George-Whitefield-Field-Preacher

REFORMA TION 9
during his service in the inn, his visit to Bristol, and his idle
time under his mother's roof, and so the genial schoolmaster
had to be applied to again to take back his former pupil. He
gladly consented, and this time the pupil, animated by the
hope of gaining an honourable object, worked diligently and
successfully. At first his morality and religion were not
improved equally with his learning. A knot of debauched and
atheistical youths—their atheism probably founded on their^
immorality which did not like to retain the knowledge of God
succeeded in inveigling him. His thoughts about religion
grew more and more like theirs ;
he reasoned that if God had
given him passions, it must be to gratify them. He affected to
look rakish, and when he went to public service it was only to
sport and walk about. Twice or thrice he got drunk.
Then a reforming impulse came upon him, and upon infor-
mation given by him to his master of the principles and
practices of his companions, their proceedings were stopped.
Efforts after a better life, relapses into sin, meditations upon
serious books, particularly Drelincourt's ' The Christian's
Defence against the Fears of Death,' dutiful service done for
his mother, and, finally, a firm resolution to prepare for taking
the sacrament on his seventeenth birthday, marked his moral
history at school for the first twelve months.
Strange fancies now began to flit through his mind. Once
he dreamed that he was to see God on Mount Sinai, and was
afraid to meet Him—a circumstance which impressed him
deeply; and when he told it to a 'gentlewoman,' she said,
' George, this is a call from God.' He grew more serious, and
his looks—such, he says, was his ' hypocrisy '—were more
grave than the feelings behind them. The gentlewoman's
words also helped to increase his impressionableness, and it is
not surprising to learn that ' one night, as he was going on an
errand for his mother, an unaccountable but very strong