Isaac Watts: His Life and Writings

Chapter VII Hymns

So early as the year 1700 Watts’ brother, Mr. Enoch Watts, wrote a letter to him from Southampton, urging upon him the publication of his hymns. It sets not only the mind of the writer as a member of the Doctor’s family in a favourable light, as well as it expresses the probable general feeling of desire for some hymns suitable for Divine service. We quote it here:

“Southampton: March, 1700.

“Dear Brother,—

“In your last you discovered an inclination to oblige the world by showing it your hymns in print, and I heartily wish, as well for the satisfaction of the public as myself, that you were something more than inclinable thereunto. I have frequently importuned you to it before now, and your invention has often furnished you with some modest reply to the contrary, as if what I urge was only the effect of a rash and inconsiderate fondness to a brother; but you will have other thoughts of the matter when I first assure you that that affection, which is inseparable from our near relationship, would have had in me a very different operation, for instead of pressing you to publish, I should with my last efforts have endeavoured the concealment of them, if my best judgment did not direct me to believe it highly conducing to a general benefit, without the least particular disadvantage to yourself. This latter I need not have mentioned, for I am very confident whoever has the happiness of reading your hymns (unless he be either sot or atheist) will have a very favourable opinion of their author; so that, at the same time you contribute to the universal advantage, you will procure the esteem of men the most judicious and sensible. In the second place, you may please to consider how very mean the performers in this kind of poetry appear in the pieces already extant. Some ancient ones I have seen in my time, who flourished in Hopkins and Sternhold’s reign; but Mason now reduces this kind of writing to a sort of yawning indifferency, and honest Barton chimes us asleep. There is, therefore, a great need of a pen, vigorous and lively as yours, to quicken and revive the dying devotion of the age, to which nothing can afford such assistance as poetry, contrived on purpose to elevate us even above ourselves. To what may we impute the prevalency of the songs, filled with the fabulous divinity of the ancient fathers, on our passions? Is it, think you, only owing to a natural propensity in us to be in love with fable, and averse to truth in her native plainness? I presume it may partly be ascribed to this, that as romance has more need of artifice than truth to set it off, so it generally has such an abundance more, that it seldom fails of affecting us by making new and agreeable impressions. Yours now is the old truth, stripped of its ragged ornaments, and appears, if we may say so, younger by ages, in a new and fashionable dress, which is commonly tempting.

“And as for those modern gentlemen who have lately exhibited their version of the Psalms, all of them I have not seen I confess, and, perhaps, it would not be worth while to do it unless I had a mind to play the critic, which you know is not my talent, but those I have read confess to me a vast difference to yours, though they are done by persons of no mean credit. Dr. Patrick most certainly has the report of a very learned man, and, they say, understands the Hebrew extremely well, which, indeed, capacitates him for a translator, but he is thereby never the more enabled to versify. Tate and Brady still keep near the same pace. I know not what sober beast they ride (one that will be content to carry double), but I am sure it is no Pegasus: there is in them a mighty deficiency of that life and soul which is necessary to raise our fancies and kindle and fire our passions, and something or other they have to allege against the rest of adventurers; but I have been persuaded a great while since, that were David to speak English, he would choose to make use of your style. If what I have said seems to have no weight with you, yet you cannot be ignorant what a load of scandal lies on the Dissenters, only for their imagined aversion to poetry. You remember what Dr. Speed says:

So far hath schism prevailed they hate to see
Our lines and words in couplings to agree,
It looks too like abhorred conformity:
A hymn so soft, so smooth, so neatly drest,
Savours of human learning and the beast.

And, perhaps, it has been thought there were some grounds for his aspersion from the admired poems of Ben. Keach, John Bunyan, etc., all flat and dull as they are; nay, I am much out if the latter has not formerly made much more ravishing music with his hammer and brass kettle.

