The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 6.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

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[152] had all of Whitefield's intensity and fervor, added to reasoning powers greatly transcending those of the revivalist of the next century. Young in years, he was even then old in bodily infirmity and mental experience. Believing himself the victim of a mortal disease, he lived and preached in the constant prospect of death. His memento mori was in his bed-chamber, and sat by him at his frugal meal. The glory of the world was stained to his vision. He was blind to the beauty of all its ‘pleasant pictures.’ No monk of Mount Athos or silent Chartreuse, no anchorite of Indian superstition, ever more completely mortified the flesh, or turned his back more decidedly upon the ‘good things’ of this life. A solemn and funeral atmosphere surrounded him. He walked in the shadows of the cypress, and literally ‘dwelt among the tombs.’ Tortured by incessant pain, he wrestled against its attendant languor and debility, as a sinful wasting of inestimable time; goaded himself to constant toil and devotional exercise, and, to use his own words, ‘stirred up his sluggish soul to speak to sinners with compassion, as a dying man to dying men.’

Such entire consecration could not long be without its effect, even upon the ‘vicious rabble,’ as Baxter calls them. His extraordinary earnestness, self-forgetting concern for the spiritual welfare of others, his rigid life of denial and sacrifice, if they failed of bringing men to his feet as penitents, could not but awaken a feeling of reverence and awe. In Kidderminster, as in most other parishes of the kingdom, there were at this period