Whitefield returned to London to welcome his wife home from the Bermuda Islands. From her he learned that there his character had been aspersed by one of the clergy; but while he grieved over the fact, he said, "I am content to wait till the day of judgment for the clearing up of my character; and after I am dead, I desire no other epitaph than this, 'Here lies George Whitefield. What sort of a man he was, the great day will discover.'" In the midst of his sorrows, Whitefield was comforted by a visit from two German ministers, who had been laboring among the Jews with apparently happy results. He found also several of the peeresses, and others of "the great," cordially disposed to receive him; and shortly afterwards was visited by Mr. Grimshaw, a clergyman from Yorkshire, for whom in September he went to preach. Thousands in the village of Haworth attended his preaching, even ten thousand at a time, and a thousand communicants approached the table of the Lord. At Leeds also he preached, at the invitation of Mr. Wesley's people, to ten thousand persons, and Mr. Charles Wesley himself introduced him to the pulpit at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In the north of England the visits of Mr. Whitefield were always looked for with intense interest. In one of his letters, he thus describes the state of things there in August, 1756: "It is now a fortnight since I came to Leeds, in and about which I preached eight days successively, three times almost every day, to thronged and affected auditories. On Sunday last at Bradford, in the morning, the audience consisted of above ten thousand; at noon, and in the evening, at Birstal, of nearly double that number. Though hoarse, I was able to speak so that they all heard." These hallowed services were often spoken of by the late Rev. Dr. John Fawcett, for more than half a century an eminent Baptist minister of that neighborhood, to whose soul they proved a rich blessing. After having heard Whitefield at Bradford in the morning, he followed him to Birstal, where a platform was erected at the foot of a hill adjoining the town, whence Mr. Whitefield addressed an immense concourse of people, not fewer, it was believed, than twenty thousand, who were ranged before him on the declivity in the form of an amphitheatre. "I lay," says Fawcett, "under the scaffold, and it appeared as if all his words were addressed to me, and as if he had known my most secret thoughts from ten years of age. As long as life remains, I shall remember both the text and the sermon." Accustomed as he was to preach to large and promiscuous multitudes, when he looked on this vast assemblage, and was about to mount the temporary stage, he expressed to his surrounding friends a considerable feeling of timidity; but when he began to speak, an unusual solemnity pervaded the assembly, and thousands, in the course of the sermon, as was often the fact, gave vent to their emotions by tears and groans. Fools who came to mock, began to pray, and to cry out,