The Life Of Joseph Hart 3: ‘I Will Arise’

Thomas Wright | Added: Oct 16, 2025 | Category: Biography

In the year 1751, Hart began ‘to reform a little and to live in a more sober and orderly manner’. ‘And now’, he says, ‘as I retained the form of sound words, and held the doctrines of free grace, justification by faith and other orthodox tenets, I was tolerably confident of the goodness of my state; especially as I could now also add that other requisite, a moral behaviour’. About this time he became united in marriage to a young woman of whom we know nothing, except that her Christian name was Mary, that she was 14 years his junior, and that she may have been the sister of the Rev. John Hughes, a Baptist minister, who as we shall see, succeeded to Hart’s pulpit. Mr. Hughes is styled Hart’s brother-in-law, but whether Mrs Hart was Hughes’s sister or whether Hughes married Hart’s sister is not disclosed. In either case Hart and Hughes, who became affectionate friends, had probably by this time made each other’s acquaintance. ‘The generality of both sexes’, laments Hart in a note to his Phocylides, ‘rush into marriage as carelessly as if their interest were but lightly concerned in it, and their happiness or misery did not at all depend on their choice’. It may be assumed, therefore, that he himself exercised reasonable caution. Be that as it may, the union, which was doubtless one of the causes of his reformation, proved an ideal one, and he became a tender and attentive husband.

For several years he continued with a ‘lukewarm, insipid kind of religion, yet not without some secret whispers of God’s love and visitations of His grace, and now and then warm addresses to Him in private prayer’. Then, too, he regularly read the scriptures, both in English and the original languages; but he could not see that there was any necessity for our Saviour’s death, and often resolved that he never would believe it.

In the meanwhile George Whitfield, to use the phrase of an enemy, had been travelling from common to common, preaching from chairs, joint-stools, and garden walls, and making the people cry, but his principle preaching place was a huge shed which he had erected in Moorfields, very near to Wesley’s centre, ‘The Foundry’. About 1744 he visited Plymouth, and among those who received serious impressions under him, and with whom he became personally acquainted, was a young man of splendid physique – a Hercules for strength – Andrew Kinsman, of Tavistock – who was destined to become, through Whitfield’s instrumentality, Joseph Hart’s most devoted friend and correspondent. A little later Kinsman removed to Plymouth, where he fell in love with and married a Christian lady of means, Miss Ann Tilley. They resided in a thoroughfare called Briton Side; and, moved by pious desires, they erected at the end of their garden a chapel, which they called, after the Free Grace centre in London, the Tabernacle. The supplies were Whitfield’s colleagues, John Cennick, the hymn-writer, John Adams, and occasionally Kinsman himself.

Several years passed away, and in 1749 Whitfield, who had been making a tour in the West, once more approached Plymouth. His spiritual children, headed by Kinsman, rode out on horseback to meet him, and welcomed him as an ‘angel of God’. Hundreds waited ‘to hear the word’, and he preached to them (‘celestial radiance shining in his face’) in the Briton Side Tabernacle. Like Whitfield, Kinsman was often roughly treated – sometimes stoned – by the rabble, and persecuted in other ways. Thanks, however, to a powerful frame and a mind insensible of fear and inured to contempt, he proved equal to every emergency. On one occasion a lieutenant in the Navy led a gang of rioters into the Tabernacle, and commenced smashing the windows and beating the worshippers. Kinsman straightway grappled with the leader, wrested his sword from him, and by main strength, and notwithstanding the opposition of the other rioters, dragged him bare-headed (for his laced hat had fallen in the struggle) into the yard, and thence through the street to a magistrate. In 1752 Kinsman settled at Devonport, where he built another chapel; and he not only superintended the services at both places of worship, but he made preaching tours throughout the surrounding country, sometimes journeying as far as Bristol.

