And when the sermon is
finished, to hear all this heated mass break forth into song, the wild
melody of which floats, in the stillness of night, upon the breeze to
the listening ear a mile away, in cadences mournfully sweet, make the
camp-meeting among the most exciting of human exhibitions. In such a
school were trained those great masters of pulpit oratory, Pierce,
Wynans, Capers, and Bascomb. Whitfield was the great exemplar of these;
but none, perhaps, so imitated his style and manner as John Newland
Maffit and the wonderful Summerfield.
Like all that is great and enduring, the Methodist Church had its
beginning among the humble and lowly. Rocked in the cradle of penury
and ignorance, it was firmly fixed in the foundations of society,
whence it rose from its own purity of doctrine and simplicity of
worship to command the respect, love, and adoption of the highest in
the land, and to wield an influence paramount in the destinies of the
people and the Government. Its ministers are now the educated and
eloquent of the Church militant. Its institutions of learning are the
first and most numerous all over the South, and it has done for female
education in the South more than every other sect of Christians,
excepting, perhaps, the Roman Catholic.
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