be cast out of the Church now, only for what I have been doing these forty years—­speaking and living for Jesus Christ; and if the days of my captivity are now to be accomplished, those that turn me out and so set me at liberty, may soon feel what it is, by sore distress themselves for those hard services they have caused me.’[773] Still she could not make up her mind to call herself and those in connexion with her, Dissenters.  She tried to find some middle term; it was not a separation from the Church, but a ‘secession;’ which looks very like a distinction without a difference.  ‘Our ministers must come,’ writes her ladyship in 1781, ’recommended by that neutrality between Church and Dissent—­secession;’ and to the same effect in 1782:  ’Mr. Wills’s secession from the Church (for which he is the most highly favoured of all from the noble and disinterested motives that engaged his honest and faithful conscience for the Lord’s unlimited service) brings about an ordination of such students as are alike disposed to labour in the place and appointed for those congregations.  The method of these appears the best calculated for the comfort of the students and to serve the congregations most usefully, and is contrived to prevent any bondage to the people or minister.  The objections to the Dissenters’ plan are many, and to the Church more; that secession means the neutrality between both, and so materially offensive to neither.’[774]

One result of this ‘secession’ was the withdrawal from the Connexion of those parochial clergymen who had given their gratuitous services to Lady Huntingdon—­Romaine, Venn, Townsend, and others; but they still maintained the most cordial intimacy with the countess, and continued occasionally to supply her chapels.

It must be admitted, in justice to the Church rulers of the day, that the difficulties in the way of co-operation with Lady Huntingdon were by no means slight.  Her Churchmanship, like that of her friend Whitefield, was not of the same marked type as that of John Wesley.  It will be remembered that John Wesley, in his sermon at the foundation of the City Road Chapel in 1777—­four years, be it observed, before Lady Huntingdon’s secession—­described, in his own vigorous language, the difference between the attitude of his followers towards the Church, and that of the followers of Lady Huntingdon and Mr. Whitefield.  So far as the two latter were concerned, he did not overstate the case.  The college at Trevecca could hardly be regarded in any other light than that of a Dissenting Academy.  Berridge saw this, and wrote to Lady Huntingdon:  ’However rusty or rickety the Dissenters may appear to you, God hath His remnant among them; therefore lift not up your hand against them for the Lord’s sake nor yet for consistency’s sake, because your students are as real Dissenting preachers as any in the land, unless a gown and band can make a clergyman.  The bishops look on your students as the worst kind of Dissenters; and manifest