cribe pills and powders in the place of Scripture texts. More than
thirty years after the commencement of his labors at Kidderminster he
thus writes: "I was troubled this year with multitudes of melancholy
persons from several places of the land; some of high quality, some of
low, some exquisitely learned, and some unlearned. I know not how it
came to pass, but if men fell melancholy I must hear from them or see
them, more than any physician I knew." He cautions against ascribing
melancholy phantasms and passions to the Holy Spirit, warns the young
against licentious imaginations and excitements, and ends by advising all
to take heed how they make of religion a matter of "fears, tears, and
scruples." "True religion," he remarks, "doth principally consist in
obedience, love, and joy."

At this early period of his ministry, however, he 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 pious, sober, pra