V.

WHITEFIELD AS LADY HUNTINGDON’S CHAPLAIN.

Prior to 1744, the date of Whitefield’s first voyage to the American colonies, the Countess had made his acquaintance, and had often heard him preach.  She, in common with multitudes of her contemporaries, had come under the extraordinary spell of his pulpit oratory.  In 1748, after a four years’ absence in North America, Whitefield returned to England, and at her request Howel Harris, the famous Welsh evangelist, brought the great preacher to Lady Huntingdon’s house in Chelsea.  In a reply to a letter sent the next day, conveying the request that he would come again, as “several of the nobility desired to hear him,” Whitefield wrote, August 21, 1748:  “How wonderfully does our Redeemer deal with souls!  If they will hear the Gospel only under a ceiled roof, ministers shall be sent to them there.  If only in a church or a field, they shall have it there.  A word in the lesson, when I was last at your Ladyship’s, struck me, ‘Paul preached privately to those who were of reputation.’  This must be the way, I presume, of dealing with the nobility who yet know not the Lord.  Oh, that I may be enabled, When called to preach to any of them, so to preach as to win their souls to the blessed Jesus!  I know that you will pray that it may be so.”

Thus began the series of drawing-room services which were attended by so many of those who were high in rank, and at which some of the most famous incidents in Whitefield’s career occurred.  At these services the Word of God often found an entrance into worldly hearts, and once and again Whitefield tried to win for the Saviour such men as Chesterfield and Bolingbroke.  Lady Huntingdon made him one of her chaplains, and in order to afford greater facilities for this special work, she removed from Chelsea to a house in Park Street, and for six weeks Whitefield carried on these special services, in addition to all his other work.  When, for his own spiritual refreshment, he left London for an evangelistic tour to Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth, this special work was continued by John and Charles Wesley, and several of their fellow-workers.

The young Earl of Huntingdon came of age in 1750, and the Countess gave up Donnington Park to him, removing her household to Ashby, living there with her other children and two of the Ladies Hastings.  Towards the close of 1749 Whitefield desired, if possible, with the aid of Lady Huntingdon, to organise the vast numbers who had been greatly blessed by his evangelistic work, into a corporate body, like that which the clear, practical wisdom of John Wesley had created for the societies which looked up to him as leader.  Whitefield had already seriously differed from Wesley on the tenets of Calvinism and much trouble was to ensue in after years from a renewal of the controversy between the two sections, Calvinistic and Arminian Methodism.  Lady Huntingdon seems to have been attracted by Whitefield’s