Father of lights we sing thy name

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Father of lights we sing thy name

Author: Philip Doddridge
Tune: FEDERAL STREET
Published in 52 hymnals

Representative Text

1 Father of lights! we sing thy name,
Who kindlest up the lamp of day:
Wide as he spreads his golden flame,
His beams thy pow'r and love display.

2 Fountain of good! from thee proceed
The copious drops of genial rain,
Which, o'er the hill and through the mead,
Revive the grass and swell the grain.

3 Through the wide world thy bounties spread,
Yet millions of our guilty race,
Though by thy daily bounty fed,
Affront thy law, and spurn thy grace.

4 Not so may our forgetful hearts
O'er look the tokens of thy care;
But, what thy lib'ral hand imparts,
Still own in praise, still ask in pray'r.

5 So shall our suns more grateful shine,
And showers in sweeter drops shall fall,
When all our hearts and lives are thine,
And thou, O God, enjoy'd in all.

Source: A Collection of Hymns and Prayers, for Public and Private Worship #438

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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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First Line:	Father of lights we sing thy name
Author:	Philip Doddridge
Copyright:	Public Domain

Matthew 5:45
(hymns)

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Notes

Father of lights, we sing Thy Name. P. Doddridge. [Ps. lxxxiv.] This hymn is No. xlvi. in the D. MSS. in 6 stanzas of 4 lines, and entitled "Providential Bounties Surveyed and Improved, St. Matt. v. 45." A slightly different text was given by Job Orton in his posthumous edition of Doddridge's Hymns, 1755, No. 176, and the text in J. D. Humphreys's edition of the Hymns, &c, 1839, No. 197, differs in a few words from both. The 1755 text is that in common use sometimes in an altered form. The hymn is given in most of the American Unitarian collections.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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Tune

FEDERAL STREET

Henry Kemble Oliver (b. Beverly, MA, 1800; d. Salem, MA, 1885) composed FEDERAL STREET in 1832, possibly as an imitation of earlier psalm tunes in long meter. He took it to a music class taught by Lowell Mason (who may have contributed to the harmony); Mason (PHH 96) published it in his Boston Acade…

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