nd manuscript, of which they are the favored
guardians, but of which their shelves are in the fair way to become not
the dormitory alone, but the sepulchre? Nor was it to the mere
intellectual culture of his pupils that Dr. Doddridge directed his
labors. His academy was a church within a church; and not content with
the ministrations which its members shared in common with his stated
congregation, this indefatigable man took the pains to prepare and
preach many occasional sermons to the students. These, and his formal
addresses, as well as his personal interviews, had such an effect, that
out of the two hundred young men who came under his instructions,
seventy made their first public profession of Christianity during their
sojourn at Northampton....

Whilst in labors for his students and his people thus abundant,
Doddridge was secretly engaged on a task which he intended for the
Church at large. Ever since his first initiation into the Bible story,
as he studied the Dutch tiles on his mother's knee, that book had been
the nucleus round which all his vast reading and information revolved
and arranged itself; and he early formed the purpose of doing something
effectual for its illustration. Element by element the plan of the
"Family Expositor" evolved, and he set to work on a New Testament
Commentary, which should at once instruct the uninformed, edify the
devout, and facilitate the studies of the learned. Happy is the man who
has a "magnum opus" on hand! Be it an "Excursion" poem, or a Southey's
"Portugal," or a Neandrine "Church History,"--to the fond projector
there is no end of congenial occupation, and, provided he never
completes it, there will be no break in the blissful illusion. Whenever
he walks abroad, he picks up some dainty herb for his growthful Pegasus;
or, we should rather say, some new bricks for his posthumous pyramid.
And wherever he goes he is flattered by perceiving that his book is the
very desideratum for which the world is unwittingly waiting; and in his
sleeve he smiles benevolently to think how happy mankind will be as soon
as he vouchsafes his epic or his story. It is delightful to us to think
of all the joys with which, for twenty years, that Expositor filled the
dear mind of Dr. Doddridge; how one felicitous rendering was suggested
after another; how a bright solution of a textual difficulty would rouse
him an hour before his usual, and set the study fire a blazing at four
o'clock of a winter