4, 1740, at Farnham, England. His father, a major in the English army,
was killed the following year at the siege of Carthagena. The widowed
mother later removed to Ireland, where her son was educated at Trinity
College, Dublin. It was during this period of his life that Augustus,
then sixteen years of age, chanced to attend an evangelistic service held
in a barn. The preacher was an unlettered layman, but his message so
gripped the heart of the lad that he determined then and there to give
his heart to God. Of this experience Toplady afterward wrote:

"Strange that I who had so long sat under the means of grace in England
should be brought right unto God in an obscure part of Ireland, amidst a
handful of people met together in a barn, and by the ministry of one who
could hardly spell his own name. Surely it was the Lord's doing and is
marvelous."

Toplady was ordained at the age of twenty-two as a minister of the Church
of England. He was frail of body, and after some years he was stricken
with consumption. It was while fighting the ravages of this disease that
he wrote his famous hymn, two years before his death.

The hymn first appeared in the March issue of the _Gospel Magazine_, of
which Toplady was editor, in the year 1776. It was appended to a curious
article in which the author attempted to show by mathematical computation
how dreadful is the sum total of sins committed by a man during a
lifetime, and how impossible it is for a sinner to redeem himself from
this debt of guilt. But Christ, who is the sinner's refuge, has paid the
entire debt. It was this glorious thought that inspired him to sing:

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.

For some years John Wesley, the great founder of Methodism, and Toplady
had been engaged in a theological dispute. Toplady was a confirmed
Calvinist and was intolerant of Wesley's Arminian views. Both men were
intemperate in their language and hurled unseemly and sometimes bitter
invectives at each other. Wesley characterized Toplady as a
"chimney-sweep" and "a lively coxcomb." Toplady retorted by calling
Wesley "Pope John" and declaring that his forehead was "petrified" and
"impervious to a blush." There are reasons for believing that the article
in the _Gospel Magazine_ by Toplady to which we have alluded was for the
purpose of refuting Wesley's teachings, and that "Rock of Ages" was
written at the conclusion of the article as an effective way of