And thus also was ended his education.Before the completion of his twenty-first year, Whitfield returned to Gloucester; and such was the fame of his piety and talents, that Dr. Benson, the then bishop of the diocess, offered to dispense, in his favour, with the rule which forbade the ordination of deacons at so unripe an age. The mental agitation which preceded his acceptance of this proposal, is described in these strange but graphic terms in one of his latest sermons.

finally closed on the rude figure of one of her | For some time I could not avoid singing illustrious sons, expelled by poverty to seek a Psalms wherever I was, but my joy became precarious subsistence, and to earn a lasting gradually more settled. Thus were the days reputation in the obscure alleys of London. of my mourning ended." In the following year they were opened to a pupil as ill provided with this world's wealth as Samuel Johnson, but destined to achieve a still more extensive and a more enduring celebrity. The waiter at the Bell Inn had become a servitor at Oxford—no great advancement in the social scale according to the habits of that age-yet a change which conferred the means of elevation on a mind too ardent to leave them unimproved. He became the associate of Charles, and the disciple of John Wesley, who had at that time taken as their spiritual guide the celebrated mystic, William Law. These future chiefs of a religious revolution were then "interrogating themselves whether they had been simple and recollected; whether they had prayed with fervour Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and on Saturday noon; if they had used a collect at nine, twelve, and three o'clock; duly meditated on Sunday from three to four on Thomas à Kempis, or mused on Wednesday and Friday from twelve to one on the Passion." But Quietism, indigenous in the East, is an exotic in this cold and busy land of ours, bearing at the best but sorry fruit, and hastening to a premature decay. Never was mortal man less fitted for the contemplative state than George Whitfield. It was an attempt as hopeless as that of converting a balloon into an observatory. He dressed the character indeed to admiration, for "he thought it unbecoming a penitent to have his hair powdered, and wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes." But the sublime abstractions which should people the cell and haunt the spirit of the hermit he wooed in vain. In the hopeless attempt to do nothing but meditate, "the power of meditating or even of thinking was," he says, "taken from him." Castanza on the "Spiritual Combat" advised him to talk but little; and "Satan said he must not talk at all." The Divine Redeemer had been surrounded in his temptations by deserts and wild beasts, and to approach this example as closely as the localities allowed, Whitfield was accustomed to select Christ Church meadow as the scene, and a stormy night as the time of his mental conflicts. He prostrated his body on the bare earth, fasted during Lent, and exposed himself to the cold till his hands began to blacken, and "by abstinence and inward struggles so emaciated his body as to be scarcely able to creep up stairs." In this deplorable state he received from the Wesleys books and ghostly counsels. His tutor, more wisely, sent him a A man within whose bosom resides an oraphysician, and for seven weeks he laboured cle directing his steps in the language and under a severe illness. It was, in his own with the authority of inspiration, had needs be language, "a glorious visitation." It gave thus self-devoted in soul and body to some him time and composure to make a written honest purpose, if he would not mistake the record and a penitent confession of his youth-voice of the Pythoness for that which issues ful sins to examine the New Testament; to read Bishop's Hall's Contemplations; and to seek by prayer for wisdom and for peace. The blessings thus invoked were not denied. "The day-star," he says, "arose in my heart. The spirit of mourning was taken from me.

"I never prayed against any corruption I had in my life so much as I did against going into holy orders so soon as my friends were for having me go. Bishop Benson was pleased to honour me with peculiar friendship, so as to offer me preferment, or to do any thing for me. My friends wanted me to mount the church betimes. They wanted me to knock my head against the pulpit too young, but how some young men stand up here and there and preach, I do not know. However it be to them, God knows how deep a concern entering into the ministry and preaching was to me. I have prayed a thousand times, till the sweat has dropped from my face like rain, that God of his infinite mercy would not let me enter into the church till he called me to and thrust me forth in his work. I remember once in Gloucester, I know the room; I look up to the window when I am there, and walk along the street. I know the window upon which I have laid prostrate. I said, Lord, I cannot go, I shall be puffed up with pride, and fall into the condemnation of the devil. Lord, do not let me go yet. I pleaded to be at Oxford two or three years more. I intended to make one hundred and fifty sermons, and thought that I would set up with a good stock in trade. I remember praying, wrestling, and striving with God. I said, I am undone. I am unfit to preach in thy great name. Send me not, Lord-send me not yet. I wrote to all my friends in town and country to pray against the bishop's solicitation, but they insisted I should go into orders before I was twentytwo. After all their solicitations, these words came into my mind, 'Nothing shall pluck you out of my hands;' they came warm to my heart. Then, and not till then, I said, 'Lord, I will go; send me when thou wilt.' He was ordained accordingly; and when the bishop laid his hands upon my head, my heart,' he says, 'was melted down, and I offered up my whole spirit, soul, and body.""

