We cannot particularise others: there were Sampson Staniforth, the soldier, Alexander Mather, Christopher Hopper, John Haime, John Parson—and these are only representative names. There were crowds of them; they travelled to and fro, with hard fare, throughout the land. Their excursions were not recreations or amusements. Attempt to think what England was at that time. It is a fact that they often had to swim through streams and wade through snows to keep their appointments; often to sleep in summer in the open air, beneath the trees of a forest. Sometimes a preacher was seen with a spade strapped to his back, to cut a way for man and horse through the heavy snow-drifts. Highwaymen were abroad, and there are many odd stories about their encounters with these men; but, then, usually, they had nothing to lose. Rogers, in his Lives of the Early Preachers, tells a characteristic story. One of these lay preachers, as usual on horseback, was waylaid by three robbers; one of them seized the bridle of his horse, the second put a pistol to his head, the third began to pull him from the saddle—all, of course, declaring that they would have his money or his life. The preacher looked solemnly at them, and asked them “if they had prayed that morning.” This confounded them a little, still they continued their work of plunder. One pulled out a knife to rip the saddle-bag open; the preacher said, “There are only some books and tracts there; as to money, I have only twopence halfpenny in my pocket;” he took it out and gave it them. “All that I have of value about me,” he said, “is my coat. I am a servant of God; I am going on His errand to preach; but let me kneel down and pray with you; that will do you more good than anything I can give you.” One of them said, “I will have nothing to do with anything we can get from this man!” They had taken his watch; they restored this, and took up the bags and fastened them again on the horse. The preacher thanked them for their great civility to him; “But now,” said he, “I will pray!” and he fell upon his knees, and prayed with great power. Two of the rascals, utterly frightened at this treatment, started off as fast as their legs could carry them; the third—he who had first refused to have anything to do with the job—continued on his knees with the preacher; and when they parted company he promised that he would try to lead a new life, and hoped to become a new man.
Should the reader search the old magazines and documents in which are enshrined the records of the early days of the Revival, he will find many incidents showing what a romantic story is this of the self-denials, the difficulties, and enthusiasm of these men, whose best record is on high—most of them faithful men, like Alexander Coates, who, after a life of singular length and usefulness in the work, went to his rest. His talents were said to be extraordinary, both in preaching and in conversation. Just as he was dying, one of his brethren called upon him and said, “You don’t think you have followed a cunningly-devised fable now?” “No, no, no!” said the dying man. “And what do you see?” “Land ahead!” said the old man. They were his last words. Such were the men of this Great Revival; so they lived their lives of faithful usefulness, and so they passed away.
CHAPTER VIII
A GALLERY OF REVIVALIST PORTRAITS.
If we were writing a sustained history of the Revival, we might devote some pages, at this period, to notice the varied forms of satire and ribaldry by which it was greeted. While the noble bands of preachers were pursuing their way, instructing and awakening the popular mind of the country, not only heartless and affected dilettanti, like Horace Walpole, regarded it with the condescension of their supercilious sneers, but for the more popular taste there was The Spiritual Quixote, a book which even now has its readers, and in which Whitefield and his followers were held up to ridicule; and Lackington, the great bookseller, in his disgraceful, but entertaining autobiography, attempted to cover the Societies of Wesley with his scurrility. It was about the year 1750 that The Minor was brought out on the stage of the Haymarket Theatre; the author was that great comedian, but most despicable and dissolute character, Foote. The play lies before us as we write; we have taken it down to notice the really shameless buffoonery and falsehood in which it indulges. Whitefield is especially libelled and burlesqued. The Countess of Huntingdon waited personally on the Lord Chamberlain, and besought him to suppress it; it was not much to the credit of his lordship’s knowledge, that he declared, had he known the evil influence of the thing before it was licensed, it should not have been produced, but being licensed, it was beyond his control. Then the good Countess waited on David Garrick; Garrick knew and admired Whitefield; he received her with distinguished kindness and respect, and it is to his honour that, through his influence, it was temporarily suppressed. It seems a singular compensation that the author of this piece, who permitted himself to indulge in the most disgraceful insinuations against one of the holiest and purest of men, a few years after was charged with a great crime, of which he was, no doubt, quite innocent, and died a broken-hearted and beggared man.
Another of these disgraceful stage libels, The Hypocrite, appeared at Drury Lane in 1768; in it are the well-known characters of Dr. Cantwell, and Mawworm, and old Lady Lambert. There is more of a kind of genius in it than in The Minor, but it was all stolen property, and little more than an appropriation from Molière’s Tartuffe and Cibber’s Nonjuror. All these things are forgotten now; but they are worthy of notice as entering into the history of the Revival, and showing the malice which was stirred in multitudes of minds against men and designs, on the whole, so innocent and holy. Was it not written from of old, “The carnal mind is enmity against God”?
But as to the movement itself, companions-in-arms, and of a very high order alike for valour and character, crowded to the field; we have referred to several distinguished laymen; it is at least equally important to notice that while the leaders of the Church were, as a body, set in array against it—while archbishops and bishops of that day frowned, or scoffed and scorned, there were a number of clergymen whose piety, whose wit and eloquence, whose affluent humour, whose learning, whose intrepidity and sleepless variety of labour, surround their names, even now as then, with a charm of interest, making every life as it comes before us a readable and delightful recreation. Some of them were assuredly oddities; it is not long since we made a pilgrimage to Everton, in Bedfordshire, to read the singular epitaph, on the tomb in the churchyard, of one of the oddest and most extraordinary of all these men. Even if our readers have read that epitaph, it will do them no harm to read it again:
Here lie
The earthly remains of
John Berridge,