Philip Doddridge 

Philip Doddridge (1702-51) was one of the most influential Independent ministers of his day, studied under John Jennings at Kibworth and Hinckley, Leicestershire. Doddridge began his ministry after Jennings’s decease at Kibworth Beauchamp in 1723.  In 1729 he moved the congregation and his students to Northampton, where he was ordained pastor of the Congregational church at Castle Hill in 1730. He remained here the rest of his life, becoming a widely heard preacher and even more widely read theological and devotional writer.  His school flourished as well.  His most famous work was The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), a work that was immensely popular among evangelicals of the last half of the eighteenth century for its emphasis upon practical, or ‘experimental’, religion.  He considered his greatest work to be The Family Expositor (5 vols, 1738-56), which was read widely in America and translated into several languages.  Another influential work was his Course of Lectures (1763).  He was also a noted hymn writer and a forerunner of what would later become evangelical Calvinism; they were published in Job Orton’s posthumous edition of Doddridge’s Hymns founded on Various Texts in the Holy Scriptures (1755).

For more on Doddridge, see Geoffrey Nuttall, ed., Philip Doddridge 1702-51: His Contribution to English Religion (London: Independent Press, 1951); Isabel Rivers, "Philip Doddridge," Oxford Dictionary National Biography; Isabel Rivers, "Philip Doddridge's New Testament: The Family Expositor (1739-56)," in The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences, ed.Hannibal Hamlin and Norman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); Tessa Whitehouse, "The Family Expositor, the Doddridge Circle and the Booksellers," The Library 11.3 (2010), 321-44; Tessa Whitehouse, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720-1800 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).