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 compelled to withdraw from formal union, though he still retained the closest intimacy with her.  He was for some time her senior chaplain, and her adviser and assistant on all occasions.  Although he differed from John Wesley on the disputed points of Arminianism and sinless perfection more widely than any of his co-religionists, he appears to have retained the affection of that great man after others had lost it; for we find Wesley writing to Lady Huntingdon in 1763:  ’Only Mr. Romaine has shown a truly sympathising spirit, and acted the part of a brother.’  Indeed, although Romaine was quite ready to enter into the lists of controversy with Warburton and others whom he considered to be outside the Evangelical pale, he seems to have held aloof from the disputes which distracted those within that pale.  ‘Things are not here’ [in London], he writes to Lady Huntingdon, ’as at Brighthelmstone; Foundry, Tabernacle, Lock, Meeting, yea and St. Dunstan’s itself [his own church], has each its party, and brotherly love is almost lost in our disputes.  Thank God, I am out of them.’

Romaine’s Calvinism was of a more extreme type than that of most of the Evangelicals.  He was no Antinomian himself, but one can well believe that his teaching might easily be perverted to Antinomian purposes.  Wilberforce has an entry in his journal for 1795:—­’Dined with old Newton, where met Henry Thornton and Macaulay.  Newton very calm and pleasing.  Owned that Romaine had made many Antinomians.’[804] It seems not improbable that Thomas Scott, when he spoke of ’great names sanctioning Antinomianism,’ had Romaine in view; at any rate, there is no contemporary ‘great name’ to whom the remark would apply with equal force.[805] It should be added that the ‘Life, &c., of Faith’ possesses the strength as well as the defects of early Puritanism.  It is, perhaps, on the whole, the strongest book, as its author was the strongest man of any who appeared among the Evangelicals.  To find its equal we must go back to the previous century.