166 History of Methodism 



and a daughter Hope Hull; and Robert Purnell, of 

 Beauty Spot, who was awakened and converted under 

 a sermon preached in the open air, because the log 

 church could not contain the multitude that thronged 

 the appointment, and who was one of the first local 

 preachers raised up in the South Carolina Conference, 

 and a great revivalist, named his second son Hope 

 Hull, and sent him afterward to the academy which 

 he established in Georgia to be educated for the min- 

 istry. Dr. Pierce, in Sprague's Annals, says: 



Mr. Hull's style of preaching was awakening and inviting — by- 

 far the most successful mode with the mass of mankind. He was 

 also, emphatically, what may be called an experimental preacher, 

 both as regards the renewed and unrenewed heart ; a style grow- 

 ing out of the fact that he had carefully studied human nature in 

 its deceitful workings, and Christian experience, not only in its 

 more palpable, but more intricate phases, so that when an attentive 

 hearer had listened to one of his searching discourses, whether it 

 was intended to lay bare the sinner's heart or to test the Christian's 

 hopes, he always felt as if he had passed through a process of spir- 

 itual engineering which had mapped before him the whole held 

 of his accountable life. Sinners often charged him with having 

 learned their secrets, and using the pulpit to gratify himself in 

 their exposure ; and Christians, entangled in the meshes of Satan's 

 nut, and ready to abandon their hope of the Divine mercy, have 

 been cleared of these entanglements under his judicious tracings of 

 the Holy Spirit in his manifold operations on the heart and con- 

 science. Powerful emotion could be seen as it played in unmistak- 

 able outline upon the anxious believer's countenance, while under- 

 going one of these spiritual siftings ; and when, at last, the verdict 

 was written on his heart that he was a child of God according to the 

 rules of evidence laid down, all the conventional rules about the 

 propriety of praise were broken by one welling wave of joy, and he 

 told aloud that the kingdom of God was not a kingdom of word 

 only, but of power. Mr. Hull was a fine specimen of what may be 

 regarded an old-fashioned American Methodist preacher. His ora- 

 tory was natural, his action being the unaffected expression of his 

 inmost mind. Not only was there an entire freedom from every 



