Page:Imperialdictiona03eadi Brandeis Vol3b.pdf/617

WHI "Letters from Spain, by Don Leucadion Doblado," which in 1822 were gathered into a separate volume. In this year he started a second Spanish periodical, Las Variedades, intended for Hispano-Americans, and it survived for three years. His books against popery were very popular, such as his "Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism" in 1825; "The Poor Man's Preservative against Popery;" "Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of Religion," a reply to Moore's famous work with a similar title. He also edited the London Review for the six months of its duration, and was a frequent contributor to the monthly and quarterly periodicals. After many reasonings and doubts he in 1835 publicly avowed himself a unitarian; and his attendance at the unitarian chapel in Liverpool is described by himself as a "sublime moral and intellectual treat." But he seems to have gradually passed into a rationalism which left very few articles in his creed. His last years were spent in Liverpool amidst much weakness and disease, and he died on the 20th May, 1841, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. Blanco White was a man of subtle mind, but of a morbid and melancholy temperament. Changes in opinion were his habit, prompted by a nervous self-questioning, no less than an eager desire for truth. There was a constitutional want of fixity about all his plans and resolves, but he was ever true to himself in avowing his convictions. At the age of eight he had doubts of Christianity—at least in its popish form—and his hostility to orthodoxy is marked by him often in his journal. Thus he records—"A letter from Mrs. Whately; kind, but full of religious anxiety about me. Oh bitter superstition!" He was greeted by many friends on his arrival in this country, and the university of Oxford gave him the honorary degree of A.M. Among his correspondents were Southey, Coleridge, Mrs. Hemans, John Stuart Mill, Channing, Baden Powell, Lord Holland—to whose son he was for some time tutor—and Archbishop Whately, who dedicated to him the first edition of his Errors of Romanism, and in whose house he was a frequent sojourner. Besides the works already mentioned, he translated into Spanish the Evidences of Bishop Porteous and Dr. Paley; the Book of Common Prayer, and some of the Homilies. He published also a "Letter to Charles Butler," and "Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy."—(Autobiography in 3 vols., edited by John Hamilton Thom, London, 1845.)—J. E.  WHITE,, a celebrated engraver in line and mezzotint, was born in London in 1645. He was a pupil of David Loggan. His prints, chiefly portraits, are extremely numerous; Walpole's list of about two hundred and fifty is incomplete. They include portraits of the English sovereigns, and a great many of the most distinguished personages of his own time. Some were drawn from the life by himself, others are after Vandyck, Kneller, Van Vorst, &c. White engraved the first Oxford almanac in 1674. According to Walpole, he had saved about four or five thousand pounds from his profession, but from some misfortune or waste died in indigence in 1704.—J. T—e.  WHITE,, founder of St. John's college, Oxford, was the son of a clothier of Reading, where he was born in 1492. He was apprenticed to a merchant tailor of London, and amassed considerable wealth, a portion of which he applied to charitable and beneficent purposes in Coventry, Bristol, and Leicester. He is chiefly remembered, however, by his establishment and endowment of St. John's college, Oxford, in 1555. He was sheriff of London in 1546, and lord mayor in 1553, when he was knighted by Queen Mary for his services during Wyatt's rebellion. Of the fifty fellowships at St. John's, Oxford, endowed by Sir Thomas White, thirty-seven belong to Merchant Tailors' school, founded in 1561 by that London company, of the court of which he was then a member. He died at Oxford in 1566.—F. E.  WHITE,, an English clergyman, was born at Bristol, and educated at Magdalen college, Oxford. He became vicar of St. Dunstan's, Fleet Street, in 1575, and obtained other ecclesiastical preferments in the metropolis, being at his death in 1623 a prebendary of St. Paul's, and a canon of Christ church and of Windsor. Some of his sermons were published; but he is chiefly remembered as one of the benefactors of the Oxford college at which he received his education, and as the founder of Zion college, which was erected on the site of a ruined priory in London Wall, and endowed out of the funds which he bequeathed for that purpose.—W. B.  WHITE,, an English philosopher, whose Latinized name was Thomas Albus or De Albis, was born in 1582 of a catholic family in Essex, and educated on the continent, where he took priestly orders, and held the office of subrector at Douay. He held controversial correspondence with Hobbes and Des Cartes, and died in 1676.