S ) in 1748, ' in how many things have I judged

and acted wrong. I have been too rash and hasty in
giving characters, both of places and persons. Being
fond of Scripture language, I have often used a style
too apostolical, at the same time I have been too
bitter in my zeal. Wild fire has been mixed with it,
and I find that I frequently wrote and spoke in my
own spirit, when I thought I was speaking and
writing by the Spirit of God. I have likewise too
much made inward impressions my rule of acting, and
too soon and too explicitly published what had better
have been kept in longer or told after my death. By
these things I have given some wrong touches to
God's ark, and hurt the blessed cause I would defend,
and also stirred up needless opposition.' How much
deeper a humility is expressed in this temperate con-
fession of faults than in all his vehement self-accusa-
tions put together ! It is a useful lesson to discover
that the same person may use both, for the first im-
pulse of any reader is to believe that one who was so
ready with the false humility had none of the true.
Whitefield died in America in 1770. He was happy
in the time of his death ; had his life been prolonged,
he must have been the spectator of one conflict ^the
American War) in which his influence would have
certainly been thrown into the scale of tyranny, and
of another (the Calvinist controversy) in which it
seems almost equally probable that he would have
been dragged into association with strife as bitter and
ignoble as that by which any religious body has ever
been rent in twain.
CHAPTER XV.
