Part 2 — Chapter XV ISAAC WATTS AND HIS PERIOD

I. THE HYMNIC NEED OF THE TIME

We have now reached the point in the development of the English hymn where the shortcomings of the metrical versions of the Psalms were keenly realized, and where the conception of the practicable congregational hymn was clarified and the model definitely established.

Someone of combative courage and of organizing ability was needed who would break down the wall of mere usage and custom in the churches—of the sheerly mechanical tradition and mental inertia; all the better, if he could replace the outworn Psalm versions with practicable congregational hymns that would more intelligently and efficiently voice the faith and the experience of God’s people. He needed to be a man of clear vision of the essential lyric needs of the church, of a clear conception of the type of hymns best fitted to supply those needs, of literary culture and adaptativeness, and of a high moral courage to face and overcome the extreme conservativeness that seems to be inherent in all ecclesiastical organizations.

II. THE LIFE OF WATTS

In the distinct providence of God, the man appeared, exactly fitted for the important task. Isaac Watts was born at Southampton, England, July 17, 1674, the son of a very intelligent 169 and devout schoolmaster, who during the reign of Charles II was imprisoned and exiled from his family for his nonconformity. Isaac was extraordinarily precocious, studying Greek and Hebrew at the age of eight years, writing verses when a mere child, and attempting Latin and English poetry in his schooldays. His brilliant scholarship brought him offers of a career at one of the universities, but he refused, being staunch in his nonconformity.

He became a Nonconformist minister in 1698 and pastor of the Independent Church, Berry Street, London, in 1702. His health being frail, owing to his excessive study as a student, he was given an assistant, Rev. Samuel Price, with whom he spent “many harmonious years of fellowship in the Gospel.”

Visiting Sir Thomas Abney, a staunch Dissenter living at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, for a week, Watts was persuaded to remain with him and his wife permanently, making his home with them the rest of his life. He never married. His health was always precarious, and his pastorate at the Berry Street Independent Church, which ended only with his death, was largely nominal.

We rarely think of Isaac Watts as anything more than a hymn writer, but his intellectual activities were wide and his writing outside of hymnody extensive. He wrote a number of treatises on Theology. His textbooks on Geography, Astronomy, and Logic were used in the English universities, and at Yale and Harvard.

III. WATTS AS A HYMN WRITER

Watts had been recognized from childhood as having a talent in the making of verses. Returning from a church service in Southampton, he sharply criticized the hymns of Barton—an inferior contemporary of John Mason. His devout father, a deacon in the church, playfully, perhaps seriously, replied that he should try his skill in supplying a better one. The challenge was accepted and he brought his father the hymn:

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He little realized that it was his life’s most illustrious task to fulfill the exhortation of the last two lines.

The success of the new hymn when lined out to the congregation and sung by them led to a demand for more. Thus unconsciously and unpretentiously was ushered in a new epoch in the devotional singing of the Christian Church. Presumably this occurred in his twenty-first year, for this and the succeeding year were spent at home in Southampton in varied studies and in writing hymns.

These hymns seem to have remained in manuscript for some years, despite the earnest protest of his younger brother, who declared that “Mason now reduces this kind of writing to a sort of yawning indifference, and honest Barton chimes us asleep.” This literary judgment of young Enoch must not be taken too seriously, except as expressing his eagerness to have his brilliant brother’s hymns brought before the public.

It was nearly or quite ten years after the first hymn that a collection of hymns and odes and other poems, Horæ Lyricæ, was issued, in 1706. It contained twenty-five hymns, four psalm paraphrases, and eleven religious songs in varied measures and meters. It also contained elegies, odes, and blank verse of a purely literary character. In his preface he suggests the spirit and methods which should later be more fully developed. “The hymns were never written to appear before the judges of wit, but only to assist the meditations and worship of vulgar Christians.”[1]

In 1709 the second edition of the Horæ furnished an increased number of hymns. In the preface of this edition he confesses that in the hymns of the Horæ “there are some expressions which are not suited to the plainest capacities, and 171 differ too much from the usual methods of speech in which holy things are proposed to the general part of mankind.”

The hymns contained in the more popular Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1707, and in the augmented edition of 1709, were of a plainer type for “the level of vulgar capacities.” The edition of 1709 contained two hundred and fifty-five hymns, seventy-eight paraphrases, and twenty-two communion hymns. The hymns were in only three meters, Long, Common, and Short. Watts had an eye single for practicability.

The four Psalm versions contained in his Horæ Lyricæ had a prefatory note, “An essay on a few of David’s Psalms translated into plain verse, in language more agreeable to the clearer revelations of the Gospel,” which makes certain that he had already clearly in mind the evangelical psalter which, despite his absorption in other tasks and his long illness in 1712, finally appeared in 1719, “The Psalms of David imitated in the language of the New Testament and apply’d to the Christian state and worship.” Watts excluded twelve Psalms entirely and omitted passages from some of the one hundred and thirty-eight that were retained, because they were not adapted to Christian use.

