Hence he put Harris in charge (27 April 1749) of the Moorfields tabernacle and other English societies. After his rupture with Rowlands (May 1750), Harris seceded to form an association of his own (Hughes, p. 364), Rowlands heading the main body.
In September 1743 Doddridge preached at the tabernacle, and was taken to task (20 Sept.) by Isaac Watts for ‘sinking the character of a minister, and especially a tutor, among the dissenters, so low thereby’ (Humphreys, Correspondence of Doddridge, 1829, iv. 254). Next month Doddridge opened his pulpit at Northampton to Whitefield, and was warmly censured by Nathaniel, son of Daniel Neal [q. v.], and by John Barker (1682–1762) [q. v.] (ib. pp. 275 sq.). They considered that any alliance with methodism would prejudice their relations with the established church. Others maintained that field-preaching was not protected by the Toleration Act. Richard Smalbroke [q. v.] had charged against methodists in 1743, having Whitefield especially in view. Taking his wife with him, Whitefield embarked for America at Plymouth on 10 Aug. 1744, and reached New York on 26 Oct. His stay in America lasted till 2 June 1748. His success was achieved in the face of opposition from New England ministers, many of whom wrote strongly respecting his irregular methods. Testimonies against him were issued by the faculties of Harvard (28 Dec. 1744) and Yale (25 Feb. 1745). Towards the support of his orphan house he purchased (March 1747) ‘a plantation and slaves’ in South Carolina, holding it ‘impossible for the inhabitants to subsist without the use of slaves’ (Christian History, 1747, p. 34), an opinion which he reiterated in a letter (6 Dec. 1748) to the Georgia trustees (Works, ii. 208). The ‘lawfulness of keeping slaves’ he defended (22 March 1751) on biblical grounds (ib. ii. 404).
Shortly after his return, Lady Huntingdon made him (August 1748) one of her domestic chaplains, following the course by which, before toleration, nonconforming clergy had been protected. Bolingbroke wrote to her that the king had ‘represented to his grace of Canterbury’ [Herring] ‘that Mr. Whitefield should be advanced to the bench, as the only means of putting an end to his preaching’ (Tyerman, ii. 194). During a visit of six weeks to Scotland (September-October 1748) the synods of Glasgow, Lothian, and Perth passed resolutions intended to exclude him from churches. In November he visited Watts on his deathbed. The attacks on methodism by George Lavington [q. v.], which began in 1749 (Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists compared, 1749–51, 3 pts.), were mainly directed against Whitefield. Lavington had been nettled by a sham ‘charge’ published in his name by some unknown person during 1748, and containing methodist sentiments. In the Grace Murray episode [see Wesley, John] Whitefield followed Charles Wesley's bidding, though he told John Wesley that in his judgment Grace Murray was his wife. He visited Ireland in May 1751, remaining till July, when he embarked from Belfast for Scotland. The impression he made in Ireland seems to have been very transitory. His fourth visit to America (October 1751–May 1752) was curtailed by his wish to gain from the Georgia trustees, before their charter expired, certain privileges for his orphan house. His hymn-book (1753), which in 1796 had passed through thirty-six editions, was compiled for the new-built tabernacle. During a visit to Scotland (July-August 1753) a playhouse at Glasgow against which he had declaimed was pulled down (Scots Magazine, 1753, p. 361). Detained a month at Lisbon, on his way to America, he wrote and published (1755) graphic accounts of the religious observances there. On this his fifth visit to America (May 1754–May 1755) the M.A. degree was conferred on him (September 1754) by New Jersey College.
The eight years from May 1755 to June 1763 were spent by Whitefield in the United Kingdom (excepting a trip to Holland in 1762). In a remarkable letter (2 July 1756) Franklin wrote: ‘I sometimes wish that you and I were jointly employed by the crown to settle a colony on the Ohio’ (Evangelical Magazine, 1803, p. 51). On 7 Nov. 1756 Whitefield opened the chapel in Tottenham Court Road (rebuilt 1899); at the laying of the foundation in the previous June he had the countenance of Benjamin Grosvenor, D.D. [q. v.], Thomas Gibbons [q. v.], and Andrew Gifford [q. v.], representing the three sections of protestant dissent. He constantly visited Scotland, and in 1757 heard the debates in the general assembly on the case of Alexander Carlyle, D.D. [q. v.], prosecuted for attending the representation of the tragedy of ‘Douglas’ by John Home [q. v.] In 1760 Whitefield (‘Dr. Squintum’) was burlesqued by Samuel Foote [q. v.] in the ‘Minor.’ The performance let loose a flood of discreditable lampoons and caricatures. Of numerous animadversions by Whitefield's friends, none were more effective than John Wesley's three letters to ‘Lloyd's Evening Post’ in November and December 1760. In the ‘Register Office’ (1761), by Joseph Reed [q. v.], Whitefield is introduced as ‘Mr. Watch-
