Philip Doddridge's Chapel, Northampton

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Tue, 22/09/2026 - 00:00

I came down to Northampton yesterday. Thanks to a bus breaking down, my train was missed, and I had to buy another rail ticket at three times the cost. Nevertheless, emerging from the bowels of public transportation into the sunny, blue skies of Northamptonshire was a pleasure. I had already put my shorts away for the year and wore jeans and a jumper but I wish I hadn’t, for it is so warm. Northampton is an attractive town, though most of its inhabitants appear to have been imported. If diversity is our strength (which it isn’t), Northampton is a stronghold.

My hotel was fortuitously close to one of my intended calls: Philip Dodridge’s Chapel. Just a stone’s throw away, this stately old church dates back to 1695 with some inevitable, Victorian extensions and improvements. Although I do not expect to gain entry to behold the marvels within, this elderly chapel may now be ticked off my ‘to do’ list. Once Presbyterian but now United Reformed, it was a great bastion of nonconformity, forged in the white fires of 1662's Great Ejection of the puritans from the Church of England. Doddridge was minister from 1729 until his death in 1751, even though he was a Congregationalist by persuasion, demonstrating the easy passage between the two churches and their differing understandings of church government. As well as authoring The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, so beloved by Wesley and Spurgeon, his hymn O Happy Day is still sung at the likes of Salem Chapel. It reminds unbelievers of their need for an actual conversion, while reminding the converted of that wonderful day when they first believed. He skilfully manoeuvres the scriptural tension between the individual freely professing faith and God’s own sovereign work in its execution, describing both the sinner’s choice and the Saviour’s draw:

O Happy day that fixed my choice

on Thee, my Saviour and my God!

Well may this glowing heart rejoice,

and tell its raptures all abroad.

'Tis done; the great transaction’s done!

I am my Lord's, and He is mine.

He drew me, and I followed on,

charmed to confess the voice divine.

Now rest, my long-divided heart;

fixed on this blissful centre, rest.

Here have I found a nobler part;

with Him of every good possessed.