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CHAPTER XIII.

PULPIT ORATORS.

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F one were asked who was the greatest pulpit orator that ever lived, it would be a nice question to determine, so various are the styles of sacred eloquence, and so different are the tastes of even the most competent judges. But if we were to judge by the effects produced, we should hardly need to hesitate in pronouncing GEORGE WHITEFIELD the Demosthenes of the pulpit. In reading his printed sermons, as in reading the speeches of Fox or Sheridan, we are utterly puzzled to account for their electrical effect. One of the latest biographers of the great preacher, Mr. Gledstone, is compelled to confess. their "tameness," their "feeble thought and unpolished language"; and though, among the extracts he has given, there are a few striking and dramatic passages, they are neither numerous or powerful enough to discredit his statement. When pressed to print his sermons, Whitefield might well have answered with a popular French divine, "Gladly, provided that you print the preacher." Yet no fact in the history of eloquence is better attested than the overpowering effects of Whitefield's oratory. Even in his youth, when, being but twenty-one years of age, and deeming himself unfit for the pulpit, he had "prayed, and wrestled, and striven with God," that he might not yet be called to preach, complaint was made to his bishop.

that he had driven fifteen persons mad by his very first sermon, to which the worthy prelate replied that "he hoped the madness might not be forgotten before the next Sunday."

For thirty years Whitefield was listened to with breathless interest in both hemispheres. His preaching tours, it has been truly said, were often like triumphal processions, in which he was escorted by bands of enthusiastic horsemen from place to place, and awaited at every halt by crowds of insatiate listeners, who could never have enough of his heartfelt oratory. Shut out from the English churches, he turned to the open fields,

To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder,

Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply.
Its choir the winds and waves, its organ thunder,

Its dome the sky,"

and there, with the hillside for his pulpit, harangued the men, women, and children, who came trooping from north, south, east, and west, even before daylight, to hear him. Preaching four times on Sunday, and on every day of the week, talking sometimes from seven in the morning till late at night, he showed no signs of exhaustion, but everywhere and at all times subdued and charmed men by the spell of his fervid oratory. At Kingswood, Kensington, and other places, audiences of twenty, thirty, and even forty thousand, hung for hours on his lips; sometimes through pelting rain, or far into the night, standing around him as if entranced, and unable to tear themselves away; and over all these vast assemblies he ruled supreme, at his will hushing them into awe-struck silence, or melting them to tears, or drawing from them cries and groans that almost drowned his voice.

At Bristol, where the Bishop threatened him with ex

communication, if he should dare to wag his tongue in the diocese, his triumphs were no less signal. Before day the people might be seen going with lanterns to hear him; and so vast was the throng, that men clung to the rails of the organ-loft, and climbed to every accessible place to get within reach of his voice. Even the rude colliers of the mining-regions, and the rabble of Moorfields,—a motley crowd of mountebanks, merry-andrews, and persons of the vilest character,-attested his spiritual triumphs. In spite of a furious opposition, and though the whole field, as he said, "seemed ready, not for the Redeemer's, but for Beelzebub's harvest"; though missiles of the most offensive kind were hurled at him, and he was lashed at by a whip, assaulted with a sword, and his voice drowned at times by drums and trumpets; he preached for three days to a throng of twenty-five thousand persons, of whom three hundred and fifty were converted, and a thousand pricked in their consciences during the first twenty-four hours!

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Among the wary and thoughtful Scotch the excitement was no less intense. In vain did sectarian narrowness oppose his efforts; in vain did the Presbyterians denounce. the revivals that followed his preaching as a wark of the deevil," stigmatize him as "a false Christ," and even keep a fast on the occasion of his reappearance; the people flocked by thousands to hear him, and the stoutest hearts shook and trembled under his impassioned and electric appeals. On one occasion, we are told, as the night darkened over his vast audience, his word went through it like a shot piercing a regiment of soldiers, casting many to the ground, groaning and fainting under the vehemence of their emotions. Nor was this only when they were led by the great preacher to Sinai, and saw the

lightnings flash and heard the thunders roar; far greater numbers were overcome when told, in the tenderest accents, of redeeming love. Fourteen times he visited "Auld Scotia" with the same results; and so happy was he there, that he called the day of his departure execution day.

Crossing the Atlantic thirteen times, he spent nine years in "hunting for sinners in the wilds of America," and everywhere with the same results. At Boston, at New York, at Philadelphia, at Charleston, his words fell like a hammer and like fire on all who heard him. Some who listened to him were struck pale as death, others sank into the arms of their friends, and others lifted up their eyes to heaven and cried out to God for mercy. "I could think of nothing," he says on one of these occasions, "when I looked upon them, so much as the great day. They seemed like persons awakened by the last trump, and coming out of their graves to judgment." Opposition, instead of checking, only increased the impetuous flow of his speech. The men who came to scoff or jeer, speedily found that he was superior to the passions of his audience, and either submitted to the spell of his oratory, or slunk away cheated of their sport.

Nor was Whitefield, as Dr. Johnson supposed, merely the orator of the mob. Not only the unlettered, but men of the highest culture, yielded to the fascination of his speech. The cold, skeptical Hume declared that he would go twenty miles on foot to hear Whitefield preach; and in his chapel might be seen the Duke of Grafton, not yet pierced by the arrows of Junius, the heartless George Selwyn, Lord North, Charles James Fox, William Pitt, and Soame Jenyns. John Newton, the friend of Cowper, used to get up at four in the morning to hear the great

preacher at five; and he says that even at that early hour the Moorfields were as full of lanterns as the Haymarket of flambeaux on an opera night. So great, at last, was the spell, that, "when the scandal could be concealed behind the well-adjusted curtain, 'e'en mitred auditors would nod the head." Even the calm and unimpassioned Franklin caught fire at Whitefield's burning words; and perhaps no more signal proof of the orator's power could be given than its triumph over the prudence of Poor Richard. Whitefield had consulted Franklin about the location of a proposed orphan house, but had refused to adopt his advice, and thereupon Franklin decided not to subscribe. "I happened soon after," he says, "to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded I began to soften, and concluded to give him the copper. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that, and determined me to give the silver, and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all."

The same sermon was heard by a friend of Franklin's, who, agreeing with him about the location of the house, had, as a precaution, emptied his pockets before he came. from home. But, before the discourse was ended, he begged a neighbor, who stood near him, to lend him some money for a contribution. If any men could have resisted the preacher's spell, it must have been the haughty and brilliant Bolingbroke, and the worldly and fastidious Chesterfield; yet the former, we are told, was once deeply

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