How long shall dreams of creature-bliss

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How long shall dreams of creature-bliss

Author: Philip Doddridge
Published in 36 hymnals

Representative Text

1 How long shall dreams of creature-bliss
Our flatt'ring hopes employ,
And mock our fond deluded eyes
With visionary joy?

2 How wretched they, that leave the Lord,
And from his word withdraw,
That lose his gospel from their sight
And wander from his law!

3 O thou eternal spring of good,
Whence living waters flow!
Let not our thirsty erring souls
To broken cisterns go.

4 Like characters inscrib'd in dust,
Are sinners borne away;
And all the treasures they can boast,
The portion of a day.

Source: A Collection of Hymns and Prayers, for Public and Private Worship #60

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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 >

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First Line:	How long shall dreams of creature-bliss
Author:	Philip Doddridge
Copyright:	Public Domain

Jeremiah 3:23
(hymns)

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Notes

How long shall dreams of creature [earthly] bliss? P. Doddridge. [God the Salvation of His People.] Written Aug. 15, 1736, Doddridge Manuscript, and published in his (posthumous) Hymns, &c, 1755, No. 125, in 4 stanzas of 4 lines; and again in J. D. Humphreys's edition of the same, 1839. In one or two American collections it begins, "How long shall dreams of earthly bliss?" as in the Unitarian Hymns for the Church of Christ, Boston, 1853.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

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