The Infidel: A Story of the Great Revival

He was startled from the automatic monotony of his life by a letter whose superscription so agitated him that his shaking hand could scarcely break the seal. Indeed, he did not break it for some moments, but sat with the letter in his hand, staring at the familiar writing – Antonia's writing, a strong and firm penmanship, every letter definite and upright, somewhat resembling Joseph Addison's. Oh, how embued with sin, how trapped and entangled in Satan's net, must his soul be when only the sight of Antonia's writing could so move him!

He was alone. The letter had been brought him by the little maid-servant. His wife was upstairs, busy with her son, whose footsteps might be heard running across the floor above.

He broke the seal at last, and unfolded her letter.

    "St. James's Square, Monday night.

"DEAR SIR,

"I believe it is near a month since you have honoured me with a visit, nor was I so fortunate as to meet you on Saturday afternoon, when I spent some hours among our poor friends in the Marsh, and went to look at Sally's grave in the Baptist burial-ground. I must impose on your goodness to order a neat headstone, with the dear creature's name and age, and one of those Scripture texts which so consoled her last hours. I doubt, since the afternoon was so fine, you were treating yourself to a rustic holiday with Mrs. Stobart, to whom I beg you to present my affectionate compliments.

"Well, sir, since you are too busy to visit me, I must needs thrust my company upon you, at the risk of being thought troublesome. In one of my conversations with Sally Dormer the poor soul entreated me, with tearful urgency, to hear the famous preacher who converted her, believing that even my stubborn mind must yield to his invincible arguments, must be touched and melted by his heavenly eloquence. To soothe her agitated spirits I promised to hear Mr. Whitefield preach, a promise which I gave the more readily as my curiosity had been aroused by the reports I had heard of his genius.

"I am told that he is to preach at Kennington Common to-morrow night, to a vaster audience than his new Tabernacle, large as it is, could contain, and I should like better to hear him under the starry vault of a June evening than in the sultry fustiness of a crowded meeting-house. I have ever been interested in your description of those open-air meetings where you yourself have been the preacher. There is something romantic and heart-stirring in your picture of the rugged heath, the throng of humanity huddled together under a wild night sky, seeing not each other's faces, but hearing the beating of each other's hearts, the quickened breath of agitated feeling, and in the midst of that listening silence the shrill cry of some overwrought creature falling to the ground in a transport of agitation, which you and Mr. Wesley take to be the visitation of a Divine Power.

"I have not courage to go alone to such a meeting, and I do not care to ask any of my modish friends to go with me, though there are several among my acquaintance who are admirers of Mr. Whitefield, and occasional attendants at Lady Huntingdon's pious assemblies. To them, did I express this desire, I might seem a hypocrite. You who have sounded the depths of my mind, and who know that although I am an unbeliever I have never been a scoffer, will think more indulgently of me.

"The service is to begin at ten o'clock. I shall call at your door at nine, and ask you to accompany me to Kennington in my coach.

    "I remain, dear sir, with heartfelt respect,
    "Your very sincere and humble servant,
    "ANTONIA KILRUSH."

"What has happened, George?" asked his wife, who had come into the room unheard by him, while he was reading his letter. "You look as pleased as if you had come into a fortune."

He looked up at her with a bewildered air, and for the moment could not answer.

"What does she say, George? 'Tis from Lady Kilrush, I know, for her footman is waiting in the passage."

"Yes, 'tis from Lady Kilrush. She desires to hear Whitefield preach to-morrow night, and asks me to accompany her."

"What, is she coming round, after all? I doubt you will be monstrous proud if you convert her."

"I should be monstrous happy – but it will be God's work, not mine. My words have been like the idle wind. Whitefield's influence might do something; but, alas! I fear even he will fail to touch that proud heart, that resolute mind, so strong in the sense of intellectual power. Will you go with us to-morrow?"

"Mr. Whitefield's sermons are so long, and the heat at the Tabernacle always makes my head ache."

"'Tis not at the Tabernacle, but at Kennington, in the open air."

"And we may have to stand all the time. I think I'd rather stay at home with Georgie."

"Her ladyship will call for me at nine. The boy will be in bed and asleep hours before."

