they kept a deep silence during my whole discourse. God strengthened me to speak so loud that most could hear, and so powerfully, that most, I believe, could feel."

Whitefield made large use of singing. Needless to say, the "gospel" variety was unknown in those days. Indeed, until the Wesleyan song movement got under way, there were not many hymns apart from the Psalms. But the preacher did his best and the crowd followed suit, and so vociferously that when conditions were favorable the sound carried two miles. Singing proved especially effective when the people were restless, or when disturbers tried to break up a meeting. Let no one imagine that this open-air work was easy; it taxed Whitefield to the limit. Picture a crowd-tens of thousands, the "scum o' the earth"; and no police restraint; some of them openly bent on mischief; others friendly, but the bulk of them of uncertain temper, swayed by a passing breeze. It was a familiar experience that Whitefield alluded to, when, at the close of one of these meetings, he wrote to a friend: "I continued in praying, preaching, and singing (for the noise at times, was too great to preach) about three hours." Hard work, but glorious! Whitefield exulted in it. He used to say: "I think every day lost that is not spent in fieldpreaching." Nowhere was he so completely in his element. He was a born master of crowds, and they felt it. Rarely did they escape him.

As time passed, his hearers were singularly drawn to him, and wherever he went multitudes became his stanch friends. Just before he sailed the second time for America we find this entry in his Journal: "Preached in the evening to near twenty thousand, at Kennington Common. . . . Could scarcely get to the coach for the people thronging me, to take me by the hand and give me a parting blessing."

An important part of these meetings, decidedly novel in those times, was the collection. Day and night the Georgia orphanage was on Whitefield's heart, and next to saving souls he was bent on finding a support for his little wards. Rarely did he preach without bringing in an appeal for the children, and never lived the man who could appeal more persuasively than he. The results were astonishing. This is a single day's experience, taken almost at random: "Preached this morning to a prodigious number of people in Moorfields, and collected for the orphans £52 19s. 6d., above £20 of which was in halfpence. Indeed, they almost wearied me in receiving their mites, and they were more than one man could carry home." No wonder! Ten thousand copper halfpennies, besides all the larger coins; and remember that the value of money then was several times what it is now. But this was not all. That same day he "preached in the evening to near sixty thousand people. After sermon I made another collection of £29 17s.

8d.," a total of nearly £83, worth at least $2,000 in these days, and a great part of it coming from the dregs of society.

While open-air preaching, on a large scale, centered in London, Whitefield carried it on to the limit of his strength, in all parts of the kingdom. Throughout the land he had his favorite preachingplaces, pieces of rising ground where he could easily speak to multitudes; and for long years after his death many of these places were associated with his name and were known as "Whitefield's Mounts."

TABERNACLE AND CHAPEL

The results of this work were blessed and ofttimes immediate. Whitefield used to invite those who wished to begin a new life to write a brief note and pass it up to him, and at the close of one of the huge London meetings, held in the spring of 1742, he wrote to a friend: "We then retired to the Tabernacle. My pocket was full of notes from persons brought under concern. I read them amid the praises . . . of thousands. This was the

Three hunreceived in

beginning of the Tabernacle Society. dred and fifty awakened souls were one day; and, I believe the number of notes exceeded a thousand."

The Tabernacle of which he speaks was a large frame shed, recently erected by some of his friends on the edge of Moorfields, as a protection for his