This episode is called Ben chimes in on George and I bet you're wondering who the

Ben is you might think it's big Ben. Well it's not it actually is America's

Ben. This is Ben Franklin. So now we have the Ben we need to talk about the George. This George is none other than George

Whitfield, the evangelist of the Great Awakening. Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography and in that autobiography he devotes a number of pages to his recollections of his friendship with George Whitfield.

He introduces Whitfield in his autobiography with this line. with

he introduces Whitfield in his autobiography with this line in 1739

Arrived among us from England the Reverend Mr Whitfield

who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant preacher.

He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches, but the clergy taking a dislike

to him soon refused him their pulpits, and he was obliged to preach in the fields.

Well, that was nothing new for Whitfield.

He was used to being uninvited from Pulpets back in Old England.

One of his sermons he liked to preach is the almost Christian and he would walk

into churches and he would say, you know who the almost Christian is? Well, it's one who is

arresting and simply being a churchgoerer or one who was resting in the fact

that maybe they were baptized as an infant in the Anglican Church, but they're

not a true Christian, they're an almost Christian. So it probably shouldn't surprise us that after a few of those kinds of sermons,

Whitfield found himself uninvited from pulpit's. Didn't stop him though. He simply turned into the open fields, or or even as in the case of Philadelphia

into the open streets of Philadelphia. In his autobiography, Franklin goes on to say

of Whitfield, I observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his common abuse of them by assuring them they were naturally half beasts and half devils.

Of course what Franklin is referring to here is Wetfield was a Calvinist and as he's talking

about the gospel he needs to say as I think Dr.

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