by H. W. Brands
Yet Oxford initially attempted to corrupt him. His classmates habitually engaged in an “excess of riot” and encouraged him to come along. By now at least aware of the evil nature of such a life, Whitefield prayed for the strength to resist temptation.
God answered his prayers by leading him to the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, who had formed a small group devoted to piety, prayer, and an ascetic “method” of living. These “Methodists” were the butt of ridicule of most of Whitefield’s classmates, and at first he attempted to keep his connection secret. But, driven by a deep conviction that he was unworthy of salvation, he soon became more methodical—indeed fanatical—than the Wesleys. He fasted for days at a time and deprived himself of everything that gave him pleasure, thinking that somehow this mortification of the flesh would save him. Yet the more he strove, the more convinced he grew of his sinfulness.
One day revelation came to him in the form of a desperate woman. For some time Whitefield had been carrying the message of the gospel to prisoners in the local jail; this woman was the wife of one of the prisoners. Distraught at her inability to support her children with her husband behind bars, she had attempted to escape their hungry cries by the sole expedient she knew: to hurl herself into the river and drown. The chance intervention of a passerby had prevented her from carrying out her plan; now she turned to the only one she could think of who might help her, the one who had visited her husband in jail. Whitefield comforted her as best he could at the moment, and told her to meet him at the jail that afternoon. She did so. He read to the woman and her husband from the Gospel of John, and suddenly, as he later described it, “God visited them both by his free grace.” The woman was “powerfully quickened from above”; the man, trembling and crying out, “I am upon the brink of hell!” likewise felt the powerful rush of salvation. “From this time forward, both of them grew in grace.”
Having now witnessed this instantaneous rebirth through grace, Whitefield longed to experience it himself. He mortified the flesh more than ever, increasing his fasts, taking long walks on cold mornings till his fingers turned black from the frost. His health began to fail and his body to break down.
One day, perceiving an uncommon drought and disagreeable clamminess in my mouth, and using things to allay my thirst, but in vain, it was suggested to me that when Jesus Christ cried out, “I thirst,” His sufferings were near at an end. Upon which I cast myself down on the bed, crying out, “I thirst! I thirst!” Soon after this, I found and felt in myself that I was delivered from the burden that had so heavily oppressed me. The spirit of mourning was taken from me, and I knew what it was truly to rejoice in God my Saviour…. Now did the Spirit of God take possession of my soul, and, as I humbly hope, seal me unto the day of redemption.
Having felt for himself what he soon took to calling “the new birth,” Whitefield set to sharing the experience with others. In 1736 he was ordained at Gloucester; he shortly began preaching the message of the new birth. Despite his inexperience and his youth (he was only twenty-one), he vowed to speak the truth as it had been revealed to him. “I shall displease some, being determined to speak against their assemblies,” he confided to a friend on the eve of his inaugural sermon. “But I must tell them the truth, or otherwise I shall not be a faithful minister of Christ.”
The “boy parson,” as he was dubbed, made a sensation from the start—a matter not lost on the parson himself. “I preached at Bishopsgate Church, the largeness of which, and the congregation together, at first a little dazed me,” he wrote, regarding his initial appearance in London. But God saw him through. “My mind was calmed, and I was enabled to preach with power. The effect was immediate and visible to all; for as I went up the stairs almost all seemed to sneer at me on account of my youth; but they soon grew serious and exceedingly attentive, and, after I came down, showed me great tokens of respect, blessed me as I passed along, and made great enquiry who I was.”
The clergy did not all bless Whitefield. Some were simply jealous of his oratorical brilliance; others questioned the orthodoxy of his message. Consequently, few men of the cloth—although many of the laity—lamented the news that he intended to take his message to America, to pursue his ministry among the debtors and other poor of James Oglethorpe’s new colony in Georgia. The Wesleys had already gone; Whitefield would follow.
His first American mission lasted four months. He generated as much excitement in Georgia as he had at home. “Mr. Whitefield’s auditors increase daily,” wrote one who saw him in Savannah. “And the place of worship is far too small to contain the people who seek his doctrine.” That doctrine was the doctrine of the new birth; Whitefield called on his hearers to cast aside their sinful ways and take God directly into their lives.
He returned to England to even more popular acclaim than before, and even more clerical disapproval. One by one the churches closed their pulpits to him. Yet the people demanded to hear him, so he began preaching in the open fields. His first outdoor sermon was heard by some two hundred coal miners on a hill near Bristol. Within weeks the crowds numbered twenty thousand. What even Whitefield at first characterized as the “mad trick” of preaching in the fields became the centerpiece of his ministry. “Blessed be God that I have now broken the ice!” he recorded after the Bristol performance. “I believe I never was more acceptable to my Master than when I was standing to teach those hearers in the open fields. Some may censure me; but if I thus pleased me, I should not be the servant of Christ.”
