The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

by M. E. Braddon

After this they remained silent for the greater part of the way, Antonia watching the road, where the houses were set back behind long gardens, and where the countrified inns had ample space in front for a horse-trough and rustic tables and benches, with here and there a row of fine elms. That sense of space and air which is so sadly wanting now in the mighty wilderness of brick and stone gave a rural charm to the suburbs when George II. was king. Ten minutes' walk took a man from town to country, from streets and alleys to meadow and cornfield, hedgerow and thicket. The perfume of summer flowers was in the air through which they drove, and the village that hemmed the fatal common, so recently a scene of ignominious death, was as rustic as a hamlet in Buckinghamshire.

The crowd had gathered thickly, and had spread itself over the greater part of the common when Lady Kilrush's chariot drew up on the outskirts of the assembly. Stobart alighted and went to reconnoitre. A platform had been erected about six feet from the ground, and on this there had been placed a row of chairs, and a table for the preacher, with a brass lantern standing on each side of the large quarto Bible. Whitefield was there, with one of his helpers, a member of Parliament, his devoted adherent, and two ladies, one of whom was the Countess of Yarmouth's daughter, Lady Chesterfield, dowered with the blood of the Guelfs, and a fine fortune from the royal coffers, Whitefield's most illustrious convert, and a shining light in Lady Huntingdon's saintly circle.

Stobart was on terms of friendship with the orator, and had no difficulty in obtaining a seat for Lady Kilrush. Indeed, her ladyship's name would have obtained the favour as easily had she sent it by her footman, for George Whitefield loved to melt patrician hearts, and draw tears from proud eyes. Enthusiast as he was, there is a something in his familiar letters which suggests that aristocratic converts counted double. They were the écarté kings, the trump-aces in the game he played against Satan.

Stobart brought Antonia through the crowd, and placed her in a chair at the end of the platform, farthest from the preacher, lest the thunder of his tremendous voice should sound too close to her ear.

There was a chair to spare for himself, and he took his seat at her side, in the silence of that vast audience, waiting for the giving out of the hymn with which these open-air services usually began.

Never before had Antonia seen so vast an assemblage hushed in a serious expectancy, with faces all turned to one point, that central spot above the heads of the crowd where the lanterns made an atmosphere of faint yellow light around George Whitefield's black figure standing beside the table, with one hand resting upon an open Bible, and the other uplifted to command silence and attention.

From the preacher's platform, almost to the edge of the common the crowd extended, black and dense, a company gathered from all over London, and compounded of classes so various that almost every Metropolitan type might be found there, from the Churchman of highest dignity, come to criticize and condemn, to the street-hawker, the professional mendicant, come to taste an excitement scarcely inferior to gin.

Whitefield's helper gave out the number of the hymn, and recited the first two lines in slow and distinct tones. Then, with a burst of sound loud as the stormy breakers rolling over a rock-bound beach, there rose the voices of a multitude that none could number, harsh and sweet, loud and low, soprano and contralto, bass and tenor, mingled in one vast chorus of praise. The effect was stupendous, and Antonia felt a catching of her breath, that was almost a sob. Did those words mean nothing, after all? Was that cry of a believing throng only empty air?

A short extempore prayer followed from the helper. George Whitefield's voice had not yet been heard. The influence of his presence was enough, and it may have been that his dramatic instinct led him to keep himself in reserve till that moment of hush and expectancy in which he pronounced the first words of his text.

He stood there, supreme in a force that is rare in the history of mankind, the force that rules multitudes. 'Twas no commanding grace of person that impressed this prodigious assembly. He stood there, the central point in that tremendous throng, a very common figure, short, fat, in a black gown with huge sleeves, and a ridiculous white wig, features without beauty or grandeur, eyes with a decided squint; and that vast concourse thrilled at his presence, as at a messenger from the throne of God. This was the heaven-born orator, the man who at two-and-twenty years of age had held assembled thousands spell-bound by his eloquence, the man gifted with a voice of surpassing beauty, and with a dramatic genius which enabled him to clothe abstract ideas with flesh and blood, and make them live and move before his awestruck hearers.