Mr. Duffield’s own idea of his book is well expressed in the Introduction which follows this Preface. I give it as he left it, although he had noted his purpose to prepare another which would cover the ground more fully. It now remains to say something of the man personally, and in this I am indebted much to the assistance of his faithful coworker in his hymnological studies, Miss Lilian B. Day of Bloomfield, who copied his great _Index of the Latin Hymns_, and who prepared the indexes to both his _English Hymns_ and the present volume.
Samuel Augustus Willoughby Duffield was born at Brooklyn, on September 24th, 1843. His family was of French Huguenot extraction (Du Field), and found a home in the North of Ireland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Between 1725 and 1730 George Duffield, his ancestor by five removes, settled in Lancaster County, as one of the great Ulster emigration which was flowing into Pennsylvania. His son George graduated at Princeton, and after several pastorates was settled in Philadelphia in the Pine Street church. He was an ardent patriot, chaplain in Washington’s army, and Bishop White’s associate in the chaplaincy of the Continental Congress. Of two sons who survived him, one became a minister, while the other took a prominent part in public life. His grandson, Rev. George Duffield, D.D. (1796-1868) was a leader of the New School division of the Presbyterian Church, both before and after the separation of 1837, and while pastor at Carlisle was arraigned for unsound teaching in his work on _Regeneration_. “Barnes, Beman, and Duffield” were the three names most offensive to the Aristarchuses of orthodoxy in that time. He was married to a sister of Dr. George W. Bethune. His son, generally known in our times as Dr. George Duffield, Jr., to distinguish him from his father, was born in 1818 at Carlisle, graduated at Yale College in 1837, and at Union Theological Seminary. One of his pastorates was in Brooklyn, from 1840 to 1847, during which his son, Samuel Augustus Willoughby, was born. He is best known as a hymn-writer, two of his hymns being known and loved wherever the English language is spoken. They are, “Blessed Saviour, Thee I love,” and “Stand up, stand up for Jesus,” the latter being suggested by the dying words of Dudley Tyng in 1858.