In the meantime Whitfield, finding the Tabernacle shed in Moorfield’s inconvenient and inadequate, took it down and erected on its site a huge hive-shaped building capable of seating 4000 persons. It was opened with the name unchanged, 10^th June, 1753. A little earlier Whitfield had made a tour through Kent, and among those converted by him and with whom he became personally acquainted was William Shrubsole – a shipwright of Sheerness – the William Shrubsole who afterwards by his Christian memoirs linked his name not only with Whitfield’s but also with Hart’s. In 1754, just before setting sail for America, Whitfield sent for Kinsman to London, and in his announcement at the Tabernacle he told his people that ‘a promising young man, Mr Kinsman’, would preach to them. The news circulated that he had said, ‘my kinsman’; and curiosity having been whetted, a large and expectant crowd gathered on the following Sunday. However, Kinsman’s evident sincerity, conjoined with a harmonious voice and a sprightly and pathetic delivery, enabled him to rivet the attention of an exacting audience; and thenceforward he was second in popular favour only to Whitfield himself. Among his regular hearers were Hart’s father and mother, and he became an honoured guest at their house. 

Whitfield returned to England in May, 1755, and among those who were attracted to the ‘dear old beehive’, as Berridge of Everton called the Tabernacle, was Joseph Hart. Whitfield in wig, black robe, and bands ascended the pulpit, his pockets bulging with notes written by persons ‘brought under concern’. The notes having been read, the sermon followed. The earnestness of the preacher was even terrible. ‘Mr Fervidus’ had never more truly deserved his name. He threw out his arms. To threatenings (the ‘wildfire’ of the profane and even of some of the faithful) succeeded ‘soft compassion’. The people, always emotional, were exceptionally moved; some wrung their hands, others cried out; and Hart, becoming thoroughly alarmed, ‘manifested all the signs of a sincere repentance of his sins’. There was but one thought in his mind: ‘I will arise and go to my Father’. A few days later he fell into a deep despondency because ‘he had never experienced grand revelations and miraculous discoveries’. ‘I was very melancholy’, he says, ‘and shunned all company, walking pensively alone or sitting in private and bewailing my sad and dark condition, not having a friend in the world to whom I could communicate the burden of my soul, which was so heavy that I sometimes hesitated even to take my necessary food’. To the end, Hart continued to be a solitary man.

He often fell on his knees and besought God with strong and fervent cries and tears, to reveal Himself in a clearer manner. In the midst of one of these prayers, a voice said to him, ‘Do you choose the visionary revelations of which you have formed some wild idea, or to be content with trusting to the low, despised mystery of a crucified Man?’ Hart was enabled to prefer the latter, and the choice gave him sweet comfort. ‘His father had compassion on him.’ But to dejection he was still at times a prey. ‘From this’, he says, ‘I used to be relieved by pouring out my soul to Christ, and beseeching him, with cries and groans and tears, to reveal Himself to me’.

A verse of Scripture answered his petition: ‘That which thou hast already, hold fast till I come’.

Clasping fast his hands, he exclaimed with emotion, ‘I would sooner part with every drop of blood than let go the hopes I already have in a crucified Saviour’.

Another scripture having presented itself, behold I come quickly, and my reward is with me’, he cried in ecstasy, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come!’

The year 1756 passed away – a year of gloom for England, for the country had been plunged into the horrors of war. There was talk of nothing but gorgeous uniforms, muskets, and the departure of troops; the kettle-drum, the fife, and the trumpet were heard in the streets; and yet the year was marked by at least one conspicuous religious event – the erection by Whitfield of a second ‘soul-trap’, as the ‘indolent clergy who battened in ease’ thought fit to call it – the chapel in Tottenham Court Road. The spring of 1757 – an even more calamitous time – marked as it was by defeat and disgrace to Britain (‘Oswego gone, an army cut to pieces, an admiral shot to death!’) also passed away; and then finally came the answer to Hart’s fervent prayer. It was the central event of his life; and cannot better be described than in his own words.

To be continued.

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