Eternal and immortal King

Representative Text

Eternal and immortal King!
Thy peerless splendors none can bear;
But darkness veils seraphic eyes,
When God with all his glory’s there.

Yet faith can pierce the awful gloom,
The great Invisible can see;
And with its tremblings mingle joy,
In fixed regard, great GOD! to Thee.

Then every tempting form of sin,
Shamed in Thy presence, disappears;
And all the glowing raptured soul
The likeness it contemplates, wears.

O ever conscious to my heart!
Witness to its supreme desire:
Behold it presseth on to Thee,
For it hath caught the heavenly fire.

This one petition would it urge—
To bear Thee ever in its sight;
In life, in death, in worlds unknown,
Its only portion and delight!



Source: A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion (15th ed.) #537

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 >

Text Information

First Line: Eternal and immortal King
Author: Philip Doddridge
Language: English
Copyright: Public Domain

Notes

Eternal and immortal King. P. Doddridge. [Faith.] First published in his posthumous Hymns, &c, 1755, No. 321, in 5 stanzas of 4 lines, and again in J. D. Humphreys’s edition of the same, 1839, No. 347. It is based on Heb. xi. 17. In several American collections it is altered to: "Almighty and immortal King,” and reduced to 3 stanzas.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

Tune

ETERNAL KING


[Eternal and immortal King]


HAMBURG

Lowell Mason (PHH 96) composed HAMBURG (named after the German city) in 1824. The tune was published in the 1825 edition of Mason's Handel and Haydn Society Collection of Church Music. Mason indicated that the tune was based on a chant in the first Gregorian tone. HAMBURG is a very simple tune with…

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The Cyber Hymnal #8446
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The Cyber Hymnal #8446

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