should have experienced the conversion for which he set the standard.

"The generality of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ," he said. "The reason why congregations have been so dead is that they have had dead men preaching to them. The Lord will choose vessels made meet by operations of the Holy Spirit for His sacred use. I would not lay hands [in ordination] on an unconverted man for ten thousand worlds."

It was in this mood, as he himself afterward admitted, of being "puffed up" by his great success in New England that he wrote the famous sharp rebuke to John Wesley for "Arminianism" which was the entering wedge in the lifelong breach between them. At the top of the wave of triumphant Calvinism, Whitefield had no patience with the Wesleyan widening of the approach to a heaven dedicated by dogma to the elect.

Whitefield left Boston with this same critical attitude. Praising the Lord for the "glorious work begun," he laid strictures upon the inhabitants for being "too much conformed to the world" and for having too much "pride of life."

He denounced the "mixed dancings and frolickings" prevalent in New England and the "jewels, patches and gay apparel commonly worn by the female sex." He also expressed fear of the Bostonian tradition, that many should "rest in head knowledge." Nevertheless, he concluded that the people of Boston were "dear to my soul, greatly affected by the Word, very liberal to my dear orphans, and I promised to visit them again.'

The parting was at the high tide of the Great Awakening. It was a tide of tears. Whitefield so wept with the

throng which followed him to his lodgings from the farewell service on the Common that he had to break off in the midst of his last prayer. Governor Belcher, constantly giving way to his emotions, went with Whitefield as far as Worcester, spurring him to stir up the clergy and spare none. Whitefield preached to thousands all along the overland route to Northampton, confessing that the Governor had heartened him to it.

Then the prophets met and wept together before the Lord. They also argued. Edwards warned Whitefield against "impulses." The forerunner spoke from bitter experience, but this Elisha would have none of it. He wore his own mantle and was conscious of its folds. And yet Whitefield preached mightily from the pulpit of Northampton and, dwelling in the home of Edwards, hailed his host as a "son of Abraham" and the good woman by his side as a "daughter of Abraham." With the old fire relighted on the altar of Northampton, the sacristan of salvation went on to New Haven and New York.

Mingled with his proclaiming the necessity of the new birth at Springfield, Suffield, Windsor and New Haven, Whitefield pressed his insistence upon ministers going through this transformation before they could preach Christ aright. Many parsons heard and great offense was given. The students of Yale College were told of the "dreadful ill consequences of an unconverted ministry" and they responded with forty pounds for the Orphan House. Another weeping Governor was grateful for refreshings in the way, but President Clapp of Yale saved something against a later day when he took Whitefield to task for those self-same "impulses" which had brought the caution from Edwards.

It was one of these "impulses" that led him across the

boundary into New York, causing him to declare that the Lord had filled his heart to "wrestle" with the Almighty for the inhabitants of another Nineveh. This time in Pemberton's meeting house the Spirit of the Lord "came down like a mighty rushing wind and carried all before it."

This was in the first week of November, 1740. Though New England had borne the brunt of the Great Awakening, it had remained for New York to exalt the evangelist to the zenith of his conscious power. Wall Street for the moment become the Fetter Lane of the New World.

"Shrieking, crying, weeping and wailing were to be heard in every corner," Whitefield said, "men's hearts failing them for fear and many falling into the arms of their friends. My soul was carried out till I could scarce speak any more."

"Fast flowing divine manifestations" shook the "frail tabernacle" of his body and followed him to his couch. He prayed alternately with friends sitting round the bedside with strong cries and "pierced by the eye of faith even within the veil."

The "Spirit" went with him out from New York southward, the emotional force within him gaining momentum from his contact with Jonathan Barber and James Davenport, the Long Island itinerants who were to carry the revival to then unexpected excesses. Whitefield was already pointing the way, however, when at Baskingridge he let a weeping boy of eight years preach in his stead as one inspired by the Holy Ghost.

"God displayed His sovereignty and out of an infant's mouth came perfecting praise," said Whitefield. "Fresh persons dropped down and the cry increased for more and more."

Across New Jersey, now witnessing the presence of Christ in a crowded barn, now exhorting from a scaffold outside a jail, now in the as yet roofless new church of the Tennents, always to "thousands on thousands melting under the power," Whitefield pushed on to Reedy's Island whence he sailed December 1 for Savannah and Charleston to take ship for England.

In the seventy-five days between his landing in Rhode Island and his arrival at Reedy's Island, he had preached one hundred and seventy-five times in public, not to count private occasions, on a journey of eight hundred miles. And seven hundred pounds accrued in money and goods for the unforgettable orphans.

"Never did God vouchsafe me such assistance," said the evangelist. "Never did I see such a continuance of the Divine Presence in the congregations to whom I preached. All things concur to convince me that America is to be chief scene of action."

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Whitefield was right in his prediction. Though London built him a tabernacle and the power of his eloquence was felt throughout the British Isles, swaying such men as David Garrick, the brilliant actor of Drury Lane, Viscount Bolingbroke, the adviser of Kings, the Earl of Chesterfield, immortalized as a man of fashion, and David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, yet it was in America that his life found its greatest usefulness in perpetuating and extending the effects of the Great Awakening even unto death in the service of his God.

In the Fall of 1741, upon his return to England, Whitefield, by deliberate resolution, married Mrs. Elizabeth Burwell James, a widow about ten years his senior. He said of her: "She has been a housekeeper for many years, once gay, but for three years past a despised follower of the

Lamb of God." However true that may have been, she certainly was neglected, remaining almost out of mention till her death from a fever in August, 1768. She accompanied her husband on at least one of his voyages to America, for a writer in the Boston Evening Post in November, 1744, upbraided the evangelist with his wife's nonattendance at a certain revival meeting. It was afterwards proved that she was present.

Whitefield records delivering his wife's funeral sermon and then turns to his own concerns in the same item, telling of bursting a vein by overexertion amid "glorious gospel gales." Of their only child, a son who died in infancy in February, 1744, he voices disappointment that another Whitefield could not have been raised to be a preacher!

In October, 1744, Whitefield, on his third voyage to America, landed at York, Maine, and proceeded to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Gravely ill, he was believed nigh to death. Suddenly he cried out to his doctor: "My pains are suspended. By the help of God I will go and preach and then come home and die." The people listened to him as if to a dying man. He spoke "expecting to be launched into eternity before morning and with the invisible realities of another world open to view" and achieved an effect that was "worth dying for a thousand times."

Gradually he recovered, but on all his preaching journeys he was subject constantly to such sinkings, with retching, perspiring, and even hemorrhages. It was at Portsmouth that another dramatic episode occurred. A chimney fire seen through the church windows caused the alarm to be spread that the Last Judgment had indeed come. In a torrent of eloquence Whitefield drew the parallel while a bucket brigade doused the blaze.