Jesus, I sing Thy matchless grace. P. Doddridge. [Jesus, the Head of the Church.] This hymn begins in the Doddridge Manuscript, "Jesus, I own Thy matchless grace." It is entitled "Christ our Head” and is undated. It was given with the first line as above in J. Orton's posthumous edition of Doddridge's Hymns, 1755, No. 290, in 5 stanzas of 4 lines, and the title changed to :Christ the Head of the Church,” and again in J. D. Humphreys's edition of the same, 1839. The 1755 text is that in common use.
--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)
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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