These, however, were exceptional cases.  As a rule, Lady Huntingdon was in far more danger of being spoiled by flattery than of being discouraged by rebuffs.  Poor Whitefield’s painful adulation of his patroness has been already alluded to; and it was but natural that the students at her college, who owed their all to her, should, in after-life, have been inclined to treat her with too great subservience.

One is thankful to find no traces of undue deference on the part of those parochial clergymen who were made her chaplains, and who at irregular intervals, when they could be spared from their own parishes, supplied her chapels.  But though these good men did not flatter her, they felt and expressed the greatest respect for her character and exertions, as did also the Methodists generally.  Fletcher described an interview with her in terms which sound rather overstrained, not to say irreverent, to English ears; but allowance should be made for the ‘effusion’ in which foreigners are wont to indulge.  ‘Our conversation,’ he writes to Charles Wesley, ’was deep and full of the energy of faith.  As to me, I sat like Paul at the feet of Gamaliel; I passed three hours with a modern prodigy—­a pious and humble countess.  I went with trembling and in obedience to your orders; but I soon perceived a little of what the disciples felt when Christ said to them, It is I—­be not afraid.’ John Wesley, in spite of his differences with her, owned that ’she was much devoted to God and had a thousand valuable and amiable qualities.’  Rowland Hill, when a young man, wrote in still stronger terms:  ’I am glad to hear the Head is better.  What zeal for God perpetually attends her!  Had I twenty bodies, I could like nineteen of them to run about for her.’[772]

The good countess was not unworthy of all this esteem.  In spite of her little foibles, she was a thoroughly earnest Christian woman.  Her munificence was unbounded.  ‘She would give,’ said Grimshaw, ’to the last gown on her back.’  She is said to have spent during her life more than 100,000_l._ in the service of religion.

Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion, like John Wesley’s societies, drifted away rather than separated from the National Church.  In consequence of some litigation in the Consistorial Court of London about the Spa Fields Chapel, it became necessary to define more precisely the ‘status’ of Lady Huntingdon’s places of worship.  If they were still to be considered as belonging to the Church of England, they were, of course, bound to submit to the laws of the Church.  In order to find shelter under the Toleration Act, it was necessary to register them as Dissenting places of worship.  Thus Lady Huntingdon, much against her will, found herself a Dissenter.  She expressed her regret in that extraordinary English which she was wont to write.  ’All the other connexions seem to be at peace, and I have ever found to belong to me while we were at ease in Zion.  I am to