“My very dear Sir,—The Christmas holiday season has prevented me sending an immediate answer to your last kind letter. The love therein expressed shall be returned, by praying for the writer’s whole self, and the honourable, Christian, and ministerial circle with which you are at present happily surrounded. Four Methodist parsons! Honourable title! so long as it is attended with the cross. When fashionable, we will drop it. Four Methodist parsons! Enough, when Jesus says, ‘Loose them and let them go,’ to set a whole kingdom on fire for God. I wish them prosperity in the name of the Lord.
“To-morrow, God willing, and on Thursday also, with many hundreds more, I intend to take the sacrament upon it, that I will begin to be a Christian. Though I long to go to heaven, to see my glorious Master, what a poor figure shall I make, among saints, confessors, and martyrs, without some deeper signatures of His divine impress—without more scars of Christian honour!
“Our truly noble mother in Israel is come to London full of them.Crescit sub pondere virtus. Happy they who have the honour of her acquaintance! Highly honoured are the ministers, who have the honour of preaching for and serving her!
“O this single eye,—this disinterested spirit,—this freedom from worldly hopes and worldly fears,—this flaming zeal,—this daring to be singularly good,—this holy ambition to lead the van! O, it is, what? a heaven upon earth! O for a plerophory of faith! to be filled with the Holy Ghost! This is the grand point. All our lukewarmness, all our timidity, all our backwardness to do good, to spend and be spent for God,—all is owing to our want of more of that faith, which is the inward, heartfelt, self-evident demonstration of things not seen.
“But whither am I going? Pardon me, good sir. I keep you from better company. Praying that all of you (if you live to be fifty-two) may not be such dwarfs in the Divine life as I am, I hasten to subscribe myself, etc.,
“George Whitefield.”
Whitefield began the year 1767 by writing a preface to the third edition of the collected works of Bunyan, published in two large folio volumes (pp. 856 and 882), admirably printed, and containing curious and well-executed illustrations. The title was, “The Works of that Eminent Servant of Christ, Mr. John Bunyan, Minister of the Gospel, and formerly Pastor of a Congregation at Bedford. With Copperplates, adapted to the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Holy War, etc., in Two Volumes. The Third Edition. To which are now added The Divine Emblems, and several other Pieces, which were never printed in any former Collection, with a Recommendatory Preface by the Reverend George Whitefield, M.A., Chaplain to the Right Honourable the Countess of Huntingdon. London: printed for W. Johnston, in Ludgate Street; and E. and C. Dilly, in the Poultry, near the Mansion House. 1767.”[556]
Whitefield’s preface is dated January 3, 1767. Two extracts from it must suffice. In reference to the fact thatBunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was written in Bedford Gaol, Whitefield remarks:—
“Ministers never write or preach so well as when under the cross. The Spirit of Christ and of glory then rests upon them. It was this, no doubt, that made the Puritans of the last century such burning and shining lights. When cast out by the black Bartholomew Act, and driven from their respective charges to preach in barns and fields, in the highways and hedges, they, in an especial manner, wrote and preached as men having authority. Though dead, by their writings they yet speak. A peculiar unction attends them to this very hour. For these thirty years past, I have remarked that the more true and vital religion has revived, either at home or abroad, the more the good old Puritanical writings, or the authors of a like stamp, who lived and died in the communion of the Church of England, have been called for.”
Then again, with reference to what, throughout the whole of his career, was one of Whitefield’s favourite virtues, namely, catholicity of spirit, he writes:—