DODDRIDGE, Philip (1702-1751), a celebrated nonconformist divine, was born in 1702. His father, Daniel Doddridge, was a London merchant, and his mother the orphan daughter of the Rev. John Bauman, a Bohemian clergyman who had fled to England to escape religious persecution, and had held for some time the mastership of the grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames. He was the youngest of a family of twenty, of whom there was at his birth only one other child, a daughter, surviving. It is also remarkable that he himself at his birth was put aside as actually dead, and was only preserved alive owing to the accidental glance of one of the attendants, who fancied she perceived a feeble heaving of the infant’s chest, and was successful in rekindling the almost extinguished vital spark. Before he could read, his mother taught him the history-of the Old and New Testament by the assistance of some blue Dutch tiles; and these stories, he says, were the means of enforcing such good impressions on his heart as never afterwards wore out. When sufficiently old to leave the paternal roof he was placed under the tuition of the Rev. Mr Scott, who taught a private school in London, and on attaining his tenth year he was sent to the grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames. About 1715 he was removed to a private school at St Albans, where he began to keep an exact account of his time in order the better to improve himself by private meditation and study, and was in the habit during his walks of entering the neighbouring cottages to read to the inmates a few pages from the Bible or from some religious book. Through the interest of friends a proposal was made to him, in 1719, which would have enabled him to enter the English bar; but receiving at the same time an invitation to study for the ...