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Book Extract: George Whitefield And the Rise of Methodism – An Encouragement for Christians Today

These are trying times for Christians, with wars and rumours of wars, persecution and hindrances aplenty, disdain for Christians and all that we stand for, a ‘new morality’ which is nothing more nor less than an old immorality writ large, parody and blasphemy of all that Christians hold dear, secularism rapidly gaining ground, with other religions obtaining preference while Christianity is being pushed further and further away … and the list of our grievances goes on.

            How blessed we are then to be able to turn our eyes away from present sorrow and heartache to the Word of God with all its ‘very great and precious promises’ (2 Pet 1.4) such as Isaiah 35:4,

‘Say to those who have an anxious heart, “Be strong; fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you”.’

            How comforted we are to know that ‘where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’ (Rom 5.20). And how reassured we are to see that such promises have been confirmed within Scripture and at various critical times in Church History.

            Dr Arnold Dallimore has chronicled one such time: the Methodist Revival/Great Awakening of the 18^th Century, in his two-volume biography of George Whitefield (‘George Whitefield, The Life and Times Of The Great Evangelist Of The Eighteenth Century Revival’, Vols. 1, 2, Edinburgh: Banner Of Truth, 1980).

            The first extract given here sets the scene of a sin-sodden society in the 18^th Century, but one remarkably similar to our own; the second extract shows the amazing grace of God as exercised through Whitefield and the Wesleys; and the third shows the author’s earnest, prayerful hope that God in His mercy and grace would raise up an army of men after His own heart through whom He would revive His work in the midst of the years.

1. Sin Increasing

            Nowhere was the nation’s weakness more evident than in the Gin Craze. With the prohibition, in 1689, of the importation of liquor, Englishmen began to brew their own, and so large was the demand, that within a generation, every sixth house in London had become a gin shop and the nation was in an uncontrollable orgy of gin drinking. ‘What must become’, asked Magistrate Fielding of the infant who is conceived in gin, with the poison distillations of which it is nourished both in the womb and at the breast. ‘Those cursed liquors’, asserted Bishop Benson, will, if continued to be drunk, destroy the very race of the people themselves.’ The nation which had been taught to scoff at self-restraint learned that it had not the strength to withstand the slavery of alcohol. We shall need to remember that it was among a people broken by gin that Whitefield and the Wesleys went about in the nobility of their ministries and that there was triumphant meaning to Charles Wesley’s lines on the deliverance effected by the Gospel:

            Hear Him, ye deaf!

            His praise ye dumb,

            Your loosened tongues employ;

            Ye blind, behold your Saviour come,

            And leap ye lame for joy!

            He breaks the power of cancelled sin,

            He sets the prisoner free!

            His blood can make the foulest clean.

            His blood availed for me!

Perhaps the worst effect of the Gin Craze was that indicated by Bishop Benson when. towards the close of his life he stated, ‘Gin has made the English people what they never were before: cruel and inhuman’. From almost every aspect of British life there arises evidence that an unwonted heartlessness had come over the nation.

2. Faith Required

            For the past thirty years numerous people have been saying, ‘There can never be another revival. The times are too evil. Sin is now too rampant. We are in the midst of apostasy and the days of revival are gone forever!’

The history of the eighteenth-century Revival entirely contradicts that view. It demonstrates that true revival is the work of God – not man – of God who is not limited by such circumstances as the extent of human sin or the degree of mankind’s unbelief. In the decade between 1730 and 1740 the life of England was foul with moral corruption and crippled by spiritual decay, yet it was amidst such conditions – conditions remarkably similar to those of the English-speaking world today – that God arose in the mighty exercise of His power, which became the eighteenth-century Revival.

