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

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Our eye has been taught to rest on an interesting incident. It was in 1757 John Wesley, travelling and preaching, then about fifty years of age, but still with nearly forty years of work before him, arrived in Glasgow. He saw in the University its library and its pictures; but, had he possessed the vision of a Hebrew seer he might have glanced up from the quadrangle of the college to the humble rooms, up a spiral staircase, of a young workman, over whose lodging was the sign and information that they were tenanted by a “mathematical instrument maker to the University.” This young man, living there upon a poor fare, and eking out a poor subsistence, with many thoughts burdening his mind, was destined to be the founder of the greatest commercial and material revolution the world has known: through him seems to have been fulfilled the wonderfully significant prophecy of Nahum: “The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.” This young man was James Watt, who gave to the world the steam engine. A few years after he gave his mighty invention to Birmingham; and the world has never been the same world since. “By that invention,” says Emerson, “one man can do the work of two hundred and fifty men;” and in Manchester alone and in its vicinity there are probably sixty thousand boilers, and the aggregate power of a million horses.