“Now when you are exposed to the public view these calumnies will immediately vanish, which, methinks, should be a motive not the least considerable. And now we are talking of music, I have a crotchet in my brain, which makes me imagine, that as chords and discords equally please heavy-eared people, so the best divine poems will no more inspire the rude and illiterate than the meanest rhymes, which may in some measure give you satisfaction, in that fear you discover, ne in rude vulgus cadant, and you must allow them to be tasteless to many people, tolerable to some, but to those few who know their beauties, to be very pleasant and desirable; and, lastly, if I do not speak reason, I will at present take my leave of you, and only desire you to hear what your ingenious acquaintance in London say to the point, for I doubt not you have many solicitors there, whose judgments are much more solid than mine. I pray God Almighty have you in His good keeping, and desire you to believe me, my dear brother,

“Your most affectionate kinsman and friend,

“Enoch Watts.”

But notwithstanding this and other solicitations, the first edition was not published until 1707. The copyright of the hymns was sold to Mr. Lawrence, the publisher, for £10; about half a century before the same sum was given to Milton for his “Paradise Lost;” the volume instantly obtained a very large acceptance, and he then directed his attention to his version of the Psalms; this was only completed by him during the painful and distressing illness from which he suffered about 1712 and the following years, but the Psalms were not published until the year 1719.

“Dr. Watts,” says James Montgomery, in his introduction to the “Christian Psalmist,” “may almost be called the inventor of hymns in our language, for he so far departed from all precedent that few of his compositions resemble those of his forerunners, while he so far established a precedent to all his successors that none have departed from it otherwise than according to the peculiar turn of mind in the writer, and the style of expressing Christian truths employed by the denomination to which he belonged.” And, again, he says, “We come to the greatest name among hymn-writers, for we hesitate not to give that praise to Dr. Isaac Watts, since it has pleased God to confer upon him, though one of the least of the poets of this country, more glory than upon the greatest either of that or of any other, by making his ‘Divine Songs’ a more abundant and universal blessing than the verses of any uninspired penman that ever lived. In his ‘Psalms and Hymns’ (for they must be classed together) he has embraced a compass and variety of subjects which include and illustrate every truth of revelation, throw light upon every secret movement of the human heart, whether of sin, nature, or grace, and describe every kind of trial, temptation, conflict, doubt, fear, and grief, as well as the faith, hope, charity, the love, joy, peace, labour, and patience of the Christian in all stages of his course on earth, together with the terrors of the Lord, the glories of the Redeemer, and the comforts of the Holy Spirit, to urge, allure, and strengthen him by the way. There is in the pages of this evangelist a word in season for every one who needs it, in whatever circumstances he may require counsel, consolation, reproof, or instruction. We say this without reserve of the materials of his hymns; had their execution only been correspondent with the preciousness of these, we should have had a Christian Psalmist in England next (and that only in date, not in dignity) to the ‘Sweet Singer of Israel.’ Nor is this so bold a word as it may seem. Dr. Watts’ hymns are full of ‘the glorious Gospel of the blessed God;’ his themes, therefore, are much more illustrious than those of the son of Jesse, who only knew ‘the power and glory’ of Jehovah as he had ‘seen them in the sanctuary,’ which was but the shadow of the New Testament Church, as the face of Moses holding communion with God was brighter than the veil he cast over it when conversing with his countrymen.”

His attention was very early awakened to the importance and necessity for some improvement in this department of Divine service. Our readers will remember that after he had closed his academical studies at Stoke Newington, before he entered on the ministry, he returned home and lived during the years 1695 and 1696 in the old house with his father; he devoted those years, the twenty-first and twenty-second of his life, to systematic reading, meditation, and prayer; and during those years he appears to have composed the greater number of his hymns. Thus, if they are among the first effusions of his poet’s pen, they are among the best, and in this circumstance they resemble the first and chief volume of one of his successors in the art of sacred poetry in our own day, John Keble, whose “Christian Year” was the production of his earliest manhood, and all whose subsequent efforts in verse seem to be a vain striving to overtake the beauty and harmony of his first performances. Many of Watts’ later hymns are very noble and beautiful, but the greater number appear to have been composed in those early Southampton days. Dr. Gibbons says, “Mr. John Morgan, a minister of very respectable character now living at Romsey, Hants, has sent me the following information: ‘The occasion of the Doctor’s hymns was this, as I had the account from his worthy fellow-labourer and colleague, the Rev. Mr. Price, in whose family I dwelt above fifty years ago. The hymns which were sung at the Dissenting meeting at Southampton were so little to the gust of Mr. Watts, that he could not forbear complaining of them to his father. The father bid him try what he could do to mend the matter. He did, and had such success in his first essay that a second hymn was earnestly desired of him, and then a third, and fourth, etc., till in process of time there was such a number of them as to make up a volume.’”