from the sanctuary. But the uprightness and inflexible constancy of Whitfield's character rendered even its superstitions comparatively harmless; and the sortilege was ever in favour of some new effort to accomplish the single object for which he henceforward lived. The

next words which "came to his soul with | bed-chamber. Such indeed was its force, that power" were "Speak out, Paul," and never when the scandal could be concealed behind a was injunction more strictly obeyed. well adjusted curtain, "e'en mitred 'auditors' "Immediately," he says, "my heart was would nod the head." Neither English reserve, enlarged, and I preached on the Sunday morn- nor the theological discrimination of the ing to a very crowded audience with as much Scotch, nor the callous nerves of the slavefreedom as if I had been a preacher for some dealers of America, nor the stately self-posyears. As I proceeded I perceived the fire session of her aborigines, could resist the enkindled, till at last, though so young, and chantment. Never was mortal man gifted amidst a crowd of those who knew me in my with such an incapacity of fatiguing or of infant childish days, I trust I was enabled to being fatigued. speak with some degree of gospel authority. Some few mocked, but most for the present seemed struck, and I have heard since that a complaint had been made to the bishop that I drove fifteen mad by my first sermon. The worthy prelate, as I am informed, wished that the madness might not be forgotten before next Sunday."

Thus early apprized of the secret of his strength, his profound aspirations for the growth of Christianity, the delight of exercising his rare powers, and the popular admiration which rewarded them, operating with combined and ceaseless force on a mind impatient of repose, urged him into exertions, which, if not attested by irrefragable proofs, might appear incredible and fabulous. It was the statement of one who knew him well, and who was incapable of wilful exaggerationand it is confirmed by his letters, journals, and a whole cloud of witnesses-that "in the compass of a single week, and that for years, he spoke in general forty hours, and in very many sixty, and that to thousands; and after his labours, instead of taking any rest, he was engaged in offering up prayers and intercessions, with hymns and spiritual songs, as his manner was, in every house to which he was invited."

No similar praise could be honestly awarded to Whitfield's present biographer. He has followed the steps of the great itinerant from the cradle to the grave, in a volume of nearly six hundred closely printed pages, compiled on the principle that nothing can be superfluous in the narrative of a man's life which was of any real importance to the man himself, or to his associates. The chronicle so drawn up, illuminated by no gleams of philosophy, human or divine, and arranged on no intelligible method, is a sore exercise for the memory and the patience of the reader. It records, without selection or forbearance, thirteen successive voyages across the Atlanticpilgrimages incalculable to every part of this island, and of the North American continent, from Georgia to Boston-controversies with Wesley on predestination and perfection, and with the bishops on still deeper mysterieschapel buildings and subscriptions-preachings and the excitement which followed them

and characteristic sayings and uncharacteristic letters, meetings and partings, and every other incident, great and small, which has been preserved by the oral or written traditions of Whitfield's followers. His life still remains to be written by some one who shall bring to the task other qualifications than an honest zeal for his fame, and a cordial adoption of his opinions.

