Hark, the glad sound! The Saviour comes

Behind Philip Doddridge’s hymn lies the tale of two towns, two Scriptures, and two sermons. The full version has been called ‘very uneven’; many books reduce it to 4 stzs by omitting alternate ones from its original 7, as commended by Routley. This book has been bolder than most in being unwilling to lose the vivid lines usually omitted, though that necessarily involves further revision. Stz 2 originally began, ‘On him the Spirit largely poured/ exerts its sacred fire …’; stz 4, ‘He comes from thickest films of vice/ to purge the mental ray’. The silver trumpets of stz 6 (Numbers 10) were too good to lose, though the lines are rearranged to give ‘jubilee’ (Leviticus 25) its full 3 syllables. Of the more familiar stzs, only the 5th needed emendation to remove ‘bleeding soul’ and clarify the ‘gospel’ reference to the underlying text. Though with good reason it is called an ‘Advent’ hymn, the sermon it was written to supplement was preached in the dissenting chapel at Northampton on 28 Dec 1735, with the hymn immediately following, as was the pastor/author/preacher’s custom. He had clearly done his work on Isaiah, the original text taken by Jesus at Nazareth, as well as on Luke’s account of it (Luke 4:16–30). He also knew Alexander Pope’s ‘sacred eclogue’ from 1712, Messiah (which itself used Isaiah, and Virgil), well enough to quote but not publish some of its language, while its author was still alive and writing. More important, the emphatic double ‘every’ in stz 1 is as crucial as the fourfold ‘all’ in 100A.

We have no record of what they sang at Nazareth that day (Psalms 40 or 72 would have been appropriate—but not after the sermon!) nor of any violence offered to the preacher at Northampton. But after wide circulation in leaflet form, the hymn appeared in Scottish Translations and Paraphrases in 1745, and posthumously in England with some changes 10 years later. The Church Hymnary 3rd Edition 1973 reflects the earlier Scots tradition including in stz 1, ‘let every heart exult with joy,/ and every voice be song!’; the final line ‘… most honoured name’; and the ‘jubilee’ verse represented by ‘The sacred year has now revolved,/ accepted of the Lord,/ when heaven’s high promise is fulfilled,/ and Israel is restored.’ Garrett Horder went so far as to call this ‘one of the noblest hymns ever written, alike as to style and substance.’ (A footnote: at that Christmas season 1735, the brothers Wesley were embroiled with quarrelsome fellow-passengers on their stormy voyage to America.)

The anonymous BRISTOL has become the standard accompaniment. It was BRISTOLL TUNE in Thomas Ravenscroft’s 1621 Psalter (The Whole Booke of Psalmes with the Hymnes Evangelicall and the Songs Spirituall …), which described it as an English melody and set it with Psalms 16 and 64. There the melody is in the tenor; the first A&M attached it to Doddridge’s hymn in 1861. The compiler was apparently fond of naming his tunes after cathedral cities. The second tune ETHERINGTON was composed by Henry Walford Davies c1900, but is almost unknown to British hymnbooks. ST SAVIOUR (214) has often been used; Patrick Appleford’s TEMPLAR STREET made a bright but briefer impact in 1966.

b London 1702, d Lisbon, Portugal 1751. The youngest and barely surviving 20th child of a dissenting London oil merchant, he was one of only two to grow beyond infancy. He was educated at home by his mother, then briefly at the Grammar School at Kingstonon- Thames, Surrey, and at St Albans; being orphaned at 13 he was cared for by a guardian, then by his relatives. The Duchess of Bedford offered to support him at Oxford or Cambridge, but (like his older contemporary Watts) he declined to adopt the Anglicanism which was then required for those universities. Discouraged by the renowned Dr Edmund Calamy but encouraged by his own pastor Samuel Clark, from 1719 he trained at Dr Jennings’ Academy at Kibworth, Leics. He ministered at Kibworth, Stretton and Market Harborough and in 1729 he began a 22-year pastorate in Northampton which he combined with the leadership of a remarkable academy/seminary there which in many ways outshone the Oxbridge of its day. Aberdeen Univ awarded him an hon DD in 1736. Among his many books including the popular Family Expositor and the dramatic Life of Colonel Gardiner (short title, 1747), the most influential proved to be The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745). A moderate Calvinist of evangelical and catholic spirit (Faith Cook calls him ‘large-hearted’), he maintained friendships, not without criticism, with Whitefield and the Wesleys as well as with Isaac Watts, and such local Anglicans who were willing to associate with him. As a patriot he helped raise a small militia to counter a possible advance from the north by the army of the RC ‘young pretender’; as a philanthropist he pleaded for mercy for felons condemned to death, supported inoculation against smallpox and made the plans which led to the building of the town’s general hospital; as an educator he opened a new school for boys and addressed the town’s philosophical society.

Doddridge wrote some 400 hymns, many of them at some speed to be in time for the following Sunday’s services, when they would sum up or illustrate the message of his sermons. Many are very fine and some leave room for gentle irony in the style of the prophets, even in a final stz: ‘Now let the powers of darkness roar,/ how vain their threats appear;/ when they can match Jehovah’s power,/ I will begin to fear’! Never very fit physically, he sailed to Portugal from Falmouth in Sept 1751 in a final attempt to regain his failing health, but died there soon after arriving and is buried at Lisbon. Just before leaving England he had said to Lady Huntingdon, ‘I can as well go to heaven from Lisbon, as from my own study at Northampton.’ His sermons and some letters were printed; the hymns were collected and scripturally arranged in various posthumous edns from 1755 onwards, not always compatible, by Job Orton in 1755 and by John Doddridge Humphreys in 1839. Among many studies of his life and work is a symposium edited by Geoffrey Nuttall in 1951, Malcolm Deacon’s 1980 biography, and Alan Clifford’s (qv) The Good Doctor (2002). He was the subject of the Evangelical Library’s annual lecture in 2002. James Montgomery wrote in 1825 that his hymns ‘shine in the beauty of holiness’; they are mild, human, ‘lovely and acceptable…for that fervent and unaffected love to God, his service, and his people, which distinguishes them.’ John Ellerton quoted the judgement that none were so good as Watts’s best and none as bad as his worst. Northampton’s Castle Hill ch, now URC, is known as the Doddridge Memorial Ch and contains many memorabilia. Doddridge is the third in order of contributors of Spurgeon’s Our Own Hymn Book (1866), with 45 entries, Wesley having 48 and Watts 246. The 1951 Congregational Praise included 14 of his hymns; Rejoice and Sing (1991) retained 8 of them; while GH has 13; CH had 23 in 1977 and 19 in 2004. Nos.345, 409, 654, 721, 864, 867, 873, 964.