Augustus Montague Toplady

Augustus Montague Toplady was an English Anglican clergyman, poet, editor, and theological controversialist born at Farnham, Surrey, in 1740. His father, a British army officer, died when Toplady was an infant. After Westminster School, Toplady studied at Trinity College Dublin. During his teenage years in Ireland he underwent an evangelical conversion that he later described as occurring at a lay-led meeting, and he subsequently became a convinced Calvinist.

Toplady was ordained in the Church of England in 1762 and eventually served as vicar of Broadhembury in Devon. He also preached in chapels associated with the evangelical revival, wrote for “The Gospel Magazine” under several signatures, and briefly served as its editor beginning in late 1775. In 1776 he accepted a lectureship at the French Calvinist Reformed Church in Orange Street, Leicester Fields, London. His sharp public controversy with John Wesley over predestination and Christian perfection became one of the more contentious theological disputes of eighteenth-century evangelicalism.

Toplady’s 1776 “Psalms and Hymns for Public and Private Worship” contained more than four hundred texts and included the authorized form of “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.” He died in London in 1778 at only thirty-seven. Although much of his controversial prose faded from regular use, this hymn became his enduring contribution to congregational song.