[In the following essay, Hope examines the achievements of Watts in relation to English hymnody and praises his contributions to this field.]

In any account of the development of the English hymn, the name of Isaac Watts must occupy a place of high honor. To be sure, it would doubtless be correct to say that the very greatest of all English hymn-writers was not Watts, but Charles Wesley. But even so, it may well be thought that Watts's over all contribution to English hymnody was at least as great as that of any other, Wesley included.

The chief facts concerning the life of Isaac Watts can be briefly summarized. He was born in Southampton, England, on July 17, 1674, the son of a Dissenting schoolmaster who later went into business. Since during the reign of King Charles II (1660-85) Nonconformity was penalized by law in England, Watts's father—like such other Dissenters as John Bunyan—more than once went to prison for his religious convictions. Young Watts received his early education at the Grammar School of his native town, which he attended from 1680 till 1690. At that time, and indeed down to the nineteenth century, Nonconformists were debarred from the two English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Accordingly, Watts pursued his higher studies at the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington, London, between 1690 and 1694. As the late Bernard L. Manning has pointed out, such academies as the one at which Watts studied had at least one notable advantage over the older universities at that time, inasmuch as they developed a wider conception of education, in which not only mathematics and classics, but also philosophy, natural science, history and modern languages found a place. Thus Watts was enabled to lay the foundations of a wide and varied scholarship.

After leaving the Academy, Watts spent the next two years at home in Southampton. In 1696 he became tutor to the family of Sir John Hartopp, a well-known London Nonconformist, with whom he remained until 1702. Between 1699 and 1702 Watts acted as part-time assistant to the Rev. Dr. Isaac Chauncey, minister of the important Independent (i.e., Congregational) chapel at Mark Lane, London, of which Hartopp was a member; and in the latter year he was installed as sole pastor. Ill-health, however, dogged his footsteps almost from the very outset of his ministry. As early as 1703 Watts was obliged to seek pulpit assistance from the Rev. Samuel Price, who in 1713 was given the official status of co-pastor. So deeply entrenched was Watts, however, in the loyalty and affection of his people, that he was not allowed to sever his official connection with the congregation, of which he remained senior minister all the rest of his life. About this time—the exact date is not quite certain, but it must have been between 1712 and 1714—Watts accepted the invitation of a wealthy friend, Sir Thomas Abney by name, to live in his (Abney's) home, first in the country at Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, and then at Stoke Newington, London; and in the Abney home he remained as an honored guest until his death in 1748.

Watts never married. So far as is known, the only lady to whom he ever proposed was a Miss Elizabeth Singer, afterwards Mrs. Thomas Rowe. Miss Singer, who was something of a poetess herself, had been greatly attracted by Watts's writings. But when the two of them met, though Watts fell deeply in love with her, she was so disappointed by his ungainly and unprepossessing appearance that she declined to be his wife, adding—not perhaps very tactfully or graciously—“Mr. Watts, I only wish I could say that I admire the casket as much as I admire the jewel.” Thereafter Watts, while retaining this lady's staunch friendship to the end of her life, remained a bachelor.

Though he was never in robust health, Watts managed to crowd into his life a large volume of literary activity:

I. He wrote educational treatises, of which the most important were (a) his Logic, or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth, 1724, which was for many years used as a text-book at Oxford University and other educational institutions; and (b) his “Knowledge of the Heavens and Earth Made Easy,” 1725.

II. Watts composed several works of controversial divinity, such as The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity, 1722, Dissertations Relating to the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity, 1725, and Useful and Important Questions Concerning Jesus the Son of God, 1746. Some of his theological writings caused him to be accused of Arian heresy, i.e. denial of the full and essential deity of Jesus Christ, but without sufficient justification.

III. Watts's poetical volume, Horæ Lyricæ: Poems Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, published in 1706, caused Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eminent eighteenth century literary critic, to include Watts in his famous Lives of the Poets, 1781, which has been described as “perhaps the greatest body of critical opinion in the English language.” There Dr. Johnson appraises Watts's poetry thus: “As a poet, had he been only a poet, he would probably have stood high among the authors with whom he is now associated. For his judgment was exact, and he noted beauties and faults with very nice discernment; his imagination, as the ‘Dacian Battle’ proves, was vigorous and effective, and the stores of knowledge were large by which his fancy was to be supplied. His ear was well-tuned, and his diction was elegant and copious; but his devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well.” This volume of Watts's poems, it may be noted, after running through many editions, was reissued in 1834 in a series of “Sacred Classics,” with a memoir of the author by Robert Southey, the then Poet Laureate of Great Britain.

