In 1742 a human fireball hit Scotland. Revd George Whitefield came hurtling from his successful open-air preaching revivals in England to Cambuslang, near Glasgow. A memorial, placed there by the Friends of Cambuslang Park was erected in March 2008. It says:
‘Preaching Braes. Site of the “Cambuslang Wark” the great religious revival of 1742. In this place the Methodist evangelist, George Whitefield led congregations of many thousands in prayer and worship.’
Whitefield was a Church of England clergyman at the time. Having been converted to Christ in 1735 through reading The Life of God in the Soul of Man, by the Scottish Puritan, Henry Scougal, a professor at Aberdeen University, he found that since 1738 there was a great hunger in England for the crowds who flocked to hear him in the open air. Soon the High Flyers, or evangelicals in Scotland, were calling him to come up north, and in the summer of 1741, he came to Edinburgh for a thirteen-week preaching tour, through the invitation of the brothers Revd Ralph and Revd Ebenezer Erskine of the Secession Church. He recounts his experiences in August that year:
‘Every morning I have a constant levee of wounded souls… At seven in the morning, we have a lecture in the fields, attended not only by the common people, but persons of great rank. I have reason to think several of the latter sort are coming to Jesus… Congregations consist of many thousands. Never did I see so many Bibles, nor people look into them, when I am expounding, with such attention… I preach twice daily, and expound at private houses at night, and am employed in speaking to souls under distress a great part of the day.’
On 24th September he was stunned by what was happening. He records that ‘On Thursday evening I preached to the children of the city with a congregation of near twenty-thousand in the park.’
The work amongst pupils in Edinburgh was extraordinary in the boarding schools, which were known as ‘Hospitals’. Edward Anderson was an eyewitness teacher at Heriot Hospital (now called George Heriot School), next to Greyfriars’ Kirk, and he wrote a letter to Whitefield expressing his amazement after his preaching. ‘Our Boys seem to be in love with their Bibles and to delight in Prayer,’ he said.‘I have frequently taken course through their Rooms, at ten and eleven o’clock at Night, and found great Numbers in raptures of Devotion… this is their constant practice everyday. The elder Boys teach the young ones to pray, not only by example, but also by advice and Instruction… They abhor Vice… The other Hospitals and they live now in great friendship and love, delighting to talk of the Goodness of God to lost sinners; whereas formerly they were too often falling out. Heriot’s Hospital is now no more a Den of vicious boys, but a Bethel, for there God is worshipped.’
As Whitefield preached it seemed that Scotland, as with England and the colonies of America, was in the grip of a religious revival with thousands becoming Christians. It is not surprising that he had opposition with James ‘Claudero’ Wilson calling him ‘A Zealous, pig-eyed English quack’. Whitefield’s famous revival gathering of about 30,000 at Cambuslang witnessed many deep emotional expressions including shaking, swooning, and crying out, as the people came under a ‘conviction of sin’and turned to Christ. The Moderates tended to scorn the meetings as much as the Enlightenment set, but Alison Cockburn could despairingly write to her friend David Hume, ‘The drinking dens are empty and everyone has gone after Whitefield and Wesley.’
William Smollett exclaimed ‘Imposture and fanaticism still hang upon the skirts of religion. Weak minds were seduced by the delusions of a superstition, styled Methodism… Many thousands were infected with this enthusiasm by the endeavours of a few obscure preachers, such as Whitefield and the Wesleys.’Revd Sydney Smith of the Edinburgh Review could use heavily-laden words and phrases such as ‘fanatics’, ‘lunacy’, and a ‘conspiracy against common sense and rational, orthodox Christianity.’Even those amongst the High Flyers joined in the attack, with Revd Adam Gib, an eminent pastor from Edinburgh, shooting a broadside at Whitefield with a long-titled pamphlet warning people not to attend the meetings because they were ‘Scandalous’and ‘Diabolical’. The Cameronians thought he was ‘a limb of Antichrist’. Even Revd Ralph Erskine, one of the brothers who had first invited him to Scotland a year before the Cambuslang revival, ended up denouncing him.
You would think that Whitefield, with all that abuse and betrayal, would have packed up his bags and returned to England. Instead, he kept coming – fourteen times between 1741 and 1768! He let the changed lives and results speak for themselves. Besides this, whilst the Moderates were debating their philosophies in ‘polite society’ over a bottle of French claret, he was pragmatically collecting money to have the Royal Infirmary built to care for the sick in Edinburgh, and for schools and orphanages in Britain and America.
‘Then the master said to the servant, “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled”’ (Luke 14:23, NKJV).
Image: George Whitefield, by Joseph Belcher, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons