ance without seizing on any striking public occasion-in a period and country of settled order, and of so much knowledge and civilization, as would, in ordinary speculation, be accounted sufficient to secure the community against any very violent effect of novelty and enthusiasm ;-under all these circumstances this plain undesigning young man came forth; and by mere addresses, from pulpits, from tables, from walls, from steps, excited, and through his whole life continued to extend, such a commotion in the public mind, that, if a list could be made from the experience of all nations and ages, of the twenty men that have produced the greatest effects, by means of their single personal influence, it is highly probable that the name of Whitefield must there hold a place.

If it were possible that any sensible foreigner could be perfectly unacquainted with the history, and should hear the case stated thus far, he would naturally say: "But at least the man in question must have possessed talents absolutely prodigious, almost miraculous.” Where then would he be in his speculations, when the writings of Whitefield were put in his hands? / when he read many of the identical sentences, which had overwhelmed with terror, or melted in tenderness, vast and heterogeneous assemblages of a people, by no means nationally distinguished, in either its southern or northern division, for facility of feeling.

It is a clear fact, admitting of no manner of question, that Whitefield's writing, nay, that those specimens of his public addresses which were written down during their powerful delivery, bear but exceedingly slender marks of any thing we are accustomed to denominate talent, in the intellectual sense. His reasoning is no more than just a common propriety in putting thoughts generally common together. His devotional sentiment is fervent, but not of elevated conception. His figures, as far as we recollect, are seldom new, or what critics mean when they speak offelicity; their analogy is the broad and obvious one, such as that between medicine and the gospel, considered as a remedial dispensation. The diction is quite plain, and does not appear to partake of eloquence, further than an easy freedom, and the genuine expression of sincerity and earnestness. The collection of letters, constituting about one half of his printed works, must have excee ingly disappointed those who sought from them any other instruction, than that which may be imparted by one general emanation of pious zeal, undistinguished by any discriminative particularity of thought, or any but the most obvious kind of reflections, often repeated, and in the same words, on the successive incidents and scenes of his life and labours. There are none of those pointed observations, either

on human nature or individual character, which might have. been suggested by the masses and the particles of the human kind so variously brought under his view, and which would have been made by such a sagacious man, for instance, as John Knox, And even the disclosures of the movements and principles of his own mind, on which subject there is no appearance of reserve, are, with a singular uniformity, for a man stimulated by the circumstances of so extraordinary a career, in the strain of pious common-place. The reader's interest would soon subside in an irresistible sense of insipidity, but for the strong and constant indications of a genuine religious zeal, and the train of references proving an unremitted and most wonderful course of exertions. In short, there can be no hazard in asserting, that his collective writings would, in the minds of all cultivated and impartial readers, leave the marvellous of his successes to be accounted for on the ground of causes quite distinct from talent, in the intellectual sense of the term. And it is remarkable how decidedly, though tacitly, the opinion of the religious public has been manifested on this point: for there has probably never been another instance of the writings of a man of pre-eminent excellence, utility, and celebrity, so soon and generally ceasing to hold a place among popular books. So far as we are apprized, Whitefield's sermons are very rarely reprinted, or quoted, or recollected; and if not his sermons, of course not the rest of his writings.

It would be, then, a very interesting inquiry, What were precisely the causes of that prodigious and most happy effect, which accompanied the ministrations of a man, who was one of the three or four most powerful and useful preachers since the apostolic age; what, we mean, were the causes exclusively of an extraordinary agency of Divine power-those human causes, which are adapted to produce a great and a calculable effect, according to the general laws of the human constitution? It would be quite proper to take the question, in the first instance, on this limited ground; inquiring howfar Whitefield's qualifications were of a nature to produce a great effect on men, with respect to other interesting concerns to which the exercise of those qualifications was applicable, and in which the results of that exercise might be considered as the proportionate and ordinary effects of the human cause. It is not with the slightest view of attempting any such disquisition that we have suggested it. We began with the in tention of proceeding very few words further, than the expres sionof a wish that a philosopher had written a life of White

field, on the plan of instituting and determining such an inquiry. Such a biographer finding, we presume, as a philosopher, a vast proportion of effect beyond what could be explained by the talents of the agent, taken at their highest possible estimate, and combined with all that could be deemed favourable in the circumstances of the times, would, às a Christian, assign, as the paramount cause, the intervention of an extraordinary influence from heaven, giving an efficacy to the operation of the human agent, incomparably beyond any natural power of its faculties and exertions. And indeed what would the judgement of that man be worth, who, even viewing the case merely as a philosopher, should fail or refuse to recognize a divine agency in the change of a multitude of profane and wicked men, into religious and virtuous ones, by means so simple as Whitefield's plain addresses to their dull or perverted understandings, their insensible consciences, and their depraved passions? A man who professes to philosophize on human nature, ought to have some way of accounting for such facts, when brought before him on competent evidence, and in great numbers. And what a laudable philosophy it would be, that should find such facts to be quite according to the general principles and the ordinary source of human nature! or, acknowledging them not to be so, should either carelessly attribute them to chance, or should virtually revive, for a new and higher application, the old notion of occult qualities! As if the cast off rags and broken implements of antiquated physics, were quite good enough for the service of the philosophy of mind, morals, and religion.

