CHAPTER IV PENTECOSTAL CONSECRATION W Come, Holy Spirit, Heav'nly Dove, ISAAC WATTS, 1674-1748. HILE Jonathan Edwards was crying in the wilderness preparing the way of the Lord and making His paths straight, the Day of Pentecost was fully come in the ancient capital of the mother kingdom, even in Fetter Lane in London Town, where the Holy Ghost descended upon the "chosen few" who were to bear the Word over sea and land and bring their brother men out of their darkness and into the light of the Great Awakening of 1740. It was there in the Moravian Chapel, built in 1738 and afterwards attacked and dismantled by rival religionists, that the gift of at least one fiery tongue was bestowed upon John Wesley and George Whitefield as they knelt on that memorable day of 1739. And it is from this solemn hour that posterity must date the beginning of their message to a "lost and ruined world." Strange was the neighborhood for a pervasion of the Presence. It was not a lane of fetters chaining felons or martyrs. Chaucer in his day called it "Faitours Lane," and to him a faitour was a "lazy, idle fellow." Others extended the meaning to include "pretenders, impostors, vagabonds and fortune tellers." Still another early usage was "Fewtars Lane," a fewtar being a "loafer and a nuisance." Running out from Fleet Street to Holborn, paralleled by Chancery Lane and nigh unto Mitre Court, Bolt Court and Wine Office Court, Fetter Lane once was fringed by cottages and gardens. Here dwelt Praisegod Barebones and his brother Damnéd Barebones, in a house later occupied by the Royal Society under the presidency of Sir Isaac Newton. Over in Chancery Lane, home of the Inns of Court and the Temple dedicated to the majesty of the secular law, Izaak Walton sold hosiery, when he was not cogitating the art of angling, and Drayton began his profane sonneteering. Boswell trailed Dr. Johnson in Mitre Court and Bolt Court and Goldsmith joined them at the Cheshire Cheese, the hostelry of Wine Office Court. Among the printers and publishers of Fleet Street, that thoroughfare of immortal tavern sign-boards, was William Hone, the free thinker, who dared issue his "Everyday Book" from No. 56. Such were the environs of Fetter Lane, first the covert of vagabonds, then the dwelling place of Roundhead zealot and Cavalier poet, then the haunt of scientist, philosopher, lexicographer, scribbler and reveller. Here it was that the Heavens opened and the Holy Ghost came down. It was the first recorded Methodist "watch-night" meeting. Gathered there in the House of the Lord in Fetter Lane as zero hour neared for the year of 1739 were the Wesley brothers, John and Charles, George Whitefield, and Benjamin Ingham, all charter members of the Oxford Holy Club, of which more shall be told presently. Messrs. Hall, Kinchin and Hutchins are also mentioned as being among the leaders of the sixty brethren at the love feast. "About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer," John Wesley writes, "the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch, that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground. As soon as we had recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of His Majesty, we broke out with one voice: 'We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord!'" This occurred about eight months before Whitefield sailed for his conquest of sin in America and only eight weeks after his return from his first voyage thence on a spiritual reconnaissance when he had discovered the two guiding stars of his life ever after. One was the necessity of his preaching the English world, particularly its colonial domains, into regeneration, and the other was the need of the "Orphan House" in Georgia which supplied him with a permanent appeal for funds. To accomplish both of these aims he had to abandon the time-honored tradition of holding a settled pastorate and wander far and wide, sometimes bringing down on his head objurgation for "invading" the pulpits of others and sometimes, barred from churches, forced to preach the Word in the open fields. Thus he became the first of the long ✓ line of itinerant evangelists who have followed him to this day. II Whitefield began his work-a-day life as a bartender at the age of fifteen in the Bell Inn, in the city of Gloucester, where he was born on December 16, 1714, the youngest of a family of seven comprising six sons and one daughter. |