1 Lord, when Thine Israel we survey,
We in their crimes discern our own;
And if Thou turn our prayer away,
Our misery must, like theirs, be known.
2 To us Thy prophets have been sent
With words of terror and of love;
But not the vengeance, nor the grace,
Ten thousand stubborn hearts will move.
3 Our eyes are blind, and deaf our ears;
Our hearts are hardened into stone;
As we would bar Thy mercy out,
And leave a way for wrath alone.
4 Justly our God might give us up
To plague and famine and the sword;
Till towns and cities, rich and fair,
Lay desolate without a Lord.
5 O’er bleeding wounds of slaughtered friends
Rivers of helpless grief might flow,
Till the fierce conqueror’s haughty rage
Dragged us to chains and slaughter, too.
6 But spare a nation long Thine own,
And show new miracles of grace,
’Tis Thine to heal the deaf and blind,
And wake the dead to life and praise.
Source: The Cyber Hymnal #8190
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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