While Whitefield was learning to antagonize established religion in England on the way to his sermon on the mount, Franklin was engaged in a similar dispute in Philadelphia. Not since Boston had he attended church regularly, although he judged the institution of religion conducive to civic welfare and, accordingly, contributed to its upkeep. The object of his subscription was the Presbyterian congregation in Philadelphia, which, encompassing a congeries of dissenters from both the Church of England and the Society of Friends—Congregationalists, Baptists, English Nonconformists, in addition to Presbyterians—was the closest thing Franklin could call to a church of his own. The pastor of the Presbyterians since before Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia was Jedediah Andrews, an able organizer and energetic proselytizer. Andrews engaged in a running contest with an Anglican minister, Thomas Clayton, to capture the loyalty, or at least the attendance, of those souls not irretrievably lost to Quakerism. Andrews had observed the emergence of Franklin as one of the city’s leading citizens, and he determined to bring him into his fold. From either his own persuasive skills or some lingering sense in Franklin that he ought to attend church, Andrews got Franklin to agree to come to service for five successive Sundays. If Franklin remained disinclined to join the church after that time, presumably Andrews would bother him no more.
Andrews may have been persuasive, but he was not eloquent. “His discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect,” Franklin said, “and were all to me very dry, uninteresting and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens.” Franklin served out his time, then left in disappointment and no little disgust.
He stayed away until the arrival of a new preacher. The growth of population in the colony more than offset Andrews’s inadequacy in the pulpit, and the pastor’s workload increased. In 1733 he called across the Atlantic for an assistant, who arrived in the latter part of 1734. For all its amenities, Philadelphia was not the first choice of every promising young minister in the British Isles; as a result, Andrews and the Presbyterian synod had to take whom they could get. Whom they got was Samuel Hemphill, lately of Ireland, oratorically gifted but, according to his critics, doctrinally suspect. A fellow minister who knew him in Ireland called him a “new-light man”—a term denoting an unsettling latitudinarianism, either theological or institutional or both—as well as, more specifically, “a vile heretic, a preacher of morality
rather than dogma.”
Franklin cared nothing for the purity of Presbyterian dogma, and if Hemphill preached morality rather than dogma, he was probably worth a hearing. Franklin returned to Sunday services and enjoyed “most excellent discourses,” which “had little of the dogmatical kind, but inculcated strongly the practice of virtue, or what in the religious style are called good works.” Franklin was not alone in his enthusiasm for the new man; according to Andrews, who was now having second thoughts about Hemphill, “free-thinkers, Deists, nothings, getting a scent of him, flocked to him.”
Hemphill’s popularity with this unholy mob was prima facie evidence of his irregularity. At Andrews’s urging, the Presbyterian synod conducted an investigation, which culminated in a trial. Franklin might have let the matter alone, as being solely the concern of narrow-minded sectarians, but he believed that Hemphill’s emphasis on good works could have only a beneficent influence on civic life, and he was loath to lose it. Besides, the actions of Andrews and the synod struck the same anti-authoritarian nerve in Franklin that had made it impossible for him to remain in Boston. Let the dogmatists speak their piece, he believed, but do not let them stifle the opinions of others.
Franklin joined the fray, though he had no standing in the matter. The week before Hemphill’s trial Franklin published an imagined dialogue between two Presbyterians on the streets of Philadelphia. One defends the position of the Presbyterian synod; the other—clearly speaking for Franklin—dismantles the synod’s arguments. When the first complains that the new minister preaches morality rather than faith, the second says, “What is Christ’s Sermon on the Mount but an excellent moral discourse?” The first replies that, regardless, the Presbyterians have the right to determine who will preach from their pulpit; anyone who will not subscribe to the Westminster Confession should be barred. The second answers that just as Luther had found error in the practices of the Church of Rome, and Calvin been obliged to modify Luther, so might synods today correct Westminster. “Why must we be for ever confined to that, or any, Confession?” The first says that most Presbyterians are perfectly happy with the Westminster Confession; this being so, they have every right to prohibit their pulpit to an innovator. The second responds that a majority can be mistaken. At the beginning of the Reformation, the reformers were in a distinct minority. Besides, Presbyterians deem it their right to preach their version of the Gospel to unbelievers; they ought to accord a similar right to others, even if they think those others misguided. They might learn something. “We have justly denied the infallibility of the Pope and his councils and synods in their interpretations of scripture, and can we modestly claim infallibility for our selves or our synods?” None can know, this side of heaven, where lies true orthodoxy. In the meantime, “No point of faith is so plain as that morality is our duty, for all sides agree in that. A virtuous heretic shall be saved before a wicked Christian.”
Franklin must have realized this last statement made him sound almost like a papist; the crux of the Reformation had been Luther’s conviction that faith, not good works, was what allowed a person to be saved. Whether he expected that his little dialogue would help Hemphill before the synod is unclear; in the event, that body voted unanimously to censure the preacher and suspend him from his ministerial office. It did not help Hemphill’s case that he was caught having cribbed his sermons from others. He explained to Franklin that he had an exceedingly retentive memory; he needed to read a text only once and he knew it by heart. Franklin, embarrassed at seeming to defend plagiarism, nonetheless made the best of things. “I rather approved his giving us good sermons composed by others, than bad ones of his own manufacture.”
