Representative Evangelists
REPRESENTATIVE EVANGELISTS
It would be difficult to imagine men more unlike than these representative evangelists. Jonathan Edwards was a mighty logician, and his great theme was The sovereignty of Gods Grace in the Salvation of Sinners.
His sermons stirred the souls of men to their very depths, and sometimes resulted in remarkable outward manifestations of feeling, as when, during the preaching at Enfield, of the sermon entitled 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' the audience rose up in agony to cry out for mercy.
George Whitefield was an orator of great power. Indeed, many of those who heard Whitefield regarded him as the most eloquent of men, and the traditions of the remarkable effects produced, not only by his sermons but by the very tones of his voice, are still handed down.
Dr. Asahel Nettleton was very different from either of the two just mentioned. The following general estimate of his life has been given by some one:
Dr. Nettleton's life was marvelously useful and helpful. I never heard the opinion expressed that he was either a great or a very learned man; but I never heard those who knew him intimately question his goodness. He was a most godly man, serious, circumspect, discreet, and gifted with rare discrimination, enabling him to know and read men, and greatly aiding him to adapt himself and his instructions to men in their various moods, with their different peculiarities, prejudices, conditions, and prepossessions. He had power to prevail with God and man. His rare success is not to be attributed to his greatness, nor to his native sagacity, nor to the happy combination of gifts constitutional or natural, nor to everything combined in him, so much as to his holiness. He walked with God, knew and trusted God. He had a mighty faith. He found out how much God loved men, and he was brought into sympathy with God for the salvation of men. His perception of the guilt and doom of sinners was intense and absorbed him. He was a man whose religious development would lead him to cry out while prostrated on the cold ground at the midnight hour, "Give me souls or I die!"
CHARLES G. FINNEY
Charles G. Finney was still another type of man, but few men have been more mightily used of God than he. Sometimes he could proceed no farther in the service than the reading of his text when the power of God would fall upon his audience and scores of people would profess Conversion.
But with all their greatness none of them outshine Dwight L. Moody, who stands out among all men as God's chosen instrument to show what one consecrated layman may accomplish when filled with the Holy Ghost.
He was mightily moved when Henry Varley, the English evangelist, said to him as they were visiting at a friend's house together in England some years ago: "It remains for the world to see what the Lord can do with a man wholly consecrated to Christ." Mr. Moody soon returned to America, but those words clung to him with such power that he was induced to return to England and commence that wonderful series of labors in Scotland and England. Mr. Moody said to Henry Varley on returning to England, " Those were the words of the Lord through your lips to my soul."
Strangers sometimes thought him difficult to approach, and he was, if you were trying to seek him out to say flattering words to him; but no man in all the world was more approachable than he when he knew that you had an unselfish desire with him to extend the bounds of the Kingdom of God.