Jesus, at the Feast of Love

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 >

Our heavenly Father calls. P. Doddridge. [Communion with God.] This hymn is in the Doddridge Manuscript (D.MSS.) but is undated. It was given without alteration, in Job Orton’s posthumous edition of Doddridge’s Hymns, &c., 1755, No. 346, in 5 stanzas of 4 lines, with the heading, “Communion with God and Christ,” and again in J. D. Humphrey’s edition of the same, 1839. No. 372. It is in several hymn-books.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)