Retirement and Meditation

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Return, my roving heart, return

Author: Philip Doddridge
Published in 184 hymnals

Printable scores: PDF, Noteworthy Composer
Audio files: MIDI

Representative Text

1 Return, my roving heart, return,
And life's vain shadows chase no more;
Seek out some solitude to mourn,
And thy forsaken God implore.

2 O thou great God! whose piercing eye
Distinctly marks each deep retreat,
In these sequestered hours draw nigh,
And let me here thy presence meet.

3 Through all the windings of my heart,
My search let heavenly wisdom guide;
And still its beams unerring dart,
Till all be known and purified.

4 Then let the visits of thy love
My inmost soul be made to share,
Till every grace combine to prove
That God has fixed his dwelling there.

Source: The Seventh-Day Adventist Hymn and Tune Book: for use in divine worship #573

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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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