All Hail, Mysterious King

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 >

All hail, mysterious King. P. Doddridge. [Christ the King.] This hymn on Rev. xxii. 16 is not in the “D. MSS." It was first published (posthumously) in his Hymns, &c, 1755 No. 359, in 4 stanzas of 4 lines, and entitled "Christ the Root and Offspring of David, and the Morning Star." It is also repeated in later editions of the same work, and in the corrected and enlarged ed. by J. D. Humphreys, 1839. Its use in Great Britain is limited, and confined almost exclusively to the older collections; but in America it is given in several hymnals.

-- John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)