Augustus Toplady

Augustus Montague Toplady was converted at sixteen in a barn in County Wexford, listening to an unlettered Methodist layman preach - a fact he liked to repeat, since it embarrassed everyone's assumptions about learning. He took Anglican orders, became vicar of a Devon parish, and turned into the fiercest Calvinist controversialist of his generation, attacking John Wesley in print in language so personal that his admirers have been apologizing for it ever since. The hymn everyone knows he published in 1776 in the magazine he edited, closing an article on the national debt with the argument that no one can pay his own; the beloved story of him sheltering from a storm in a cleft rock at Burrington Combe came along later and cannot be traced to his lifetime. Consumption killed him at thirty-eight. On his deathbed he asked to be lifted up so he could tell visitors what he could see, and refused to take back a word of his doctrine.