Given, a preacher, who during the passage of the sun though the ecliptic, addresses his audience every seventh day, in two discourses From the conflict with the enemies who of the dwarfish size to which sermons attain had threatened her existence, the church miliin this degenerate age, and multiply his efforts tant turned to resist the unwelcome ally who by forty, and you do not reach the standard now menaced her repose. Warburton led the by which, for thirty-five successive years, van, and behind him many a mitred front Whitfield regulated this single branch of his scowled on the audacious innovator. Divested exertions. Combine this with the fervour of the logomachies which chiefly engaged the with which he habitually spoke, the want of attention of the disputants, the controversy all aids to the voice in the fields and the tho- between Whitfield and the bishops lay in a roughfares he frequented, and the toil of be- narrow compass. It being mutually conceded coming distinctly audible to thousands and that the virtues of the Christian life can result tens of thousands; and, considered merely as a only from certain divine impulses, and that to physical phenomenon, the result is amongst lay a claim to this holy inspiration when its the most curious of all well authenticated legitimate fruits are wanting, is a fatal delumarvels. If the time spent in travelling from sion; he maintained, and they denied, that the place to place, and some brief intervals of person who is the subject of this sacred influrepose be subtracted, his whole life may be ence has within his own bosom an independent said to have been consumed in the delivery of attestation of its reality. So abstruse a debate one continuous or scarcely uninterrupted ser- required the zest of some more pungent ingremon. Strange as is such an example of bodily dients; and the polemics with whom Whitfield and mental energy, still stranger is the power had to do, were not such sciolists in their callhe possessed of fascinating the attention of ing as to be ignorant of the necessity of rivethearers of every rank of life and of every va- ing upon him some epithet at once opproriety of understanding. Not only were the brious and vague. While, therefore, milder loom, the forge, the plough, the collieries, and spirits arraigned him as an enthusiast, Warthe workshops, deserted at his approach, but burton, with constitutional energy of invective, the spell was acknowledged by Hume and denounced him as a fanatic. In vain he deFranklin-by Pulteney, Bolingbroke, and Ches-manded a definition of these reproachful terms. terfield-by maids of honour and lords of the To have fixed their meaning would have been

с

to blunt their edge. They afforded a solution | this life and the rewards of a future state, the at once compendious, obscure, and repulsive, connexion is necessary and indissoluble. Re of whatever was remarkable in his character, ferring this retributive dispensation exclu and have accompanied his name from that sively to the divine benevolence, his theology time to the present. inculcated humility while it inspired hope. It taught him self-distrust, and reliance on a strength superior to his own; and instructed him in the mystery which reconciles the ele vation and the purity of disinterested love with those lower motives of action which more immediately respect the future advantage of the agent. Whatever else Whitfield may have been, a fanatic, in the proper sense of that term, he assuredly was not.

their being. Engaged in arduous and lofty designs, they must, to a certain extent, live in an imaginary world, and recruit their exhausted strength with ideal prospects of the success which is to repay their labours. But, like every other emotion when long indulged, hope yields but a precarious obedience to the reasoning powers; and reason herself, even when most enlightened, will not seldom make a voluntary abdication of her sovereignty in favour of her powerful minister;-surrendering up to the guidance of impulse a mind whose aims are too high to be fulfilled under her own sober counsels. For in "this little state of man" the passions must be the free subjects, not the slaves of the understanding; and while they obey her precepts, should impart to her some of their own spirit, warmth, and energy. It is however, essential to a well constituted nature, that the subordination of the lower to the superior faculties, though occasionally relaxed, should be habitually maintained. Used with due abstinence, hope acts as a healthful tonic; intemperately indulged, as an enervating opiate. The visions of future triumph, which at first animated exertion, if dwelt upon too intently, will usurp the place of the stern reality, and noble objects will be contemplated, not for their own inherent worth, but on account of the day dreams they engender. Thus, imagi

