Great God, We Sing Your Guiding Hand

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 >

Great God, we sing that [Thy] mighty hand. P. Doddridge. [New Year.] Published by J. Orton in the posthumous edition of Doddridge's Hymns, &c, 1755, No. 157, in 5 stanzas of 4 lines, and again with variations in the text, by J. D. Humphreys's edition of the same, 1839, No. 282, the general heading in both being, "Help obtained of God, Acts xxvi. 22. For the New Year. "In some collections it begins, "Great God, we praise Thy mighty hand"; and in others, "Great God, we sing Thy mighty hand." Usually, however, the alterations, both in the English and American hymn-books, are very slight.

--John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)