Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/200

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l88 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED

head master. He became curate of St. Botolph, Aldgate, June, 1851. He joined the Roman Churchin 1856; was created D.D. by Pius IX, 1875 ; Superior of the Oblate Fathers at Bayswater, 1879, an< i became well known in London as a preacher and writer. He died at Brighton in 1885, and was buried at the cemetery of St. Mary Magdalen, Mortlake. He edited a volume of verse and prose and a small hymn-book.

Hymn 252. Gracious Spirit, dwell with rne. THOMAS TOKE LYNCH (1818-71).

Mr. Lynch was the son of a surgeon, was born at Dunmow in 1818, and studied for a time at Highbury Independent College. In 1847 he became minister in Highgate, and in 1862 at Mornington Church, Hampstead Road, where he was pastor till his death in 1871. The freshness and spirituality of his preaching drew many thoughtful hearers around him.

As a child he had been delicate, and wrote hymns and poems. Before he was fifteen he had written a dedication to himself for the volume he hoped some day to publish. He had many a laugh over this in later years. His hymns appeared in The Rivulet: A Contribution to Sacred Song, 1855. Gracious Spirit, dwell with me, is in the first edition. The Rivulet roused a fierce controversy, and was unsparingly denounced by Dr. John Campbell in the Eclectic Review for what was styled its negative theology. The Congregational Union was split into parties by this controversy, but Dr. Binney defended Lynch s book, and it is now almost regarded as a Noncon formist Christian Year. It is difficult in our day to understand how such a storm arose over so inoffensive a volume.

Hymn 253. Spirit blest, who art adored.

THOMAS BENSON POLLOCK.

The Rev. T. B. Pollock, M.A. (1836-96), graduated in 1859 at Trinity College, Dublin, where he gained the prize for English verse. He was his brother s curate at St. Alban s, Birmingham, and succeeded him in the living, which wore down his health as it had done that of his brother.

Mr. Pollock was one of our most successful composers of metrical litanies. His Metrical Litanies appeared in 1870. His litanies on the Seven Words on the Cross, published in

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