It is remarkable that in England the power of the popular hymn was so late in discovering itself. It does not appear to have been known here in the old Roman Catholic days as assuredly it was in other countries, while in Germany the Reformation was born and brought forth amidst the chanting of noble and triumphant hymns. It appears to be impossible to realise the services of the Church without the hymn. Canon Liddon, curiously analyzing the texts of several of the Pauline Epistles, seems to demonstrate that those “faithful sayings” quoted by the apostle as the embodiment of the belief of the Church, were apostolic hymns sung in the Redeemer’s honour. And certainly the early Church expressed its faith and its best aspirations in hymns. Of this we have many and very beautiful illustrations; as we descend from that time along the line of the ages, the great Divine truths united themselves to experiences and hopes in the hearts of many, and as we read the great hymns of the Church we behold her travelling along as beneath a series of triumphal arches reared out of the service of sacred song, expressing the emotion of multitudes of spirits. For the history of holy hymns is really the history of the Church. Our sacred hooks carry us back, indeed, to the airs of Palestine; the voices of the soul strong, intuitional, and clear, rising from the sands of Arabia; from the tabernacle in Shiloh, from the forests of Lebanon, from Moses and David, from Asaph to the sons of Korah, from the majestic antiphones of the temple; the murmur of captives by Babylonish streams; and then rich and strong the raptures of the apostles, touched from the altar flame of heaven, they were not less than sacred hymns; and from their times what gushes and wails of sacred song come sounding to us, clear and shrill, over the roar of persecuting multitudes, or from desert caves or the lonely Churches of the catacombs! The rich hymns of the early Fathers are still amongst the most treasured legacies of the Church. Christian hymnology is the treasure-house into which all the best devotions of the men “of whom the world was not worthy,” exiled kings, bishops, confessors, and seers, and souls of lowlier state, have been poured, giving to us in some instances the doxology of a life-time, and associating through all ages the martyr’s or the musician’s name with that one particular chord. We have no collection yet, at all such as we desire to see, in which the varied tones of human hearts through all times are collected; the surges of old cathedral aisles; low, thrilling tones of old monks; thunder-peals of the wild, old, rugged people; chants of the ancient martyrs at the stake; the glorious and wonderful hymns of the Greek Church; the treasuries of Latin hymns, and even many of the more popular of the great vernacular German chants. For the hymns of the Church are the lamps of the Church; they are the myriad lights which stream through the darkness of the dark centuries, and they furnish the fresher beam of the new illumination, lighting the shrines and altars and chapels of modern times. What is a hymn? St. Augustine has, in a well-known passage, defined a hymn to have necessarily a threefold function. It must be praise; it must be praise to God; it must be praise in the form of song. These limitations, essential as they seem, would perhaps curtail many of our selections. We should then have to exclude much of that meditative devotion with which our best books abound; much also of that too painful and curious self-anatomy which many of our best hymn-writers permit their strains to exhibit. Yet we are very far from thinking that to be the test of sacred song which Augustine has supplied, and with which a very able writer in the “Quarterly Review,” in an article on hymnology, has quoted with approbation.15 This test, applied to the great hymnals and hymnologists of the Church of the middle ages, would, we apprehend, be quite a failure. It is true that praise, and praise to God, and praise to God through Christ, in the form of song, should be the grand criterion for the structure of sacred verses for the use of congregations; but to what extent should these be mixed with the strains of simple devotion, the dwelling of the spirit upon the perfections of the Almighty; and with confession, the laying bare of the heart—its wants and its woes—in no morbid tone or strain, before the Divine and searching eye? Our impression surely is that hymns should represent all that the spirit desires to express in its moods of praise and prayer. By a more earnest appeal to the senses, the soul is opened; and it has been well said that so closely and mystically knit together are our higher and lower natures, that to neglect the one is to neglect the other. In prayer—the long, earnest, extemporaneous prayer—the spirit becomes abstracted, and, perhaps, even in the highest states, in the most subduing states of ecstacy, there are few of the congregation who rise as the preacher rises, or rest as he rests. The hymn, in its throbbings and tremulous and pendulous vibrations, breaks through the monotony and ennui the body imposes on the soul, and, therefore, we are quite away from that increasing number in our more immediate midst who are indisposed to avail themselves of the bursts of sensuous song. We remember that it is not long since grave exception was taken by some among us to the singing—

