thus appears that in five days he preached seven times, journeying nearly 120 miles, chiefly on foot.
These prodigious labours, undertaken on so poor a fare as he had to content himself with, brought him into such a condition that he was obliged to gird his stomach with a handkerchief as tight as he could bear it, in order to gather strength to enable him to preach, as he sometimes did, three times a day.
At last his friends in London bought him a horse—as he believed, in answer to prayer. On this horse he took long journeys across the country, so that he was enabled to do much more with far less toil to himself.
In 1778 he was summoned before the magistrates at Kingston, as one who had intruded himself into the parish of Ditton without having gained any legal settlement. However, his influence had now so increased, that some one in the metropolis hired two lawyers to defend him, and he left the court triumphant.
In 1779 he was first invited to preach in London, supplying the pulpit of a chapel in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square.
He had tried agricultural labour, gun-making, gardening, coal-heaving, and cobbling, without making the slightest progress in any one of them—hardly, in fact, getting a subsistence by them; but now he became a preacher he was able, in three years after his first sermon in London, to build a chapel on his own responsibility. He had never shown the slightest enterprise in any other walk of life, except perhaps when, in the ardour of love, he apprenticed himself to gun-making; but now this poor coal-heaver, with scarcely a penny in his pocket, had the courage to hire ground on the Duke of Portland's estate, in Titchfield Street, at a rental of £47 a year, and to set about erecting a chapel, relying for the means to supply the money entirely upon Him whom he loved to call his Divine Banker. Whether we call it faith or presumption, as a matter of fact, the money was forthcoming, the place was soon built, and named "Providence Chapel."
Once in London he rapidly rose in fame. By diligence and care he overcame his uncouth provincial dialect, and such crowds came to hear him, that in a few years he added a second gallery to the chapel, making it big enough to hold 2000 persons. He evidently regarded it as a sort of Ark, floating above the waters of a drowning
