"Whilst I continued oppressed and hurt with these reflections, your excellent sermon for the County Hospital came in to my relief. The piety, the justness of the sentiments and arguments, the manly, graceful diction, and the benevolent spirit that runs through the whole of it, both amazed and charmed me. It must have extorted from any heart less acquainted with your disposition for public usefulness than I am, a devout ejaculation, that God would never permit such talents to come under a wrong direction, or suffer the disadvantages they must necessarily submit to, if engaged amongst men of weak heads and narrow, gloomy sentiments, who may and ought to be pitied and prayed for, and better informed, as opportunity allows, but whom no rules of piety or prudence will oblige us to make our friends and confidants.

"There are letters shown about town, from several ministers in the west, which make heavy complaints of the disorders occasioned by Whitefield and Wesley in those parts. One of them, speaking of Mr. Whitefield, calls him honest, crazy, confident Whitefield.' These letters likewise mention, that some ministers there, who were your pupils, have given them countenance; and you can hardly conceive the disrespect this has occasioned several ministers and other persons in town to speak of you with. Whether you are aware of this I know not; and I am sure, if I did not esteem it a mark of sincere friendship, I would not give you the uneasiness of hearing it."

The answer to this letter Doddridge preserved, and I would perpetuate.

TO NATHANIEL NEAL, ESQ.

"I am truly sorry that the manner in which I spoke of Mr. Whitefield in my last should give you uneasiness. I hope I did not assert his sermon to have been free from its defects; but I must be extremely prejudiced indeed, if it were such 'wild, incoherent stuff,' as you heard on Kennington Common. Nor does it seem at all difficult to account for this; for that preached here, which, I believe, was one of his more elaborate, and, perhaps, favourite discourses, might deserve to be spoken of in a different manner. What I then said, proceeded from a principle which I am sure you will not despise : I mean a certain frankness of heart, which would not allow me to seem to think more meanly of a man to whom I once

professed some friendship, than I really did. I must, indeed, look upon it as an unhappy circumstance, that he came to Northampton just when he did, as I perceive, that, in concurrence with other circumstances, it has filled town and country with astonishment and indignation. Nor did I, indeed, imagine my character to have been of such great importance in the world, as that this little incident should have been taken so much notice of. I believe the true reason is, that for no other fault than my not being able to go so far as some of my brethren into the new ways of thinking and speaking, I have long had a multitude of enemies, who have been watching for some occasion against me; and I thank God, that they have hitherto, with all that malignity of heart which some of them have expressed, been able to find no greater!

"As for you, dear sir, I must always number you among my most affectionate and faithful friends; and though the human heart is not so formed that it is agreeable to hear ourselves spoken of with disrespect, yet I am well assured that the writing the information you gave me was among the instances of your greatest kindness. You know, sir, that a fear to offend God, by doing as most self-prudent people do, has generally been esteemed a weakness and my conscience testifies that those actions of mine which have been most reproached, have proceeded from that principle. It is impossible to represent to you the reason, at least the excuse, I have had, and esteemed a reason, unless I could give you an account of the several circumstances in which I have successively been placed for these few past years. If I could, I believe you would be less inclined to blame me than you are; though I am sensible your censures are very moderate, when compared with those of many others.

"I had, indeed, great expectations from the Methodists and Moravians. I am grieved, from my very heart, that so many things have occurred among them which have been quite unjustifiable and I assure you faithfully, they are such as would have occasioned me to have dropped that intimacy of correspondence which I once had with them. And I suppose they have also produced the same sentiments in the archbishop of Canterbury, who, to my certain knowledge, received Count Zinzendorf with open arms, and wrote of his being chosen the Moravian bishop, as what was done 'plaudente toto cœlesti choro.' I shall always be ready to weigh whatever can be said against Mr. Whitefield, as well as against

any of the rest: and, though I must have actual demonstration before I can admit him to be a dishonest man, and though I shall never be able to think all he has written, and all I have heard from him, nonsense, yet I am not so zealously attached to him as to be disposed to celebrate him as one of the greatest men of the age, or to think that he is the pillar that bears up the whole interest of religion among us. And if this moderation of sentiment towards him will not appease my angry brethren, as I am sensible it will not abate the enmity which some have, for many years, entertained towards me, I must acquiesce, and be patient till the day of the Lord, when the secrets of all hearts shall be made manifest; in which, I do from my heart believe, that with respect to the part I have acted in this affair, I shall not be ashamed.

