The Gospel Magazine

The Gospel Magazine is a Calvinist, evangelical magazine from the United Kingdom, and is one of the longest running of such periodicals, having been founded in 1766. Most of the editors have been Anglicans. It is currently published bi-monthly.

A number of well-known hymns, including Augustus Montague Toplady's Rock of Ages first appeared in the Gospel Magazine. Toplady, sponsored by Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, used the magazine to attack John Wesley.^[1] Other contributors included John Newton, the organist William Shrubsole (1760–1806), the hymn writer Daniel Turner (1710–98) and (at a later date) the particular Baptist minister John Andrew Jones (1779–1868).^[2]

The Gospel Magazine Trust are currently working to have all of their extant copies—going back 240 years—digitised and uploaded onto their website and available to read on their archives page.

List of editors

• 1766–1774: Joseph Gurney (died 1815)
• 1774–1775 & 1776: William Mason (1719–1791)
• December 1775–June 1776: Augustus Montague Toplady
• Erasmus Middleton (1739–1805), editor 1776–1805

Some time between 1783 and 1796 the Gospel Magazine was suspended for some time and a magazine called the Spiritual Magazine was produced

• 1796–1838: Walter Row, a personal friend of Toplady
• 1839–1840: Bagnall Baker, a High Anglican—but not an Anglo-Catholic
• June 1840–1893: David Alfred Doudney (1811–1893)
• 1893–1894: George Cowell, editor
• 1895–1916: James Ormiston, rector of St Mary le Port Church, Bristol
• 1916–1951: Thomas Houghton
• 1951–1964: William Dodgson Sykes
• 1964–1975: Herbert M. Carson (died 2004)
• 1976–1981: John Tallach, then Free Presbyterian minister in Kinlochbervie, now Church of Scotland minister in Cromarty.[1]
• 1981–2000: Maurice Handford
• 2000– : Edward Malcolm

References

1. ^ Boyd Stanley Schlenther, ‘Hastings , Selina, countess of Huntingdon (1707–1791)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 4 Jan 2008
2. ^ ODNB

External links

• Gospel Magazine official website
• Gospel Magazine page on GraceNet
• David Alfred Doudney and the Gospel Magazine also gives details of several other editors