"I love to sit by his bed sewing. He wakes sometimes, and likes to find me there; and sometimes he has bad dreams, and wakes in a fright."

"And wants his mother's hand and voice to soothe his spirits. Happy child, who knows not the burden of sin, and has but shadowy fears that vanish at a word of comfort! Well, you must do as you please, Lucy; but there will be room for you in her ladyship's coach."

"Oh, she is always kind, and I should love the ride; but Mr. Whitefield's sermons are so long."

Stobart wrote briefly to assure Lady Kilrush of his pleasure in being her escort to Kennington, with the customary formal conclusion, protesting himself her ladyship's "most obliged and most devoted humble servant."

When his letter was despatched he went out to the Marsh, and walked for an hour in that waste region outside the streets and alleys where his work lay. His wife's parlour had grown too small for him. He felt stifled within those four walls.

He would see her again, spend some hours in her company, her trusted friend and protector, permitted to guard her amidst that rabble throng which was likely to assemble on the common. His heart beat with a fierce rapture at the thought of those coming hours. Only to stand by her side under the summer stars, hemmed round, half suffocated by the crowd; only to see her, and to hear the adored music of her voice, the voice which had so haunted him of late, that he had started up out of sleep sometimes, hearing her call his name. Vain delusion, that betrayed the drift of his dreams!

Her coach was at his door five minutes before the hour. The night was sultry, and the two parlour windows were wide open. He had been leaning with folded arms upon the window-sill watching for her, while Lucy sat at the table sewing by the light of two candles in tall brass candlesticks. She had thought the pair of tallow candles a mark of gentility in the beginning of her married life, when the remembrance of the slum near Moorfields was fresh; but she knew better now, having seen the splendours of St. James's Square, and wax candles reckoned by the hundred.

Her ladyship had four horses to her chariot, and a couple of postillions. The lamps flamed through the summer darkness.

"I may be late," Stobart said hurriedly. "Don't sit up for me, Lucy."

He saw Antonia's face at the coach door, and the sight of it so moved him that he could scarcely speak.

His wife ran to bid him good-bye, with her customary childlike kiss, standing on tip-toe to offer him her fresh young lips, but he waved her aside.

"We shall be late. Good-night."

His heart was beating furiously. On the threshold of his door he had half a mind to excuse himself to Antonia, and to go back. He felt as if the devil was tugging him into some dark labyrinth of doom. This man believed in the devil as firmly as he believed in God – believed in an actual omnipresent Satan, ubiquitous, ever on the watch to decoy sinners, ever eager to people hell with renegades from Christ. And he felt, with a thrill of agony, that he was in the devil's clutch to-night. Satan was spreading his choicest lure to catch the sinner's soul – a woman's ineffable beauty.

She was alone, and welcomed him with her sweetest smile.

"I am turning my back on Handel's new oratorio to hear your Mr. Whitefield," she said, as they shook hands; "but now the hour is approaching I feel as eager as if I were going to see a new Romeo as seducing as Spranger Barry."

"Ah, madam, dared I hope that Whitefield's eloquence could change this frivolous humour to a beginning of belief! Could your stubborn mind once bend itself to understand the mysteries of God's redeeming grace you would not long remain in darkness. Could but one ray of Divine truth stream in upon your soul, like the shaft of sunshine through Newton's shutter, you would soon be drowned in light, dazzled by the prismatic glory of the Heavenly Sun."

"And blinded, as I doubt you are, sir. I will not impose upon you. I do not go to Kennington to be assured of free grace, or to be convinced of sin; but first to keep a promise to the dead, and next to follow the fashion, which is to hear and criticize Mr. Whitefield. Some of my friends swear he is a finer orator than Mr. Pitt."

After this they remained silent for the greater part of the way, Antonia watching the road, where the houses were set back behind long gardens, and where the countrified inns had ample space in front for a horse-trough and rustic tables and benches, with here and there a row of fine elms. That sense of space and air which is so sadly wanting now in the mighty wilderness of brick and stone gave a rural charm to the suburbs when George II. was king. Ten minutes' walk took a man from town to country, from streets and alleys to meadow and cornfield, hedgerow and thicket. The perfume of summer flowers was in the air through which they drove, and the village that hemmed the fatal common, so recently a scene of ignominious death, was as rustic as a hamlet in Buckinghamshire.

