Eternal and immortal King

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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)

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