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Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution On March 22, 1739 George Whitefield, who had been preaching in and around Bristol, wrote to John Wesley and invited him to come and take his place there. Whitefield was about to depart for America and wanted Wesley to come and carry on his work. He writes:
I wish you would be here the latter end of next week … . If you was here before my departure, it might be best. Many are ripe for the bands. I leave that entirely to you – I am but a novice; you are acquainted with the great things of God. Come, I beseech you, come quickly. I have promised not to leave this people till you or somebody came to supply my place.
Whitefield is being modest. By any measure his work in Bristol was unprecedented. By this time he was preaching to crowds in excess of 10,000 people in the fields outside Bristol. His influence was tremendous. As Margaret Austin described it in a later letter to Charles Wesley,
he preacht in moore-fields and his subject was on persecuting the saints and there again I was much affected with the word finding my self to be the very person and so continued to follow him where-eer I could: and indeed the Lord by his ministry did awaken me and I saw my self to be a lost undone sinner.
Later Austin went to see Whitefield again at Bexley ‘on the indwelling of the holy Spirit’, and through his preaching came to see that she ‘was really half a beast and half a devill’ in need of salvation3 – language that Mary Jane Ramsey echoes in a different letter before concluding that ‘there was something in that heart of mine that showd me it was very true though it was such a hard heart those words made some impression that I was really convinced that I was inwardly very wicked.’
While Whitefield was apparently expert at convincing women that they were in need of salvation, John and Charles Wesley were much better at converting and nurturing these women. When John Wesley finally did accept Whitefield's invitation to come to Bristol in the spring of 1739 he witnessed Whitefield preaching to a crowd of nearly 30,000 and began preaching to large crowds himself.
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