[ CHAPTER 3 ] - ( CHRISTIAN LEADERS OF THE 18TH CENTURY ) - { PT. 5 }


 { PT.  5 } - After preaching for a few months in Cloucestershire, and especially at Bristol and Stonehouse, he sailed for America in the latter part of 1737, and continued there about a year. The affairs of this orphan house, it can be noted, occupied much of his attention from this period of his life until he died. Although well-intentioned, it seems to have been a design of very questionable wisdom, and certainly brought Whitefield a world of anxiety and responsibility to the end of his days. Whitefield returned from Georgia in the latter part of the year 1738, partly to obtain priest's orders,which were conferred on him by his old friend Bishop Benson, and partly on business connected with the orphan house. Soon, however, he discovered that his position was no longer what it was before he sailed for Georgia. The majority of the clergy were no longer favorable to him, but regarded him with suspicion as an enthusiast and a fanatic. They were especially opposed to him preaching the doctrine of regeneration, or the new birth, as something that many baptized persons greatly needed! The number of pulpits to which he had access rapidly diminished. Church officials, who had no eyes for drunkenness and impurity, were filled with intense indignation about what they called breaches of order. Bishops who could tolerate Arianism, Socinianism, and Deism were filled with indignation at a man who fully declared the atonement of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, and they began to denounce him openly. Beginning at this period of his life, Whitefield's field of usefulness within the Church of England narrowed rapidly on every side. The turning point of the whole course of Whitefield's ministry was his adoption of the system of open-air preaching. Seeing that thousands everywhere would not attend any place to worship, but spent their Sundays in idleness or sin and were not to be reached by sermons within walls, he resolved, in the spirit of holy aggression, to go out after them into the highways and hedges, on his Mater's principle, and compel them to come in ( LUKE  14:23 ). His first attempt to do this was among the coal miners at Kings-wood near Bristol, in February of 1739. After much prayer, he one day went to Hannam Mount, stood upon a hill, began to preach from MATTHEW  5:1--3 to about a hundred miners. 

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