d them the nickname of
"Methodists." Three figures detached themselves from the group as soon
as, on its transfer to London in 1738, it attracted public attention by
the fervour and even extravagance of its piety; and each found his
special work in the task to which the instinct of the new movement led
it from the first, that of carrying religion and morality to the vast
masses of population which lay concentrated in the towns or around the
mines and collieries of Cornwall and the north. Whitefield, a servitor
of Pembroke College, was above all the preacher of the revival. Speech
was governing English politics; and the religious power of speech was
shown when a dread of "enthusiasm" closed against the new apostles the
pulpits of the Established Church, and forced them to preach in the
fields. Their voice was soon heard in the wildest and most barbarous
corners of the land, among the bleak moors of Northumberland, or in the
dens of London, or in the long galleries where in the pauses of his
labour the Cornish miner listens to the sobbing of the sea. Whitefield's
preaching was such as England had never heard before, theatrical,
extravagant, often commonplace, but hushing all criticism by its intense
reality, its earnestness of belief, its deep tremulous sympathy with the
sin and sorrow of mankind. It was no common enthusiast who could wring
gold from the close-fisted Franklin and admiration from the fastidious
Horace Walpole, or who could look down from the top of a green knoll at
Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coal-pits,
and see as he preached the tears "making white channels down their
blackened cheeks."

[Sidenote: The religious revival.]

On the rough and ignorant masses to whom they spoke the effect of
Whitefield and his fellow Methodists was mighty both for good and ill.
Their preaching stirred a passionate hatred in their opponents. Their
lives were often in danger, they were mobbed, they were ducked, they
were stoned, they were smothered with filth. But the enthusiasm they
aroused was equally passionate. Women fell down in convulsions; strong
men were smitten suddenly to the earth; the preacher was interrupted by
bursts of hysteric laughter or of hysteric sobbing. All the phenomena of
strong spiritual excitement, so familiar now, but at that time strange
and unknown, followed on their sermons; and the terrible sense of a
conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven,