01.07. CHAPTER VII - THE PASSION OF THE GBEAT EVANGELISTS
CHAPTER VII - THE PASSION OF THE GBEAT EVANGELISTS Where shall we begin the story of evangelism? Who were the great evangelists? We can only touch upon one here and there, for their number is legion. Prophets, apostles, the church fathers, the reformers themselves were all what they were because of the great evangel which trembled upon their lips. Perhaps we cannot do better than to mention first that wonderful evangelist, John Bunyan. How we love him! How we have marched with him to the city of the great King, the new Jerusalem! He has led us all the way into the green pastures by the delectable mountains, past the slough of despond, and all the wonderful path until we come in sight of the City of the Saved. All this he crowded into a narrow cell in Bedford Jail. It was there he heard sweet angels singing lauds for him, and because of what happened there, he would be willing to go back and stay “until the moss grows over my eyebrows rather than in anywise to deny my Lord. ’ ’ Look at his wonderful characters and the names they bear Mr. Great Heart, Christian, Faithful, and Mr. Valiant-f or-Truth. How many souls has John Bunyan led out of the City of Destruction? He could not have led others if he had not gone that way himself. It is out of his own great experience that he is speaking, and no man can lead others unless he himself is led of God. John Bunyan had known the sinful life, but with what fulness and depth he came to know his Saviour is found in the sweet story of Grace Abounding. May we all stand at last with Mr. Valiant-forTruth and see the heavens filled with the chariots of God and hear the trumpets sound for us on the farther shore.
Next we turn for a moment to the man who traveled more miles to bring the gospel to the lost, as Birrell says, “than any man who ever bestrode a beast “; a man whose devotion was marvelous from the days when he was a student in Lincoln College in Oxford, but who says that all that availed him nothing until that day which Christendom will never allow to pass out of its sight, when his heart was “strangely warmed” and he went out to do for England more than was done by the armies and navies of England in the whole length of his life. What courage and what toil! Ease and he had parted company, and as for money, he lived upon a pittance and gave away more than $200,000. Abused and maligned in his time, he could say, “I leave my reputation where I leave my soul in the hands of God.”
He said to his brother Charles, “When I devoted to God my ease, my time, my labor, did I exempt my reputation.” So he traveled 225,000 miles and preached 2,400 sermons, and, amid misrepresentation and abuse, never knowing the delights of love at home, subject to incessant attacks of the mob, the pulpit and the press, he did not abate a jot of heart or hope until he had reached the age of eighty-eight and ceased at once to labor and to live. Canon Farrar says, “Overwhelming evidence exists to show that the church and people of England in his day were dull, vapid and soulless and the preaching was careless, the land steeped in immorality. To Wesley was granted the task for which he was set apart by enviable consecration the task which even an archangel might have envied him, of awakening a mighty revival of religious life in those dead pulpits in that slumbering church and moribund society. His was the religious sincerity which not only formed the Wesley Community but, working through the heart of the very church which had despised him, he flashed fire into her whitening embers. It was he who discovered that lost secret of Christianity the compulsion of human souls.
He was the voice that cried over the valley of dry bones, l Come from the four winds, oh spirit, and breathe upon the slain that they may live.’ “ In Westminster Abbey, that great temple of silence and reconciliation, one may read three of his great sayings: one full of holy knowledge, “I look on all the world as my parish”; another full of triumphant confidence, ’ * God buries His workmen but His work goes on”; the third, his cry in age and feebleness extreme, the best of all is, “God is with us.” In the long list of great evangelists, no name stands out clearer in the light of an absorbing passion than that of Whitefield. To him two continents acknowledge their debt and keep green the traditions of his marvelous power. Most of the leaders and charmers of men have come to their service from under the low lintels of the poor, and “Whitefield was no exception. Uniting with Wesley to form the Holy Club at Oxford, he was at first morbid in his spiritual earnestness.
He wore patched clothing, ate coarse food, prayed under the trees far into the winter nights in such agony of soul that the sweat ran down his face. At last he laid hold on God by simple faith. He had traveled his own via dolorosa and through pain he came to peace; thereby he was enabled to help others who journey alone in the cypress path.
Ordained at twenty-two, he began to preach immediately with tremendous effect. Probably no man since the days of Paul excelled him in sacred eloquence. Said John Newton, “If you ask me who is the second preacher in the world, I do not know; but if you ask me who is the first, there can be but one answer.”
