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 against methodists, continued for some months by ‘Richard Hooker’ (i.e. William Webster [q. v.]) in the ‘Weekly Miscellany.’ A consequence was that at Bath and Bristol, where he wished to preach on behalf of the Georgia orphanage, his overtures were rejected. At Salisbury he visited Susanna Wesley, who asked him if her sons ‘were not making some innovations in the church;’ he assured her ‘they were so far from it that they endeavoured all they could to reconcile dissenters to our communion’ (, Memorials of the Wesley Family, 1876, p. 216). He began open-air preaching at Rose Green, on Kingswood Hill, near Bristol, on 17 Feb. 1739. This service converted Thomas Maxfield, afterwards John Wesley's assistant. The pulpits of Bristol churches were now opened to him, but on 20 Feb. he was summoned to the chancellor's court and threatened with excommunication for preaching without license. Bishop Butler, to whom he applied, wrote him a favourable letter, promising a benefaction towards the orphanage; he gave five guineas on 30 May (, i. 182, 233, 349). He was, however, excluded from churches, and even from preaching in the prison; only the ‘society’ rooms were open to him. Hence he threw himself into the work of outdoor preaching, always wearing his clerical robes.

Visiting Wales in March with William Seward (1702–1740), brother of Thomas Seward [q. v.], he first met Howel Harris [q. v.] On 2 April he laid the first stone of a school for the colliers at Kingswood, a work taken up by Wesley in the following June. At St. Mary de Crypt, Gloucester, he baptised (17 April) a quaker ‘about sixty years of age.’ At Oxford he received ‘a great shock’ on hearing that his old friend Kinchin had resigned his fellowship, and was reported to be on the point of leaving the church; he looked forward to ‘dreadful consequences’ from ‘a needless separation.’ No pulpit was open to him in Oxford. In London George Stonehouse, vicar of St. Mary's, Islington, invited him to preach, but the churchwarden interfered; accordingly he preached (27 April) in the churchyard, standing on a tombstone, ‘to a prodigious concourse of people.’ His first open-air sermon at Moorfields (then a wooded park) was on 29 April, before church time. At morning service the same day he heard a violent sermon against his movement by Joseph Trapp [q. v.] at Christ Church, Newgate, and remarks that ‘the preacher was not so calm as I wished him.’ Trapp was backed up by the ‘Weekly Miscellany;’ Whitefield by Robert Seagrave [q. v.] Doddridge heard Whitefield in May on Kennington Common, and thought him rash and enthusiastic, ‘a weak man, much too positive’ (, Correspondence of Doddridge, 1829, iii. 381). Bishop Benson, disapproving of his itinerant labours, ‘affectionately admonished’ him to preach only where he was ‘lawfully appointed,’ a suggestion at which, replied Whitefield (9 July), ‘my blood runs chill.’ He had already (10 March) begun a correspondence with Ralph Erskine [q. v.], the Scottish seceder, whose sermons he had read. Whitefield wrote (23 July) ‘My tenderest affections await the associate presbytery’ (constituted 6 Dec. 1733). It has been said that in Whitefield's sermon (Gen. iii. 15) at Stoke Newington (31 July) ‘to about twenty thousand people,’ he gives prominence for the first time to the Calvinistic doctrine of election; but this sermon (‘The Serpent beguiling Eve,’ 1740, 8vo) has been confused with a later sermon (‘The Seed of the Woman,’ &c., 1742, 8vo) from the same text (, i. 273). On 1 Aug. Bishop Gibson issued a pastoral in which ‘enthusiasm,’ as manifest in Whitefield's journals, is condemned; Whitefield, in reply, offered Gibson ‘the dilemma of either allowing my divine commission, or denying your own’ (Works, iv. 13).

On 14 Aug. 1739 he embarked for America in the Elizabeth, taking with him William Seward and Joseph Periam (an attorney's clerk, whose father, thinking him crazy, had put him into Bedlam for three weeks). They landed in America on 30 Oct. and visited Philadelphia on 2 Nov.; thence he visited New York. He left Pennsylvania on 29 Nov. to make his way through Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina, to Georgia. His preaching, welcomed by ‘all but his own church’ (Letter of Benjamin Colman, D.D.), was mainly in presbyterian meeting-houses and the open air. There is no better testimony to its power than that of Benjamin Franklin, who writes, ‘It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants’ (Memoirs, 1818, i. 85). He reached Savannah on 11 Jan. 1740, bringing with him 2,530l. (about half collected in America) towards the orphanage, for which the Georgia trustees had granted him five hundred acres of land. He at once hired a house, and on 25 March began a building, to be called Bethesda. For the remainder of his life the maintenance of this institution was an important factor in his work, compelling him to travel, and inspiring him to preach (, i. 350). During thirty years of its management he expended on it, from his private resources, 3,299l. (ib. ii. 581).