“Beyond the clouds of furnace smoke and back of piers of cotton bales arise the visions of old Savannah. What glories cluster about her honored name! From out her past appears the noble form of him who from the brilliant old world light and the gay splendor of the English Court sought these untried shores, an exile in fair mercy’s sake, and lent to the struggle of his fellow-men the strength of that genius which sped his fame through all the fields of Europe; and with him through the shadows of that far-off time comes a dusky figure, a Christian who has never heard of God, a gentleman into whose guiltless life had never come the influence of court or fashion; brave with a conscience of honest aim; kindly with the innate tendency of a noble nature; regal in that charity which loves to give; a hero to whose virtues no tablet speaks; a Georgian in whose memory no marble shaft lifts up its polished line; forgotten of those he served; asleep in his nameless grave; but blessed be the soil which has mingled with Tomochichi’s dust, the first of the great Savannahians!” On the original spot where the colonists established a house of worship stands to-day the beautiful and classic proportions of Christ Church. Here Wesley preached and Whitefield exhorted,--the most gifted and erratic characters in the early settlement of Georgia. Wesley came to the Georgia shores with a fervor amounting almost to religious mysticism. He thought his mission was to Christianize the Indians. No priest from Spain ever carried the Cross among the Aztecs and Incas of Mexico and Peru with more zeal than the sanguine Wesley. His career in Georgia was checkered and unfruitful. A man of great ability and undoubted piety, he suspended his missionary work among the Indians because he could not learn the language and never understood their temperament. His ministry among the whites was marked by a severity which made him unpopular. He seems to have been a martinet in the pulpit,--as Colonel Jones calls him, “a _censor morum_ in the community.” He became embroiled with his parishioners and left Savannah between the suns. And yet Bishop Chandler of Georgia probably spoke the words of truth from the pulpit of Wesley Monumental Church in Savannah, in November, 1899, when he said that “no grander man ever walked these historic streets than John Wesley.” [Illustration: CHRIST CHURCH.] [Illustration: OAKS AT BETHESDA ORPHANAGE, UNDER WHICH WHITEFIELD PREACHED.]