ccountable."

My church in Brooklyn prospered. In about three months from the date of
my installation it was too small to hold the people who came there to
worship. This came about, not through any special demonstration of my
own superior gifts, but by the help of God and the persecution of
others.

During my pastorate in Brooklyn a certain group of preachers began to
slander me and to say all manner of lies about me; I suppose because
they were jealous of my success. These calumnies were published in every
important newspaper in the country. The result was that the New York
correspondents of the leading papers in the chief cities of the United
States came to my church on Sundays, expecting I would make counter
attacks, which would be good news. I never said a word in reply, with
the exception of a single paragraph.

The correspondents were after news, and, failing to get the sensational
charges, they took down the sermons and sent them to the newspaper.

Many times have I been maligned and my work misrepresented; but all such
falsehood and persecution have turned out for my advantage and enlarged
my work.

Whoever did escape it?

I was one summer in the pulpit of John Wesley, in London--a pulpit where
he stood one day and said: "I have been charged with all the crimes in
the calendar except one--that of drunkenness," and his wife arose in the
audience and said: "You know you were drunk last night."

I saw in a foreign journal a report of one of George Whitefield's
sermons--a sermon preached a hundred and twenty or thirty years ago. It
seemed that the reporter stood to take the sermon, and his chief idea
was to caricature it, and these are some of the reportorial interlinings
of the sermon of George Whitefield. After calling him by a nickname
indicative of a physical defect in the eye, it goes on to say: "Here the
preacher clasps his chin on the pulpit cushion. Here he elevates his
voice. Here he lowers his voice. Holds his arms extended. Bawls aloud.
Stands trembling. Makes a frightful face. Turns up the whites of his
eyes. Clasps his hands behind him. Clasps his arms around him, and hugs
himself. Roars aloud. Holloas. Jumps. Cries. Changes from crying.
Holloas and jumps again."

One would have thought that if any man ought to have been free from
persecution it was George Whitefield, bringing great masses of the
people into the kingdom of God, wearing himself out for Christ's sake:
and yet the learned Dr. Joh