Lord, We Have Broke Thy Holy Laws

Representative Text

1 Lord, we have broke Thy holy laws,
And slighted all Thy grace;
And justly Thy vindictive wrath
Might cast us from Thy face.

2 Yet while such precedents appear
Marked in Thy sacred Book,
We from these depths of guilt and fear
Will to Thy temple look.

3 To Thee, in our Redeemer’s name,
We raise our humble cries;
May these our prayers, perfumed by Him,
Like grateful incense rise.

4 O never may our hopeless eyes
An absent God deplore,
Where the dear temples of Thy love
Shall stand revealed no more.

5 Far from those regions of despair
Appoint our souls a place;
Where not a frown thro’ endless years
Shall veil Thy lovely face.

Source: The Cyber Hymnal #12591

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 >

Text Information

First Line: Lord, we have broke Thy holy laws
Title: Lord, We Have Broke Thy Holy Laws
Author: Philip Doddridge
Meter: 8.6.8.6
Language: English
Copyright: Public Domain

Tune

MARTYRDOM (Wilson)

MARTYRDOM was originally an eighteenth-century Scottish folk melody used for the ballad "Helen of Kirkconnel." Hugh Wilson (b. Fenwick, Ayrshire, Scotland, c. 1766; d. Duntocher, Scotland, 1824) adapted MARTYRDOM into a hymn tune in duple meter around 1800. A triple-meter version of the tune was fir…

Go to tune page >


Media

The Cyber Hymnal #12591
  • PDF (PDF)
  • Noteworthy Composer Score (NWC)

Instances

Instances (1 - 1 of 1)
TextScoreAudio

The Cyber Hymnal #12591

Suggestions or corrections? Contact us