The Rise and Progress of the Soul in the Valley of Vision

I first purchased The Valley of Vision from my church’s book table while I was in seminary. I’ll never forget laying in my bed and praying these beautiful prayers as my own. It was a deeply spiritual experience, in the best sense of that phrase. Since that night in my dorm room at seminary, I’ve continued to use The Valley of Vision as a regular part of my devotional life.

Recently, Justin Taylor posted an extremely helpful FAQ about Arthur Bennett, the little-known Anglican minister who compiled the “Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions.” As Taylor points out, the prayers in The Valley of Vision were not simply copied from 16th- and 17th-century Puritan divines. Rather, Bennett took prayers from 14 different writers, spanning three centuries, across a fairly broad spectrum of evangelical literature.

One of the writers Bennett drew from was Philip Doddridge (1702-1751). Doddridge’s most famous work, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), led to William Wilberforce’s conversion, and his Dissenting academy at Northampton was an influential training ground for non-Anglican pupils. In his lifetime, Doddridge’s friends and correspondents included Isaac Watts, John Wesley, George Whitefield, Lady Huntingdon, and Count Zinzendorf.

Although Bennett claimed that all his sources “adopted the same attitude toward the Christian religion,” there was more theological variation among his “Puritans” than Bennett may have realized. Doddridge, for example, though a committed and earnest evangelical in terms of piety, was Baxterian in his theology and quite Lockean in his philosophy, Moreover, he eschewed confessional subscription, believed that Christ’s divine nature was created and derived, and did not take a hard line on the necessity of unevangelized persons putting conscious faith in Christ in order to be saved. In short, he was a moderate Calvinist (with a few strange views besides) who emphasized heart religion more than strict theological boundaries.

For several years, I’ve wondered if Doddridge might be responsible for a good number of the prayers in The Valley of Vision (in the Preface, Bennett “sent out” his work with a prayer from Doddridge). The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul consists of 30 chapters. Each chapter concludes with a first-person meditation or a prayer running several pages long. My educated guess is that Bennett used these for at least 30 of his entries. Without too much trouble, I was able to find Bennett’s dependence upon Doddridge.

Here’s just one example:

Bennett is clearly taking the ideas, and often the words, from Doddridge, but it is certainly not a cut-and-paste job. Bennett has taken a long prayer and condensed it into half a dozen complex sentences (and put these into poetic verse in The Valley of Vision). I imagine this was Bennett’s process with Doddridge and with excerpts from the other “Puritans.” It’s a simple task in one sense, and yet a remarkable achievement all the same.