But unquestionably Watts's sacred songs are his greatest literary as well as religious achievement; and it is by them that he will always be remembered. It appears that he began to compose hymns in the following circumstances. One Sunday, in or about the year 1695, Watts, returning home from the Independent service—he was then living with his parents at Southampton—complained about the uncouthness of the psalms which had been sung, declaring them to be lacking in both beauty and dignity. “Try then,” said his father, “whether you can produce something better.” Taking up this challenge, young Watts bent his energies to the task, and in due course produced the well-known hymn whose first three stanzas run thus:

Behold the glories of the Lamb
          Amidst His Father's throne;
Prepare new honors for His name,
          And songs before unknown.
Let elders worship at His feet,
          The Church adore around,
With vials full of odors sweet,
          And harps of sweeter sound;
These are the prayers of all the saints,
          And these the hymns they raise.
Jesus is kind to our complaints,
          He loves to hear our praise.

This was the beginning of a prolific career of hymn-writing. Watts's hymns, numbering around seven hundred and fifty in all, were scattered in the pages of seven different works:

• Horæ Lyricæ, 1706; second edition 1709.
• Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707; second edition 1709.
• Divine and Moral Songs, 1715.
• Psalms of David, 1719.
• Sermons, 1721-27.
• Reliquiæ Juveniles, 1734.
• Remnants of Time, 1736.

But it is not unfair to say that the best of his hymns were written by 1719; thereafter, though he continued to compose and to publish, his inspiration seemed to falter and fail.

How are Watts's hymns to be characterized? They deal with the central themes of the Christian faith, from that strictly Calvinistic point of view in which he was brought up and which he sincerely held. They emphasize the brevity, weakness, and general unsatisfactoriness of human life apart from God, as in the stanza:

How vain are all things here below,
          How false, and yet how fair!
Each pleasure hath its poison too,
          And every sweet a snare.

They dwell upon the glory of Jesus Christ's incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and present intercession, as in the lines:

Jesus, my Great High Priest,
          Offered His blood and died;
My guilty conscience seeks
          No sacrifice beside;
His powerful blood did once atone,
And now it pleads before the throne.

And they picture the fate of the lost in fearsome terms, as in the stanza:

There is a dreadful hell,
          And everlasting pains;
Where sinners must with devils dwell
          In dungeons, fire, and chains.

As might be expected in an author so prolific, the hymns of Watts are of uneven poetical quality. He can be appallingly, almost incredibly, prosaic and can write sheer doggerel, as in such lines as these:

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
          For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
          For 'tis their nature to;

or

Birds in their little nests agree,
          And 'tis a shameful sight
When children of one family
          Fall out, and chide, and fight;

or

The tulip and the butterfly
Appear in gayer coats than I;
Let me be drest fine as I will,
Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.

In some cases Watts does not manage his rhymes very gracefully, in this matter comparing unfavorably with Charles Wesley. Thus, he writes:

Not all the outward forms on earth,
          Nor rites that God has given,
Nor will of man, nor blood, nor birth,
          Can raise the soul to heaven.
The sovereign will of God alone
          Creates us heirs of grace,
Born in the image of His Son,
          A new peculiar race.

But when every defect in Watts's hymns has been freely admitted, it remains true that he rendered three outstanding services to English hymnody:

I. He, more than anyone else, created for the singing of hymns that place which it has always subsequently retained in English services of public worship. Lord Selborne has called Watts “the father of English hymnody;” and Bernard L. Manning has said that “to Watts more than any other man, is due the triumph of the hymn in English worship. All later hymn-writers, even when they excel him, are his debtors.”

Among the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, there were two quite contrasted views concerning the propriety of singing hymns “of human composition” at Christian public worship. On the one hand, Martin Luther, influenced by his love of German folksong and his regard for the Latin hymns of the Catholic Church, strongly favored the singing of vernacular hymns by worshipping congregations. He not only composed thirty-seven hymns himself—the most famous of which, of course, is “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”—but he also began a tradition of hymn composition in the Lutheran Church which found worthy expression in hymnists like Paul Gerhardt (1607-76).

