Whitefield and his friend, William Seward, arrived in Philadelphia in the evening of Friday, November 2, 1739, on horseback from Lewes, where they had disembarked.
He read prayers and assisted at Christ Church in the services of the following Sunday, and preached there in the afternoon and every day for the rest of the week with increasing congregations. He dined at Thomas Penn’s, and was visited by the ministers of the Presbyterian and Baptist Churches and by many Quakers. He preached twice to more than three thousand persons.
He made a trip to New York, and on his return preached from the yard of the Reverend William Tennent’s church on the Neshaminy to about three thousand, and from the porch window of the Presbyterian Church at Abington, and again several times at Christ Church.
When Whitefield was to preach his farewell sermon in the afternoon of November 28, the church not being large enough for those expected he adjourned to the fields, and preached to 10,000. Twenty gentlemen on horseback accompanied him out of town. At Chester he spoke from a balcony to 5000, of whom one-fifth had come from Philadelphia.
He was energetically philanthropic. His main purpose in going back to Georgia was to carry on his work among the poor orphans.
On Boston Common he preached to 20,000 at one time, and was distinctly heard.
Although he was active in the establishment of the Methodist denomination, he disagreed with Wesley on points of doctrine, and was finally an evangelist without the discipline of any denomination.
Whitefield crossed the ocean many times, and made tours from Georgia to New Hampshire. In September, 1769, he started on his seventh tour there, and the day before his death he preached two hours at Exeter, N. H., and the same evening preached in the open air at Newburyport, Mass. He died of asthma the next day, September 30, 1770, and was buried under the pulpit of the Federal Street Church in that town.