George Whitefield could hold a crowd of twenty thousand in an open field with nothing but his voice. He went from a drunken tavern boy in Gloucester to the most powerful preacher the English-speaking world had ever heard, and J.C. Ryle, one of Victorian England's most fiery evangelical voices, set out in 1854 to make sure history never forgot him. This biography fights for Whitefield's legacy against those who had dismissed him as an eccentric or a fanatic, tracing his transformation from a reluctant, tongue-tied young minister into the evangelist who crossed the Atlantic seven times, who preached to more people in person than anyone before him, and who helped ignite a spiritual revolution that reshaped Britain and America. Ryle gives us Whitefield in all his contradictions: the theatrical performer who wept on stage, the Calvinist who befriended Arminians, the man expelled from churches who filled fields. This is not neutral history. It is a 19th-century evangelical's passionate defense of his spiritual ancestor, written with the conviction that Whitefield's story matters because the gospel it proclaimed still matters. For anyone who wants to understand where evangelicalism came from, or who simply loves a life lived at full intensity, this is the place to start.
