Faith & Spirit Quote by George Whitefield

Whitefield makes righteousness sound less like a moral résumé and more like a cosmic password humans could never have guessed. By calling it a "great mystery" coveted even by angels, he elevates the doctrine past the reach of mere piety or good behavior. The line flatters the listener and humiliates them at the same time: you are small, fallen, confused - yet you are being invited into something heaven itself leans toward. That reversal is classic Whitefield, the revivalist showman of the Great Awakening, who knew how to turn theology into urgency.

The phrase "after the fall" smuggles in the core Calvinist/evangelical logic that powered his preaching. If the fall is the human baseline, then righteousness cannot be self-generated; it has to be credited, gifted, imputed - Jesus' righteousness counted as yours. Whitefield isn't selling ethical improvement. He's insisting on rescue. The subtext is a polemic against complacent Anglican respectability and any faith that treats Christianity as manners plus church attendance. Your "goodness" doesn't fix the rupture; only Christ's does, and that solution was God's first lesson because it addresses the deepest problem first.

There's also a strategic tenderness in the grandeur. Mystery here isn't an excuse to stop thinking; it's a way to widen the frame until the listener feels both exposed and held. Whitefield's intent is conversional: to move the audience from self-trust to dependence, from moral striving to astonished gratitude, with angels as the silent witnesses urging you to take this seriously.