Franklin went to hear him plead for Ms orphan school in Georgia, but resolved lie would give nothing. After listening a little, he decided to give his coppers, then his silver and then his gold, and emptied his pockets into it when the plate was passed. Hopkinson left his money at home purposely, but was moved to borrow of his neighbors. Garrick said he could repeat the word “Mesopotamia” so that it moved him to tears. But after all has been said about his eloquence, his power with men depended most upon the passion of his soul which absorbed every lesser ambition and used every God-given power to lead men to the personal choice of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. He was a kindred spirit with Jonathan Edwards in this regard and together they led the Great Awakening of our young Republic. No man was more untiring in devotion than he. At one time he writes, “Lord when thou seest me in danger of nestling down put a thorn in tender pity into my nest,” and again, “I am determined to go on until I drop, to die fighting though it be on my stumps.” When nations forget their dependence upon Him and personal allegiance is lightly held and the individual conscience is benumbed, when form triumphs over spirit, and worship degenerates into heartless ceremonials, God sends his messengers of flame. So came the old prophets to Israel; so came Savonarola to Italy; Luther to Germany; Knox to Scotland; Wesley to England, Edwards and WMtefield to America, In such manner God in all ages has called back His people from apostasy. When Whitefield preached in Boston, the city was at white heat. Twenty thousand heard him in Philadelphia, and thirty thousand crowded Boston Common to listen to him. Mr. Cooper, pastor in Boston, said, “Under Whitefield ’s preaching more people came to me in one week in deep concern about their souls than in the whole twenty-four years of my ministry.” Mr. Prince, another pastor, said in substance the same thing.
Mr. “Webb said about 1,000 in deep conviction came to him in three months. The pastors unite in saying the same spirit prevailed for more than a year and a half after Whitefield had gone.
Speaking of his passion, Dr. Parsons said of him, in a sermon preached on the day of his death, “ We were convinced that he believed the message he brought to be of the last importance.” On the marble cenotaph above his dust at Newburyport these words are carved: “As a soldier of the Cross, humble, devout, ardent, he put on the whole armor of God, preferring the honor of Christ to his own interest, repose, reputation or life.’* In thirty-four years he crossed the Atlantic thirteen times and preached 18,000 sermons. For his seal he had a lambent flame and under it the motto, “Let us seek heaven.” In his time, Whitefield, like Wesley, was accused of almost every crime. As Dr. Squintum, he was caricatured by Foot, the actor, from one end of Great Britain to the other, even after he was in his grave. He was called the clerical pickpocket, and accused of appropriating his great collections to himself, but those accusations only live in history to fasten obloquy upon those who made them. In Cowper’s words, “He loved the world that hated him. The tear That dropped upon his Bible was sincere.
Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife His only answer was a blameless life.” The record of his last hours at Newburyport is thrilling beyond words to tell. He is preaching his last sermon. His subject is “Faith and Works.” With far carrying tones he cries, “Works, Works, a man get to heaven by Works!
I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand!” But his voice begins to fail, “I go, ’ ’ he said, 1 1 to my everlasting rest. My sun has risen, shone, and is setting. Nay, it is about to rise and shine forever. I have not lived in vain, and though I could live to preach Christ a thousand years, I die to be with Him, which to me is far better. “ He was to preach that night, but he felt he could not. He took his candle to go up to bed, but midway on the outside stairs he paused with his candle in his hand. Answering the importunity of the people, he spoke with the passion of his blessed Lord until the candle burned down to its socket and went ont. Would that a picture of that scene at Newburyport might hang in every preacher’s study in America! He went up to his room and to an agonizing night, then “Just as the sun in all his state Illumined the eastern skies He passed through glory’s morning gate And walked in Paradise.”
Whitefield was no organizer like Wesley. He was the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” and America owes him a debt which it does not fully appreciate and which it can never repay.
Time would fail me to tell of Fox and Tennant and Brainerd; of Finney, losing his strength that he might gain his power; of Moody saying, “There shall be one man completely consecrated to show the world what God can do with a soul entirely given up to His service; and scores of men, some of whom have finished their evangel in victory, and others who still move the people up to God, both in the pulpit and out of it. They are the heralds of a passion which stopped not at the Cross, and they shall share here and hereafter the glory and benediction of their Lord.”