George-Whitefield-Field-Preacher

266 GEORGE Iff//TEE/ELD
revival movement among his comrades in Flanders, and since
his return home had preached in Methodist fashion, and been
rewarded for his zeal by a place among knaves and felons !
Whitefield's ' grand catholicon ' under both public and
domestic trials— preaching—was now used by him with un-
remitting diligence ; and in the autumn of 1 749 we find him in a
new district, and among a people as different from those of the
west of England as Yorkshire moors are different from Devon-
shire lanes and orchards. It was the splendid autumn season
when he first clambered up that steep road ' winding between
wave-like hills that rise and fall on every side of the horizon,
with a long, illimitable look, as if they were a part of the line
of the great serpent, which, the Norse legend says, girdles the
world ; ' and was received at bleak little Haworth, sacred both to
piety and genius, by William Grimshaw, the incumbent. The
old parsonage (not the one in which the Brontes afterwards
lived), standing half a mile from the church, and commanding
from its windows a wide view of the valley of the Worth, and
from its door the interlacing hills towards Keighley, the
sheltered valley at their feet, and the swelling moors, traced
with winding roads, that lie bordering on the moors of Ilkley,
was solid and weather-beaten, like the sturdy man who then
inhabited it. We do not know whether his eye often lingered
on the beauty and grandeur that lay around his home ;
perhaps
at the most it would be a hurried glance that he would give,
when he halted for a moment on the doorstone, as he went
forth to preach, or returned from the same duty ;
for he was an
untiring apostle of the truth, and it would be little time that he
could find for communion with nature. His work was to
soften and change the rugged, hardened sinners of the village,
and of all the district round, as far as his iron strength could
carry him ; and for that he must only exchange the saddle
where he made his sermons for the pulpit where he preached