Toplady

Toplady, AUGUSTUS MONTAGUE, hymn-writer, was born at Farnham in Surrey, November 4, 1740, and had his education at Westminster and Trinity College, Dublin. He had been awakened at fifteen in an Irish barn, but it was three years more before he had 'a full and clear view of the doctrines of grace.' He took orders in 1762, and became vicar of Broad Henbury, Devonshire, in 1768. During the last three years of his life he preached in a chapel near Leicester Fields in London; and here he died, August 11, 1778. A strenuous defender of Calvinism, he was a bitter controversialist, and is not sparing in terms of abuse, even of Wesley himself. His work, The Church of England vindicated from the Charge of Arminianism (2 vols. 1774), is safely forgotten, as it deserves to be; but his name survives secure of immortality in a hymn like 'Rock of Ages.' As early as 1759 he had published at Dublin Poems on Sacred Subjects; his Psalms and Hymns (1776) was a collection, with but few of his own. The best edition of his whole verse is that by D. Sedgwick (1860); of his entire works collections were published in six vols. in 1794 and in 1825. See Bishop Ryle's Christian Leaders of a Hundred Years Ago (1869).