feelings, nor to reclaim the vicious.  How great, then, must have been the effect of the impassioned eloquence of a Whitefield, which could draw tears from thousands of hardened colliers, upon such a society as that of Mr. Turner and his friends, accustomed only to the discourses of their boon companion, the Rev. Mr. Porter.  The prevailing licence and the prevailing moral consciousness were elements especially adapted to the work of the religious revivalist.  The effect of the sermons of Berridge is thus described by an eye-witness[186]: 

I heard many cry out, especially children, whose agonies were amazing.  One of the eldest, a girl of ten or twelve years old, was full in my view, in violent contortions of body, and weeping aloud, I think incessantly, during the whole service. * * * While poor sinners felt the sentence of death in their souls, what sounds of distress did I hear!  Some shrieking, some roaring aloud.  The most general was a loud breathing, like that of people half strangled and gasping for life.  And indeed, almost all the cries were like those of human creatures dying in bitter anguish.  Great numbers wept without any noise; others fell down as dead; some sinking in silence; some with extreme noise and violent agitation.  I stood on the pew seat, as did a young man in an opposite pew—­an able-bodied, fresh, healthy countryman.  But in a moment, when he seemed to think of nothing less, down he dropped with a violence inconceivable.  The adjoining pews seemed shook with his fall.  I heard afterward the stamping of his feet, ready to break the boards as he lay in strong convulsions at the bottom of the pew. * * * Among the children who felt the arrows of the Almighty I saw a sturdy boy about eight years old, who roared above his fellows, and seemed, in his agony, in struggle with the strength of a grown man.  His face was red as scarlet; and almost all on whom God laid his hand turned either red or almost black. * * * A stranger, well dressed, who stood facing me, fell backward to the wall; then forward on his knees, wringing his hands and roaring like a bull.  His face at first turned quite red, then almost black.  He rose and ran against the wall till Mr. Keeling and another held him.  He screamed out “Oh! what shall I do? what shall I do?  Oh, for one drop of the blood of Christ!”

These were violent remedies, but they were applied to a powerful disease.  If the revivalists did harm by the religious terrorism which they excited, they yet had a powerful and wide-spread influence for good.  They awakened religious feelings among the people, and diffused a new earnestness among the clergy.  A spirit of philanthropy was born with their teachings which has gone on growing until it now extends a protecting arm even to brutes.  The societies for the prevention of cruelty to children and to animals are part of a great philanthropic movement which began at the end of the eighteenth century, which has carried into