The crowd had gathered thickly, and had spread itself over the greater part of the common when Lady Kilrush's chariot drew up on the outskirts of the assembly. Stobart alighted and went to reconnoitre. A platform had been erected about six feet from the ground, and on this there had been placed a row of chairs, and a table for the preacher, with a brass lantern standing on each side of the large quarto Bible. Whitefield was there, with one of his helpers, a member of Parliament, his devoted adherent, and two ladies, one of whom was the Countess of Yarmouth's daughter, Lady Chesterfield, dowered with the blood of the Guelfs, and a fine fortune from the royal coffers, Whitefield's most illustrious convert, and a shining light in Lady Huntingdon's saintly circle.

Stobart was on terms of friendship with the orator, and had no difficulty in obtaining a seat for Lady Kilrush. Indeed, her ladyship's name would have obtained the favour as easily had she sent it by her footman, for George Whitefield loved to melt patrician hearts, and draw tears from proud eyes. Enthusiast as he was, there is a something in his familiar letters which suggests that aristocratic converts counted double. They were the écarté kings, the trump-aces in the game he played against Satan.

Stobart brought Antonia through the crowd, and placed her in a chair at the end of the platform, farthest from the preacher, lest the thunder of his tremendous voice should sound too close to her ear.

There was a chair to spare for himself, and he took his seat at her side, in the silence of that vast audience, waiting for the giving out of the hymn with which these open-air services usually began.

Never before had Antonia seen so vast an assemblage hushed in a serious expectancy, with faces all turned to one point, that central spot above the heads of the crowd where the lanterns made an atmosphere of faint yellow light around George Whitefield's black figure standing beside the table, with one hand resting upon an open Bible, and the other uplifted to command silence and attention.

From the preacher's platform, almost to the edge of the common the crowd extended, black and dense, a company gathered from all over London, and compounded of classes so various that almost every Metropolitan type might be found there, from the Churchman of highest dignity, come to criticize and condemn, to the street-hawker, the professional mendicant, come to taste an excitement scarcely inferior to gin.

Whitefield's helper gave out the number of the hymn, and recited the first two lines in slow and distinct tones. Then, with a burst of sound loud as the stormy breakers rolling over a rock-bound beach, there rose the voices of a multitude that none could number, harsh and sweet, loud and low, soprano and contralto, bass and tenor, mingled in one vast chorus of praise. The effect was stupendous, and Antonia felt a catching of her breath, that was almost a sob. Did those words mean nothing, after all? Was that cry of a believing throng only empty air?

A short extempore prayer followed from the helper. George Whitefield's voice had not yet been heard. The influence of his presence was enough, and it may have been that his dramatic instinct led him to keep himself in reserve till that moment of hush and expectancy in which he pronounced the first words of his text.

He stood there, supreme in a force that is rare in the history of mankind, the force that rules multitudes. 'Twas no commanding grace of person that impressed this prodigious assembly. He stood there, the central point in that tremendous throng, a very common figure, short, fat, in a black gown with huge sleeves, and a ridiculous white wig, features without beauty or grandeur, eyes with a decided squint; and that vast concourse thrilled at his presence, as at a messenger from the throne of God. This was the heaven-born orator, the man who at two-and-twenty years of age had held assembled thousands spell-bound by his eloquence, the man gifted with a voice of surpassing beauty, and with a dramatic genius which enabled him to clothe abstract ideas with flesh and blood, and make them live and move before his awestruck hearers.

It was this dramatic genius that made Whitefield supreme over the masses. Those of his admirers who had leisure to read and weigh his published sermons might discover that he had no message to deliver, that those trumpet tones were but reverberations in the air, that of all who flocked to hear the famous preacher, none ever carried home a convincing and practicable scheme of religious life; yet none could doubt the power of the man to stir the feelings, to excite, awaken and alarm the ignorant and unenlightened, to melt and to startle even his superiors in education and refinement. None could deny that the man who began life as a pot-boy in a Gloucester tavern was the greatest preacher of his time.