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Give either of them Whitefield's auditory, and these effects become impossible. Here we come upon the inert masses, which cannot by any possibility be induced to ascend one single stair in any upward movement, but must be swayed this way or that way upon a thoroughly dead level. It is just here that the realistic preaching of the Spurgeon school is available, and nothing else is.
As to the matter of them, there was at least one point in which Whitefield was not deficient. He had the descriptive power in a very remarkable degree. If it were not that the expression conveyed an idea of unreality the very last idea that should be associated with Whitefield's preaching one might say that he had a good eye for dramatic effect.
David Hume, the skeptic, explained Whitefield's charm by saying that the preacher spake to his audience with the same passionate abandon with which an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart when he pleads for her hand.
He had it from the late Sylvester Horne Member of Parliament and minister of Whitefield's Chapel who had known the President for years before he was elevated to his high office. Home happened to be in America where he was always a welcome guest before the war, shortly after the President was inaugurated, and he called at the White House to pay his respects.
The petty-fogger now likewise departed, and then Jones desired the favour of Mrs Whitefield's company to drink tea with him; but she refused, and with a manner so different from that with which she had received him at dinner, that it a little surprized him.
At this early period of his ministry, however, he had all of Whitefield's intensity and fervor, added to reasoning powers greatly transcending those of the revivalist of the next century. Young in years, he was even then old in bodily infirmity and mental experience. Believing himself the victim of a mortal disease, he lived and preached in the constant prospect of death.
At length, as I am coming back through Tottenham Road, on the 25th of May O day to be marked with the whitest stone! a little way beyond Mr. Whitefield's Tabernacle, I see a landau before me, and on the box-seat by the driver is my young friend Charley, who waves his hat to me and calls out, "George! George!"
Warburton could have no more moved the hearts of living masses to their inmost depths, as Whitefield did, than Whitefield could have written the 'Divine Legation. Butler could no more have carried on the great crusade against sin and Satan which Wesley did, than Wesley could have written the 'Analogy. But without such work as Wesley and Whitefield did, Butler's and Warburton's would have been comparatively inefficacious; and without such work as Butler and Warburton did, Wesley's and Whitefield's work would have been, humanly speaking, impossible.
Thus my uneventful life ran on, while I learned to write, and acquired, with other simple knowledge, enough of Latin and Greek to fit me for entrance at the academy, which Dr. Franklin had founded in 1750, in the hall on Fourth street, built for Whitefield's preaching.
We have heard much of Whitefield's piercing voice and Patrick Henry's silvery tones, but we cannot believe that either of those natural orators possessed an organ superior to Clay's majestic bass. No one who ever heard him speak will find it difficult to believe what tradition reports, that he was the peerless star of the Richmond Debating Society in 1795. Oratory was then in the highest vogue.
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