The currents of life had drifted Warburton on divinity as his profession, but nature designed him for a satirist; and the propensity was too strong to yield even to the study of the gospel. From them he might have discovered the injustice of his censure; for the real nature of religious fanaticism can be learnt with equal clearness from no other source. They tell of men who compassed sea and land to make one proselyte, that when made they The charge of enthusiasm was so ambigu might train him up as a persecutor and a ous, that it might, with equal propriety, be unbigot; of others, who erected sepulchral monu-derstood as conveying either commendation or ments to the martyrs of a former age, while reproach. Hope is the element in which all unsheathing the sword which was to augment the great men of the world move and have their number; of some who would have called down fire from heaven to punish the inhospitable city which rejected their master; and of those who exhausted their bodies with fasting, and their minds with study, that they might with deeper emphasis curse the ignorant multitude. They all laboured under a mental disease, which, amongst fanatics of every generation, has assumed the same distinctive type. It consists in an unhallowed alliance of the morose and vindictive passions with devotion or religious excitement. Averting the mental vision from what is cheerful, affectionate, and animating in piety, the victims of this malady regard opposing sects, not as the children, but as the enemies of God; and while looking inward with melancholy alternations of pride and self-reproach, learn to contemplate Deity itself with but half-suppressed aversion. To connect the name of the kind hearted George Whitfield with such a reproach as this! To call on the indolent of all future generations who should believe in Warburton, to associate the despised itinerant with the Dominics, De Rances, and Bonners of former ages! Truly the indignant prelate knew not what manner of spirit he was of. If ever philanthropy burned in the human heart with a pure and intense flame, embracing the whole family of man in the spirit of universal charity, that praise is pre-eminently due to Whitfield. Hination makes one man a hero, another a sompredestinarian speculations perplexed his mind but could not check the expansion of his Catholic feelings. "He loved the world that hated him." He had no preferences but in favour of the ignorant, the miserable, and the poor. In their cause he shrunk from no privation, and declined neither insult nor hostility. To such wrongs he opposed the weapons of an all-enduring meekness, and a love incapable of repulse. The springs of his benevolence were inexhaustible, and could not choose but flow. Assisted it may have been by natural disposition, and by many an external impulse; but it ultimately reposed on the fixed persuasion that he was engaged in a sacred duty, the faithful discharge of which would be followed by an imperishable recompense. With whatever undigested subtleties his religious creed was encumbered, they could not hide from him, though they might obscure the truth, that, between the virtues of

nambulist, and a third a lunatic: while it renders them all enthusiasts. And thus are classed together, under one generic term, characters wide asunder as the poles, and standing at the top and at the bottom of the scale of human intellect; and the same epithet is used to describe Francis Bacon and Emanuel Swedenborg.

Religious men are, for obvious reasons, more subject than others to enthusiasm, both in its invigorating and in its morbid forms. They are aware that there is about their path and about their bed a real presence, which yet no sense attests. They revere a spiritual inmate of the soul, of whom they have no definite conciousness. They live in communion with one, whose nature is chiefly defined by nega tives. They are engaged in duties which can be performed acceptably only at the bidding of the deepest affections. They rest their faith on prophetic and miraculous suspensions, in

times past, of the usual course of nature; and form, no man would have more vehemently derive their hopes and fears from the dim sha- disclaimed; and the great mystery which dows cast by things eternal on the troubled blends together the human and the divine in mirror of this transient scene. What wonder the Christian dispensation, lost much of its if, under the incumbent weight of such thoughts sublime character, and with it much of its as these, the course of active virtue be too salutary influence. often arrested; or if a religious romance sometimes takes the place of contemplative piety, and the fictitious gradually supersedes the real; and a world of dreams, a system of opinions, and a code of morals, which religion disavows, occasionally shed their narcotic influence over a spirit excited and oppressed by the shapeless forms and the fearful powers with which it is conversant?

It was indeed impossible that a mind feeding upon such visions as he invited and cherished should entirely escape their practical mischief. He would have rejected with horror the impious dream that the indwelling Deity would absolve him from any obligation of justice, mercy, or truth. Yet he could persuade himself that he enjoyed a dispensation from the duty of canonical obedience to his ecclesiastical superiors. His revolt against the authority of the church of which he was a presbyter is at once avowed and defended by his present biographer. "If," he says, "a bishop did good or allowed good to be done, Whitfield venerated him and his office too; but he despised both whenever they were hostile to truth or zeal-I have no objection to say, whenever they were hostile to his own sentiments and measures. What honest man would respect an unjust judge, or an ignorant physician, because of their professional titles? It is high time to put an end to this nonsense."

