Bristol the people thronged the churches and followed him through the streets. The "enthusiasm" pained the staid regular clergy, who branded Whitefield a "spiritual pickpocket" and closed their doors to him. But his star kept on rising and was riding high when he preached his valedictory, solemnly adjuring the sobbing penitents that they "might see him no more." He never forgot this postscript upon subsequent departures for America and it was always effective.

While Whitefield's ship lay off the Downs awaiting a favorable wind, John Wesley's vessel came in from America. The departure of Whitefield weighed on Wesley's soul. He prayed and sought Scriptural guidance and finally resorted to the casting of a lot under divine blessing a measure by which he made many of his momentous life decisions—and the drawing was against Whitefield's setting forth. Wesley sent word. Then it was Whitefield's turn at supplication. He sensed an answer to his prayer and determined to sail on.

It was not till the end of January, 1738, that the evangel craft cleared and then she had to call at Gibraltar with troops, Whitefield's shipboard "redcoat parish." Those troopers ceased from swearing, listened to preaching and even allowed themselves to be catechized. On the open Atlantic the skipper was converted and all "bad books and playing cards were cast into the sea." A contagious malignant fever scourged many into serious reflection and Whitefield, though himself stricken, crept over the decks administering medicine and saving both souls and bodies.

Whitefield landed at Savannah on May 5, taking leave of the ship's company in a flood of tears. He received respectful treatment from the magistrates who had been at odds with Wesley and promptly plunged into his work.

It was a torrid summer. The sun-baked earth burned his feet and in the comparative cool of the nights he inured himself to future hardships by learning to sleep on the ground. The while he was preaching about the colony and exhorting from door to door, he developed his plan for the Orphan House that was first conceived by Governor Oglethorpe and Charles Wesley. He made it his own project and it proved to be his talking point to the end of his days. The redeemed were provided with a conscience fund and surely the breadwinner of the fatherless was worthy of his own pittance wherewithal to be sheltered, clothed and fed on his holy mission.

Anxious to complete his own preparations, Whitefield sailed back to England on September 6 and, on January 14, 1739, he was ordained a priest of the Established Church. The Georgia Trustees offered him the "living" at Savannah. He refused it but accepted a grant of five hundred acres for his beloved Orphan House. His eyes were fixed on America. He had no patience with settling down in a comfortable pastorate. He had the primal apostolic call. That is what took him to Fetter Lane and thence to preach in the fields.

Those Fetter Lane meetings with the Wesleys and the others were to Whitefield what "third heavens" were to Paul, one commentator says, and became the "school of his spirit in which he caught the holy and heroic impulse to challenge the Scribes and Pharisees." Church doors swung shut in his face. Bishops turned cold to his "enthusiasm.” And then Whitefield forsook the righteous and went out among sinners.

"I thought it might be doing the service of my Creator," said Whitefield, "Who had a mountain for his pulpit and the heavens for a sounding board and Who, when His

gospel was refused by the Jews, sent His servants into the highways and hedges."

So he went out from Bristol into barbaric Kingswood, the habitat of savage miners, brutalized by unmitigated toil, despised outcasts who had never known the amenities of church-going and who had stones and staves as well as jeers and gibes for the first preacher to dare to come among them. Barred from the sanctuary, he raised a cross upon a hillside in the midst of a glowering mob. Thus of him it was written:

Whitefield preached to colliers grim-
Bishops in lawn sleeves preached at him.
-AUSTIN DOBSON,

"The Ballad of Beau Brocade."

From a scant ten score of surly ruffians the Kingswood congregation grew to twenty thousand singing souls. The swelling chorus of their hymns could be heard for two miles and the voice bearing the tidings to them is said to have carried almost half as far.

"Having no righteousness of their own to renounce," Whitefield wrote of them, "they were glad to hear of a Jesus Who came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance."

He told of the "white gutters made by their tears which fell plentifully down their black cheeks as they came out of their coal pits" and rejoiced that "hundreds and hundreds were brought to full conversion."

John Wesley, with the power that was to inspire the Methodist militants to go out to "make the world his parish," took up the battle of the Lord on the Bristol front while Whitefield swept on to greater and yet greater triumphs at Moorfields, Kennington Common and Black

heath on the fringe of London whose multitudes poured out to hear him.

The preparation was completed. Given to view the promised land on his first voyage to America, consecrated and reconsecrated at Fetter Lane, tried by fire at Kingswood, brought to the fulness of spiritual puissance under the firmament in the shadow of London, this "Luther of the Great Awakening" was ready for his life. Across the Atlantic this time he would go knowing what to do and how to do it.

With upwards of one thousand pounds amassed for his Orphan House, Whitefield and his friend, William Seward, with a company of eight men, a youth and two children, set sail on August 14, 1739. But he did not land in Georgia to take up the task of an almoner. Instead the ship bore him to Philadelphia where the miracle of Moorfields was to be multiplied a hundredfold. Another Boanerges went ashore to claim the New World for his God.

A

CHAPTER V

THE GREAT AWAKENING

There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.

WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800

MERICA'S evangelist had come. Philadelphia was the threshhold and the gates were flung open wide.

No meeting house could contain the people or circumscribe the spirit that responded to the man and the message he was to spread from the craggy coast of Maine to the sandy shores of Carolina for thirty years till death should ride with him the last march on the Gospel trail.

Night after night, while the chill winds of November blew over them, the thousands massed in Market Street where the Court House steps became the pulpit of George Whitefield. His voice could be heard on the distant Jersey shore. His every word could be clearly understood aboard craft at the river wharves. And under the spell of his eloquence penitents knelt in windrows upon the cobble stones crying out what they should do to be saved.

The impress upon Philadelphia made by Whitefield on this and subsequent visits was both deep and lasting. All denominations were quickened. Mrs. Hannah Hodges, in her memoirs published at Philadelphia in 1806, tells of public worship continuing twice daily and thrice and more