Choosing the Better Part

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Beset with snares on every hand

Author: Philip Doddridge
Published in 163 hymnals

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Audio files: MIDI

Representative Text

1 Beset with snares on every hand,
In life’s uncertain path I stand:
Saviour divine! diffuse Thy light,
To guide my doubtful footsteps right.

2 Engage this roving treacherous heart
Wisely to choose the better part;
To scorn the trifles of a day,
For joys that none can take away.

3 Then let the wildest storms arise;
Let tempests mingle earth and skies:
No fatal shipwreck shall I fear,
But all my treasures with me bear.

4 If Thou, my Jesus, still be nigh,
Cheerful I live, and joyful die:
Secure, when mortal comforts flee,
To find ten thousand worlds in Thee.

Source: Church Book: for the use of Evangelical Lutheran congregations #450

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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:	Beset with snares on every hand
Title:	Choosing the Better Part
Author:	Philip Doddridge
Meter:	8.8.8.8
Source:	Published posthumously in Hymns Founded on Various Texts in the Holy Scriptures, by Job Orton (J. Eddowes and J. Cotton, 1755)
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

Luke 10:42-43
(hymns)

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Notes

Beset with snares on every hand. P. Doddridge. [Mary's choice.] This hymn is not in the Doddridge Manuscript. It was first published by J. Orton in the posthumous edition of Doddridge's Hymns, 1755. No. 207, in 4 stanzas of 4 lines, and headed "Mary's Choice of the Better Part;" and again in J. D. Humphreys's edition of the same, 1839. Although used but sparingly in the hymnals of Great Britain, in America it is found in many of the leading collections, and especially in those belonging to the Unitarians. The translation—-"In vitae dubio tramite transeo," in Bingham's Hymnologia Christiana Latina, 1871, p. 109—is made from an altered text in Bickersteth's Christian Psalmody, 1833.

-- John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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Tune

HEBRON (Mason)

DUKE STREET

First published anonymously in Henry Boyd's Select Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (1793), DUKE STREET was credited to John Hatton (b. Warrington, England, c. 1710; d, St. Helen's, Lancaster, England, 1793) in William Dixon's Euphonia (1805). Virtually nothing is known about Hatton, its composer,…

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ST. GALL (13455)

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