Whitefield left England the day before Wesley reached it. He landed in Georgia on the 7th of May, 1738, and remained sixteen weeks; and then set out again for his own country, where he arrived on November 30. A flying visit, but not a fruitless one. Having been ordained by Bishop Benson in June, 1736, he began his unparalleled preaching career with a sermon in the church of St. Mary de Crypt, Gloucester, where he had been baptized, and where he first received the sacrament of the Lord’s supper. Some of his congregation mocked, but most were powerfully impressed. The bishop was informed that the sermon had driven fifteen persons mad; the worthy prelate hoped the madness would be abiding. Whitefield was a stripling of twenty-one; but wherever he went crowds flocked to hear him. At Bristol, the whole city seemed alarmed; Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, and sectarians of all kinds, ran after him; and churches were as full on week days as they had used to be on Sundays. Wesley wrote to his Oxford friends, asking help for Georgia. Whitefield was preaching as often as four times a day, and had become so famous that Raikes, of Gloucester, and others, thought it an enrichment of their newspapers to insert accounts of his doings; but his friend Wesley needed help, and that was quite enough to make him treat as trifles the praises of the multitudes who ran after him. Just at the time when Wesley was compelled to leave Georgia, Whitefield repaired to London to embark for it. During his brief detention, in less than three months, he preached in London above a hundred sermons, and collected above a thousand pounds for charity schools and for the poor. When he set sail, he read prayers and preached twice every day; and such was his influence on board, that the very soldiers stood out before him to say their catechism like little children. The day after his arrival at Savannah, Causton and the magistrates sent word that they would wait upon him; but he chose rather to wait upon them, and was treated with as much deference as Wesley had been treated with disrespect. He began to visit from house to house, catechized, read prayers morning and evening, and expounded the two second lessons every day. He found Tomo-Chichi, the Indian chief, on a blanket, thin and meagre, and evidently dying. At Hampstead and Highgate he followed Wesley’s example, and read prayers once a week, though the population of the former village consisted of only three men, one woman, and seven children. He also visited Thunderbolt, a village of three families consisting of sixteen persons, and preached to them. He likewise opened a girls’ school at Savannah. He paid a few days’ visit to Frederica, where there was now a population of about one hundred and twenty; and read prayers and preached, under a large tree, to more than could have been expected. He also visited the Saltzburghers at Ebenezer, and found two such pious ministers as he had not often seen.