Romeyn, James. The Crisis, and Its Claims upon the Church of God; A Sermon, preached in Franklin Street Church, New York, at the Opening of the General Synod of the Reformed Dutch Church, June 1, 1842. New-York: John Moffet, 1842. [7710]
Printed wrapper, 1842 gift inscription top front, 1 inch tear edge of top front, 5 3/4 x 9 inches, 55 clean pp., (1) p. of errata, back of wrapper with publisher's adverts. Good. Pamphlet.
A sermon on Habakkuk 2: 1-4. It consists of two parts: I. The discoveries made in an evil day, by the prophet from his watchtower, and II. The vision or message from God, prescribing corresponding duties. He calls on the gathered ministers to not relinquish the honor and dignity of their office; that they exercise it in a day of "appalling laxity of moral sentiment"; denounces legislatures that enact laws which are but the reflection of public sentiment; points out the superficial and defective religious principles en vogue; the "prevalence of a disturbing, disorganizing, destructive philosophy...the independence and supremacy of the individual man, in his whole spiritual nature"; the vain philosophies of Anatomy, Phrenology, and Animal Magnetism; and has six pages on the increase and dangers of Popery. Then on p. 24 Romeyn begins to delineate the responsibilities of the gathered ministers to counteract these dangers, and how to do it.
James Romeyn (1797-1859), b. Greenbush, New York; d. Geneva, New York. He was descended from a long line of ministers of the Reformed Dutch Church in America, whose ancestors left the United Provinces (now Belgium) during the persecutions of Louix XIV. James graduated at Columbia College (1816) and from the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church at New Brunswick (1819). He was the pastor of congregations at Nassau, NY; Six Mile Run, NJ; Hackensack, NJ; Catskill, NY; Leeds, NY; Bergen Neck, NJ; and Geneva, NY. He had declined both larger congregations and the professorship of logic and rhetoric at Rutgers College. Although he contributed frequently to the religious press, only three sermons of his were ever published, The Crisis and its Claims upon the Church of God; A Plea for the Evangelical Press; and Enmity to the Cross of Christ, this last of which was published in Dr. H. C. Fish's Pulpit Eloquence of the Nineteenth Century.
Dr. James W. Alexander wrote about Romeyn in a letter to a friend in 1844, "Here I heard James Romeyn; and a more extraordinary man I never heard. Fulness of matter, every step sudden and unexpected, genius, strength, fire, terror, amazing and preposterous rapidity, contempt of rule and taste. It was an awful discourse: 1 Thess. v, 3. It was one I shall not soon forget." - see entry in M'Clintock & Strong.