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During the first forty years of that century, the eye that seeks for spiritual life can hardly find it; least of all that hopeful and diffusive life which is the harbinger of more. "It was

taken for granted that Christianity was not so much as a subject for inquiry, but was at length discovered to be fictitious. And men treated it as if this were an agreed point among all people of discernment.' Doubtless there were divines, like Beveridge and Watts and Doddridge, men of profound devotion, and desirous of doing good; but the little which they accomplished only shews how adverse was the time. And their appearance was no presage. They were not the Ararats of an emerging economy. The zone of piety grew no wider, and they saw no symptoms of a new world appearing. But, like the Coral Islands of the Southern Pacific, slowly descending, they were the dwindling peaks of an older dispensation, and felt the water deepening round them. In their devout but sequestered walk, and in their faithful but mournful appeals to their congregations and country, they looked like the pensive mementoes of a glory departed, not the hopeful precursors of a glory to come. Remembrance and regret are feeble reformers; and the story of godly ancestors has seldom shamed into repentance their lax and irreverent sons. The power which startles or melts a people is zeal surcharged with faith in the great realities, and baptized with the fire of heaven-that fervour which, incandescent with hope and confidence, bursts in flame at the sight of a glorious future, and which, heaping "coals of fire" on the heads of opponents, at once consumes the obstacle, and augments its own transforming conflagration.

Of this power the splendid example was WHITEFIELD.† The son of a Gloucester innkeeper, and sent to Pembroke College, his mind became so burdened with a sense of sin, that he had little heart for study. God and eternity, a holy law

*Bishop Butler.

Born 1714. Died 1770.

and his own personal shortcoming, were thoughts which haunted every moment, and compelled him to live for the salvation of his soul; but, except his tutor Wesley and a few gownsmen, he met with none who shared his earnestness. And though earnest, they were all more or less in error. Among the influential minds of the University there was no one to lead them into the knowledge of the gospel, and they had no religious guides except the genius of the place and books of their own choosing. The genius of the place was an ascetic quietism. Its libraries full of clasped schoolmen and tall fathers, its cloisters so solemn that to congenial spirits a hearty laugh or hurried step seemed sinful, and its halls lit with medieval sunshine, perpetually invited their inmates to meditation and silent recollection; whilst the early tinkle of the chapel bell and the frosty routine of winter matins, the rubric and the founder's rules, proclaimed the religious benefits of bodily exercise. The Romish postern had not then been re-opened; but with no devotional models, save the marble Bernards and de Wykhams, and no spiritual illumination except what came in by the North windows of the past, it is not surprising that ardent but reverential spirits should in such a place have unwittingly groped into a Romish pietism. With an awakened conscience and a resolute will, young Whitefield went through the sanatory specifics of A-Kempis, Castanza, and William Law; and, in his anxiety to exceed all that is required by the rubric, he would fast during Lent on black bread and sugarless tea, and stand in the cold till his nose was red and his fingers blue, whilst, in the hope of temptation and wild beasts, he would wander through Christ-Church meadows over dark. It was whilst pursuing this course of self-righteous fanaticism that he was seized with alarming illness. It sent him to his Bible, and, whilst praying and yearning over his Greek Testament, the open secret" flashed upon his view. The discovery of a completed and gratuitous salvation filled with ecstasy a spirit pre

pared to appreciate it, and from their great deep breaking, his affections thenceforward flowed, impetuous and uninterrupted, in the one channel of love to that Saviour who, on his behalf, had performed all things so excellently. The Bishop of Gloucester ordained him, and on the day of his ordination he wrote to a friend, "Whether I myself shall ever have the honour of styling myself a prisoner of the Lord' I know not; but, indeed, my dear friend, I can call heaven and earth to witness that, when the Bishop laid his hand upon me, I gave myself up to be a martyr for Him who hung upon the Cross for me. Known unto Him are all future events and contingencies. I have thrown myself blindfold, and, I trust, without reserve, into His Almighty hands; only I would have you observe, that, till you hear of my dying for or in my work, you will not be apprised of all the preferment that is expected by GEORGE WHITEFIELD." In this rapture of self-devotion he traversed England, Scotland, and Ireland, for four and thirty years, and crossed the Atlantic thirteen times, proclaiming the love of God and His unspeakable gift to man. A bright and exulting view of the atonement's sufficiency was his theology; delight in God and rejoicing in Christ Jesus were his piety; and a compassionate solicitude for the souls of men, often rising to a fearful agony, was his ruling passion; and strong in the oneness of his aim and the intensity of his feelings, he soon burst the regular bounds, and began to preach on commons and village greens, and even to the rabble at London fairs. He was the prince of English preachers. Many have surpassed him as sermon-makers, but none have approached him as a pulpit orator. Many have outshone him in the clearness of their logic, the grandeur of their conceptions, and the sparkling beauty of single sentences; but in the power of darting the gospel direct into the conscience he eclipsed them all. With an open beaming countenance, and the frank and easy port which the English people love-for it is the symbol of honest

