Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/182

 pleased to let him see and feel the plague of his own heart’ (Works, viii. 188). It has been thought that the portrait was his own (ib. vii. 19). In 1748 he was appointed to a lectureship at the united parishes of St. George's, Botolph Lane, and St. Botolph's, Billingsgate, and entered on the career of a London clergyman. In 1749 he was instituted to a double lectureship at St. Dunstan's-in-the-West. In 1750 he became in addition morning preacher at St. George's, Hanover Square. About this time also he held for a little while the professorship of astronomy in Gresham College. His lectures must have been original; he used to ‘attack some part of the Newtonian philosophy with boldness and banter.’ In 1753 he published a pamphlet against the bill for naturalising the Jews.

Romaine was now an ardent follower of Whitefield, proclaiming his belief not only to the citizens of St. Dunstan's, but to the fashionable world of St. George's. Persecution followed. The fashionable people of Hanover Square could not tolerate the poor folk that crowded to his preaching, although the old Earl of Northampton defended him, dryly remarking that no complaint was made of crowds in the ballroom or in the playhouse. Romaine consequently, at the request of the vicar, resigned his morning lectureship at St. George's. Trouble next arose at St. Dunstan's; the parishioners complained that they had to force their way to their pews through a ‘ragged, unsavoury multitude,’ ‘squeezing,’ ‘shoving,’ ‘panting,’ ‘riding on one another's backs.’ The rector sat in the pulpit to prevent Romaine from occupying it (Monthly Review, xxi. 271). The matter was carried to the king's bench, and that court deprived him of one parish lectureship, supported by voluntary contributions, but confirmed him in the other, which was endowed with 18l. a year (1762), and granted him the use of the church at seven o'clock in the evening. The churchwardens, however, refused to open the church until the exact hour, and declined to light it. Romaine had frequently to perform his office by the light of a single candle, which he held in his hand; until Terrick, the bishop of London (a predecessor of Romaine's in the lectureship) happening on one occasion to observe the crowd at the closed door, interfered, and obtained fair and decent arrangements for the service.

Romaine stood almost alone. The university of Oxford refused him the pulpit of St. Mary's in consequence of two sermons (1757) preached before it, in which he declaimed against moral rectitude being put in the place of justification by faith. The ‘Monthly Review’ treated his sermons and treatises with pitiless ridicule. A sermon, ‘The Self-existence of Jesus,’ 1755, on the divinity of Christ, was called an ‘amazing rhapsody.’ ‘The Life of Faith’ (1763) was ‘a silly treatise, a stupid treatise, a nonsensical treatise, a fanatical treatise.’ But Romaine reiterated his views and retracted nothing (Preface to ‘Sermon on 107th Psalm,’ Works, 1758, iv. p. xx). If men called the plain doctrines of scripture and the church ‘enthusiasm,’ he hoped, he said, to live and die ‘a church of England enthusiast’ (ib. iv. p. cclxii).

After his dismissal from St. George's he was appointed chaplain by Lady Huntingdon, preaching both in her kitchen and in her drawing-room. In 1756 he became curate and morning preacher at St. Olave's, Southwark; in 1759 he removed to the same post at St. Bartholomew the Great; and nearly two years afterwards to Westminster chapel, a chapel-of-ease to St. Margaret's, from which he was driven in six months by the hostility of the dean and chapter. The outlook in London seemed hopeless. Lord Dartmouth offered him a living in the country, and Whitefield wished him to take charge of a great church at Philadelphia at a salary of 600l. a year. But he declined to leave St. Dunstan's. He found occupation in preaching charity sermons, and assisted Archbishop Secker at Lambeth. He also preached to Ingham's societies at Leeds, with Grimshaw at Haworth, in the new chapel at Brighton, and in Lady Huntingdon's chapel at Bath, where his learning made him not wholly unequal to his temporary colleague, Whitefield.

In 1764 Romaine became a candidate for the living of St. Anne's, Blackfriars, with St. Andrew of the Wardrobe, which was in the gift of the parishioners, and preached before them a straightforward and characteristic sermon. The poll of the parish issued in his favour, but was disputed; and it was not till 1766 that the court of chancery confirmed his right to the benefice. There, at last, he had an assured position and a satisfied congregation: the communicants on his first Good Friday rose to the unprecedented number of five hundred, and on Easter-day there were as many as three hundred. A gallery had soon to be erected for the crowded congregations. Romaine stayed at Blackfriars for the remaining twenty-nine years of his life. Until John Newton's arrival in 1780, Romaine was the sole incumbent preaching the doctrines of the revival; and his learning made him always the central figure in it in London.