John Calvin, on the other hand, disgusted with the frivolity of contemporary French song, averse to everything which savored of Romanism, and hostile to anything which might seem to detract from the paramount authority of Holy Scripture, from the outset of his ministry in Geneva set his face against the introduction of “human hymns.” All that he would permit for use in congregational praise were metrical versions of Bible passages, particularly the psalms.

Under the influence of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, England at the Reformation followed the Calvinistic pattern of public praise, as Scotland did under John Knox and Andrew Melville. From the Reformation down to the end of the seventeenth century, the staple of public praise in England, both in Anglican and Nonconformist churches, consisted of metrical psalms. Of these the most widely used version was that of Sternhold and Hopkins, which, issued in 1561-2, achieved such widespread popularity as to acquire something of the character of “an almost authorized psalm book.” This “Old Version,” as it came to be called,—despite its popularity—left much to be desired from the literary point of view. Indeed, one authority says that “for literary use, it must be confessed to be almost dead. The likeness to the Hebrew is that of the corpse to the living body.” And another critic, hearing a parish clerk sing these psalms, expressed his views in the following epigram:

Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualms,
When they translated David's psalms,
          To make the heart right glad;
But had it been King David's fate,
To hear thee sing and them translate,
          By—, 'twould set him mad.

As can readily be imagined, under those circumstances congregational praise was in a parlous state. Isaac Watts, in the preface to his Hymns in 1707, described the situation, probably without much exaggeration, thus: “While we sing the praises of God in His Church we are employed in that part of worship which of all others is nearest akin to heaven; and it is a pity that this should be performed the worst upon earth … To see the dull indifference, the neglect and the thoughtless air that sits upon the faces of a whole assembly while the Psalm is on their lips, might tempt even a charitable observer to suspect the fervency of inward religion.” “Many ministers and private Christians,” he goes on to say, “have long groaned under this inconvenience … At their importunate and repeated requests I have for some years devoted many hours of leisure to this service.”

To be sure, even before Watts's day some attempts had been made to remedy this deplorable state of affairs. Thus, in 1696 Messrs Tate and Brady issued their “New Version” of the Psalms; but this, though employed in the London area, did not supersede the “Old Version” on any large scale. Again, other portions of Scripture, besides the psalms, were turned into verse; for example, in 1623 George Wither published his Hymns and Songs of the Church, the first part of which consisted of Bible paraphrases. Even original hymns, which made no pretence of being based upon any particular passage of Scripture, were written and published in the seventeenth century: for instance, Bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711) in 1674 published a Manual of Prayers for the use of the scholars of Winchester College, that school with which he was then associated. This Manual contained the injunction, “Be sure to say the Morning and Evening Hymn in your chamber devoutly.” Though Ken's morning and evening hymns were not included in his Manual until 1694, it seems certain that they were in use not long after the Restoration of 1660. Watts himself, in the preface to his Hymns of 1707, declared that some ministers had already begun to use “evangelical hymns.” But until Watts published his hymns, the employment of such compositions in public worship in England was very much the exception and not the rule. The late Dr. Louis F. Benson was quite right in affirming that “there was no English Hymnody in any effective sense until the eighteenth century” (The English Hymn, p. 21). The main begetter of this hymnody was Isaac Watts.

Though it would hardly be correct to say that Watts's hymns achieved universal acclaim overnight, before many years had passed their excellence, both from the religious and the literary point of view, won for them widespread recognition and use. Thus, in 1744 Dr. Philip Doddridge could write to his friend Watts thus: “I congratulate you that by your sacred poetry, especially by your Psalms and your Hymns, you are leading the worship and I trust animating the devotion of myriads in our public assemblies every Sabbath, and in their families and closets every day. This, Sir, at least so far as it relates to the service of the sanctuary, is an unparalleled favor, by which God hath been pleased to distinguish you, I may boldly say it, beyond any of His servants now upon earth.” (Quoted by Dr. Louis F. Benson, “The English Hymn,” p. 124). So strong a hold, indeed, did Watts's hymns take in Independent circles that, as late as the nineteenth century, there were—so it is said—many older Congregationalists who refused to sing any other hymns, and who kept their seats when such were announced! Thus, under Watts's inspiration, hymns secured that place of importance as vehicles of congregational praise which they have ever since enjoyed in services of public worship in England.