Both in the more and in the less favourable sense of the expression, Whitfield was an enthusiast. The thraldom of the active to the meditative powers was indeed abhorrent from his nature; but he was unable to maintain a just equilibrium between them. His life was one protracted calenture; and the mental fever discoloured and distorted the objects of his pursuits. Without intellectual discipline or sound learning, he confounded his narrow range of elementary topics with the comprehensive scheme and science of divinity. Leaping over the state of pupilage, he became at once a teacher and a dogmatist. The lessons which he never drew from books, were never taught him by men. He allowed himself no leisure for social intercourse with his superiors, or with his equals; but underwent the debilitating effects of conversing almost exclusively with those who sat as disciples at his feet. Their homage, and the impetuous tumult of his career, left him but superficially acquainted with himself. Unsuspicious of his own ignorance, and exposed to flattery far more intoxicating than the acclamations of the theatre, he laid the foundations of a new religious system with less of profound thought, and in a greater penury of theological research, than had ever fallen to the lot of a reformer or heresiarch before. The want of learning was concealed under the dazzling veil of popular eloquence, and supplied by the assurance of divine illumination; and the spiritual influence on which he thus relied was little else than a continually recurring miracle. It was not a power like that which acts throughout the material world-the unseen and inaudible source of life, sustaining, cementing, and invigorating all things, hiding itself from the heedless beneath the subordinate agency it employs, and disclosed to the thoughtful by his prolific and plastic energies. The access of the Sacred presence, which Whitfield acknowledged, was perceptible by an inward consciousness, and was not merely different,nisters. In the midst of his revolt he perbut distinguishable from the movements of that intellectual and sensitive mechanism of his own nature, by means of which it operated. He discerned it not only in the growth of the active and passive virtues and in progressive strength and wisdom and peace, but in sudden impulses which visited his bosom, and unexpected suggestions which directed his path. A truth of all others the most consolatory and the most awful, was thus degraded almost to a level with superstitions, which, in their naked

Mr. Philip's boast is not, or at least should not be, that he is well found in the principles of casuistry. He is no Ductor Dubitantium, but a spiritual pugilist, who uses his pen as a cudgel. But, whatever may be the value of hard words, they are not sufficient to adjust such a question as this. Under sanctions of the most awful solemnity, Whitfield had bound himself to submit to the lawful commands of his bishop. His "measures," being opposed to the law ecclesiastical, were interdicted by his diocesan; but, his "sentiments" telling him that he was right, and the bishop wrong, the vow of obedience was, it seems, cancelled. If so, it was but an impious mockery to make or to receive it. If it be really "nonsense" to respect so sacred an engagement, then is there less sense than has usually been supposed in good faith and plain dealing. Even on the hazardous assumption that the allegiance voluntarily assumed by the clergy of the Anglican church is dissoluble at the pleasure of the inferior party, it is at least evident that, as an honest man, Whitfield was bound to abandon the advantages when he repudiated the duties of the relation in which he stood to his bishop. But, "despising" the episcopal office, he still kept his station in the episcopal church; and, if he had no share in her emoluments, continued at least to enjoy the rank, the worship, and the influence which attend her mi

formed her offices, and ministered in her temples, as often as opportunity offered. It was the dishonest proceeding of a good man bewildered by dreams of the special guidance of a Divine Monitor. The apology is the error of an honest man led astray by a sectarian spirit.

The sinister influence of Whitfield's imagination on his opinions, and through them on his conduct, may be illustrated by another example. He not only became the purchaser of slaves, but condemned the restriction which

at that time forbade their introduction into | ble things with less embarrassment or with Georgia. There is extant, in his handwriting, less of silent awe. Illustrations might be an inventory of the effects at the Orphan drawn from every part of his writings, but House, in that province, in which these mise- hardly without committing the irreverence we rable captives take their place between the condemn. cattle and the carts. "Blessed be God," he exclaimed, "for the increase of the negroes. I entirely approve of reducing the Orphan House as low as possible, and I am determined to take no more than the plantation will maintain till I can buy more negroes." It is true that it was only as founder of this asylum for destitute children that he made these purchases; and true, that in these wretched bondsmen he recognised immortal beings for whose eternal welfare he laboured; and it is also true that the morality of his age was lax on the subject. But the American Quakers were already bearing testimony against the guilt of slavery and the slave trade; and even had they been silent, so eminent a teacher of Christianity as Whitfield, could not, without censure, have so far descended from Scriptural to conventional virtue.

