Bicentennial Notes #2
Zion on the Raritan
George Whitefield, the young Anglican priest who studied Methodism with Charles and John Wesley at the Oxford “Holy Club” in the early 1730s, brought the Wesleyan spirit to New Brunswick less than 10 years later.
Whitefield and John Wesley (10 ½ years older that Whitefield) spent much of their careers as allies, although they disagreed on some issues, theological and otherwise. Whitefield held fast to John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, holding that God pre-destined all souls for membership in His Kingdom. Wesley adhered to the teaching of Dutch Reformed cleric Jacobus Arminius, that salvation was available to everyone professing faith.
Wesley modeled his out-of-doors preaching style on a practice begun by Whitefield in Kingswood, England; but probably differed with his younger colleague on some of the more flamboyant aspects. Whitefield carried Wesley’s toleration for pulpit enthusiasm to high levels. The British actor David Garrick is said to have claimed that Whitefield made his congregants swoon by his manner of speaking in the “Mesopotamia.”
Whitefield’s success in itinerant preaching, however, surely captured Wesley’s attention. The Journals maintained by Whitefield and his traveling companion, William Seward, frequently speak of large crowds – both indoors and out – with numbers reaching up to 10,000. Benjamin Franklin, measuring congregants in Philadelphia by pacing their perimeter, came up with a much higher figure, 30,000.
John Wesley made one trip to North America, to the Georgia colony in 1737. Whitefield made seven, starting in 1738, and died here in 1770 in New Hampshire, at age 55. His Journals documents three visits to New Brunswick - twice in 1739 and once in 1740 - preaching indoors in Gilbert Tennent’s Presbyterian meeting-house by the waterfront on Burnet Street, and outside from a farm-wagon in front of Theodorus Frelinghuysen’s Dutch Reformed Church, next door.
The Journals date the first as November 13, 1739, a Tuesday. The actual date from the current Gregorian calendar is 11 days later, November 24. The British Empire did not switch from the old-style Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar until 1752. The Journal for the first-visit date reads:
“Left Trent at six in the morning and reached Brunswick, thirty miles distant, at one. Here we were much refreshed with the company of Mr. Gilbert Tennent, an eminent Dissenting minister, about forty years of age, son of that good old man who came to see me on Saturday in Philadelphia.
God, I find, has been pleased greatly to own his labours. He and his associates are now the burning and shining lights of this part of America…
…I read the Church Liturgy, and preached in the evening at Mr. Tennent’s meeting-house; for there is no place set apart for the worship of the Church of England, and it is common, I was told, in America, for the Dissenters and Conformists to worship at different times in the same place. Oh, that the partition-wall were broken down, and we all with one heart and one mind could glorify our common Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!”
The “good old man” who visited Whitefield in Philadelphia was William Tennent, father of sons Gilbert and William Jr., founder of an evangelical movement within the Presbyterian Church.
After a week in New York City, Whitefield returned to New Brunswick. The Journal reads:
“Tuesday, Nov. 20. Reached here about six last night, and preached to-day, at noon, for near two hours, in worthy Mr. Tennent’s meeting-house, to a large assembly gathered together from all parts, and amongst them, Mr. Tennent told me, was a great number of solid Christians.
About three in the afternoon, I preached again, and at seven, I baptized two children, and preached a third time.”
Whitefield then labored for several months in the southern colonies, returning to the Mid-Atlantic grouping the following spring, preaching for two days out-of-doors at New Brunswick. His Journal reads:
“Saturday, April 26. …Sung psalms and set out for New Brunswick about eight. Reached thither by four in the afternoon, and preached to about two thousand hearers in the evening. Many were affected.
Sunday, April 27. …Preached morning and evening to near seven or eight thousand people. In the afternoon sermon, had I proceeded, I believe the cries and groans of the congregation would have drowned my voice. One woman was struck down, and a general cry went through the assembly.
At night, a woman came to me under strong convictions. She told me she had often been somewhat moved; but now, she hoped God had struck her home. She cried out, I can see nothing but hell!
Oh that all were in as good a way to Heaven.”
New Brunswick’s population was then about 300.
A holding can be made that the activities of these three visits represent a Zionist moment of a sort, an efflorescence of a new type of Christianity, involving local pastors Tennent and Frelinghuysen as well as the itinerant Whitefield.
Christian historian Mark A. Noll, based at Wheaton College in Illinois, asserts in the 2003 book, The Rise of Evangelicalism, the evangelical movement began with revivalists like George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent, along with John and Charles Wesley “and many others.” New Brunswick, through the activities and travels of Tennent and Whitefield, was a fulcrum-point of the Great Awakening religious revival of the 1730s and 40s in the English-settled parts of North America.
Perhaps. Whitefield himself, although formally an Anglican and never officially part of the Wesley 18th century entourage, called himself a Methodist to his death, an inheritance of his activities in the Oxford “Holy Club,” whose members called themselves Methodists.
Thus, Whitefield’s 1739 and 1740 visits here represent the first appearance of Methodism in New Brunswick.
Submitted by George Dawson, Church Historian