In dwelling upon these secondary causes of Whitefield’s success as a preacher it is by no means intended to lose sight of the great First Cause.  God, who can make the weak things of this world to confound the mighty, could and did work for the revival of religion by this weak instrument.  But God works through human agencies; and it is no derogation to the power of His grace, but simply tracing out the laws by which that grace works, when we note the human and natural agencies which all contributed to lend a charm to Whitefield’s preaching.  The difficulty of accounting for that charm is not so great as would at first sight appear.  Indeed, immeasurably superior as Wesley’s printed sermons are to Whitefield’s in depth of thought, closeness of reasoning, and purity of diction, it is more difficult to explain the excitement which the older and far abler man produced than to explain that which attended the younger man’s oratory.  For Wesley—­if we may judge from his printed sermons—­carefully eschewed everything that would be called in the present day ‘sensational.’  Plain, downright common sense, expressed in admirably chosen but studiously simple language, formed the staple of his preaching.  One can quite well understand anyone being convinced and edified by such discourses, but there is nothing in them which is apparently calculated to produce the extraordinary excitement which, in a second degree only to Whitefield, Wesley did in fact arouse.

Preaching was Whitefield’s great work in life,—­and his work was also his pleasure.  ‘O that I could fly from pole to pole,’ he exclaimed, ‘preaching the everlasting Gospel.’  When he is ill, he trusts that preaching will soon cure him again.  ‘This,’ he says, ’is my grand Catholicon.  O that I may drop and die in my blessed Master’s work.’  His wish was almost literally fulfilled.  When his strength was failing him, when he was worn out before his time in his Master’s work, he lamented that he was ’reduced to the short allowance of one sermon a day, and three on Sundays.’[751] He preached when he was literally a dying man.  His other work scarcely claims a passing notice in a short sketch like the present, especially as his peculiar opinions and his relationship with the Wesleys and others will again come under our notice in connection with the Calvinistic controversy.  With the exception of letters to his friends and followers, and the inevitable journal (almost every member of the Evangelical school in the last century kept a journal), he wrote comparatively little; and what he did write, certainly need not cause us to regret that he wrote no more.  On one of his voyages from America, Whitefield employed his leisure in abridging and gospelising Law’s ‘Serious Call.’  Happily the work does not appear to have been finished; at any rate, it was not given to the world.  Law’s great work would certainly bear ‘gospelising,’ but Whitefield was not the man to do it.  William Law improved by