There is a land of pure delight, on the ground that it contains no recognition of, or praise to, the Redeemer. But, surely, as long as beautiful sights and beautiful sounds, the solemn gloom and glory of the everlasting hills, and the endlessness of the pure sky are to be apprehended by men, so long it must be not only a desirable, but an imperative thing, that they should all be transferred to the keys of the Christian organ and of Christian speech. We are not unaware of the danger of the defence of æsthetic beauty, to spiritual Christianity, but a wise and balanced nature will know how far to advance and when to stop, and we quite believe that our doxologies, and thanksgivings, and moments of Christian fervour should lay under contribution every faculty of the soul, and that each faculty may be moved by a Divine affection, speak to the heart’s inner chambers, and relate them to the most consecrated heights.

For song being a natural expression of inflamed emotion, man must become an unnatural creature if he disdain to sing, and those who cannot themselves sing do not therefore always the less delight in the happy jubilant expressions attained by others; for man, happily, can enjoy that to which he cannot attain, and in this consists one of the great moving powers of his soul. Unconverted people sing. They have airs and melodies wafted from the ground of the nature in which they live and have their being; and when they learn and feel their heritage of salvation and immortality, the joy in God through Jesus Christ demands its appropriate expression in suitable elevated strains and tones. And Christians feel their unity, not so much in reading or in preaching as in those great expressions which rise above the colder forms of the understanding, and touch each other at the centre of some great affection of faith or hope. It is, we must think, to Protestantism that the Church is indebted for the ample and sweeping robes of spiritual melody. Papists indignantly deny this. Cardinal Wiseman has told us in a well-known article, that Protestantism is essentially undevotional. Our devotional practices and services might be improved and increased; but for the multitudes of its hymnologists, and the multitude of their songs, and for the fulness and the fervour of those same songs Protestantism seems to leave Western and Eastern Churches far behind. Although some of our spiritual airs and aspirations need the hallowing touch of time before they can receive the consecration of affection which crowns the words of Basil, and the hymns of Ambrose, and the chants of Gregory.

Thus, the history of the hymn, and of hymns from the earliest ages, their originals, their writers, their associations, would form one of the most charming chapters of Church history. To read how the great hymns grew, what study of Church history can be more delightfully entertaining? Down the long line of the ages the hymns pass on, and they, more than the creeds of councils and the clangour of warriors, seem to shape the spandrels from whence leap up the great arches of the Church. The great Church hymns, by these greatly its unity of faith is proclaimed. In what simple incidents many of the chords arose. That is a very sweet, solemn, pathetic line in our wonderful Burial Service, “In the midst of life we are in death”—in fact, it seems to be the adaptation of the first line of the rare old Latin hymn, the “Media Vita,” composed by Notker Balbulus, born of a noble family of Zurich. He attained to great eminence at St. Gall by his learning and skill in music and poetry, and his knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. No one ever saw him, say the old stories of him, but he was reading, writing, or praying. The faint sound of a mill-wheel near his abbey, moved him to compose a beautiful air to some pious verses, and looking down into a deep gulf, and the danger incurred by some labourer in building a bridge over the abyss, suggested the celebrated hymn, the “Media Vita.” What a singular and interesting history there is in the hymn, “Jerusalem, my happy home.” Through what generations of variations it has passed!

