The border line between such expounding and preaching is very narrow, and it is hardly to be wondered at that Maxfield soon found that he was not only preaching, but doing so with the most true and certain warrant of fitness for the office—souls were being born again under his ministrations. On hearing such unexpected tidings, Wesley hurried back to London, and entering his house next door to the Foundry with clouded face, replied to his mother's question as to the cause, "Thomas Maxfield has turned preacher, I find." Great was his surprise to receive the rejoinder, "Take care what you do with respect to that young man, for he is as surely called of God to preach as you are." Such testimony from such a source could not fail to move John Wesley. He wisely heard for himself, and expressed his judgment in the words of Scripture—"It is the Lord: let Him do what seemeth Him good."
Thus Methodism passed through what might have been its first great crisis. Thus it equipped itself to keep pace with the ever-increasing claims of its work. The quick spiritual insight of Lady Huntingdon recognised both the need and the fitness of the hitherto unrecognised worker.
One of the first members of the noble band of itinerating preachers thus called into the active exercise of their spiritual gifts was David Taylor, a servant in Lord Huntingdon's household, who did much fruitful evangelistic work in the villages surrounding Donnington Park. It was this man who stood by John Wesley's side when the drunken curate of Epworth refused him admission to what had been his father's pulpit, and who announced to the congregation as they left the church that in the afternoon Wesley would preach in the graveyard. And there that same afternoon Wesley, standing upon his father's tombstone, preached to a congregation, the like of which Epworth had never seen before, the first of a series of sermons that afterwards became famous.
Having thus aided one of the brothers during a critical administrative stage, Lady Huntingdon shortly afterwards was of great service to the other in a crisis of spiritual experience. Soon after the organisation of the first Methodist Society, the "still" heresy developed among the Moravian members of the Fetter Lane Chapel. This was the view, "that believers had nothing to do with ordinances—were not subject to them—and ought to be still; that they ought to leave off the means of grace, and not go to church; not to communicate; not to search the Scriptures; not to use private prayer till they had living faith; and to be still till they had it."3 Wesley used all his influence and all his persuasive power to counteract these opinions, but without avail. At length he decided to sever all connection with those who insisted upon acting in accordance with them, and removed Methodism to the Foundry. Charles Wesley at first went cordially with his brother, but at a later date he ceased attending the Foundry, and manifested signs of a desire to return to Fetter Lane. Lady Huntingdon, for whose views he entertained feelings of the deepest respect, remonstrated with him, and in conjunction with John Wesley's efforts kept him from a step that might have proved fatal to his further usefulness. In a letter written to John Wesley in October, 1741, Lady Huntingdon writes: "Since you left us the still ones are not without their attacks. I fear much more for your brother than for myself, as the conquest of the one would be nothing to the other…. I comfort myself very much that you will approve a step with respect to them your brother and I have taken. No less than his declaring open war with them…. Your brother is also to give his reasons for quite separating. I have great faith God will not let him fall; He will surely have mercy on him, and not on him only, for many would fall with him."
IV.
FAMILY BEREAVEMENTS
Lady Huntingdon at this period of her life was called upon to endure some very heavy domestic griefs. She had to mourn for two of her sons, George, aged thirteen, and Fernando, aged eleven, who died of small-pox. They were both buried in Westminster Abbey. On October 13, 1746, she lost her husband, who was carried off by an apoplectic seizure, in his fiftieth year. The Countess had only just passed her thirty-ninth birthday when this last great sorrow came upon her. She herself was at the same time tried by a long and severe illness. The effect of these repeated and heavy afflictions was to further develop her character, and to increase the devotion and self-sacrifice with which she gave herself to works of benevolence and to the extension of the Saviour's kingdom. On Lord Huntingdon's death, besides having entire control of her own means, she became sole trustee of the children and their fortune. In regard to the latter she proved herself a good steward; the former she devoted very largely to the evangelistic and charitable work in which she delighted.
Early in 1747 she wrote to Dr. Doddridge: "I hope you will comfort me by all the accounts you can gather of the flourishing and spreading of the glad tidings. Oh, how do I lament the weakness of my hands, the feebleness of my knees, and coolness of my heart! I want it on fire always, not for self-delight, but to spread the Gospel from pole to pole." And in other letters: "My heart wants nothing so much as to dispense all—all for the glory of Him whom my soul loveth." "I am nothing—Christ is all; I disclaim, as well as disdain, any righteousness but His. I not only rejoice that there is no wisdom for His people but that from above, but reject every pretension to any but what comes from Himself. I want no holiness He does not give me, and I could not accept a heaven He did not prepare me for; I can wish for no liberty but what He likes for me, and I am satisfied with every misery He does not redeem me from; that in all things I may feel that without Him I can do nothing…. To preach Christ and His blessing upon repentance over the earth is the commission—the event must be with Him—all else is from man and of man. May the Lord give us all such love, to live and die to Him and for Him alone."
At a later period in life, May, 1763, she sustained another serious bereavement in the loss of her youngest daughter. Although only twenty-six years of age, she had long been a great comfort to her mother, who, writing after her death, called her "the desire of my eyes and the continual pleasure of my heart." Many were the letters of sympathy she received from Venn, Berridge, Romaine, Fletcher, and others; but it was a loss that could not be replaced. But it could and it did help to purify still more the loving and trusting heart which could see, even as Fletcher urged, in so sore a trial, "mercy rejoicing over judgment." One of the sayings of her daughter on that death-bed must often have come to the mother's mind in later days, "I am as happy as my heart can desire to be."
V.
WHITEFIELD AS LADY HUNTINGDON'S CHAPLAIN
Prior to 1744, the date of Whitefield's first voyage to the American colonies, the Countess had made his acquaintance, and had often heard him preach. She, in common with multitudes of her contemporaries, had come under the extraordinary spell of his pulpit oratory. In 1748, after a four years' absence in North America, Whitefield returned to England, and at her request Howel Harris, the famous Welsh evangelist, brought the great preacher to Lady Huntingdon's house in Chelsea. In a reply to a letter sent the next day, conveying the request that he would come again, as "several of the nobility desired to hear him," Whitefield wrote, August 21, 1748: "How wonderfully does our Redeemer deal with souls! If they will hear the Gospel only under a ceiled roof, ministers shall be sent to them there. If only in a church or a field, they shall have it there. A word in the lesson, when I was last at your Ladyship's, struck me, 'Paul preached privately to those who were of reputation.' This must be the way, I presume, of dealing with the nobility who yet know not the Lord. Oh, that I may be enabled, When called to preach to any of them, so to preach as to win their souls to the blessed Jesus! I know that you will pray that it may be so."
Thus began the series of drawing-room services which were attended by so many of those who were high in rank, and