George-Whitefield-Field-Preacher

SERIOUS ILLNESSES 233
old Mr. Moody, called to bid him welcome to America, and
then urged him to give them a sermon. He consented.
Meanwhile news had gone to Boston that he was dying ; and
when it reached that city two of his friends started for York,
to nurse him if he were alive, or to attend his funeral if he
were dead. On their arrival they found him in the pulpit
Soon a relapse came on, through his catching cold, and his
friends again thought that his end was come ; yet while he
lay in agony of body, his greater pain was that he had been
announced to preach and could not go. The hour of service
drew near; the minister who had been appointed to preach
was leaving the house for church, when of a sudden Whitefield
said to his friend and doctor, ' Doctor, my pains are sus-
pended ; by the help of God I'll go and preach, and then
come home and die.' And he did go, pale as death, and
looking to the astonished congregation like one risen from the
grave. It was taken for a last sermon by both people and
preacher. The invisible things of another world lay open to
his view, and expecting to be with his Master before morning,
he spoke with peculiar energy for an hour. The effect of his
word was, he says, worth dying for a thousand times over.
But nature was hard pressed by the effort, and when, on his
return home, he was laid on a bed before the fire, animation
seemed to be suspended, and he could hear his friends say to
each other, ' ! He is gone ' Gradually he recovered ; and the
first visitor who would see him, yea or nay, was a poor Negro
woman. Sitting on the ground beside him, and looking
earnestly into that kind face which always wore its gentlest
aspect when such as she approached it, she said in her broken
English,
' Master, you just go to heaven's gate, but Jesus
Christ said, Get you down, get you down ;
you must not come
here yet ; but go first and call some more poor Negroes.'
The sick man prayed that it might be as the simple-hearted