How many kindred souls are fled

Representative Text

1 How many kindred souls are fled
To the vast regions of the dead,
Since from this day the changing sun
Through his last yearly period run!

2 We yet survive; but who can say,
Or through the year, or month or day,
I will retain this vital breath;
Thus far at least in league with death?

3 That breath is Thine, eternal God,
’This Thine to fix the soul’s abode;
It holds its life from Thee alone,
On earth, or in the world unknown.

4 To Thee our spirits we resign,
Make them and own them, still as Thine;
So shall they smile, secure from fear,
Though death should blast the rising year.

Source: The Cyber Hymnal #9598

Author: Philip Doddridge

Philip Doddridge (b. London, England, 1702; d. Lisbon, Portugal, 1751) belonged to the Non-conformist Church (not associated with the Church of England). Its members were frequently the focus of discrimination. Offered an education by a rich patron to prepare him for ordination in the Church of England, Doddridge chose instead to remain in the Non-conformist Church. For twenty years he pastored a poor parish in Northampton, where he opened an academy for training Non-conformist ministers and taught most of the subjects himself. Doddridge suffered from tuberculosis, and when Lady Huntington, one of his patrons, offered to finance a trip to Lisbon for his health, he is reputed to have said, "I can as well go to heaven from Lisbon as from Nort… Go to person page >

Text Information

First Line: How many kindred souls are fled
Author: Philip Doddridge
Copyright: Public Domain

Tune

TRURO (Williams)

TRURO is an anonymous tune, first published in Thomas Williams's Psalmodia Evangelica, (second vol., 1789) as a setting for Isaac Watts' "Now to the Lord a noble song." Virtually nothing is known about this eighteenth-century British editor of the two-volume Psalmodia Evangelica, a collection of thr…

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The Cyber Hymnal #9598
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The Cyber Hymnal #9598

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