These slight remarks are made with any other purpose in the world, than that of depreciating the endowments of Whitefield. While regarding his powers, strictly intellectual, as all discerning readers of his writings must do, as very moderate; and while holding, as also all those who coincide with Whitefield in religious faith hold, that an energy indefinitely superior to that of any or all the powers he exerted, was evinced in the success which attended him; we have all the admiration which it can seem little better than idly gratuitous to profess, of those extraordinary qualifications which he displayed in the sacred cause-qualifications which were adapted, even according to the common principles of human nature, to excite a very great sensation. According to the testimony of all his hearers that have left memorials of him, or that still survive to describe him, he had an energy and happy combination of the passions, so very extraordinary as to constitute a commanding species of sublinity of character. In their swell, their fluctua tions, their very turbulence, these passions so faithfully followed the nature of the subject, and with such irresistible

evidence of being utterly clear of all design of oratorical management, that they bore all the diguity of the subject along with them, and never appeared, in their most ungovernable emotions, either extravagant or ludicrous to any but minds of the coldest or profanest order. They never, like the violent ebullitions of mere temperament, confounded his ideas, but on the contrary had the effect of giving those ideas a distinct and matchlessly vivid enouncement: insomuch that ignorant and half-barbarous men often seemed, in a way which amazed even themselves, to understand Christian truths on their first delivery. Some of them might have heard, and they had heard as unmeaning sounds, similar ideas expressed in the church service; but in Whitefield's preaching they seemed to strike on their minds in fire and light. His delivery, if that could be spoken of as a thing distinguishable from that energy which inflamed his whole being, was confessedly oratorical in the highest degree of the highest sense of the term. It varied through all the feelings, and gave the most natural and emphatic expression of them all. He had, besides, great presence of mind in preaching, and the utmost aptitude to take advantage of attending circumstances, and even the incidents of the moment.

His display of unparalleled energy was uniformly accom panied by irresistible evidence-in the perfectly inartificial character of his signs of passion-in the exhausting frequency and interminable prosecution of his labours-in the courage and hazard in which some of them were ventured on-in the complete renunciation, which such a course plainly involved, of all views of emolument and preferment-and in his forbearance to attempt, to any material extent, any thing like an organized sectarian system of co-operation,-irresistible evidence, that his unceasing exertion, that his persuasions, his expostulations, his vehemence, his very indignation, were all inspirited by a perfectly genuine and unquenchable zeal for the Christian cause, and the eternal welfare of men: And our unhappy nature is yet not so totally perverse, but that this will always make a great impression on the multitude.

Again, it was, by the constitution of human nature, a great luxury, in spite of the pain, to have the mind so roused and stimulated, the passions so agitated, For the sake of this, even religion, evangelical religion, would be endured for a little while; and great numbers, who were inveigled by this mere love of strong excitement to endure religion a little while, were happily so effectually caught, that they could never after wards endure life without religion.

According to all testimony, the ministry of the national church was at that time generally such, as to give, with

respect, at least, to the excitement of attention, a ten-fold effect to the preaching of Whitefield. It was such a contrast as could not but contribute to magnify him into a stupendous prodigy. He might be called, by the ministers of this very church, a fanatic, a madman, or a deceiver; he might be proclaimed and proscribed under all terms and forms of opprobrium or execration; but, the while, it was perfectly inevitable, that all the world would wonder after the beast.'

As there is little hope of obtaining a philosophical biographer for Whitefield, we must be content with a simple detail of facts, given in a language remote from the secular style of history, and therefore much adapted to baffle the reader in any attempt to compare, and to find the proportions between such facts, as those of Whitefield's life and the events and transactions of the general world. It is nevertheless a very interesting book that is here reprinted, with additions of which we have not the immediate means of ascertaining the extent. It is such a record as no pious man can peruse, without some earnest wishes so be better disposed and better qualified to serve the great cause, which this apostolic man had so much delight and success in promoting; and as no thoughtful man can peruse, without being led into deep reflections on the phenomena of that agency, by which the Governor of the world influences the spiritual condition of mankind. How the grand effects here displayed could be produced, will be a problem far beyond the science of an infidel speculatist, and, we think, a little beyond that of some declared believers, who make high claims on the ground of a peculiar rationality in their Christianity.

It would be quite out of place to attempt any abstract of this memoir. It brings him very speedily into full and extraordinary action, and briefly marks the most prominent particulars of a career, which permitted him hardly a day of what could, in the common sense of words, be called repose, till he found it in the grave, at the age of fifty-six, in the year 1770. The wonder, the extreme wonder is, that he did not sink into that repose at a much earlier period. The reader of this volume, must maintain in his mind a watchful horror of fanaticism, and be very stoutly set against admitting any thing approaching the supernatural, in any part of the modern dispensations of Providence, if he can repel all suspicion, not only that this man's labours were attended, but that his very life was prolonged, by a specifically extraordinary intervention. We repeatedly find him, during a state of languor which sometimes sunk quite down to illness, prosecuting such a course of exertions as would have been enough to reduce most strong men soon to that condition; for example, preaching, in his ardent