Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.Anonymous
History
Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.
Anonymous
Clergy; Medicine -- Anecdotes; Medicine -- Humor; Pastoral theology -- Anecdotes; Physicians
A student of Cambridge observing a multitude flock to a village church
on a working day, inquired what was the cause. On being informed that
"one Bunyan, a tinker," was to preach there, he gave a boy a few
halfpence to hold his horse, resolved, as he said, "to hear the tinker
prate." The tinker _prated_ to such effect, that for some time the
scholar wished to hear no other preacher; and, through his future life,
gave proofs of the advantages he had received from the humble ministry
of the author of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. Bunyan, with rude but
irresistible zeal, preached throughout the country, and formed the
greater part of the Baptist churches in Bedfordshire; until, at the
Restoration, he was thrown into prison, where he remained twelve years.
During his confinement he preached to all to whom he could gain access;
and when liberty was offered to him on condition of promising to
abstain from preaching, he constantly replied, "If you let me out
to-day, I shall preach again to-morrow." Bunyan, on being liberated,
became pastor of the Baptist Church at Bedford; and when the kingdom
enjoyed more religious liberty, he enlarged the sphere of his
usefulness by preaching every year in London, where he excited great
attention. On one day's notice, such multitudes would assemble, that
the places of worship could not hold them. "At a lecture at seven
o'clock in the dark mornings of winter," says one of his
contemporaries, "I have seen about twelve hundred; and I computed about
three thousand that came to hear him on a Lord's day, so that one-half
of them were obliged to return for want of room."
LETTSOM'S LIBERATION OF HIS SLAVES.
Dr. Lettsom, the founder of the Sea-Bathing Infirmary at Margate, and
of the General Dispensary, was left by his father a property, which
happened to consist almost entirely of a number of slaves on an estate
in Jamaica. When the benevolent doctor went out to the West Indies to
take possession of his inheritance, he is said to have emancipated
every one of the slaves on his arrival; so that, in the words of his
biographer, "he became a voluntary beggar at the age of twenty-three."
The doctor went afterwards to Tortola, where, by his practice as a
physician, he amassed a considerable sum of money, with which he
returned to England in 1768, and attained a distinguished position
among the Metropolitan practitioners.
CIVIL TO THE PRINCE OF EVIL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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