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Updated: June 17, 2025
"Pleased! I was delighted beyond measure." We asked, if at Whitefield's return the same popularity continued. "Not the same fury," he said, "not the same wild enthusiasm as before, but a greater esteem, as he became more known. He did not terrify, but was admired." We spent about an hour in his room.
What was the secret of his fascination? His printed sermons which have come down to us are certainly disappointing. They are meagre compositions enough, feeble in thought and badly expressed; and what is known of Whitefield's mental powers would hardly lead us to expect them to be anything else.
Some people in Hanover County, assembling on Sundays to read a book of Whitefield's sermons which by some chance had come their way, and being desired by the county court to declare what religion they were of, found themselves at a loss for a name, "as we knew but little of any denomination of Protestants, except Quakers."
But God works through human agencies; and it is no derogation to the power of His grace, but simply tracing out the laws by which that grace works, when we note the human and natural agencies which all contributed to lend a charm to Whitefield's preaching. The difficulty of accounting for that charm is not so great as would at first sight appear.
But he was never too much carried away to omit analyzing and observing; and on one occasion, when Whitefield was preaching in the open air, he calculated by a clever experiment that the speaker might be heard by more than thirty thousand persons. Nor did he suffer Whitefield's cant phrases to pass unchallenged.
Whitefield's Orphan House in Georgia was his hobby; it was only one out of a thousand instances of his benevolence; but his enthusiastic efforts in behalf of it hardly form a part of the Evangelical revival, and therefore need not be dwelt upon. And yet he had a very decided character of his own; he would have been singularly unlike the Wesley family if he had not.
But Benjamin Franklin tells us that the charm in Whitefield's speech was not his musical voice, not his stream of thought running clear as crystal, not his sudden electric outbursts, when the great man seemed on fire; the something that men have tried in vain to analyze, was his character goodness and sincerity glowing and throbbing in and through words, just as the electric current glows and throbs through the connecting wires.
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