THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 113
Hymn 108. Christ, of all my hopes the ground. RALPH WARDLAW, D.D.
He wrote twelve hymns and edited a Selection of Hymns in 1803, for the use of the Scotch Congregationalists. This appeared in the 5th edition of this Selection, 1817, in two parts with thirteen verses; the second part begins, When with wasting sickness worn.
Dr. Wardlaw was born at Dalkeith in 1779, educated at Glasgow University. He became in 1803 minister of Albion Street Congregational Church, Glasgow. In 1811 he was appointed Professor of Divinity in the Congregational Theo logical Hall, Glasgow, which position he held for forty years. He was a profound theologian and expositor, and lived to celebrate the jubilee of his pastorate in Glasgow. His funeral in 1853 was a wonderful demonstration of respect.
Hymn 109. How sweet the name of Jesus sounds. JOHN NEWTON (see 60).
Olncy ffyins t 1779, entitled The Name of Jesus. John Wesley published it in the Arminian Magazine for 1781, but it did not find a place in the Weslcyan Methodist hymn-bouk till 1875. The weak ver. 4 is omitted
By Thee my prayers acceptance gain,
Although with sin denied ; Satan accuses me in vain,
And I am owned as child.
John Newton was born in July, 1725, in London, where his mother, a pious Nonconformist, early stored his mind with Scripture. She died when he was seven, and four years later he went to sea with his father, a stern, silent man, who had been educated at a Jesuit college in Spain. He became an infidel, was flogged as a deserter from the Navy, and for fifteen months was brutally treated by a slave dealer at Sierra Leone with whom he had taken service. He managed to escape in 1747. He had formed an attachment when seventeen for Mary Catlett, then a girl of fourteen, and this proved the one restrain ing influence of his life. He was only prevented from drowning himself by the fear that she would form a bad opinion of him. He was much impressed by reading Stanhope s Thomas d
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