Granted free tuition, he acted as a servant to fellows and fellow-commoners; duties including teaching them in the morning, helping them bathe, cleaning their rooms, carrying their books, and assisting them with work.

It was Henry Scougal's book, The Life of God in the Soul of Man, that Whitfield says opened his eyes to the Gospel and led to his conversion.

[1] Whitefield preached his first sermon at St Mary de Crypt Church[2] in his home town of Gloucester, a week after his ordination as deacon.

Because he was returning to Georgia he invited John Wesley to take over his Bristol congregations and to preach in the open air for the first time at Kingswood and then at Blackheath, London.

[13] Three churches were established in England in his name—one in Penn Street, Bristol, and two in London, in Moorfields and in Tottenham Court Road—all three of which became known by the name of "Whitefield's Tabernacle".

[4] In 1740 he engaged Moravian Brethren from Georgia to build an orphanage for negro children on land he had bought in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.

His journey on horseback from New York City to Charleston, South Carolina, was at that time the longest in North America ever documented.

But Whitefield had charisma, and his loud voice, his small stature, and even his cross-eyed appearance (which some people took as a mark of divine favor) all served to help make him one of the first celebrities in the American colonies.

[23] While explicitly affirming God's sole agency in salvation, Whitefield freely offered the Gospel, saying at the end of his sermons: "Come poor, lost, undone sinner, come just as you are to Christ.

He employed print systematically, sending advance men to put up broadsides and distribute handbills announcing his sermons.

"Had Negroes been allowed" to live in Georgia, he said, "I should now have had a sufficiency to support a great many orphans without expending above half the sum that has been laid out.

[4] In 1740, during his second visit to America, Whitefield published "an open letter to the planters of South Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland" chastising them for their cruelty to their slaves.

[42] Benjamin Franklin attended a revival meeting in Philadelphia and was greatly impressed with Whitefield's ability to deliver a message to such a large group.

Franklin had previously dismissed as exaggeration reports of Whitefield preaching to crowds of the order of tens of thousands in England.

[45] True loyalty based on genuine affection, coupled with a high value placed on friendship, helped their association grow stronger over time.

A statue of George Whitefield was located in the Dormitory Quadrangle, standing in front of the Morris and Bodine sections of the present Ware College House on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

That ambivalence—believing God willed a wife, yet wanting to live as if without one—brought Whitefield a disappointing love life and a largely unhappy marriage.

At the end of the 19th century the Chapel needed restoration and all those interred there, except Augustus Toplady, were moved to Chingford Mount cemetery in north London; her grave is unmarked in its new location.

"[53][55] After Elizabeth's death, however, Whitfield said, “I feel the loss of my right hand daily.”[56] In 1770, the 55-year-old Whitefield continued preaching in spite of poor health.

[4] Whitefield chastised other clergy for teaching only "the shell and shadow of religion" because they did not hold the necessity of a new birth, without which a person would be "thrust down into Hell".

[4] After Whitefield preached at St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina, the Commissary, Alexander Garden, suspended him as a "vagabond clergyman."

[4] In England, by 1739 when he was ordained priest,[72] Whitefield wrote that "the spirit of the clergy began to be much embittered" and that "churches were gradually denied me".

In addition, Whitefield's collecting money for his Bethesda orphanage, combined with the hysteria evoked by his open-air sermons, resulted in bitter attacks in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Edwards was "deeply disturbed by his unqualified appeals to emotion, his openly judging those he considered unconverted, and his demand for instant conversions".

Later, Edwards delivered a series of sermons containing but "thinly veiled critiques" of Whitefield's preaching, "warning against over-dependence upon a preacher's eloquence and fervency".

[85] In his preaching, Whitefield used rhetorical ploys that were characteristic of theater, an artistic medium largely unknown in colonial America.

Harry S. Stout refers to him as a "divine dramatist" and ascribes his success to the theatrical sermons which laid foundations to a new form of pulpit oratory.

[87] Divinity schools opened to challenge the hegemony of Yale and Harvard; personal experience became more important than formal education for preachers.

[88] Whitefield's preaching bolstered "the evolving republican ideology that sought local democratic control of civil affairs and freedom from monarchial and parliamentary intrusion.

19th-century biographies generally refer to his earlier work, A Short Account of God's Dealings with the Reverend George Whitefield (1740), which covered his life up to his ordination.