m intimately, somewhat
repellent in manners. Romaine would have been quite unfitted for the
work which Grimshaw and Berridge, in spite--or, shall we say, in
consequence?--of their boisterous bonhomie and occasionally ill-timed
jocularity were able to do. The farmers and working men of Haworth or
Everton would assuredly have gone to sleep under his preaching, or
stayed away from church altogether. One can scarcely fancy Romaine
itinerating at all; but if he had done so, the bleak moors of Yorkshire
or the cottage homes of Bedfordshire would not have been suitable
spheres for his labours. But where he was, he was the right man in the
right place. Among the grave and decorous citizens who attended the city
churches, and among the educated congregations who flocked to hear him
at St. George's, Hanover Square, Romaine was appreciated. Both in his
character and in his writings Romaine approached more nearly than any of
the so-called Puritans of his day to the typical Puritan of the
seventeenth century. He was like one born out of due time. One can fancy
him more at home with Flavel, Howe, and Baxter than with Whitefield,
Berridge, and Grimshaw. Did we not know its date, we might have imagined
that the 'Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith' was written a hundred years
before it actually was. Its very style and language were archaic in the
eighteenth century, Romaine, indeed, thoroughly won the sympathy of the
generation in which he lived, or at any rate of the school to which he
belonged. But it was a work of time. He was at Oxford at the time of the
rise of Methodism, but appears to have held no communication with its
promoters. In another respect he differed from almost all the
Evangelicals. There was apparently no transition, either abrupt or
gradual, in his views. The only change which we can trace in his career
is the change in his outer life from the learned leisure of a six years'
residence at Oxford and ten years in a country curacy to the more active
sphere of duty of a London clergyman. The mere fact that a man of his
high reputation for learning and his irreproachable life should have
been left unbeneficed until he had reached the ripe age of fifty-two, is
another proof of the suspicion with which Methodism was regarded; for no
doubt he was early suspected of being tainted with Methodism. He
belonged to Lady Huntingdon's Connexion until the 'secession' of 1781,
when, like Venn and other parochial clergymen, he was compell