Philip Doddridge’s work was almost done before the Methodist movement was known. It seems to us that no adequate honour has ever yet been paid to that most beautiful and remarkably inclusive life. It was public, it was known and noticed, but it was passed almost in retreat in Northampton. That he was a preacher and pastor of a Church was but a slight portion of the life which succumbed, yet in the prime of his days, to consumption. His academy for the education of young ministers seems to us, even now, something like a model of what such an academy should be; his lectures to his students are remarkably full and scholarly and complete. From thence went forth men like the saintly Risdon Darracott, the scholarly and suggestive Hugh Farmer, Benjamin Fawcett, and Andrew Kippis. The hymns of Doddridge were among the earliest, as they are still among the sweetest, of that kind of offering to our modern Church; their clear, elevated, thrush-like sweetness, like the more uplifted seraphic trumpet tones of Watts, broke in upon a time when there was no sacred song worthy of the name in the Church, and anticipated the hour when the melodious acclamations of the people should be one of the most cherished elements of Christian service. [Illustration: ISAAC WATTS. ] And Isaac Watts was, by far, the senior of Doddridge; he lived very much the life of a hermit. Although the pastor of a city church, he was sequestered and withdrawn from public life in Theobalds, or Stoke Newington, where, however, he prosecuted a course of sacred labor of a marvellously manifold description, inter-meddling with every kind of learning, and consecrating it all to the great end of the christian ministry and the producing of books, which, whether as catechisms for children, treatises for the formation of mental character, philosophic essays grappling with the difficulties of scholarly minds, or “comfortable words” to “rock the cradle of declining age,” were all to become of value when the nation should awake to a real spiritual power. They are mostly laid aside now; but they have served more than one generation well; and he, beyond question, was the first who taught the Protestant Christian Church in England to sing. His hymns and psalms were sounding on when John Wesley was yet a child, and numbers of them were appropriated in the first Methodist hymn-book. But Watts and Doddridge, by the conditions of their physical and mental being, were unfitted for popular leaders. Perhaps, also, it must be admitted that they had not that which has been called the “instinct for souls;” they were concerned rather to illustrate and expound the truth of God, and to “adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour,” by their lives, than to flash new convictions into the hearts of men. It is characteristic that, good and great as they were, they were both at first inimical to the Great Revival; it seemed to them a suspicious movement. The aged Watts