Although he never married, Watts was very fond of children. In 1715, in the midst of his program for the public service of song, his opus magnum, he prepared his “Divine Songs, attempted in easy language for the use of children.” It was to be used in connection with the “Catechism” he had prepared for their use. It was the first collection of its kind and was the forerunner of the immense supply of children’s songs that was to grow out of the activities of the Sunday school. One is amazed that the writer of “When I survey the wondrous cross,” or “Our God, our help in ages past,” could write so tender and graceful a lullaby as

IV. WATTS’ ARGUMENTS FOR THE HYMN

However kindly we may estimate the value of Watts’ hymns and of his evangelical metrical versions of the Psalms, we must recognize that his service as the protagonist of the free hymn is quite as great. His hymns and evangelical psalter would likely have suffered the fate of those of Wither and Mason, his immediate predecessors, had he not written attractive and practicable congregational hymns and versions, and not accomplished two other results essential to the substitution of the free hymn for the often grotesque Psalm versions.

He did not simply write a miscellaneous lot of religious lyrics and shoot them like arrows into the air; he had a clear and efficient theory of church song, recognizing not only the varied needs, but the psychology underlying those needs, and produced “a system of praise” that supplied those needs and conciliated current prejudices.

Again, in his prefaces and in his Essay towards the Improvement of Psalmody, he laid hymnological foundations that not only prepared the way for the introduction of his own hymns and versions, but also for such a fresh consideration of the whole subject as led to the revolution in the English song service; from these have come the freedom and spontaneity, genuineness and sincerity, definiteness of purpose, and deepening of personal experience which have blessed succeeding generations.

His supreme merit, in this definite onslaught on the rigid literalism of the churches, was that he not only brought destructive criticism, but supplied an adequate substitute for that which he condemned.

Watts denied the obligation to sing the Bible. The Scriptures were the Word of God to the soul and the hymn was the work of the soul in response to God. He further denied that 173 the Book of Psalms was given as a hymnbook for the Christian Church. It was not even adapted to its use, for it was distinctly Jewish and not Christian in ideals and spirit. “Some of ’em are almost opposite to the spirit of the Gospel; many of them are foreign to the state of the New Testament and widely different to the present circumstances of Christians.” Before they can be sung in a Christian service they must be rewritten as if David were a Christian and not a Jew.

Even allowing that there was an obligation to sing the Word of God, Watts denied that the metrical Psalm was the pure Word of God. The demands of meter and rhyme so refashioned and even mutilated the Psalms that they no longer were the words of the Scripture, nor even its ideas. Its inspiration suffered a total eclipse under the hands of the versifiers, and the metrical Psalm became a work of “human composure” with none of the vital spirit of the free hymn.

Watts could not understand why “we under the Gospel should sing nothing else but the joys, hopes, and fears of Asaph and David.” He declared that “David would have thought it very hard to have been confined to the words of Moses and sung nothing else on all his rejoicing days but the drowning of Pharaoh in the fifteenth of Exodus.” He complained that even in those places where the Jewish psalmist seems to mean the Gospel, excellent poet as he was, he was not able to speak it plain, by reason of the infancy of that dispensation, and longs for the aid of a Christian writer.

He set aside the prevalent “superstitious reverence for the letter of the Jewish Scriptures,” and in an almost defiant spirit declared, “Though there are many gone before me who have taught the Hebrew Psalmist to speak English, yet I think I may assume the pleasure of being the first who hath brought down the royal author into the common affairs of the Christian life, and led the Psalmist of Israel into the Church of Christ, without anything of the Jew about him.”

Whatever devotional value we may assign to the Psalms, we 174 must accept Watts’ fundamental idea that they are not the exclusive formulary of the use of song in the worship of God and in the life of the Church. His further contention that not all the Psalms, nor all parts of them, are adapted to Christian use, we cannot now gainsay. The Jews themselves only used about forty of them. It was not until centuries after the Apostolic Age had elapsed that, due to monkish superstition, all the Psalms were recognized as of equal exclusive use.

So many versions of individual Psalms make such satisfactory hymns and so many hymns are such faithful transcripts of passages from the Psalms, or echoes of their sentiments, that the distinction between psalm versions and hymns in individual cases might well be set aside entirely, as having no actual basis or value.

V. WATTS’ INSISTENCE ON PRACTICABILITY

While Watts laid the strongest emphasis on the awkwardness and absurdity of much of the Psalm paraphrasing, he was also impressed with the unavailability of the literary hymns of his predecessors, or even of some of his own in his first book. The common people would not sing them, they were out of their reach; moreover, they were not in practicable meters and measures, and did not fit the accepted tunes the people knew. Watts accepted the current Psalm version meters, Long Meter, Common Meter, and Short Meter, and the Psalm tunes at once became hymn tunes. It was quite a handicap to a literary hymn writer, but essential to the practical use of the hymn.

Watts deliberately avoided distinctly literary quality in his hymns, seeking only lucidity and plainness of expression, all within the capacity of the common people. To quote from his prefaces, he “endeavored to make the sense plain and obvious.... The metaphors are generally sunk to the level of vulgar capacities.... Some of the beauties of poesy are neglected and some wilfully defaced.”

