Whitefield was a perfect gentleman, of manners most affectionate and amiable; altogether the most unlikely creature, it seems, to rise triumphant over the execrations of a mighty mob. The oratory of Whitefield seems to us almost the greatest mystery in the history of eloquence: his voice must have been wonderful; its strength was overwhelming, but it was not a roar; its modulations and inflections were equal to its strength, so that it had the all-commanding tones of a bell in its clearness, and all the modulations of an organ in its variety and sweetness. Kingswood only stands as a representative of crowds of other such places, where savages fell before the enchantment of his sweet music. Read any accounts of him, and it will be seen that we do not exaggerate in speaking of him as the very Orpheus of the pulpit. Assuredly, as it has been said Orpheus, by the power of his music, drew trees, stones, the frozen mountain-tops, and the floods to bow to his melody, so men, “stockish, hard, and full of rage,” felt a change pass over their nature, as they came under the spell of Whitefield. Yet, perhaps, he would not have gone to Kingswood had he not been inhibited from preaching in the Bristol churches. He had preached in St. Mary Redcliff, and the following day had preached opening sermons in the parish church of SS. Philip and Jacob, and then he was called before the Chancellor of the diocese, who asked him for his licence by which he was permitted to preach in that diocese. Whitefield said he was an ordained minister of the Church of England, and as to the special licence, it was obsolete. “Why did you not ask,” he said, “for the licence of the clergyman who preached for you last Thursday?” The Chancellor replied, “That is no business of yours.” Whitefield said, “There is a canon forbidding clergymen to frequent taverns and play at cards, why is that not enforced?” The Chancellor evaded this, but charged Whitefield with preaching false doctrine; Whitefield replied that he preached what he knew to be the truth, and he would continue to preach. “Then,” said the Chancellor, “I will excommunicate you!” The end of it was that all the city churches were shut against him. “But,” he says, “if they were all open, they would not contain half the people who come to hear. So at three in the afternoon I went to Kingswood among the colliers.” Whitefield laid his case in a very respectful letter, before the Bishop, but on he went. As to Kingswood, tears poured down the black faces of the colliers; the great audiences are described as being drenched in tears. Whitefield himself was in a passion of tears. “How can I help weeping,” he said to them, “when you have not wept for yourselves?” And they began to weep. Thus in 1739 began the mighty work at Kingswood, which has been a great Methodist colony from that day to this. That was a good morning’s work for the cause of Christ when the Chancellor shut the doors of the churches of Bristol against the brave and beautiful preacher, and threatened to excommunicate him. Was it not said of old, “Thou makest the wrath of man to praise Thee”?
Now, then, see him girt and road-ready; we might be sure that the example of the Chancellor of Bristol would be pretty generally followed. The old ecclesiastical corporations set themselves in array against him; but how futile the endeavour! Their canons and rubrics were like the building of hedges to confine an eagle, and they only left him without a choice—without any choice but to fulfil his instinct for souls, and to soar. Other “little brief authorities,” mayors, aldermen, and such like, issued their fulminations. Coming to Basingstoke, the mayor, one John Abbott, inhibited him. John Abbott seems to have been a burly butcher. The intercourse and correspondence between the two is very humorously characteristic; but, although it gives an insight as to the antagonism which frequently awaited Whitefield, it is too long to quote in this brief sketch. The butcher-mayor was coarse and insolent; Whitefield never lost his sweet graciousness; writing to abusive butchers or abusive bishops, as in his reply to Lavington, he never lost his temper, never indulged in satire, never exhibits any great marks of genius, writes straight to the point, simply vindicates himself and his course, never retracts, never apologises, goes straight on.
There is no other instance of a preacher who was so equally at home and equally impressive and commanding in the most various and dissimilar circles and scenes; it is significant of the notice he excited that his name occurs so frequently in the correspondence of that cold and heartless man and flippant sneerer, Horace Walpole, whose allusions to him are usually disgraceful; but so it was, he was equally commanding in the polished and select circles of the drawing-room, surrounded by dukes and duchesses, great statesmen and philosophers, or in the large old tabernacle or parish church, surrounded by more orderly and saintly worshippers, or in nature’s vast and grand cathedrals, with twenty or thirty thousand people around him.
