Morning

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 >

Awake, my soul, to meet the day. P. Doddridge. [Morning.] This hymn is in the “D. MSS." but undated. In 1755, it was published by J. Orton in Doddridge's Hymns, &c, No. 362, in 7 stanzas of 4 lines without alteration, .the title being, "A morning hymn, to be used at awaking and rising." It was republished in J. D. Humphreys's edition of the Hymns, 1839, No. 389. It is not in common use in Great Britain. In the American Hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1878, stanzas i., ii., vi., vii., are given, somewhat altered, as No. 96.

-- John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)