Just about this time, a young man from Gloucester-as earnest and sincere as themselves, joined the little community-George Whitefield. He was descended from a respectable family; but his father, who was a wine merchant, ultimately kept the Bell Inn at Gloucester. There the future great preacher was born in 1714. For some time before meeting with the Wesleys, he had been the subject of much anxiety on matters of religion, and, like the Wesleys, he had been greatly perplexed by Thomas a Kempis, and also by Law's "Serious Call." But as we cannot pursue in detail the deep exercises through which they passed, and their subsequent course, we would only add that, ere long, they were led, by God's Holy Spirit and the plain truths of scripture, to know the gospel for their own peace and joy, and to preach it to others.
Being clergymen of the church of England, they were privileged to preach in the churches this new gospel-immediate pardon and salvation through faith in Christ, without works of human merit. But this was too simple and too scriptural to be tolerated; and in a short time almost every pulpit in England was closed against them. Thus driven outside, they were compelled to preach in the open air, and thereby inaugurated open-air preaching which has since become so common. In Moorfields, on Kennington Common, and such like places they preached in town and country to audiences numbering from ten to twenty thousand. By the grace of God these "twin apostles" of England-Wesley and Whitefield-continued faithful and devoted to the end of their career.
They were used of God to rescue the English people from the depths of moral darkness, leading thousands, both in this country and in America, to the feet of Jesus. Men of all ranks acknowledged the force of their appeals-colliers and carpenters, plowmen and philosophers; and many of the nobility yielded their hearts to the power of the truth. But their record is on high, and there the fruits of their labors shall abide throughout eternity. Whitefield died in America in 1770; and Wesley in London in 1791, in the eighty-eighth year of his age.