The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: With a supplemental chapter on the revival in AmericaHood, Edwin Paxton
History
The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: With a supplemental chapter on the revival in America
Hood, Edwin Paxton
Evangelical Revival
either rest or calm; for, in that case, how could he ever have stirred
the deep foundations of universal sympathy?
But that heart, whose very mould was tenderness, was easily called aside
by the sight of suffering; and there is an interesting story, how, at
this time, in one of his walks by the banks of the river, in such a
frame of mind as we have described, he met a poor woman whose appearance
was discomposed. Naturally enough, he talked with her, and found that
her husband was in the gaol in Oxford, that she had run away from home,
unable to endure any longer the crying of her children from hunger, and
that she even then meditated drowning herself. He gave her immediate
relief, but arranged with her to meet him, and see her husband together
in the evening at the prison. He appears to have done them both good,
ministering to their temporal necessities; he prayed with them, brought
them to the knowledge of the grace which saves, and late on in life he
says, “They are both now living, and I trust will be my joy and crown of
rejoicing in the day of the Lord Jesus.” Happy is the man to whose life
such an incident as this is given; it calls life away from its dreary
introspections, and sets it upon a trail of outwardness, which is
spiritual health; no one can attain to much religious happiness until he
knows that he has been the means of good to some suffering soul. Faith
grows in us by the revelation that we have been used to do good to
others.
It was about this time that Charles Wesley met Whitefield moodily
walking through the college corridors. The misery of his appearance
struck him, and he invited him to his rooms to breakfast. The memory of
the meeting never passed away; Charles Wesley refers to it in his elegy
on Whitefield. In a short time he leaped forth into spiritual freedom,
and almost immediately became, youth as he was, preacher, and we may
almost say, apostle. The change in his mind seems to have been as
instantaneous and as luminous as Luther’s at Erfurt. Whitefield was at
work, commencing upon his own great scale, long before the Wesleys. John
had to go to America, and to be entangled there by his High Church
notions; and then there were his Moravian proclivities, so that,
altogether, years passed by before he found his way out into a light so
clear as to be able to reflect it on the minds of others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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