At that time, as far as I can discover, he had not even heard of the Oxford Methodists; but a few months later he heard strange news of Wesley's Oxford comrade, Charles Kinchin. The occasion was a private card party at Reading. John Cennick was asked to take a hand, and refused. For this he was regarded as a prig, and a young fellow in the company remarked, "There is just such a stupid religious fellow at Oxford, one Kinchin." Forthwith, at the earliest opportunity, John Cennick set off on foot for Oxford, to seek out the "stupid religious fellow"; found him sallying out of his room to breakfast; was introduced by Kinchin to the Wesleys; ran up to London, called at James Hutton's, and there met George Whitefield; fell on the great preacher's neck and kissed him; and was thus drawn into the stream of the Evangelical Revival at the very period in English history when Wesley and Whitefield first began preaching in the open air. He was soon a Methodist preacher himself {1739.}. At Kingswood, near Bristol, John Wesley opened a charity school for the children of colliers; and now he gave Cennick the post of head master, and authorized him also to visit the sick and to expound the Scriptures in public. The preacher's mantle soon fell on Cennick's shoulders. At a service held under a sycamore tree, the appointed preacher, Sammy Wather, was late; the crowd asked Cennick to take his place; and Cennick, after consulting the Lot, preached his first sermon in the open air. For the next eighteen months he now acted, like Maxfield and Humphreys, as one of Wesley's first lay assistant preachers; and as long as he was under Wesley's influence he preached in Wesley's sensational style, with strange sensational results. At the services the people conducted themselves like maniacs. Some foamed at the mouth and tore themselves in hellish agonies. Some suffered from swollen tongues and swollen necks. Some sweated enormously, and broke out in blasphemous language. At one service, held in the Kingswood schoolroom, the place became a pandemonium; and Cennick himself confessed with horror that the room was like the habitation of lost spirits. Outside a thunderstorm was raging; inside a storm of yells and roars. One woman declared that her name was Satan; another was Beelzebub; and a third was Legion. And certainly they were all behaving now like folk possessed with demons. From end to end of the room they raced, bawling and roaring at the top of their voices. "The devil will have me," shrieked one. "I am his servant. I am damned." "My sins can never be pardoned," said another. "I am gone, gone for ever." "That fearful thunder," moaned a third, "is raised by the devil; in this storm he will bear me to hell." A young man, named Sommers, roared like a dragon, and seven strong men could hardly hold him down. "Ten thousand devils," he roared, "millions, millions of devils are about me."