the pupil and one of the warmest
admirers of Wesley, he afterward became conspicuous in the Calvinistic
section of the party, and wrote with much acerbity against his old
master.

There, too, above all, was George Whitefield, in after-years the
greatest pulpit orator of England. He was born in 1714, in Gloucester,
in the Bell Inn, of which his mother was proprietor, and where upon the
decline of her fortunes he was for some time employed in servile
functions. He had been a wild, impulsive boy, alternately remarkable for
many mischievous pranks and for strange outbursts of religious zeal. He
stole money from his mother, and he gave part of it to the poor. He
early declared his intention one day to preach the Gospel, but he was
the terror of the Dissenting minister of his neighborhood, whose
religious services he was accustomed to ridicule and interrupt. He
bought devotional books, read the Bible assiduously, and on one
occasion, when exasperated by some teasing, he relieved his feelings, as
he tells us, by pouring out in his solitude the menaces of Psalm cxviii;
but he was also passionately fond of card-playing, novel-reading, and
the theatre; he was two or three times intoxicated, and he confesses
with much penitence to "a sensual passion" for fruits and cakes. His
strongest natural bias was toward the stage. He indulged it on every
possible occasion, and at school he wrote plays and acted in a female
part.

Owing to the great poverty of his mother, he could only go to Oxford as
a servitor, and his career there was a very painful one. St. Thomas a
Kempis, Drelincourt's _Defence against Death_, and Law's devotional
works had all their part in kindling his piety into a flame. He was
haunted with gloomy and superstitious fancies, and his religion assumed
the darkest and most ascetic character. He always chose the worst food,
fasted twice a week, wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty
shoes, and was subject to paroxysms of a morbid devotion. He remained
for hours prostrate on the ground in Christ Church Walk in the midst of
the night, and continued his devotions till his hands grew black with
cold. One Lent he carried his fasting to such a point that when Passion
Week arrived he had hardly sufficient strength to creep upstairs, and
his memory was seriously impaired. In 1733 he came in contact with
Charles Wesley, who brought him into the society. To a work called _The
Life of God in the Soul of Man_, which Charle