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little; and experience has taught, that it is not easy to recover it, when once lost. So precious a jewel is always to be watched with a careful eye: for no people are likely to enjoy liberty long, that are not zealous to preserve it. As a real friend to it, I have given you my thoughts with freedom and plainness, as you desired. If they prove satisfying to you, and you judge that they may be any ways serviceable to the cause of truth and Christian liberty, you may use them for that purpose as you shall think best.

      I am &c.

      Philalethes

      Eleutheropolis,

      March 30, 1744.

      GEORGE WHITEFIELD (1714–1770). Although the Great Awakening was already in progress when Whitefield made his first journey to America in 1738, it owed more to him than to any other individual. He was truly the Great Awakener. Whitefield was born in Gloucester, England, and grew up in poverty. Two years after graduation from Oxford in 1736, he was ordained an Anglican priest. He made seven trips to America and preached in virtually every important town on the Atlantic seaboard during 1738, 1739–41, 1744–48, 1751–52, 1754–55, 1763–65, and 1769–70. He had begun his work with Charles and John Wesley in the Holy Club at Oxford, where Charles was a tutor at Christ Church, and he participated in their mission in Georgia, which remained his base over the decades. He shared the Wesleys’ conviction that a “new birth” and a converted ministry were needed, but by 1740 he had become more strictly Calvinist, while John Wesley had turned to Arminianism.

      Undoubtedly, Whitefield was the greatest evangelist of the century, preaching an average of forty hours each week, four times in a day that began at four in the morning and ended punctually at ten in the evening. It is estimated that he preached about 18,000 sermons in his lifetime. His histrionic gifts were the envy of David Garrick. Doubters, like Benjamin Franklin, who joined an audience of perhaps 30,000 Philadelphians in 1740, emptied their pockets, mesmerized, for Whitefield’s Savannah orphanage, Bethesda.

      After the Seven Years’ (French and Indian) War ended in 1763, Whitefield arrived in America for his sixth tour. On April 2, 1764, he held a private conversation in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with Samuel Langdon and other established ministers that alarmed Americans already worried about their liberty. Whitefield was quoted as saying: “I can’t in conscience leave the town without acquainting you with a secret. My heart bleeds for America. O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end. You have nothing but trouble before you. . . . Your liberties will be lost.” Whitefield outlined the secret plans (as he said) of the British Ministry to end colonial self-government and to establish the Anglican Church (William Gordon, The History of the Rise, Progress and Establishment of the United States . . . [2d ed., 3 vols. New York: Samuel Campbell, 1794], 1:102). This episode galvanized the clergy in their opposition to British policy, especially when the intelligence proved true and the 1765 Stamp Act was adopted.

      Whitefield made one more trip to America, arriving in the fall of 1769. On September 30, 1770, the evangelist suddenly died of an apparent asthma attack in Newburyport, Massachusetts, at the home of the Reverend Jonathan Parsons, in whose church, the First (South) Presbyterian Church, he was scheduled to preach that morning.

      The sermon reprinted here communicates little of the power of the spoken words of the great evangelist, a notorious characteristic of Whitefield’s published works. Still, it gives the flavor of his political theology. The events he refers to are those of the War of the Austrian Succession (called King George’s War in North America), in which the French forces’ stronghold at Louisbourg had been captured by a ragtag collection of New England frontiersmen and militia under the command of William Pepperel in June 1745. While this victory is celebrated as pivotal, the specific reason for the day of thanksgiving being observed by Whitefield and his auditors was the recent destruction by a storm at sea of a French fleet sent to recapture Cape Breton and Nova Scotia, an event in which the hand of Providence could be seen. The vigorous Indian warfare along the Pennsylvania and New York frontier also influences the discourse.

      The sermon was preached at the New Building in Philadelphia on Sunday, August 24, 1746. Whitefield, writes Michael A. Lofaro, “is central to the understanding of eighteenth century America. . . . The success of his itinerant ministry in the colonies indirectly hastened the break with England by increasing the number of dissenters and, by forming them into loosely affiliated, intercolonial, interdenominational ‘congregations,’ perceptibly encouraged American independence” (American Writers Before 1800, p. 1581).

      

That they might observe His Statutes, and keep his Laws.

      Psalm CV. 45.

      

en, brethren and fathers, and all ye to whom I am about to preach the kingdom of GOD, I suppose you need not be informed, that being indispensably obliged to be absent on your late thanksgiving-day, I could not shew my obedience to the Governor’s proclamation, as my own inclination led me, or as might justly be expected from, and demanded of me. But as the occasion of that day’s thanksgiving is yet, and I trust ever will be, fresh in our memory, I cannot think that a discourse on the subject can even now be altogether unseasonable. I take it for granted further, that you need not be informed, that among the various motives which are generally urged to enforce obedience to the divine commands, that of love is the most powerful and cogent. The terrors of the law may afright and awe, but love dissolves and melts the heart. The love of CHRIST, says the great Apostle of the gentiles, constraineth us. Nay, love is so absolutely necessary for those that name the name of CHRIST, that without it, their obedience cannot truly be stiled evangelical, or be acceptable in the sight of GOD. Although, says the same Apostle, I bestow all my Goods to feed the Poor, and though I give my Body to be burnt, and have not Charity (i.e. unless unfeigned love to GOD, and to mankind for his great name’s sake, be the principle of such actions), howsoever it may benefit others, it profiteth me nothing. This is the constant language of the lively oracles of GOD. And, from them it is equally plain, that nothing has a greater tendency to beget and excite such an obediential love in us than a serious and frequent consideration of the manifold mercies we receive time after time from the hands of our heavenly Father. The royal Psalmist, who had the honour of being stiled the man after GOD’S own heart, had an abundant experience of this. Hence it is, that whilst he is musing on the divine goodness, the fire of divine love kindles in his soul; and, out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth speaketh such grateful and extatic language as this—“What shall I render unto the Lord for all His Mercies? Bless the Lord, O my Soul, and all that is within me bless his holy Name.” And why? “Who forgiveth all thine Iniquities, who healeth all thy Diseases, who redeemeth thy Life from Destruction, who crowneth thee with loving Kindness and tender Mercies.” And when the same holy man of GOD had a mind to stir up the people of the Jews to set about a national reformation, as the most weighty and prevailing argument he could make use of for that purpose, he lays before them, as it were, in a draught, many national mercies, and distinguishing deliverances, which had been conferred upon, and wrought out for them, by the most high GOD. The psalm to which the words of our text belong, is a pregnant proof of this; it being a kind of epitome or compendium of the whole Jewish history: At least it contains an enumeration of many signal and extraordinary blessings the Israelites had received from GOD, and also the improvement they were in duty bound to make of them, viz. to observe his statutes and keep his laws.

      To run through all the particulars of the psalm, or draw a parallel (which might with great ease and justice be done) between GOD’s dealings with us and the Israelites of old—to enumerate all

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