‘O God, do it again!’

Sherwood Wirt, the editor of Decision, the magazine of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, called it ‘one of the great monumental literary achievements of the 20th century’.

The book in question? Arnold A. Dallimore’s two-volume Life of George Whitefield (1714- 1770). This work literally made Dallimore’s name a beloved one throughout English-speaking Evangelical and Reformed circles.

Dallimore, a native of Ontario, Canada, had sensed a distinct call to pastoral ministry in 1931 when he was 20 years of age. He spent the next four years studying at Toronto Baptist Seminary, preparing for pastoral ministry. Among his professors was a W. W. Fleischer, who taught church history. Fleischer gave him a rich love for the great Christian men and women of the past, even though Fleischer himself was not the best of historians. It was in one of Fleischer’s classes, when he was lecturing on the Great Awakening in the 18th century and the ministry of George Whitefield, that Dallimore asked him if there were any biographies of Whitefield he could recommend. Fleischer’s comment, that there was nothing then available, lodged in Dallimore’s mind and made him determined to write something.

After graduation in 1935, Dallimore served in a series of pastorates in southern Ontario and in 1950, he was led to pastor a new Baptist work at Cottam, a small village near Essex, Ontario.

It was during his 23-year pastorate at Cottam Baptist Church that Dallimore began researching and writing the life of George Whitefield in earnest. It took 20 years and two major trips to Great Britain before the first volume of his now classic life of Whitefield was published in 1970. Another ten years were to follow before volume two appeared.

Dallimore actually wrote several drafts of the Whitefield biography and threw them out because he realised that they were unsatisfactory. And most significantly, after one trip to England and meeting with D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), the well-known Welsh pastor of the 20th century, Dallimore realised that he did not understand the doctrinal perspective of Whitefield and that he had to start writing the biography from square one.

He later told Sherwood Wirt in 1970 of the ‘loneliness’ and other challenges that he experienced in what he called ‘the long struggle’ to write the two-volume life of Whitefield: ‘My work was done amidst the circumstances of life in a Canadian village, far removed from surroundings conducive to literary effort and without the stimulation of associates able to take a knowledgeable interest in what I was trying to do. Knowing that my subject merited and required a thorough treatment I continued with it year after year, performing the ever-present duties of the pastorate, bearing with financial stringency that constantly hindered my research, and meeting – even from fellow pastors – the suggestion that, since I didn’t turn out a finished product in the first year or two, nothing would ever come of the whole affair.

If some of his fellow Baptist ministers failed to see the importance of what Dallimore was doing, it is not surprising that a number of his church members at Cottam also failed to see the significance of his literary work. After the publication of the first volume, and as Dallimore was preparing to begin to write the second volume, one of the Cottam members said to him angrily: ‘You’ve written one book and now you’re going to write another. We’re paying you $75 a week and we ain’t getting our money’s worth!’

Yet, Dallimore stayed the course and in 1979 finally finished his two-volume work on Whitefield. Dallimore’s goal in writing these two volumes was not only to record history, but he hoped that even as the ministry of Whitefield was used in setting men on fire for God, so may the story of that life be used today. As God then granted a mighty outpouring of His Spirit and used the preaching of the gospel to the conversion of untold numbers of mankind, so may the record of that work move men to seek and to labour unto a renewal of such blessings in this, our equally needy age.

At a symposium held on 23 April, 2009 that featured D.A. Carson and John Piper addressing the subject of ‘The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor’, Carson told the audience of 2,000 or so about the impact that Dallimore’s Whitefield biography had made upon him when he first read it: ‘Few books make me weep, but on occasion that biography did. For all of its technical competence and heavy documentation, it made me pray, more than once, “O God, do it again!” ’