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When George Whitefield left England in 1739, he was the recognized leader of the evangelical awakening, and he entrusted his thousands of followers to John Wesley’s care.

When he returned, in early 1741, he found that “many of my spiritual children … will neither hear, see, nor give me the least assistance: Yes, some of them send threatening letters that God will speedily destroy me. ”

What had happened? Wesley had preached and published on two subjects dividing the leaders: predestination (whether God foreordains people’s eternal destiny) and perfection (whether sinlessness is attainable in this life).

Whitefield met with both Charles and John Wesley in early 1741, but they could not find common ground. Wrote Whitefield, “It would have melted any heart to have heard Mr. Charles Wesley and me weeping, after prayer, that if possible the breach might be prevented.” The movement had been forever divided between the followers of Wesley and the followers of Whitefield.

Christian History asked J. D. Walsh to explain how Whitefield and Wesley met, how their conflict began, and how their relationship changed.

The relationship between George Whitefield and John Wesley, the two great leaders of the eighteenth-century revival, cannot be neatly described. Their association passed through very different stages.

Whitefield arrived at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1732, a raw, provincial youth with a West Country accent. (He never lost it; accounts of his preaching describe his “twang through the nose” and the way he pronounced “Christ” as “Chroist.”) Whitefield had come from the tap-room of the family inn and was working his way through college, waiting on richer students. “As for my quality, I was a poor drawer” [of ale], he wrote.

Whitefield had heard of the “Holy Club” before he arrived, and after Charles Wesley kindly asked him to breakfast, he was swiftly drawn into the fellowship. It was Charles, open-hearted and emotional, rather than the steely-willed and self-controlled John, who was his chief Oxford mentor.

Whitefield spoke “with the utmost deference and respect” of the brothers Wesley, who had been to famous boarding schools and were his seniors. During a period of acute distress, Whitefield was sent for advice to John, and thanks to his “excellent advice and management,” Whitefield “was delivered from the wiles of Satan.” This was a somewhat subservient relationship. Whitefield wrote, “From time to time Mr. Wesley permitted me to come to him and instructed me as I was able to bear it.” Whitefield deferred to John Wesley as his “spiritual father in Christ” and his letters addressed Wesley as “Honoured sir.”

In 1736 John Wesley entrusted the newly ordained Whitefield with the oversight of the Oxford methodists, while he was away in Georgia. Whitefield soon soared to national fame as “the boy preacher.” Autograph hunters besieged him. A flood of pamphlets attacked him. He was lavishly praised and compared to Moses, to David, and to Wycliffe as the “morning star” of a second Reformation. As Whitefield freely confessed, fame went to his head. He wrote one minister in 1739: “Success, I fear, elated my mind. I did not behave to you, and other ministers of Christ, with that humility which became me.”

Although Whitefield’s evangelistic success far outstripped that of his former instructor, he showed Wesley deep respect. “I am but a novice; you are acquainted with the great things of God,” he told him in March 1739. Before inviting Wesley to join him in Bristol that year, he told his converts that “there was one coming after him whose shoes’ latchett he was not worthy to unloose.”

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