purpose and friendly assurance-he combined a voice of rich compass, which could equally thrill over Moorfields in musical thunder, or whisper its terrible secret in every individual ear; and to this gainly aspect and tuneful voice he added a most expressive and eloquent action. Improved by conscientious practice, and instinct with his earnest nature, this elocution was the acted sermon, and by its pantomimic portrait enabled the eye to anticipate each rapid utterance, and helped the memory to treasure up the palpable ideas. None ever used so boldly, nor with more success, the highest styles of impersonation. His "Hark! hark!" could conjure up Gethsemane with its faltering moon, and awake again the cry of horrorstricken Innocence; and an apostrophe to Peter on the holy Mount would light up another Tabor, and drown it in glory from the opening heaven. His thoughts were possessions, and His feelings were transformations; and if He spake because He felt, His hearers understood because they saw. They were not only enthusiastic amateurs, like Garrick, who ran to weep and tremble at his bursts of passion, but even the colder critics of the Walpole school were surprised into momentary sympathy and reluctant wonder. Lord Chesterfield was listening in Lady Huntingdon's pew when Whitefield was comparing the benighted sinner to a blind beggar on a dangerous road. His little dog gets away from him when skirting the edge of a precipice, and he is left to explore the path with his iron-shod staff. On the very verge of the cliff this blind guide slips through his fingers, and skims away down the abyss. All unconscious, its owner stoops down to regain it, and, stumbling forward-"Good God! he is gone!" shouted Chesterfield, who had been watching with breathless alarm the blind man's movements, and who jumped from his seat to save the catastrophe. But the glory of Whitefield's preaching was its heartkindled, heart-melting gospel. But for this all his bold strokes and brilliant surprises might have been no better than the

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rhetorical triumphs of Kirwan and other pulpit dramatists. He was an orator, but he only sought to be an evangelist. Like a volcano where gold and gems may be darted forth as well as common things, but where gold and molten granite flow all alike in fiery fusion, bright thoughts and splendid images might be projected from his flaming pulpit, but all were merged in the stream which bore along the gospel and himself in blended fervour. Indeed, so simple was his nature, that glory to God and goodwill to man having filled it, there was room for little more. Having no church to found, no family to enrich, and no memory to immortalise, he was the mere ambassador of God; and, inspired with its genial piteous spirit-so full of Heaven Reconciled and Humanity Restored -he soon himself became a living gospel. Radiant with its benignity, and trembling with its tenderness, by a sort of spiritual induction a vast audience would speedily be brought into a frame of mind-the transfusion of his own; and the white furrows on their sooty faces told that Kingswood colliers were weeping, or the quivering of an ostrich plume bespoke the deep emotion in which its fashionable wearer bowed her head. And coming to his work direct from communion with his Master, and in all the strength of believing prayer, there was an elevation in his mien which often paralysed hostility, a self-possession which only made him, amid uproar and fury, the more sublime. With an electric bolt he would bring the jester in his fool's cap from his perch on the tree, or galvanise the brick-bat from the skulking miscreant's grasp, or sweep down in crouching submission and shame-faced silence the whole of Bartholomew Fair; whilst a revealing flash of sententious doctrine or vivified Scripture would disclose to awestruck hundreds the forgotten verities of another world, or the unsuspected arcana of their inner man. "I came to break your head, but, through you, God has broken my heart," was a sort of confession with which he was familiar; and to see the