—W. B.  WHITEFIELD,, the most remarkable evangelist of modern times, and as the friend and colleague for a time, and then as the antagonist of Wesley, the mover of the revived christian life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the Old world and the New. In a restricted sense also he may be called the chief, or the founder, of Calvinistic methodism. He was born at the Bell inn, Gloucester, late in the year 1714. His father died when George, the youngest of a large family, was in infancy; the paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were clergymen; his mother, left a widow in embarrassed circumstances, kept the inn for the support of her family until it was taken by a son, with whom, or with his wife, George not agreeing well, he made his home with his mother, who had already done her best for him in sending him to the St. Mary de Crypt grammar-school in Gloucester, where he made respectable progress in classical studies. But a happy accident opened to him his course at Pembroke college, Oxford, where he was admitted a servitor in 1733, being then in his nineteenth year. At Oxford he soon became acquainted with the two Wesleys, Mr. Morgan, and others, whose religious practices had already attracted much attention, and had exposed them to petty persecutions. In accepting Whitefield's own account of his boyhood and youth, large allowance must be made for conventional modes of speaking on religious subjects, which, though warrantable in a certain sense, would convey an exaggerated meaning unless that same sense were well understood, and the terms were reduced to their proper value. The boy was, as the phrase goes, a "naughty boy," but not depraved or culpable in any extreme degree; and often, in the course of these early years, he was powerfully influenced by religious feelings. Before entering at Oxford he had given indications of his destination to the pulpit and the desk. Endowed with a voice of extraordinary power and compass, and gifted also with the faculty of giving expression as a speaker to the most vivid emotions, nature, so to speak, had marked him as an orator— an orator born, not made. Whitefield's intimacy with John and Charles Wesley at Oxford, which had arisen incidentally, quickly ripened into a friendship, cemented by fellowship in the fervent christian life, and by the condensing operation of the obloquy and the impiety in the midst of which the methodistic band sustained itself there. Whitefield's religious course, more impassioned than that of Wesley, and less dependent upon the reasoning or logical faculty, sooner reached a state of spiritual rest in the joyous acceptance of evangelical doctrine, and in a full assent to the terms of salvation in the gospel. While on a visit in his native city for the recovery of his health, he received encouragement from Dr. Benson, bishop of Gloucester, to take orders at the early age of twenty-one, and he was ordained deacon by this prelate. His first sermon at the church of St. Mary de Crypt gave promise of what his course was to be. He returned, however, to Oxford, where in due course he took his degree. During two months he preached at the Tower church, London, to crowded congregations always, and congregations always profoundly moved by his discourses. Wherever he preached, in the country, or in London or Bristol, the same intense feeling better than ordinary popularity—was awakened by his voice, and what might have seemed a brilliant course opened itself before the youthful preacher; but his motives were of another order, and an invitation from the Wesleys to assist them in their arduous missionary labours in Georgia took hold of him, and he determined to take this course, which had little in it to tempt ambition. During the months intervening before he could embark for America, he preached at Bristol and elsewhere with increasing effect. Gifted by nature in an unusual degree as a public speaker, Whitefield spoke as one who had received a commission from on high to proclaim the gospel to the lifeless, sermon-proof thousands of the people, and this mission he fulfilled with unabated ardour, and with undiminished effect, from the first to the very last day of his ministry—a period of almost fifty years. In leaving England for a remote, disorderly, and comfortless colony, Whitefield had given proof of his indifference to worldly advancement; and immediately on his arrival there, the abounding benevolence of his nature led him into an enterprise, the founding of an orphan-house, to which object he devoted himself thenceforward, although the establishment entailed upon him incessant labours and the heaviest anxieties. For the 