“I desire to bless His name, that I have been spared long enough to see the colony of the once-despised Georgia, and the yet more despised Orphan House, advanced to such a promising height. My honoured friend and father, good Bishop Benson, from his dying bed, sent me a benefaction for it of ten guineas, and poured forth his dying breathings for its future prosperity. That your Grace may be instrumental in promoting its welfare, when turned into a College, is the earnest prayer of, etc.,
“George Whitefield.”
On July 1, the Archbishop acknowledged the receipt of Whitefield’s letter, and stated that he had put Whitefield’s draught of a charter for the College into the hands of the Lord President, who had promised to consider it, but, meanwhile, desired to know how Whitefield proposed to endow the College. Whitefield replied to this three days afterwards to the following effect:—
“The present annual income of the Orphan House is between four and five hundred pounds sterling. The house is surrounded with 1,800 acres of land. The number of negroes employed on this land, in sawing timber, raising rice for exportation, and corn, with all other provisions for the family, is about thirty. The College will also be immediately possessed of 2,000 acres of land near Altamaha, which were granted me by the Governor and Council, when I was last in Georgia; and 1,000 acres more, left, as I am informed, by the late Rev. Mr. Zububuhler.[575] By laying out £1,000 in purchasing an additional number of negroes, and allowing another £1,000 for repairing the house and building the two intended wings, the present annual income may easily and speedily be augmented to £1,000 per annum.
“Out of this standing fund may be paid the salaries of the master, professors, tutors, etc., and also small exhibitions be allowed for orphans or other poor students, who may have their tutorage and room-rent gratis, and act as servitors to those who enter commoners.
“At present, I would only further propose, that the negro children, belonging to the College, shall be instructed, in their intervals of labour, by one of the poorer students, as is done now by one of the scholars in the present Orphan House. And I do not see why provision may not likewise be made for educating and maintaining a number of Indian children, which, I imagine, may easily be procured from the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and the other neighbouring nations.”
Such was Whitefield’s scheme. Further correspondence followed. The Lord President expressed the opinion thatthe head of the College must be a member of the Church of England, and that “the public prayers in the College should not be extempore ones, but the liturgy of the Church, or some part thereof, or some other settled and established form.” Whitefield’s reply is dated, “Tottenham Court, October 16, 1767.” He again objected to any clause being inserted in the charter, making it obligatory that the head of the College should be a member of the Established Church. He reminded the Archbishop that “by far the greatest part of the Orphan House collections and contributions came from Dissenters, not only in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Scotland, but in England also.” He stated that, since the announcement of the design to turn the Orphan House into a College, and of the approval of that project by the Governor, Council, and Assembly of Georgia, he had visited most of the places where the benefactors of the Orphan House resided, and had frequently been asked, “Upon what bottom the College was to be founded?” To these enquiries he had answered, indeed, he had declared from the pulpit, that “it should be upon a broad bottom, and no other.” He then continues:—
“This being the case, I would humbly appeal to the Lord President, whether I can answer it to my God, my conscience, my king, my country, my constituents, and Orphan House benefactors and contributors, both at home and abroad, to betray my trust, forfeit my word, act contrary to my own convictions, and greatly retard and prejudice the growth and progress of the institution, by narrowing its foundation, and thereby letting it fall upon such a bottom, as will occasion general disgust, and most justly open the mouths of persons of all denominations against me. This is what I dare not do.”
Whitefield concludes by telling the Archbishop, that, as the influence of his Grace, and of the Lord President, “will undoubtedly extend itself to others of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council,” he will not trouble them again about the business, but will himself “turn the charity into a more generous and extensively useful channel.”
Thus the matter ended. Whitefield tried to convert his Orphan House into a College; but, because the Lord President of the Privy Council, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, insisted that it should practically be an institution of theChurch of England, by insisting that its provost should be a member of that Church, his design, together with that of the governor and rulers of Georgia, was frustrated. He was well aware, that, in the present state of excited feeling among the non-episcopalians of America, it would have been worse than useless to turn his Orphanage into a Church of England College. His decision was, at once, just and prudent. When the correspondence with the Archbishop was concluded, Whitefield wrote as follows “To his Excellency James Wright, Esq., Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of the Province of Georgia”:—