tion, and there
were few forms of mob violence they did not experience. In 1741 one of
their preachers named Seward, after repeated ill treatment in Wales, was
at last struck on the head while preaching at Monmouth, and died of the
blow. In a riot, while Wheatley was preaching at Norwich, a poor woman
with child perished from the kicks and blows of the mob. At Dublin,
Whitefield was almost stoned to death. At Exeter he was stoned in the
very presence of the bishop. At Plymouth he was violently assaulted and
his life seriously threatened by a naval officer.

Scenes of this kind were of continual occurrence, and they were
interspersed with other persecutions of a less dangerous description.
Drums were beaten, horns blown, guns let off, and blacksmiths hired to
ply their noisy trade in order to drown the voices of the preachers.
Once, at the very moment when Whitefield announced his text, the belfry
gave out a peal loud enough to make him inaudible. On other occasions
packs of hounds were brought with the same object, and once, in order to
excite the dogs to fury, a live cat in a cage was placed in their midst.
Fire engines poured streams of fetid water upon the congregation. Stones
fell so thickly that the faces of many grew crimson with blood. At
Hoxton the mob drove an ox into the midst of the congregation. At
Pensford the rabble, who had been baiting a bull, concluded their sport
by driving the torn and tired animal full against the table on which
Wesley was preaching. Sometimes we find innkeepers refusing to receive
the Methodist leaders in their inns, farmers entering into an agreement
to dismiss every laborer who attended a Methodist preacher, landlords
expelling all Methodists from their cottages, masters dismissing their
servants because they had joined the sect. The magistrates, who knew by
experience that the presence of a Methodist preacher was the usual
precursor of disturbance and riot, looked on them with the greatest
disfavor, and often scandalously connived at the persecutions they
underwent.

It was frequently observed by Wesley that his preaching rarely affected
the rich and the educated. It was over the ignorant and the credulous
that it exercised its most appalling power, and it is difficult to
overrate the mental anguish it must sometimes have produced. Timid and
desponding natures unable to convince themselves that they had undergone
a supernatural change, gentle and affectionate natures who believe