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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
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