In fact, by now Hemphill was almost the least of Franklin’s concerns. Franklin could hardly contest the right of the synod to dismiss Hemphill, but he could challenge their wisdom in doing so. He did precisely this, in language that grew more vehement as the controversy continued. In July 1735 Franklin published a pamphlet dissecting the proceedings to date. He rebutted, article by article, the prosecution’s charges and evidence. He alleged “malice and envy” in certain of the accusers, “hot distempered zeal” in others, and he likened the entire affair to the Inquisition. When the synod responded with a defense of its actions, Franklin put out another pamphlet, in which such slight circumspection as his first one exhibited had evaporated entirely. He called the camp of the synod “the dominion of bigotry and prejudice”; their evidence showed “pious fraud.” Of those who defended Andrews against the allegation of bringing false evidence, he declared, “Vain is their endeavour to wipe out the indelible stain he has fixed upon his character by his conduct in that affair. They flounder and wallow in his quagmire, and cover themselves with that dirt which before belonged to him alone.” One charge by Andrews was “ridiculous, false and absurd”; another was “abominably ridiculous and absurd” and “absolutely a stranger” to Holy Scripture. To what he judged an especially egregious lapse of logic in the prosecution’s case, Franklin responded sarcastically, “Admirable reasoning! To which I answer that
Asses are grave and dull animals,
Our authors are grave and dull animals; therefore
Our authors are grave, dull, or if you will, Rev. Asses.
Lest calling the Presbyterian clergy “asses” was insufficient insult, Franklin asserted that those involved in the Hemphill prosecution fell into three categories: “first, the men of honesty who wanted sense; secondly, the men of sense who wanted honesty; and lastly, those who had neither sense nor honesty.” The instigators of the investigation were of the last sort. “Malice, rancour and prejudice” motivated their actions; “animosity” and “false zeal” gave rise to “injustice, fraud, oppression”; the prosecution was already deep and appeared about to go deeper into “the dirt and filth of hypocrisy, falsehood and impiety.”
Franklin’s outburst of anticlericalism was unlike him—or rather, unlike the side of him he preferred to present to the world. The sweet reasonableness with which he normally cloaked his actions withered before his anger at the suppression of a dissenting voice in the Presbyterian pulpit. In this regard the Presbyterians of Philadelphia were as closed-minded as the Puritans of Boston; the struggle over Hemphill aroused the same emotions in Franklin that had driven him from the city of his birth. He was not proud of his performance in the Hemphill case; in his autobiography he glossed it over almost to the point of prevarication.
Yet in this, as in so many other things, Franklin was a man of his times. Matters of religion were provoking people all across the American colonies to unusual emotions. During the late 1730s and early 1740s a religious eruption occurred, rending congregations from New England to the Carolinas. This “Great Awakening” grew out of the pietistic preaching of Theodore Frelinghuysen among his Dutch Reformed flock in New Jersey in the 1720s, and of William and Gilbert Tennent among Presbyterians in the same province. Gilbert Tennent was a particularly compelling character: brawny, earthy, and direct. Where many other preachers appealed to the intellects of their congregants, Tennent spoke to their emotions in a language to which they were unused but which they could not resist. He preached “like a boatswain of a ship, calling the sailors to come to prayers and be damned,” said one witness, who did not entirely approve. The sailors—congregants, rather—came, were damned, and came back for more.
Equally compelling, though in a style oratorically opposite to Tennent’s, was Jonathan Edwards. Two years older than Franklin, Edwards was an intellectual prodigy. He entered Yale before his thirteenth birthday and finished by his seventeenth. At twenty he was the head tutor at the college and, in effect, president. His early interests were as varied as those of Franklin—or more aptly, Cotton Mather—and he speculated on atoms, rainbows, and the lives of spiders. He never forgot about those spiders, but in time he narrowed his focus to the cure of the souls he inherited from his grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, at the Congregational Church in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Edwards’s devotion
to his calling soon became legendary. He rose by four on summer mornings, by five in winter. He ate sparingly, to keep his mind clear and sharp. He devoted fully half of each twenty-four hours to the study of the Scriptures and other volumes conducive to holiness. He chopped wood and rode horseback for exercise, yet with each fall of the ax he reflected on Adam’s fall, and with each hill his horse ascended he thought of the uplifting power of God’s grace. Like Franklin—and Mather—he sought moral self-improvement; in his case he vowed “never to do anything which I should be afraid to do if I expected it would not be above an hour before I should hear the last trump.”
To say Edwards walked in the fear of God would be to put matters mildly (and here he walked away from Franklin); to say that he attempted to instill this same fear in his congregation would be equally bland. Unlike Gilbert Tennent or George Whitefield, Edwards spoke without gestures. His eyes did not search his audience but stayed fixed on the bell-rope at the back of the meeting hall; his words came out in a flat monotone that would have put his listeners to sleep had the message not been so hair-raising:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathesome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.
You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; it is ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to wake again in this world after you closed your eyes to sleep; and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.