Our Fathers; Where Are They?

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How swift the torrent rolls

Author: Philip Doddridge
Published in 134 hymnals

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Audio files: MIDI

Representative Text

1 How swift the torrent rolls
That bears us to the sea;
The tide that hurries thoughtless souls
To vast eternity.

2 Our fathers, where are they,
With all they called their own?
Their joys and griefs, and hopes and cares,
And wealth and honor gone.

3 God of our fathers! hear,
Thou everlasting Friend!
While we, as on life's utmost verge,
Our souls to thee commend.

4 Of all the pious dead
May we the footsteps trace,
Till with them, in the land of light,
We dwell before thy face.

Source: The Voice of Praise: a collection of hymns for the use of the Methodist Church #907

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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 >

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