George Whitefield by Thomas S. Kidd

Author:Thomas S. Kidd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300182125
Publisher: Yale University Press

Whitefield longed to return to America, but following up his work in Scotland seemed more pressing. God had wrought a great renewal in the wake of his visit; exuberant Scottish Calvinist pastors told him that the “Lord Jesus is a picking up his elect vessels from among the herd that are reserved to a day of slaughter!” Particularly intriguing news came from the small parish of Cambuslang, where he had not yet preached. Cambuslang’s fifty-one-year-old pastor, William McCulloch, reported to Whitefield that three hundred people (in a town of less than a thousand) had come under conviction of sin, and that of those, perhaps two hundred had experienced authentic conversion. Many more descended on the town on Sunday mornings, and he estimated that crowds had numbered as many as ten thousand on recent Sabbaths. McCulloch pleaded with Whitefield to come to Cambuslang as soon as possible. Arriving in Edinburgh in early June, Whitefield told McCulloch, using language from 1 Kings 18: “The cloud is now only rising as big as a man’s hand; yet a little while, and we shall hear a sound of an abundance of gospel rain.”39

Whitefield finally came to Cambuslang in early July. Many at Cambuslang had heard Whitefield preach before: one Cambuslang convert—a nineteen-year-old seamstress from Glasgow—recalled rejoicing when she heard Whitefield was returning to Scotland, for it was by his preaching that she had “first fallen under soul distress.” News of Whitefield heightened the Cambuslang excitement, but his presence had not first catalyzed it.40

Whitefield played a unique role in the emerging Anglo-American evangelical movement, but we should remember that most conversions and revival meetings of the Great Awakening happened without him. One New England minister noted explicitly in 1742 that Whitefield never saw the kind of outpouring of revival that had happened since the itinerant “left this land.” Cambuslang was another example: it tapped into deeper resources within Scottish Presbyterianism, assisted by the interest generated by reports of awakenings elsewhere. Whitefield’s arrival marked a crest of the spiritual surge at Cambuslang, but McCulloch and other leaders played a longer-term pastoral role.41

McCulloch was, like Whitefield, a learned man, having graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1712 with expertise in classical languages. A published sermon, delivered on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, 1726, revealed McCulloch as a man of scholarly Reformed sensibilities and of strident but typical anti-Catholicism. (November 5 commemorated the foiling of the Catholic conspirator Fawkes’s plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.) McCulloch bluntly titled the work A Sermon against the Idolatrous Worship of the Church of Rome. His goal was to boost the “interest of Reformed Religion, in giving people a just impression of the evil of Popery.” This was an anti-Catholic rant, but not one born out of ignorance: during the course of the sermon, McCulloch referred to the original Hebrew and Greek texts as well as to the Septuagint (the Hebrew Old Testament in Greek) and Latin translations. Apparently, some at Cambuslang found this learned style—one lacking Whitefield’s flair—less than compelling.

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