ria.

(After Dodel-Port.)]

DODDRIDGE, PHILIP (1702-1751), English Nonconformist divine, was born in
London on the 26th of June 1702. His father, Daniel Doddridge, was a
London merchant, and his mother the orphan daughter of the Rev. John
Bauman, a Lutheran clergyman who had fled from Prague to escape
religious persecution, and had held for some time the mastership of the
grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames. Before he could read, his mother
taught him the history of the Old and New Testament by the assistance of
some blue Dutch chimney-tiles. He afterwards went to a private school in
London, and in 1712 to the grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames. About
1715 he was removed to a private school at St Albans, where he was much
influenced by the Presbyterian minister, Samuel Clarke. He declined
offers which would have led him into the Anglican ministry or the bar,
and in 1719 entered the very liberal academy for dissenters at Kibworth
in Leicestershire, taught at that time by the Rev. John Jennings, whom
Doddridge succeeded in the ministry at that place in 1723, declining
overtures from Coventry, Pershore and London (Haberdashers' Hall). In
1729, at a general meeting of Nonconformist ministers, he was chosen to
conduct the academy established in that year at Market Harborough. In
the same year he received an invitation from the independent
congregation at Northampton, which he accepted. Here he continued his
multifarious labours; but the church seems to have decreased, and his
many engagements and bulky correspondence interfered seriously with his
pulpit work, and with the discipline of his academy, where he had some
200 students to whom he lectured on philosophy and theology in the
mathematical or Spinozistic style. In 1751 his health, which had never
been good, broke down, and he sailed for Lisbon on the 30th of September
of that year; but the change was unavailing, and he died there on the
26th of October. His popularity as a preacher is said to have been
chiefly due to his "high susceptibility, joined with physical advantages
and perfect sincerity." His sermons were mostly practical in character,
and his great aim was to cultivate in his hearers a spiritual and
devotional frame of mind. He laboured for the attainment of a united
Nonconformist body, which should retain the cultured element without
alienating the uneducated. His principal works are, _The Rise and
Progress of Religion in the Soul_ (1745), whi