Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America онлайн

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WESTON FAVEL CHURCH,

(Where James Hervey Preached.)

The new creed of Hervey changed the whole character of his preaching. The little church of Weston Favel, a short distance from the town of Northampton, became quite a shrine for pilgrimages; he was often compelled to preach in the churchyard. He was assuredly an intense lover of natural scenery, a student of natural theology of the old school. His writing is now said to be meretricious and gaudy. One critic says that children will always prefer a red to a white sugar-plum, and that the tea is nicer to them when they drink it from a cup painted with coloured flowers; and this, perhaps, not unfairly, describes the style of Hervey; we have prettiness rather than power, elegant disquisition rather than nervous expression, which is all the more wonderful, as he must have been an accomplished Latin scholar. But he had a mind of gorgeous fullness, and his splendid conceptions bore him into a train of what now seem almost glittering extravagances. Hervey was in the manner of his life a sickly recluse, and we easily call up the figure of the old bachelor—for he never married—alternately watching his saucepan of gruel on the fire, and his favourite microscope on the study table. He was greatly beloved by the Countess of Huntingdon, perhaps yet more by Lady Fanny Shirley—the subject of Walpole’s sneer. He was, no doubt, the writer of the movement, and its thoughts in his books must have seemed like “butter in a lordly dish.” But his course was comparatively brief; his work was accomplished at the age of forty-five. He died in his chair, his last words, “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy most comfortable salvation;” shortly after, “The conflict is over; all is done;” the last words of all, “Precious salvation.” And so passed away one of the most amiable and accomplished of all the revivalists.