To the lighter graces of taste and fancy Whitfield had no pretension. He wandered from shore to shore unobservant of the wonders of art and nature, and the strange varieties of men and manners which solicited his notice. In sermons in which no resource within its reach is neglected, there is scarcely a trace to be found of such objects having met his eye or arrested his attention. The poetry of the inspired volume awakens in him no corresponding raptures; and the rhythmical quotations which overspread his letters never rise above the cantilena of the tabernacle. In polite literature, in physical and moral science, he never advanced much beyond the standard of the grammar-school of St. Mary de Crypt. Even as a theologian, he has no claims to erudition. He appears to have had no Hebrew and little Greek, and to have studied To measure such a man as George Whit- neither ecclesiastical antiquity nor the great field by the standards of refined society might divines of modern times. His reading seems seem a very strange, if not a ludicrous attempt. to have been confined to a few, and those not Yet, as Mr. Philip repeatedly, and with em- the most considerable, of the works of the later phasis, ascribes to him the character of a nonconformists. Neither is it possible to as"gentleman," it must be stated that he was sign him a place among profound or original guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours thinkers. He was, in fact, almost an uneduagainst the laws of that aristocratic common-cated man; and the powers of his mind were wealth in which the assertion of social equality, and the nice observance of the privileges of sex and rank, are so curiously harmonized. Such was his want of animal courage, that in the vigour of his days he could tamely acquiesce in a severe personal chastisement, and fly to the hold of his vessel for safety at the prospect of an approaching sea-fight. Such was his failure in self-respect, that a tone of awkward adulation distinguishes his letters to the ladies of high degree who partook and graced his triumph. But his capital offence against the code of manners was the absence of that pudicity which shrinks from exposing to public gaze the deepest emotions of the heart. In journals originally divulged, and at last published by himself, and throughout his voluminous correspondence, he is "naked and is not ashamed." Some very coarse elements must have entered into the composition of a man who could thus scatter abroad disclo-votion, that even the defects of his character sures of the secret communings of his spirit with his Maker.

never applied, and perhaps could not have been bent successfully, either to the acquisition of abstruse knowledge or to the enlargement of its boundaries. "Let the name of George Whitfield perish if God be glorified," was his own ardent and sincere exclamation. His disciples will hardly acquiesce in their teacher's self-abasement, but will resent, as injurious to him and to their cause, the impu tations of enthusiasm, of personal timidity, of irreverence and coarseness of mind, of ignorance and of a mediocrity or absence of the powers of fancy, invention and research. But the apotheosis of saints is no less idolatrous than that of heroes; and they have not imbibed Whitfield's spirit who cannot brook to be told that he had his share of the faults and infirmities which no man more solemnly ascribed to the whole human race.

Such, however, was his energy and self-de

were rendered subservient to the one end for which he lived. From the days of Paul of Akin to this fault is his seeming uncon- Tarsus and Martin Luther to our own, history sciousness of the oppressive majesty of the records the career of no man who, with a less topics with which he was habitually occupied. alloy of motives terminating in self, or of pasThe seraph in the prophetic vision was ar- sions breaking loose from the control of rearayed with wings, of which some were given son, concentrated all the faculties of his soul to urge his flight, and others to cover his face. with such intensity and perseverance for the Vigorous as were the pinions with which accomplishment of one great design. He beWhitfield moved, he appears to have been un- longed to that rare variety of the human speprovided with those beneath which his eyes cies of which it has been said that the liberties should have shrunk from too familiar a cor- of mankind depend on their inability to comtemplation of the ineffable glory. Where bine in erecting a universal monarchy. With prophets and apostles "stood trembling," he nerves incapable of fatigue, and a buoyant is at his ease; where they adored, he declaims. confidence in himself, which no authority, This is, indeed, one of the besetting sins of neglect, or opposition could abate, opposing a licentiates in divinity. But few ever moved pachydermatous front to all the missiles of among the infinitudes and eternities of invisi-scorn and contumely, and yet exquisitely sen