newburyport, Massachusetts, it's calculated he preached 18 ,000 sermons in 36 years. He would speak sometimes a thousand times a year at the height of his career.

It's remarkable. Now, not all of them were to huge gatherings. Many of them were to small groups. But many of them were to crowds 5 ,000, 8 ,000, 10 ,000, some of them 15 ,000. There is the story of when Whitefield came to Boston in 1740 and the town of Boston, New England consisted of 8 ,000 people at the time, its population.

On that first Sunday there were 2 ,000 -3 ,000 out to hear Whitefield. The second Sunday there were 8 ,000. The third Sunday there were 15 ,000. We know there were that many because Benjamin Franklin was there, one of the fathers of the American Republic a number of years later.

Franklin always went to hear Whitefield preach. He didn't like the gospel, but he loved Whitefield. He never committed his life to Christ, believed that Christ was a good man, had a great system of morality, but he was not God.

But he loved to hear Whitefield preach and he went to hear Whitefield preach on that occasion. He had heard that Whitefield had preached to such large crowds in England he couldn't believe it. So what he did was he paced out the crowd, measured it, and calculated the radius and whatever else you do, mathematics has never been my strong point, he calculated whatever he did to calculate it, figured out, yes, there were 15 ,000 or more there that Sunday.

Whitefield had an extraordinary, extraordinary voice. We'll touch on it in a minute. Often after preaching to such large crowds it's not surprising he spat up blood and he was scarring and ruining his lungs through such preaching.

His ministry was an extraordinary one. He made mistakes in the early years. He was accused of fanaticism and sometimes, yes, he did err along those lines. He argued, for instance, that one of the marks of conversion was assurance of salvation.

He should have known better. He did learn better. Assurance is not of the essence of conversion. There are some Christians who wrestle with assurance all their lives. One thinks of the man whose bicentenary of his death we celebrate this year, William Cooper.

If you know anything about the life of Cooper, spelled Cowper but sounded Cooper, you'll know he wrestled with deep depression much of his life, tried to commit suicide at least two or three times, felt that, yes, God would save his people, but he wasn't going to save William.

It's a remarkable, remarkable account. I have no doubt, well, I could be wrong, but I have no doubt that Cooper is in glory. A man who loved the Lord but felt that God would reject him. And so there are people who wrestle with assurance all their lives.

In his early years, Whitfield thought that if you're converted, you know you're converted and you know you're saved and you'll never lose that assurance. Well, people questioned him, suggested that he was wrong in doing so and arguing that way.

And he rejected that at first, but eventually learned. When his son, he had one son, was born, he predicted the man would be a great preacher, the young boy would be a great preacher. He named him John after John the Baptist.

He buried him within a year of his birth. And he learned not to trust in impressions, but to root his life in scripture. And he learned in some of those early years. But by the time Whitfield reaches his thirties, he has matured.

And some of the early faults he has put behind him. Again, in those early years, he didn't hesitate sometimes to publicly criticize ministers whom he felt were unconverted. He criticized the Archbishop of Canterbury once.

He said the man knows no more about the gospel than Muhammad did. It didn't endear him to the hierarchy in the Church of England. But again, he learned. Jonathan Edwards actually told him, you shouldn't be criticizing men publicly from the pulpit in such a way.

Whitfield wouldn't listen to him. But he learned. And so I don't want to give the impression that Whitfield did not have his faults in his early years, but by his thirties, he's put all of those major areas of problems behind him.

And his preaching is very powerful. Let me read to you, and the sheet was handed out, a letter that Sarah Edwards wrote about Whitfield. And one page of the sheet should look like so. And it's got there, actually, a little picture of Whitfield.

You probably can't see it well, but Whitfield was a bit cross-eyed. One of his eyes, I'm not sure which one, but it tended to focus towards the center, towards the bridge of his nose, which occasioned some of his critics to call him Dr. Squintum.

It's one of the rude names that was given to him. But here's Sarah Edwards, writing about Whitfield. She's listened to Whitfield preach a number of times in Northampton, and Whitfield was going over to New Haven, where her brother, James Pierpont, lived.

And she says this, I want to prepare you for a visit from the Reverend Mr. Whitfield, the famous preacher of England. He's been sojourning with us a week or more, and after visiting a few of the neighboring towns, is going to New Haven, and from thence to New York.

He's truly a remarkable man. And during his visit has, I think, verified all we have heard of him. He makes less of the doctrines of grace than our American preachers generally do. He aims more at affecting the heart.

He is a born orator. You have already heard of his deep-toned, yet clear and melodious voice. Oh, it is perfect music to listen to that alone. And he speaks so easily, without any apparent effort. You remember that David Hume thought it worth going 20 miles to hear him speak, and David Garrick said he could move men to tears and make them tremble by his simple intonations in pronouncing the word Mesopotamia.

David Garrick, well, David Hume was an atheist. He was a Scottish philosopher, one of the leading critics of Christianity in the 18th century. Again, it's remarkable. He loved to go and hear Whitfield preach.

David Garrick was as famous in his day as, say, Lawrence Olivier, or, I hope I'm not defending here, Harrison Ford, are, in our days, great actors. But nobody remembers David Garrick today. He was the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day, and he did say on one occasion, if only I could say the word Mesopotamia, the way Whitfield does, the way he can move people by just saying that one word.

Well, this last, Sarah says, was a mere speech of a play actor, but it's truly wonderful to see what a spell this preacher often casts over an audience by proclaiming the simplest truths of the Bible.

I've seen upward of a thousand people hang on his words with breath of a song, spoken only by an occasional half-suppressed sob. He impresses the ignorant and let the educated and refined. It is reported, you know, that as the miners of England listened to him, the tears made white furrows down their smucky cheeks.

And so here, our mechanics shut up their shops, and the day laborers throw down their tools to go in here and preach, and few go away unaffected. A prejudiced person, I know, might say this is all theatrical artifice and display, but not so will anyone think who has seen and known him.

He is a very devout and godly man, and his only aim seems to be to reach and influence men the best way. He speaks from a heart all aglow with love, and pours out a torrent of eloquence which is almost irresistible.

Many, very many persons in Northampton date the beginning of new thoughts, new desires, new purposes, and a new life from the day in which they heard him preach of Christ and this salvation. Let me mention here four items, and with this we'll conclude the first hour, four items regarding his preaching that Sarah draws attention to.

Whitefield’s Ability to Cross Social Boundaries

First of all is the way in which Whitfield was able to speak across class distinctions. The 18th century was a very class-oriented culture, especially Britain. And as soon as you opened your mouth, this is still true today in Great Britain, it's not true over here, thankfully, but it's still true today in Great Britain, as soon as you open your mouth and you speak, people can tell what kind of background you come from by your accent.

It was even more so in the 18th century, but Whitfield was able to speak to the poor, to minors, he was able to speak to the wealthy and the rich and the educated, and they all heard him, gladly. We'll touch on something of that, of his preaching to the wealthy in the next hour.

The second thing that she notes here, is she notes how some people might say it was all theatrical and artifice. Whitfield did have an ability of using his body in preaching, in a way that many other preachers didn't do in the 18th century.

Many of them simply read their sermons. Whitfield was able to preach extemporaneously, and he did throw his whole body into preaching. And he was not sometimes below using a little theatrics. There is a story, a true story of one occasion, when he was preaching on the second coming, and he was preaching out in a place called Moorfields, no, Kensington Common, where I have been, and it's a central park in London.