From Wales, Whitefield went to visit his native city, Gloucester; and after one or two sermons, he found himself here also excluded from the parochial pulpits. But notwithstanding his persecutions, and the infirm state of his health at that time, his labors in Gloucester and its vicinity were constant and eminently successful. Bowling-greens, market-crosses, highways, and other such places, bore witness to his faithful and tearful labors.
At Gloucester lived at that time the Rev. Mr. Cole, an old dissenting minister, who often heard Whitefield preach, and used to say, "These are the days of the Son of man indeed!" Whitefield, when a boy, had been taught to ridicule this Mr. Cole; and when he was once asked what profession he would engage in, replied, "I will be a minister, but I will take care never to tell stories in the pulpit like old Cole." Twelve years afterwards, the old minister heard the young one preach, and tell some story to illustrate his subject, when the venerable servant of Christ remarked, "I find young Whitefield can tell stories now as well as old Cole." The good man was much affected with the preaching of his young friend, and was so humble, that he used to subscribe himself his curate, and went about in the country preaching after him. One evening, while preaching, he was struck with death, and asked for a chair to lean on till he had finished his sermon. Having done this, he was carried up stairs and died. When the fact was told to Whitefield, he said, "O blessed God, if it be thy holy will, may my exit be like his!" How striking is this fact when looked at in connection with the circumstances of his own removal from earth.
Intent on the advancement of his orphan-house in Georgia, Whitefield soon went to London, passing on his way through Oxford. At both places he found opposition, and in London was shut out of the churches. He preached to thousands in Islington churchyard, and now resolved to give himself to the work in the open air.
From the conflict with the enemies who a few years before had threatened her existence, the polemics of the church of England now turned to resist the unwelcome ally who menaced her repose. Bishop Warburton led the van, and behind him many a mitred front scowled on the audacious innovator. Divested of the logomachies which chiefly engaged the attention of the disputants, the controversy between Whitefield and the bishops lay in a narrow compass. It being mutually conceded that the virtues of the Christian life can result only from certain divine impulses, and that to lay a claim to this holy inspiration when its legitimate fruits are wanting, is a fatal delusion, he maintained, and they denied, that the person who is the subject of this sacred influence has within his own bosom an independent attestation of its reality. So abstruse a debate required the zest of some more pungent ingredients, and the polemics with whom Whitefield had to do were not such sciolists in their calling as to be ignorant of the necessity of riveting upon him some epithet at once opprobrious and vague. While therefore milder spirits arraigned him as an enthusiast, Warburton, with constitutional energy of invective, denounced him as a fanatic. In vain Whitefield demanded a definition of these reproachful terms. To have fixed their meaning would have been to blunt their edge. They afforded a solution, at once compendious, obscure, and repulsive, of whatever was remarkable in his character, and have been associated with his name from that time to the present.
The spots on which Whitefield now began, in his own language, "to take the field," and publicly to erect the standard of the Redeemer's cross, are well known. Moorfields, then a place of general rendezvous and recreation from the crowded city, Kennington Common then about two, and Blackheath about five miles from London, were the favorite sites to which he loved to resort, and "open his mouth boldly" to listening thousands, in honor of his crucified and glorified Lord. Recording his first engagement of this kind in his diary of Sabbath evening, April 29, 1739, he writes, "Begun to be yet more vile this day, for I preached at Moorfields to an exceeding great multitude; and at five in the evening went and preached at Kennington Common, where upwards of twenty thousand were supposed to be present. The wind being for me, it carried my voice to the extreme part of my audience. All stood attentive, and joined in the psalm and the Lord's prayer so regularly, that I scarce ever preached with more quietness in a church. Many were much affected.
"'For this let men revile my name,
I'll shun no cross, I'll fear no shame;
All hail, reproach, and welcome pain,
Only thy terrors, Lord, restrain.'"
For several successive months, the places we have named were his chief scenes of action. At a moderate computation, the audience frequently consisted of twenty thousand. It is said that the singing could be heard two miles, and the voice of the preacher nearly one. Sometimes there were upwards of a hundred coaches, besides wagons, scaffolds, and other contrivances by which a sight of him could be obtained. The rising ground on Blackheath, from which Whitefield preached, is still known as "Whitefield's mount," and after his death, Lord Dartmouth planted it with fir-trees. It will ever be a grateful recollection to the author of this volume, that during the summer of 1839 he prevailed on some of the most eminent ministers of England to preach on every successive Monday evening on this hallowed spot; and that here many thousands then heard the way of salvation, and not a few were brought to the cross of Christ. In that immediate neighborhood too, now densely populated, he organized, and for some years preached to a Christian church. Memorable times! Many were the manifestations of the Redeemer's favor.
An anecdote which we heard many years ago from one of Whitefield's Blackheath hearers, may here be related. While one day preaching on "the heath," there passed along the road at some distance, an old man and "Mary" his wife, with their ass and his loaded panniers, returning from London to their home in Kent. Attracted alike by the crowd and the preacher's voice, the old man and his wife turned a little out of their way to hear "what the man was talking about." Whitefield spoke of somewhat which occurred eighteen hundred years ago, and the old man said, "Mary, come along, it is only something which happened a long while ago;" but Mary's attention had been arrested, and she wished to stay a minute or two longer. They were both soon in tears, and the inquiry was excited in their hearts, "What shall we do to be saved?" On their way home, while "talking of all these things," the old man recollected his neglected Bible, and asked, "Why, Mary, does not our old book at home say somewhat about these things?" They went home, and examined the old book with new light. "Why, Mary," asked the old man, "is this indeed our old book? why, every thing in it seems quite new." So true is it, that the teaching of the Spirit gives new discernment as to the truths of divine revelation.
A fact strikingly illustrating the children's love to our evangelist may be here mentioned. In his open-air preachings, especially in and about London, he was usually attended by many of them, who sat round him, in and about the pulpit, and handed to him the notes of those who desired his counsels and prayers. These children were exposed to the missiles with which he was often assailed, but however terrified they might be, or even hurt, they seldom shrunk; "but," says he, "on the contrary, every time I was struck, they turned up their little weeping eyes, and seemed to wish they could receive the blows for me."