ABSTRACT
THROUGH the dark winter mornings of the year 1823 a little group of persons might have been seen gathered together for prayer and exhortation in the kitchen of a bleak Suffolk farm house. They were the Rev. Charles Bridges, lately appointed to the cure of Old Newton, a dull village in the dullest part of Suffolk, his young wife, and a few farm labourers assembled before starting on their daily work. The Vicarage house was still unbuilt, and the new Vicar was living with one of his parishioners. Every morning he held a short service before six o'clock, the hour when work began, reading one verse each day of the 119th Psalm and commenting on it. Harriet Bridges, with numb fingers (she never forgot the bitter cold of that kitchen), took notes of his exhortations, and from those notes was compiled the Commentary on Psalm CXIX, which made her husband's name a household word to the pious of his generation, which was translated into many European languages, and which though now dusty and forgotten, may still be found much thumbed on cottage bookshelves. It had its day; it and many other devotional treatises aided the piety of simple folk all over England, and caused their author to be revered by the Evangelical party much as was John Keble by the followers of the Oxford Movement.
