George-Whitefield-Field-Preacher

PRACTICAL RELIGION 45
Whitefield began with his congregations as he continued
and ended with them. He made a practical, benevolent
use of them ; for he felt that our profession of love to
God is but a mockery, unless it be connected with love
to one another, and ' love which is not in word, but in
deed and in truth.' He did not preach to please his hearers,
and they must not come to be pleased. They must come
to know their duty, as well as their privilege in the
Gospel ; and so, twice or thrice every week, he appealed
to them on behalf of the prisoners in Newgate, and made
collections. Howard had not yet begun his holy work in
our gaols ; but the temporal and spiritual wants of prisoners
never failed to move the sympathy of Whitefield and the early
Methodists. The first band of Methodists had a special fund
for the prisoners in Oxford gaol, and when Whitefield left the
University he had the disposing of it and the chief charge of
the prisoners. In London and in Gloucester he was a regular
visitor at Newgate ; and in Bristol he pursued the same charit-
able plan. The author of the ' Life and Adventures of Oliver
Goldsmith '
imagines that Dr. Primrose was the character
which suggested prison philanthropy ; but Goldsmith much
more likely got the suggestion from the Methodists, who had
been already at work in prisons some thirty years. Joseph
Alleine, an intimate friend of Wesley's grandfather, preached |
to prisoners a hundred years before the ' Vicar of Wakefield
was written.
The same comprehensive charity was displayed towards the
poor of Georgia, whose faces Whitefield had not yet seen.
During his stay at Bristol he paid a visit to Bath, where his
preaching produced as deep an impression as in the sister city,
and where some rich ladies gave him more than a hundred
and sixty pounds for the poor of his future flock.
If parting from the simple peasants of Stonehouse was hard.