ABSTRACT
Horton Davies, in one of his admirable volumes on Worship and Theology in England, has shown that George Whitefield was a much better theologian than is commonly supposed. But on the other hand he has to censure, in Whitefield, his ‘philippics against book-learning and his pietistical and puritanical assumption that pleasure itself was a pursuit unworthy of a Christian’. Davies points out – what cannot indeed be emphasized too often-that ‘Such a philistinism was unthinkable to Wesley, for whom reason, after Scripture, was an avenue of the knowledge of God’. And ‘philistinism’ seems not too harsh a word for Whitefield, the preacher who declared: ‘Our common learning, so much cried up, makes men only so many accomplished fools.’ However, when Horton Davies describes this attitude as ‘puritanical’, he is – while not wrong, for common usage regrettably supports him-certainly misleading, for as we have seen, such dissenters as Watts and Doddridge stand on this issue squarely with Wesley, not with Whitefield – so much so indeed that they have to be defended from the opposite imputation, of being ‘cold reasoners’. And the same holds true, perhaps more surprisingly, of dissenters of an earlier, more rugged, kind – of a Richard Baxter or a Matthew Henry, whose Commentaries I remember on the bookshelves of my Baptist grandfather. And yet, if we think a little, this should not surprise us; for in Old and New England alike the dissenting ministers were typically martyrs to erudition, as witness the monumental works that they composed. Matthew Henry's Commentaries of 1710 certainly constitute such a monument; and it is interesting to see what Henry makes of a Scriptural text that might seem to give colour to an attitude like Whitefield's, the verse from Ecclesiastes which declares: ‘For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge in-creaseth sorrow.’ Matthew Henry in his comments on this passage interposes a special note, which runs:
it becomes great men to be studious, and delight themselves most in intellectual pleasures. Where God gives great advantages of getting knowledge, he expects improvements accordingly. It is happy with a people, when their princes and noblemen study to excel others as much in wisdom and useful knowledge, as they do in honour and estate; and they may do that service to the commonwealth of learning, by applying themselves to the studies that are proper for them, which meaner persons cannot do.
