old Mr. Hall used to call it Watts’ Jingle. I do not match those [metrical] Psalms with what is now admired in poetry, although time was when no less a man than the Rev. T. Bradbury thought so meanly of Watts’ Hymns as commonly to call them Watts’ Whims. And indeed, compared to the Scripture, they are like a little taper to the sun.”
He wrote to the Hon. and Rev. William Bromley Cadogan, July 30, 1784 :—
“We (i.e., himself and Mrs. Romaine, née Price) set out for the North, in all probability for the last time. I have three sisters alive, all in years as well as myself, and we are to have a family meeting to take our leave, final as to this life. It would be too much for my feelings, if I had not all the reason in the world to believe that our next meeting will be in glory. Mr. Whitfield used often to put me in mind how singularly favoured I was; my father, mother, and three sisters were like those blessed people, ‘Martha and her sister, and Lazarus,’ whom ‘Jesus loved.’”
“When,” says his biographer, “the clergy were called upon to collect in their respective parishes for the French emigrants, he was not a whit behind the chiefest of them in this business, for which he had the honour of being noticed in an anonymous pamphlet, as if to relieve the distresses of a Papist were to encourage the errors of Popery.” Thus, to his father’s persecutors William Romaine returned good for evil. “A cheerful old man,” “praising Jesus,” he died on the Lord’s Day, 26th July 1795. Funeral Sermons were preached by Rev. William Goode, Rev. Thomas Wills, and Rev. Charles Edward de Coetlogon.
The Rev. George Townshend Fox, Prebendary of Durham, sympathising with his principles, and admiring his talents, which were an honour to his native county, erected a tablet to Mr. Romaine’s memory, containing an epitaph, and four extracts from his “Treatises on Faith,” in the parish church of Hartlepool in 1876:—
William Romaine
Rector of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, London.
Born in Hartlepool, 1714.Died in London, 1795.
Sprung from the truly noble blood of a Protestant confessor
who took refuge in this town at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 1685,
he early embraced, by the grace of God, those principles of Scriptural truth for which
is father sacrificed his property and forsook his native land. A Christian of eminent piety, a ripe scholar, and a preacher of peculiar gifts, mighty in the Scriptures, he was honoured of God to become a leading instrument in accomplishing that great revival of evangelical religion in the Church of England, which took place last century.
In addition to his unwearied labours as a minister of the Gospel of Christ, and his faithful proclamation of the distinctive doctrines of grace, he greatly promoted the cause of truth, was the instrument of quickening and deepening vital piety in the hearts of thousands, and has bequeathed a rich legacy to posterity by his admirable Treatise on the Life, Walk, and Triumph of Faith.
After a lapse of 80 years, this Tablet is erected by one who reveres his memory,
loves the Scriptural doctrine which he embraced, and regards his name
as an honour to his native town and county.
I.
“I was even as others once, by nature a child of wrath and an
heir of misery, I was going on in the broad way of destruction, careless and
secure, and I am quite astonished to see the danger I was
in, I tremble to behold the precipice over which I was ready to fall
when Jesus opened mine eyes, and, by the light of his Word
and Spirit, showed me my guilt and danger, and put it
into my heart to (lee from the wrath to come;
O, what a merciful escape!”
II.
“The believer is reconciled to God, being no longer under the
law as a covenant of works but under grace, he loves the law and walks with God
in sweet obedience to it; he sets out and goes on every step in faith,
trusting to the acceptance of his person and his services in the Beloved;
he does not work now in order to be saved, but because he is saved, and
he ascribes all he does to the praise of the glory of free grace;
he works from gratitude—the faith of God’s elect always does—
it never fails to show itself by love.”
