George Whitefield wrote,
- Let the name of Whitefield perish, but Christ be glorified.
- Let my name die everywhere, let even my friends forget me, if by that means the cause of the blessed Jesus may be promoted.
- But what is Calvin, or what is Luther? Let us look above names and parties; let Jesus be our all in all—So that He is preached. . . . I care not who is uppermost. I know my place . . . even to be the servant of all.
- I am content to wait till the judgement day for the clearing up of my reputation; and after I am dead I desire no other epitaph than this, “Here lies G.W. What sort of man he was the great day will discover.”
Quoted in Arnold Dallimore, George Whitefield: God’s Anointed Servant in the Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century 
(Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1990), 154.
(This book adapts, rewrites, and abridges Dallimore’s magisterial two-volume work: George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival [Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1970–1980]. See vol. 2, pp. 257–58.)
Whitfield’s impact was doubled by his convincing John Wesley to also take up field preaching. Charles Wesley has been the instrument in Whitfield’s dedication to Christ at Oxford when they, as students, along with Oxford fellow John Wesley, formed the ‘Holy Club.’
With the waning of the Great Awakening before the Revolutionary War, Whitfield felt some discouragement. The revival in England under Wesley and others continued throughout his life because of the discipline of the little societies that were formed.
The only problem with this expression of piety is that evidently the Apostle Paul seemed to chose to defend his reputation if the gospel was at stake.