Читать книгу The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century: with a supplemental chapter on the revival in America онлайн

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Philip Doddridge’s work was almost done before the Methodist movement was known. It seems to us that no adequate honour has ever yet been paid to that most beautiful and remarkably inclusive life. It was public, it was known and noticed, but it was passed almost in retreat in Northampton. That he was a preacher and pastor of a Church was but a slight portion of the life which succumbed, yet in the prime of his days, to consumption. His academy for the education of young ministers seems to us, even now, something like a model of what such an academy should be; his lectures to his students are remarkably full and scholarly and complete. From thence went forth men like the saintly Risdon Darracott, the scholarly and suggestive Hugh Farmer, Benjamin Fawcett, and Andrew Kippis. The hymns of Doddridge were among the earliest, as they are still among the sweetest, of that kind of offering to our modern Church; their clear, elevated, thrush-like sweetness, like the more uplifted seraphic trumpet tones of Watts, broke in upon a time when there was no sacred song worthy of the name in the Church, and anticipated the hour when the melodious acclamations of the people should be one of the most cherished elements of Christian service.