[ CHAPTER 3 ] - ( CHRISTIAN LEADERS OF THE 18th CENTURY ) - { PT. 7 }


 { PT.  7 } - The gospel proclaimed in the fields was listened to and eagerly received by hundreds who never dreamed of going to a place of worship. The cause of pure religion was advanced, and souls were plucked from that hand of Satan like brands from the burning. However, it was going much too fast for the Church of England of those days. The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, entirely refused to support this strange preacher. In the true spirit of the dog in the manger,they neither liked to go after the semi-heathen masses of population themselves nor did they like anyone else to do the work for them. The consequence was that the sermons of Whitefield in the pulpits of the Church of England from this time almost entirely stopped. He loved the Church in which he had been ordained, he gloried in her Thirty-nine Articles of belief, and he used her Book of Common Prayer with pleasure--but the Church did not love him, and so lost the use of his services. The plain truth is that the Church of England of that day was not ready for a man like Whitefield. The Church was too much asleep to understand him, and was bothered by a man who would not keep still and let the devil alone! The facts of Whitefield's history from this period to the day of his death are almost entirely similar. One year was just like another, and to attempt to follow him would be only going repeatedly over the same ground. From 1739 to the year of his death in 1770, a period of thirty-one years, his life was one uniform work. He was always about his Master's business. From Sunday mornings to Saturday nights, from January 1 to December 31, except when laid aside by illness, he was almost incessantly preaching Christ and going about the world pleading with people to repent and come to Christ and be saved. There was hardly a considerable town in England, Scotland, or Wales that he did not visit as an evangelist. When churches were opened to him, he gladly preached in them, and when only chapels could be obtained, he cheerfully preached in chapels. 

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