On Criticism

An excerpt from a book on George Whitefield, the well-known preacher in the American colonies during the Great Awakening of the 1700s. The biography, from the Leaders in Action series edited by George Grant, is called Forgotten Founding Father by Stephen Mansfield:

"It is amongst the cruelest ironies. A man responds to the call of God because love compels him. He wants to please his Master, true, but he also wants to heal hurts and make a difference in the world. Yet the moment he declares himself, the moment he first reaches to tend the needs of mankind, the battering begins. He has not done enough or his theology isn't quite right or his gifts aren't equal to the task or somehow he doesn't measure. up. Then begins the test of his life, for if the man allows the criticism to seep unfiltered into his heart, it will harden him, making him distant and sour. In this state, he will never fulfill his calling, never do the good he has set out to do. He has to rise above, has to declare war on the human tendency toward despairing bitterness, and learn the truth all wise leaders know: criticism is a tool for fashioning greatness. ....
" None of this [criticism] surprised George Whitefield: 'I should doubt whether I was a true minister of Christ, was I not opposed..' Yet had he been a lesser man, he might have been crushed and embittered by the barrage against him. The pain might have driven him from ministry early, leaving him a broken, angry man. But Whitefield had acquired that condition of soul for which criticism becomes an ennobling force. He had learned that criticism is like pain in the human body, giving needed information for healthy change. Once can receive it as a blow and angrily nurse the wound Or, one can regard the words as an eagle does a gust of wind - as a force on which to fly still higher.
"Whitefield expressed this attitude beautifully when he responded to one critic by saying, 'I thank you heartily. May God reward you for watching over my soul; and as to what my enemies say against me, I know worse things of myself than they can say concerning me.' Because Whitefield peered courageously into any criticism he received and applied the wise correction he found there, his opponents only served to better him. So it was that he rose above both them and the embittered lesser man he might have been to grasp the greater character his calling required. As the poet William Cowper wrote of him:

Assail'd by Scandal, and the tongues of strife,
His only answer was -- a blameless life.