A few months later the noble old man was at rest from his labours.  When the clergyman who officiated at his funeral came to the words, ’Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother here departed,’ he substituted the word ‘father’ for ‘brother,’ and the vast multitude burst into tears.  It remained for the present generation to do justice to his memory by giving a place in our Christian Walhalla among the great dead to one who was certainly among the greatest of his day.[746]

The next great leader of the early Evangelical movement who claims our attention is George Whitefield (1714-1770).  Whitefield, like Wesley, appears from first to last to have been actuated by one pure and disinterested motive—­the desire to do as much good as he could in the world, and to bring as many souls as possible into the Redeemer’s kingdom.  But, except in this one grand point of resemblance, before which all points of difference sink into insignificance, it would be difficult to conceive two men whose characters and training were more different than those of Wesley and Whitefield.[747] Instead of the calm and cultured retirement of Epworth Rectory, Whitefield was brought up amidst the vulgar bustle of a country town inn.  His position was not very much improved when he exchanged the drawer’s apron at the ’Bell Inn,’ Gloucester, for the degrading badge of a servitor at Pembroke College, Oxford.  After two or three years’ experience in this scarcely less menial capacity than that which he had filled at home, he was at once launched into the sea of life, and found himself, at the age of twenty-two, with hardly any intellectual or moral discipline, without having acquired any taste for study, without having ever had the benefit of associating on anything like terms of equality with men of intellect or refinement, suddenly elevated to a degree of notoriety which few have attained.  Scarcely one man in a thousand could have passed through such a transformation without being spoiled.  But Whitefield’s was too noble a spirit to be easily spoiled.  Nature had given him a loving, generous, unselfish disposition, and Divine grace had sanctified and elevated his naturally amiable qualities and given him others which nature can never bestow.  He went forth into the world filled with one burning desire—­the desire of doing good to his fellow-men and of extending the kingdom of his Divine Master.

It is needless here to repeat the story of the marvellous effects produced by his preaching.  Nothing like it had ever been seen in England before.  Ten thousand—­twenty thousand—­hearers hung breathless upon the preacher’s words.  Rough colliers, who had been a terror to their neighbourhood, wept until the tears made white gutters down their cheeks—­black as they came from the colliery—­and, what is still more to the purpose, changed their whole manner of life and became sober, God-fearing citizens in consequence of what they heard; sceptical philosophers