Philip Doddridge, Sr. 

Rev. Dr. Philip Doddridge (1702-51) was one of the most influential Independent [Congregational] ministers of his day. He was the son of Daniel Doddridge (d. 1715) (his mother died in 1711) and was raised in London. Only one of his 19 brothers and sisters (he was the youngest) survived into adulthood (his sister, Elizabeth). In 1715 he was sent to St. Albans, where he attended a local school and came under the influence of Samuel Clark (1684-1750), the local Independent minister there. He boarded in his home and Clark became a father figure to him. They visited and corresponded with each other frequently until Clark's death in 1750.  In 1719 Doddridge left St. Albans for Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire where he studied under John Jennings, the local Independent minister. He was approved for the ministry in 1723 (the year Jennings died). He replaced Jennings at Kibworth and remained there through 1728, developing a brief attachment to Jenny Jennings, later the wife of Dr John Aikin, during that time. In 1729 he began teaching John Jennings, Jr., and some other students, which encouraged him to entertain the idea of continuing an academy under the methods of Dr. Jennings, especially the idea of freedom of inquiry. He was called to the pastorate at Castle Hill, Northampton, replacing Thomas Tingey, in December 1729 and was ordained there in March 1730. He met Mercy Maris (1709-90), originally from Worcester, in the summer of 1730 in Coventry, and they were married in late December of that year. She would become his single greatest correspondent. Four of their children died young and Mercy endured several miscarriages as well.  Three daughters and one son survived into adulthood. Doddridge remained minister and teacher at Northampton until his death in October 1751, helping to build and unite the dissenting interest in Northamptonshire. During those two decades he became one of the most popular figures in English dissent, making his mark not only as a preacher but also as a theological and devotional writer, tutor and educator, hymn writer, and correspondent of evangelical figures, both among dissenters, Methodists, and the established church, in England, America, and on the Continent. His most famous work was The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), a work that was immensely popular among evangelicals of the last half of the eighteenth century for its emphasis upon practical, or ‘experimental’, religion.  Aside from Rise and Progress, his most popular work in the eighteenth century was his Life of Colonel Gardiner (1745), which served as a model of evangelical biography into the nineteenth century. Doddridge’s greatest work was The Family Expositor (5 vols, 1738-56), which was read widely in America and translated into several languages.  Two important posthumous works were Job Orton’s edition of Doddridge’s Hymns founded on Various Texts in the Holy Scriptures (1755), and Doddridge’s Course of Lectures (1763). 

For more on Doddridge, see Geoffrey Nuttall, ed., Philip Doddridge 1702-51: His Contribution to English Religion (London: Independent Press, 1951); Isabel Rivers, "Philip Doddridge," Oxford Dictionary National Biography; Isabel Rivers, "Philip Doddridge's New Testament: The Family Expositor (1739-56)," in The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences, ed.Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); Tessa Whitehouse, "The Family Expositor, the Doddridge Circle and the Booksellers," The Library 11.3 (2010), 321-44; Tessa Whitehouse, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720-1800 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).