"I had before heard from some of my worthy friends in the west of the offence which had been taken at two of my pupils there, for the respect they showed to Mr. Whitefield; and yet they are both persons of eminent piety. He whose name is chiefly in question, I mean Mr. Darracott, is one of the most devout and extraordinary men I ever sent out; and a person who has, within these few years, been highly useful to numbers of his hearers. Some of these, who were the most abandoned characters in the place, are now become serious and useful Christians; and he himself has honoured his profession, when to all around him he seemed on the borders of eternity, by a behaviour which, in such awful circumstances, the best of men might wish to be their own. Mr. Fawcett labours likewise at Taunton; and his zeal, so far as I can judge, is inspired both with love and prudence. Yet I hear these men are reproached because they have treated Mr. Whitefield respectfully; and that one of them, after having had a correspondence with him for many years, admitted him into his pulpit. I own I am very thoughtful when these things will end in the mean time, I am as silent as I can be! I commit the matter to God in prayer, and earnestly beg his direction, that he would lead me in a plain path. Sometimes I think the storm will soon blow over, and that things will return again to their natural course. I am sure I see no danger that any of my pupils will prove methodists: I wish many of them may not run into the contrary extreme. It is really, sir, with some confusion that I read your encomium upon my sermon: I am sensible it is some consolation to me, amidst the uneasiness which, as you conclude, other things must give

me. I hope our design will go on, though it has not at present the success I could have wished. The dissenters do their part, but I am sorry to say the neighbouring clergy are exceedingly deficient in theirs." Doddridge.

Neal was not the only person of influence amongst the dissenters who was alarmed at Doddridge's liberality. Dr. Jennings assailed him for prefacing a book of Mason's; by which "his friends were given by name," he says, "to be baited by the methodists, as their opposers." At the same time, also, Mr. Blair wrote to him, begging his opinion of Whitefield "a man," he says, "more railed at by some, and idolized by others, than any person I ever knew in my life." His friend Barker also told him, that he had thought it "needful to warn his hearers to avoid the errors" of Whitefield and his followers. So little did good men appreciate or understand Whitefield at this time!

CHAPTER XI.

WHITEFIELD'S DOMESTIC

LIFE.

It is, indeed, almost a misnomer, to call Whitefield's conjugal life domestic. His engagements, like Wesley's, were incompatible with domestic happiness,-as that is understood by domestic men. Accordingly, their kind and degree of home enjoyment he neither expected nor proposed to himself. All that he wanted was, a help meet, who could sympathize in his absorbing public enterprises, as well as in his personal joys and sorrows; and a home, where he might recruit after labour and exhaustion. And such a wife and a home he deserved, as well as needed. He mistook sadly, however, when he sought for such a wife in the ranks of widowhood, then. There were no missionaries' widows "in these days." A young female, of eminent piety and zeal, might have fallen in with his habits and plans, and even found her chief happiness in sustaining his mighty and manifold undertakings, like Paul's Phoebe: but a widow, who had been "a housekeeper" (her own)" many years," and that in the retirement of Abergavenny, in Wales, could hardly be expected to unlearn the domestic system of the country, nor to become a heroine for the world. Both Whitefield and Wesley forgot this obvious truth, and married widows.

How much Wesley smarted for this oversight, is as proverbial as it is painful. Mrs. Whitefield had none of Mrs. Wesley's faults. She had, however, no commanding virtues, running in grand parallel with any of the noble features of her husband's character; and thus, because she was not prominently a help to him, she seems to have been reckoned a hinderance, by the gossips and busybodies who watched Mrs. Wesley. These, in their fears for their own " dear minister's comfort," watched Mrs. Whitefield also, lest he should be made as unhappy as his old friend!

The tattle of such spies is beneath contempt. It has, however, found some countenance from a quarter which no impar