George-Whitefield-Field-Preacher

CAMBUSLANG REVIVAL 187
man of considerable learning and of solid, unostentatious piety,
slow and cautious as a speaker, and more anxious to feed his
people with sound truth than to move their passions with
declamation. The news of the revivals in England and
America had awakened a lively interest in him ;
he
began to
detail to his people what he knew, and they, in their turn, felt
as interested as he did. A dilapidated church and an over-
flowing congregation next compelled the good pastor and his
flock to resort to the fields for worship; and nature, as if
anticipating their wants, had made a fair temple of her own in
a deep ravine near the church. The grassy level by the burn-
side, and the brae which rises from it in the form of an amphi-
theatre, afforded an admirable place for the gathering of a
large mass of people ; and there the pastor would preach the
same doctrines which were touching rugged Kingswood colliers,
depraved London roughs, and formal ministers and professors
of religion in both hemispheres ; but he dwelt mostly on
regeneration. The sermon over, he would recount on a
Sabbath evening what was going on in the kingdom of God
elsewhere, and then renew his application of truth to the con-
science. The great evangelist had also been heard by some of
the people ;
nor could they forget his words, or throw off their
influence. On his previous visit to Scotland, when he went to
Glasgow, they had stood on the gravestones of the high
churchyard in that immense congregation which trembled and
wept as he denounced the curses and offered the blessings of
the word of God. Others, again, had read the sermons after
they were printed, and had been as vitally affected as if they
had heard the thrilling voice which had spoken them. The
religious leaven was touching the whole body of the people
and at the end of January, 1742, five months before White-
field's second visit to Scotland, Ingram More, a shoemaker,
and Robert Bowman, a weaver, carried a petition round the