Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

OF

THE LIFE AND LABOURS

OF

THE REV. GEORGE WHITEFIELD.

TO WHICH ARE ADDED,

TWO DISCOURSES,

PREACHED IN THE YEAR 1739.

ISSUED BY THE COMMITTEE OF THE GENREAL ASSEMBLY OF
THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND, FOR THE PUBLICATION OF THE WORKS
OF SCOTTISH REFORMERS A

JOHN JOHNSTONE,

LONDON AND EDINBURGH.

210. k.

150.

PREFACE.

THE name of WHITEFIELD exhibits an anomaly in the biographical range of literature. He lived at a period comparatively so recent, that several who died in our own days had sat at his feet and listened to his wonderful eloquence. His labours were not confined to one flock, or even to a single nation, but expanded over both hemispheres, wherever the English language was spoken; so that, had he possessed the gift of tongues, we cannot imagine a single country from which his visits would have been withheld. And these labours, which, while he lived, electrified, delighted, and enlightened the noblest, the most eloquent, and accomplished of society, sent a new spirit through the Christian Churches, however separated from each other by their peculiar distinctions, so that the very echoes of his voice still seem to linger among the walls of our national Zion, and give fresh impulses to Christian piety and Christian brotherhood. A hundred years before its day, he was a living type of that illustrious association of Christendom-the Evangelical Alliance. And his, in fine, was a life and a work such as the world has scarcely ever witnessed since the close of the first century. But where are the voluminous narratives that should have been written to record the deeds of such a man? the statues and monuments erected to honour them? The pen of the ready writer, and the graving tool of the cunning

« AnteriorContinuar »