George Whitefield: A Biography, with special reference to his labors in AmericaBelcher, Joseph
Religion
George Whitefield: A Biography, with special reference to his labors in America
Belcher, Joseph
Whitefield, George, 1714-1770
"The last time he occupied my pulpit," writes his neighbor, the Rev.
George Clayton, "when he preached excellently for an hour, in behalf
of a charitable institution, he retired to the vestry after service
under feelings of great and manifest exhaustion. Here he remained
until every individual except the pew-openers, his servant, and
myself had left the place. At length he seemed with some reluctance
to summon energy enough to take his departure, intimating that it
was in all probability the last time he should preach in Walworth.
His servant went before to open the carriage-door, the pew-openers
remaining in the vestry. I offered my arm, which he declined, and
then followed him as he passed down the aisle of the chapel. The
lights were nearly extinguished, the silence was profound, nothing
indeed was heard but the slow majestic tread of his own footsteps,
when, in an undertone, he thus soliloquized:
"'And when I'm to die,' etc.
To my heart this was a scene of unequalled solemnity, nor can I ever
recur to it without a revival of that hallowed, sacred, shuddering
sympathy which it originally awakened."
When the good old saint lay literally dying, and when apparently
unconscious, a friend put his mouth close to his ear, and repeated
slowly his favorite lines:
"And when I'm to die," etc.
The light came back to his fast-fading eye, a smile overspread his
face, and his lips moved in the ineffectual attempt to articulate
the words. This was the last sign of consciousness which he gave.
We could almost wish that every disciple of Christ would commit
these lines, quaint as they are, to memory, and weave them into
the web of his Christian experience. Confidence in Christ, and
undeviating adherence to him, can alone enable us to triumph in life
and death.
In November, 1766, Whitefield again visited Bath and Bristol, and
then passed on to Gloucestershire and Oxford. Never did so many
of the nobility attend his ministry as he now saw at Bath, and
the results of his whole journey were such as to fill him with
the most devout gratitude. He saw too the number of his clerical
friends largely increasing, and especially rejoiced in the fact
that the excellent Fletcher, of Madeley, preached in his pulpits in
London. He writes of this event, "Dear Mr. Fletcher has become a
_scandalous_ Tottenham Court preacher.... Were we more scandalous,
more good would be done.... Still, 'the shout of a king is yet
heard' in the Methodist camp."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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