From the day when he went to Kingswood, we may run a rapid eye along the perspective of his career—in fields, on heaths, and on commons, it was the same everywhere; from his intense life we might find many scenes for description: take one or two. On the breast of the mountain, the trees and hedges full of people, hushed to profound silence, the open firmament above him, the prospect of adjacent fields—the sight of thousands on thousands of people; some in coaches, some on horseback, and all affected, or drenched in tears. Sometimes evening approaches, and then he says, “Beneath the twilight it was too much for me, and quite overcame me.” There was one night never to be forgotten. While he was preaching it lightened exceedingly; his spirit rose on the tempest; his voice tolled out the doom and decay hanging over all nature; he preached the warnings and the consolations of the coming of the Son of man. The thunder broke over his head, the lightning shone along the preacher’s path, it ran along the ground in wild glares from one part of heaven to the other; the whole audience shook like the leaves of a forest in the wind, whilst high amidst the thunders and the lightnings, the preacher’s voice rose, exclaiming, “Oh; my friends, the wrath of God! the wrath of God!” Then his spirit seemed to pass serenely right through the tempest, and he talked of Christ, who swept the wrath away; and then he told how he longed for the time when Christ should be revealed, amidst the flaming fire, consuming all natural things. “Oh,” exclaimed he, “that my soul may be in a like flame when He shall come to call me!” Can we realize what his soul must have been who could burn with such seraphic ardours in the midst of such scenes?
WHITEFIELD PREACHING IN LONDON.
So he opened the way everywhere, by his field-preaching, for John Wesley. Truly it has been said, “Whitefield, and not Wesley, is the prominent figure in the opening of the Methodist movement;” and the time we must assign to this first popular agitation is the winter of 1738-39. The two men were immensely different. To Whitefield the preaching was no light work; it was not talking. After one of his sermons, drenched through, he would lie down, spent, sobbing, exhausted, death-like: John Wesley, after one of his most effective sermons, in which he also had shaken men’s souls, would just quietly mount his little pony, and ride off to the next village or town, reading his book as he went, or stopping by the way to pluck curious flowers or simples from the hedges; the poise of their spirits was so different. All great movements need two men, Moses and Aaron; the prophet Elijah must go before, “to restore all things.” Whitefield lived in the immediate neighbourhood and breathed the air of essential truth; Wesley looked at men, and saw how all remained undone until the work took coherency and shape. As he says, “I was convinced that preaching like an apostle, without joining together those that are awakened, and training them up in the ways of God, is only begetting children for the murderer.” Whitefield preached like an apostle; the scenes we have described appear charming rural scenes, in which men’s hearts were bowed and hushed before him; but there were widely different scenes when he defied the devil, and sought to win his victims away, even in fairs and wakes—the most wild and dissolute periodical pests and nuisances of the age. Rough human nature went down before him, as in the instance of the man who came with heavy stones to pelt him, and suddenly found his hands as it were tied, and himself in tears, and, at the close, went up to the preacher, and said, “I came here only to break your head, and you have broken my heart!”
But the roughs of London seem to have been worse than the roughs of Kingswood; and we cannot wonder that men like Walpole, and even polite and refined religious men, thought that a man who could go right into St. Bartholomew’s Fair, in Moorfields, and Finsbury, take his station among drummers, trumpeters, merry-andrews, harlequins, and all kinds of wild beasts, must be “mad”; it must have seemed the height of fanaticism, like preaching to a real Gadarene swinery. All the historians of the movement—Sir James Stephen, Dr. Abel Stevens, Dr. Southey, Isaac Taylor, and others, recite with admiration the story of the way in which he wrestled successfully with the merry-andrews. He began to preach at six o’clock in the morning; stones, dirt, rotten eggs were hurled at him. “My soul was among lions,” he says; but the marvellous voice overcame, and he went on speaking, and we know how tenderly he would speak to them, of their own miseries, and the dangers of their own sins; the great multitude—it was between twenty and thirty thousand—“became like lambs;” he finished, went away, and, in the wilder time—in the afternoon—he came again. In the meantime there had been organisations to put him down: here was a man with a long heavy whip to strike the preacher; there was a recruiting sergeant who had been engaged with drum and fife to interrupt him. As he appeared on the outskirts of the crowd, Whitefield, who well knew how to catch the humour of the people too, exclaimed, “Make way for the king’s officer!” and the mob divided, while, to his surprise, the recruiting officer, with his drum, found himself immediately beneath Whitefield; it was easy to manage him now. The crowd around roared like wild beasts; it must have been a tremendous scene. Will it be believed—it seems incredible—that he continued there, preaching, praying, singing, until the night fell? He won a decided victory, and the next day received no fewer than a thousand notes from persons, “brands plucked from the burning,” who spoke of the convictions through which they had passed, and implored the preacher to remember them in his prayers.
This was in Moorfields, in which neighbourhood since, the followers both of Wesley and of Whitefield have found their tabernacles and most eminent fields of usefulness. Many have attempted fair-preaching since Whitefield’s day, but not, we believe, with much success; it needs a remarkable combination of powers to make such efforts successful. Whitefield was able to attempt to outbid the showmen, merry-andrews, and harlequins, and he succeeded. No wonder they called him a fanatic; he might have said, “If we be beside ourselves, it is for God, that by all means we may save some!”