George Whitefield's Journals. Edited by William Wale. (IT. J. Drane.
3s. 6d.)—These journals, which were published between 1738 and 1741, are here given, along with the author's "Short Account" and "Further Account," in a volume that is certainly handy, but the type of which, both largo and small, is as certainly uninviting. Mr. Wale, who is a very thoroughgoing Admirer of Whitefleld, although he allows that the "Short Account," written on his first voyage to America, contains "not a few unguarded and objectionable expressions," has included in his book the tolerably well-known appreciations of Cowper and John Foster, and an estimate by Canon Hay Aitken, the discriminating character of which may be gathered from the following passage :—" Whitefield was, above all things, a great emotional preacher ; his logic was of ten faulty and superficial, and his rhetoric was sometimes, no doubt, frothy and jejune; he was not much of a thinker, nor has he left behind him a treasury of fresh and original homiletical ideas, such as those which make us feel that C. H. Spurgeon being dead yet speaketh ; but in the power of making the emotions act upon the emotions, few have ever excelled him." The advantage of having these intimate revela- tions of Whitefield by himself all in one volume lies in the facility which it affords of studying closely what was undoubtedly, and to say the least of it, a very extraordinary nature. One gets the "natural man," with his exaltations, his depressions, his impatiences, at every third page or so; it is a very "natural man" indeed that one finds disputing with the Mayor of Basingstoke over the question of holding public meetings and the value of "consecration." Whitefield was an excellent photo- grapher in words, as this description of Irish misery shows :— "As I stopped to have my horses shoed I went into one of the poor people's cabins as they call them ; but it may as well be called a sty, a barn, or a poultry-coop.. It was about twenty feet long and twelve broad, the walls built with turf and mud. In it was a man threshing corn; two swine feeding ; two dogs ; several geese ; a man, his wife, three children; and a great lire. Georgia huts are a palace to it. Indeed, the people live very poorly in this part; some walk barefoot with their shoes in their hands to save them from wearing out, others of necessity. I observed many of their feet to be much swollen, and ready to gush out with blood, through extremity of cold."
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