II. Watts, both by his precept and by his example, gave a great impetus to hymn-writing in England. Not merely was he an indefatigable hymn-writer himself; but he also set others to write hymns for public worship and thus follow the trail which he had been so largely instrumental in blazing. The best known of these disciples of Watts is Philip Doddridge (1702-51), his friend and later contemporary. Doddridge composed, among others, such pieces as the communion hymn, “My God, and is Thy table spread,” and the advent hymn, “Hark the glad sound, the Saviour comes,” besides such other popular hymns as “Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve” and “Ye servants of the Lord.” Other disciples of Watts in the field of hymn-writing include men like Simon Browne (1680-1732), the author of the hymns, “O how can they look up to heaven,” and “Lord, at Thy feet we sinners lie;” Thomas Gibbons (1720-1785), one of Watts's biographers, who wrote such hymns as “Now let our souls on wings sublime” and “Great God, the nations of the earth;” and Samuel Medley (1738-1799), the author of “Come, join ye saints with heart and voice.” Though doubtless these disciples of Watts are not well known to modern congregations, since very few of their compositions are generally included in recent hymnals, they made quite a significant contribution in their day and generation to the stock of hymns suitable for public praise in Christian churches.

Watts's influence as a hymn-writer extended even to Scotland. For example, Ralph Erskine (1685-1752), one of the members of a group who broke away from the Church of Scotland in 1733 and set up ecclesiastical housekeeping on their own account as the “Original Secession Church,” published Scripture Songs in 1750-2, in which Watts's hymns were laid under heavy contribution.

III. Watts composed a number of hymns which no subsequent collection laying claim to anything like completeness has been able to omit; and some of his compositions are rightly regarded as among the very greatest hymns in the English language. Of course, many other hymns of his composition have long since passed into well-merited oblivion, from which, it is safe to assert, they will never be disinterred, at any rate for purposes of congregational praise. This is due partly to their defects of construction, to which reference has been made above. In part, again, it is due to changed theological conceptions; for instance, present-day church members, among many of whom the fires of hell melt no ice, could hardly be expected to sing with any gusto a hymn in which the licking flames and sizzling flesh of the nether regions are described with gaunt realism. Again, since Watts's day certain other hymn-writers—for example, and in particular, Charles Wesley—have produced hymns whose superior merits have caused them to replace some of Watts's compositions in modern collections of hymns for congregational singing.

But at his best Watts deals with the greatest themes of Christian experience, of “ruin, redemption, and regeneration,” with a depth of conviction, a grace and dignity, and a cosmic range and sweep, which few hymn-writers have ever equalled, much less surpassed. Obvious examples of such hymns—which are, of course, included in every modern anthology—are, “O God, our help in ages past,” “There is a land of pure delight,” “Come, we that love the Lord,” Before Jehovah's awful throne,” “Blest morning, whose first dawning rays, “Come, let us join our cheerful songs,” “I'm not ashamed to own my Lord,” and “Jesus shall reign where'er the sun”—a remarkable hymn, considering that it was written long before the beginning of the great modern missionary movement in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. Above all, Watts wrote “When I survey the wondrous cross.” In the Life of John Watson, by Sir Willium Robertson Nicoll, it is recorded that Matthew Arnold, the distinguished English literary critic, on the last day of his life in 1888 attended morning service in the Sefton Park Presbyterian Church Liverpool, England, in which his brother-in-law, with whom he was staying at the time, was a regular worshipper. The minister of the church, Dr. John Watson, preached a sermon on “The cross of Christ;” and one of the hymns sung during the service was “When I survey the wondrous cross.” Arnold, when he reached his brother-in-law's home after church, repeated the lines of Watts's hymn, declaring it to be the finest in the English language. Such commendation is praise indeed, coming as it does from Arnold, a critic of fastidious literary taste, who, moreover, had no particular sympathy with English Dissent.

In view of these massive achievements of Watts, it is not surprising that he has been hailed as one of the greatest benefactors of English hymnody. And in this age, which delights to remember and to celebrate significant anniversaries, the bicentenary of his death ought not to pass unnoticed or unrecognized by those who believe in the importance of worthy public praise in the Christian Church.