thfully taught
to the people. The other and still more important event was the
institution by Whitefield of field-preaching. The idea had occurred to
him in London, where he found congregations too numerous for the church
in which he preached, but the first actual step was taken in the
neighborhood of Bristol. At a time when he was himself excluded from the
pulpits at Bristol, and was thus deprived of the chief normal means of
exercising his talents, his attention was called to the condition of the
colliers at Kingswood. He was filled with horror and compassion at
finding in the heart of a Christian country, and in the immediate
neighborhood of a great city, a population of many thousands, sunk in
the most brutal ignorance and vice, and entirely excluded from the
ordinances of religion. Moved by such feelings, he resolved to address
the colliers in their own haunts. The resolution was a bold one, for
field-preaching was then utterly unknown in England, and it needed no
common courage to brave all the obloquy and derision it must provoke,
and to commence the experiment in the center of a half-savage
population. Whitefield, however, had a just confidence in his cause and
in his powers. Standing himself upon a hillside, he took for his text
the first words of the sermon which was spoken from the Mount, and he
addressed with his accustomed fire an astonished audience of some two
hundred men. The fame of his eloquence spread far and wide. On
successive occasions, five, ten, fifteen, even twenty thousand were
present. It was February, but the winter sun shone clear and bright. The
lanes were filled with carriages of the more wealthy citizens, whom
curiosity had drawn from Bristol. The trees and hedges were crowded with
humbler listeners, and the fields were darkened by a compact mass. The
voice of the great preacher pealed with a thrilling power to the
outskirts of that mighty throng. The picturesque novelty of the occasion
and of the scene, the contagious emotion of so great a multitude, a deep
sense of the condition of his hearers and of the momentous importance of
the step he was taking, gave an additional solemnity to his eloquence.
His rude auditors were electrified. They stood for a time in rapt and
motionless attention. Soon tears might be seen forming white gutters
down cheeks blackened from the coal mine. Then sobs and groans told how
hard hearts were melting at his words. A fire was kindled among the
outcasts of King