of His dear little ones in the Moravian flock; but many of their principles and practices are exceeding wrong, for which, I doubt not, our Lord will rebuke them in His own time. “But I fear that I weary you. Love makes my pen to move too fast, and too long. Last Sunday evening, I preached at the other end of the town, to a most brilliant assembly. They expressed great approbation; and some, I think, begin to feel. Good Lady Huntingdon is a mother in Israel. She is all in a flame for Jesus.” Whitefield’s remarks concerning the Moravians may, perhaps, seem somewhat harsh; but they were not untrue, and will prepare the reader for other critiques hereafter. Whitefield mentions his “brilliant assembly” in the mansion of the Countess of Huntingdon. In a letter to the Countess of Bath, he wrote, “It would please you to see the assemblies at her ladyship’s house. They are brilliant ones indeed. The prospect of catching some of the rich, in the gospel net, is very promising. I know you will wish prosperity in the name of the Lord.”[219] No wonder that, after one of his first services at Lady Huntingdon’s, Whitefield said, “I went home, never more surprised at any incident in my life.”[220] Such congregations were unique. Nothing like them had heretofore been witnessed. There were gatherings of England’s proud nobility, assembled to listen to a young preacher, whose boyhood had been spent in a public-house; whose youth, at the university, had been employed partly in study, and partly in attending to the wants of fellow-students, who declined to treat him as an equal; and whose manhood life, for the last thirteen years, had been a commingling of marvellous popularity and violent contempt,――a scene of infirmities and errors, and yet of unreserved and unceasing devotion to the cause of Christ and the welfare of his fellow-men. Such was the youthful preacher,――a man of slender learning, of mean origin, without Church preferment, hated by the clergy, and maligned by the public press. Who were his aristocratic hearers? The following list is supplied by the well-informed author of “The Life and Times of the Countess of Huntingdon”:――