In an overall view of a century of British history we are able to observe these conditions, not only in themselves, but as to their cause, their effect and their cure …

Our glance goes back to I660. In the violent rejection of Puritanism that then accompanied the Restoration of the monarchy, Englishmen were given to believe that the life of unfettered licentiousness might be indulged in with impunity. In this assurance much of the nation threw off restraint and plunged itself heedlessly into a course of godlessness, drunkenness, immorality and gambling. Legislation was enacted which distressed the Puritan conscience, and in I662, on one of the darkest days in British history, nearly two thousand ministers – all those who would not submit to the Act of Uniformity – were ejected from their livings. Hundreds of these men suffered throughout the rest of their lives, and a number died in prison. Yet these terrible conditions became the occasion of a great volume of prayer.

Forbidden to preach under threat of severe penalties – as John Bunyan’s Bedford imprisonment bore witness – they yet could pray, and only eternity will reveal the relationship between this burden of supplication and the revival that followed.

During these years a teaching known as Deism was introduced into England. Deism was not an organized cult, but was a form of religious rationalism advocated by a number of authors. It taught that whatever God there may be is nothing more than the First Cause, a force that made the world the way a clockmaker makes a clock, and having set its mechanism to operate according to certain laws, simply winds it up and lets it run. This Deity, they said, had revealed himself only in creation and that man’s sole responsibility towards Him was that of recognizing His being. This vague contemplation they termed NaturaI Religion, and, strangely enough, they claimed that it, and it alone, was true Christianity.

The Deists carried on a vigorous warfare against supernatural religion – Biblical Christianity – and in doing so made loud boast about the reasonableness and logic of their views. They claimed that the Bible could not be a revelation of the Deity, for, had He chosen to reveal Himself, He would not have done so through one small, ancient nation and in a book rendered unreliable by divergent readings. They sought to explain away the argument from fulfilled prophecy by stating that the prophecies were either written after their supposed fulfilment or were so ambiguous as to admit of many fulfilments. They argued that the miracles were unproved and that such dogmas as the Virgin birth and literal resurrection were no more than pious imagination. Jesus, they said, was merely a man, earnest but deluded and raised to an imagined Saviourhood by the fancies of His disciples.

To Englishmen who had already rejected the idea of moral restraint Deism proved especially welcome. It removed from their thoughts the God of the Bible, the God of holiness and justice whom the Puritans had preached, and substituted this vague Deity found, as they believed, in nature. In its assertion that man was not held responsible for his actions and that there was no judgment day, it rationalized the silt with impunity concept and, as a result, was widely received.

Deism gradually made its way into the thought of the nation. Its influence began to be felt between I660 and I670, and the successive appearance of each of its books increased its popularity … Confronted by the challenge of Deism the Church displayed its strength and its weakness.

Its strength was manifested in the intellectual force of its reply. From the ranks of the Church of England such men as Berkeley, Conybeare, Warburton and Butler, and, from the Dissenters Watts, Doddridge, Lardner and Leland – these and others – took up their pens and replied to the Deists with consummate skill. It deserves to be noticed that these men very largely adhered to the supernatural in Christianity and the works they produced still stand as the greatest body of apologetics in the English language.

3. Soldiers Of Christ Arising

            This book goes forth in the desire … that we shall see the great Head of the Church once more bringing into being His special instruments of revival, that He will again raise up unto Himself certain young men whom He may use in His glorious employ.

And what manner of men will they be? Men mighty in the Scriptures, their lives dominated by a sense of the greatness, the majesty and holiness of God, and their minds and hearts aglow with the great truths of the doctrines of grace. They will be men who have learned what it is to die to self, to human aims and personal ambitions; men who are willing to be ‘fools for Christ’s sake’, who will bear reproach and falsehood, who will labour and suffer, and whose supreme desire will be not to gain earth’s accolades, but to win the master’s approbation when they appear before His awesome judgment seat. They will be men who will preach with broken hearts and tear-filled eyes, and upon whose ministries God will grant an extraordinary effusion of the Holy Spirit, and who will witness ‘signs and wonders following’ in the transformation of multitudes of human lives.

Indeed, this book goes forth with the earnest prayer that amidst the rampant iniquity and glaring apostasy of the 20th century God will use it toward the raising up of such men and toward the granting of a mighty revival such as was witnessed 200 years ago.

– Bob Thomas