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Dr. Benson, whom it is always profitable to quote, says: “Watts’ work earns a place in the literature of power, the literature that leaves esthetic critics cold while it moves men.” Palgrave included nothing of Watts in his Golden Treasury, but elsewhere speaks of him as “one of those whose sacrifice of art to direct usefulness has probably lost them those honors in literature to which they were entitled.”

VI. THE INESTIMABLE VALUE OF WATTS’ HYMNS

The offensive lines in Watts must be judged with due regard to their background. The Sternhold and Hopkins version was vastly worse. It was a time of dry doctrinal preaching and of a literal interpretation of the Bible which to the preachers was largely a mere collection of isolated proof texts. In these matters he was speaking in the idiom and with the accent of his own generation. In the two centuries that have since passed, the sand and gravel and debris have been washed away, and our hymnals contain the pure gold of his verse for our edification and delight. Outside of the hymnbooks of the Wesley brothers, where can we find such a placer mine of spiritual wealth?

At his best Watts wrote hymns of majesty and ecstatic adoration that have never been excelled:

How he has made the Long Meter measure sound like the great Open Diapason of the pipe organ in the following lines!

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What if John Wesley does add a majestic note or two in the foregoing hymn; the singer of the whole hymn is the noble spirit of little Dr. Watts.

Had David himself returned with an English tongue, he could not have reproduced the spirit of the seventy-second Psalm more nobly:

Solomon’s coronation song (Ps. 72) was no more majestic than this crowning hymn Watts wrote for his Lord.

But Watts could not only be majestic; he could be tender:

Is there a tenderer strain in all English hymnody than the third verse?

Not in the same exquisite vein of noble tenderness, but perhaps all the more useful for its reduced voltage, is his other hymn of the Crucifixion,

Its last verse has deepened the consecration of unnumbered millions as they sang the sacred vow:

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The list of the great hymns that have come down to us from Isaac Watts is too long to be given here, but they enrich the pages of all our hymnals and exalt the spirit of all our church services.

The criticism often urged that Watts wrote too much cannot well be gainsaid, but the striking fact confronts us that most of the great hymns were written by men who wrote too much! The same is true of the composers of our greatest music, as, for instance, Mendelssohn and Handel. Much writing develops technic, ease, spontaneity, unselfconsciousness, that make the heights of feeling and expression more accessible. But what Watts needed was not so much to write less, but to have a competent editor like John Wesley to eliminate his vulgar and often grotesque lines.

That Watts should find plenty of antagonists to pick up the gauge of challenge he threw out was inevitable. His hymns were called “Watts’ Whims” in sardonic derision. It is noteworthy that the opposition did not prove so heated against his hymns as against his The Psalms of David Imitated (1719). In daring to amend the Judaism of David he had committed sacrilege! This volume practically closed his work of reforming the service of song in the English language. He was but forty-four years old at this time and he lived thirty years more—spent in theological, educational, and devotional writings.

The hymns of Watts slowly found their way among the Nonconformist churches. Before his death a large part of the Presbyterian and Congregational churches were nearly monopolized by them. However, the Established Church still clung to the Psalm Versions.

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VII. CONTEMPORARIES OF WATTS

A contemporary of Watts, Simon Browne (1680-1732) issued a collection of hymns in 1720, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, designed as a supplement to Dr. Watts, containing one hundred and sixty-six hymns which had considerable vogue during the next generation. Now only one hymn, “Come, gracious Spirit, heavenly Dove,” survives in some of our hymnals.

Another contemporary was John Byrom (1691-1763), scientist and mystic, whose “Christians, awake, salute the happy morn” is still a Christmas favorite and whose “My spirit longeth for Thee” is “terse and tender in a very high degree.”[2] MacDonald speaks of his few hymns as a “well of the water of life, for its song tells of the love and truth which are the grand power of God.”

Another hymn writer of Watts’ day was Robert Seagrave (1693-?), who added fifty of his own hymns to a collection prepared for his own church at Lorimer’s Hall, Cripplegate, London, all of which had a high degree of excellence, of which “Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings” is found in most of our current hymnbooks.

A greater than any of the above was Philip Doddridge (1702-1751), who was a close friend of Isaac Watts, although nearly thirty years younger. He wrote three hundred and seventy-five hymns, most of them as pendants to sermons, recapitulating and enforcing the points of his discourse. They were not collected and published until four years after his death. The fine character and high ability displayed by Doddridge endeared him to many of the most important people of his day. The devoutness, literary grace, and adaptation to actual use of his lyrics were immediately recognized. Their distinctly homiletical character, combined with deep religious feeling and tenderness, and their varied topics, greatly appealed to ministers, and they were recognized as second only to Watts. The Church owes some of its most useful hymns 179 to him: “Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve,” “Grace; ’tis a charming sound,” “How gentle God’s commands,” “O happy day, that fixed my choice,” “My gracious Lord, I own thy right,” are among the many found in all our hymnals. His relative standard may be inferred from the use made of leading hymn writers by Dr. Benson in his Revised Presbyterian Hymnal: Watts 49, Charles Wesley 24, Doddridge 13.

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