Why will ye lavish out your years

Top Text Author Text Info Notes Tune Timeline Page Scans Instances

Why will ye lavish out your years

Author: Philip Doddridge
Tune: DESIRE (Woodbury)
Published in 30 hymnals

Representative Text

1 Why will ye lavish out your years
Amidst a thousand trifling cares,
While, in the various range of thought,
The one thing needful is forgot?

2 Why will ye chase the fleeting wind
And famish an immortal mind,
While angels with regret look down,
To see you spurn a heav'nly crown?

3 Th'eternal God calls from above,
And Jesus pleads His dying love;
Awaken'd conscience gives you pain:
And shall they join their please in vain?

4 Not so your dying eyes shall view
Those objects which ye now pursue;
Not so shall heaven and hell appear
When the decisive hour is near.

5 Almighty God! Thine aid impart,
To fix conviction on the heart:
Thy power can clear the darkest eyes,
And make the haughtiest scorner wise.

Source: Book of Worship (Rev. ed.) #277

All representative texts • Compare texts ^ top

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 >

^ top

Text Information

Text Information

First Line:	Why will ye lavish out your years
Author:	Philip Doddridge
Language:	English
Copyright:	Public Domain

^ top

Notes

Why will ye lavish out your years. P. Doddridge. [Care of the Soul]. In the D manuscript this hymn is undated, but is placed between two hymns which are dated respectively Oct. 29,1735, and November 16, 1735. It was published in Job Orton's posthumous edition of Doddridge's Hymns, &c, 1755, No. 206, in 5 stanzas of 4 lines, and again in J. D. Humphreys's edition of the same, 1839, No. 229. It is given in most American hymn-books as "Why will ye waste in trifling cares?"

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)

^ top