Doane, George Washington

Author

b Trenton, New Jersey, USA 1799, d Burlington, NJ 1859. Union Coll, Schenectady, New York State, where he read Law. After enrolling as one of the General Theological Seminary’s first students, he was ordained in 1821 in the Protestant Episcopal Ch; he served at New York’s Trinity Ch from 1821 to 1824, then spent 4 years as Prof of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Trinity Coll, Hartford, Conn. After a further 4 year spell as Rector of another Trinity Church, in Boston, Mass, he was consecrated as the second Bishop of New Jersey in 1832. Among several educational initiatives he founded St Mary’s Hall for women, and Burlington Coll for men. In sympathy with the (Oxford) tractarian movement in England, he edited a N American edn of John Keble’s The Christian Year. In the year following his death at the age of 59, his hymnwriting son William Croswell Doane (1832–1913) edited his complete works in 4 vols (1860). He and C W Everest (qv) were the only American writers represented in the first edn of A&M in 1861; his own contribution, now featured in many mainstream UK books, coincidentally takes a more positive view of John 14:6 than an earlier text by J Hart. The 18th-c Englishman says, ‘all other paths must lead astray…all besides is death’ (etc); the 19th-c American prefers (in his original text, now modernised), ‘by thee alone…thou only’. No.678.