How extravagant some things seem when quietly read, unaccompanied by the passion, and excitement which the preacher has either apprehended, or produced! The reader remembers very well—for who does not?—Whitefield’s vehement apostrophe, “Stop, Gabriel!” Who could deliberately write it down to utter it? and what an affectation of emotion it seems to read it! But that was not the effect produced on David Hume, who heard it; and we may be very sure that man,—the most acute, profound, cold philosopher, and correct writer, had no friendly feelings either to Whitefield, or Gabriel—to the message which the preacher had to give, or the archangel to carry. A quiet, ordinary, domestic state of feeling scarcely knows how to make allowances for an inflamed orator, his whole nature heaving beneath the passion produced by some great, and subduing vision, an audience in his hands, as a river of water, prepared to move whithersoever he will. Thus Elias, when he was handling some weighty subject, would suddenly say, “Stop! silence!” (_Disymwth_! _Gosteg_!) “What are they saying in Heaven on the subject?” His hearers testify that, in such moments, he almost brought them within the precincts of the glory. The effect was thrilling. And, dealing with alarming truths, he would exclaim, “Stop! silence! What do they say in hell on this subject?”
The man who can do these things must be no hearsay man, or such questionable excursions of speech would be likely to provoke laughter, and contempt, rather than overwhelming awe. The effect of this preacher was unutterable. It is said that upon such occasions, had the people heard these things from the invisible world, as he expatiated on the things most likely to be uttered, either in Heaven or hell, upon the subject, they could scarcely have been more alarmed.
His biographer, Mr. Morgan, Vicar of Syston, in Leicestershire, tells how he heard him preaching once to a crowd in the open air, on “the Last Day,” representing the wicked as “tares gathered into bundles,” and cast into the everlasting burnings. There was a certain flax-dresser, who, in a daring and audacious way, chose to go on with his work in an open room opposite to where Elias was preaching from the platform; but, as the preacher grew more and more earnest, and the flames more flashing, the terrible fire more and more intense in its vehemence, the man was obliged to leave his work, and run into a yard behind his house, to get out of the reach of the cruel flames, and the awful peals of the thunder of the preacher’s subduing voice. “But the awful language of that Elias followed me there also,” said the panic-stricken sinner.