“The next day, I reached Gloucester, very thankful, and rejoicing greatly in Christ for giving me such a delightful and happy Christmas.”
This is a notable letter. Whitefield was now on the ground where Wesley and his friends had been nearly murdered; but all the inconvenience suffered by Whitefield was a little noise at Wednesbury, the throwing of a few clods at Mare Green, the ringing of the church bells at Kidderminster, and a game at football and the sounding of a horn at Bromsgrove. Compared with Wesley, the lines fell to Whitefield in pleasant places.
The observant reader will also notice Whitefield’s enormous labours. In four days, in mid-winter, he held nineteen services, twelve of his sermons being preached in the open air, and three in Dissenting chapels. The opportunity of thus serving his great Master was Whitefield’s idea of spending “a delightful and happy Christmas!” No wonder that his Master blessed him, and filled him so full of joy at midnight hours.
But little more remains to be said respecting Whitefield’s career in 1743. In common with his friend Wesley, he was again and again fiercely assailed by the public press. He was pilloried in the famous Dunciad of Alexander Pope, as follows:――
“So swells each windpipe; ass intones to ass, Harmonic twang! of leather, horn, and brass; Such as from lab’ring lungs th’ Enthusiast blows, High Sound, attemper’d to the vocal nose! Or such as bellow from the deep Divine; There, Webster! peal’d thy voice, and, Whitefield! thine.”
Pope was a poet; another assailant, the author of “The Progress of Methodism in Bristol, or, the Methodists Unmasked, 1743” (18mo. 72 pp.), was a _poetaster_, and unworthy of being further noticed; but, possibly, his ribald verses, in which he malignantly attacked Whitefield, as well as Wesley, were quite as goading as Pope’s more polished lines.
Whitefield began the year 1744 in his native city, Gloucester. He then went to Watford in Wales, and, as moderator of the Calvinistic Methodists, presided, on January 3rd, at one of their associations, or conferences. Among the subjects considered at this meeting, the Hampton riot seems to have been the principal. Whitefield writes:――
“After mature deliberation, we determined to prosecute the affair to the utmost, and to set apart January 24 (the first day of the term) for a day of fasting and prayer, and to make collections for that purpose. The cause is the Lord’s, and much depends on our getting the victory. I believe we shall.”