The history of hymns, from the earliest to the latest times, furnishes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the Church. In the hymn the spirit seems to bound into a higher life, and expressions which are scarcely admitted in cold conversation, which almost seem like exaggerations in an essay, or inflated even in a sermon, are felt to be a sweet, fitting, and natural utterance; in some happy moment a nature gifted by genius, subdued by sorrow, but lifted up to a region of serene vision and glowing consolation, found itself caught and compelled to utter an experience which to itself was not always abiding, but which often became afterwards an exceeding joy to it to remember, and which the Church at large retained as the expression of what it believed, and desired yet more fervently to believe through all subsequent ages. Thus the great hymns grew, and the Church has never been without them. Thus many of the portions of the Common Prayer Book of the Church of England and many of its collects are “the golden fruit in a network of silver;” and we in the present day are singing hymns of the holy men of old, who were moved by the Divine Spirit to utter forth the words of prayer and praise. In his Life of Dr. Watts, Dr. Johnson has many remarks which have been the subjects of criticism and exception, but in none are his remarks more open to exception than when he says that “his religious poetry is unsatisfactory.” “The paucity of its topics,” he continues, “forces 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.” If this is kindly said, still it is not true; perhaps Johnson was confining his observation, which he ought not to have done, to sacred poetry as belonging to that order represented by Milton or Phineas Fletcher; and yet this could scarcely be the case; and if he referred to his productions as a hymn-writer, then, through the long ages past, men innumerable had done well, as many a noble Latin and German hymn abundantly shows. In the first ages of the Church, the whole city of Milan was alive with hymns, and Augustine tells us how his soul was moved by the power of sacred psalms; the passage is well worth remembering. “The hymns and songs of the Church,” he says, “move my soul intensely; by the truth distilled by them into my heart the flame of piety was kindled, and my tears flowed for joy. The practice of singing had been of no long standing in Milan, it began about the year when Justinian persecuted Ambrose; the pious people, watched in the church, prepared to die with their pastor; there my mother sustained an eminent part in watching and praying; then hymns and psalms, after the manner of the East, were sung, with a view of preserving the people from weariness; and thence the custom has spread through Christian Churches.” Johnson was a pious man, the truth as it is in Jesus was held by him very heartily, but we are compelled to believe that, with all his amazing knowledge, he had not seen the innumerable hymns which through the successive ages had rained down their beautiful influences on the Church.

Luther, as is well known, ushered in his great Reformation with a voice of joy and singing. There is a pretty little anecdote telling how one day he stood at his window and heard a blind beggar sing. It was something about the grace of God, and it brought tears into his eyes, and then the good thought rushed into his soul, and it wrought its results there. “If I could only make gospel songs which would spread of themselves among the people.” And he did so. The songs were fashioned, and flew abroad like singing birds—“like a lark singing towards heaven’s gate,” says one writer; “the song shot upward, and poured far and wide over the fields and villages; and though the snare of the fowler sometimes captured the preacher, and military mobs dispersed the congregation—like the little minstrel among the clouds, too happy to be silenced, too airy to be caught, and too high to dread man’s artillery—the little song filled all the air with New Testament music, with words such as ‘Jesus,’ ‘Believe and be saved,’ ‘Gospel,’ ‘Grace,’ ‘Come unto Me,’ ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain,’ and thus they became the passwords and watchwords of the Church.”16

Watts has been styled the Marot of England; he must receive far higher praise than could be implied by this designation; but there are resemblances between the two. Clement Marot was the favourite poet of Francis I. of France; Bayle ascribes to him the invention of modern metrical psalmody. He was a free and even profane writer, but Vatable, the Hebrew professor, suggested to him the translation of the Psalms into French verse. He did so, or rather he translated fifty-two Psalms “from the Hebrew into French rhyme.” They quite took the taste of Paris; they found universal reception, and became favourites with Francis I., who sent a copy to Charles V. Most of the pieces were set and sung to the tunes of the gay ballads of that day. They were quite the favourites of the court of Henry II. and Catherine de Medicis, especially they became the favourites of the Huguenot party; Marot, it is said, had himself belonged to the party of the Reformation. Ere long, however, the dangerous tendency of the pieces was perceived by the Sorbonne, the book was denounced; Marot fled to Turin, where he closed in poverty a life which had passed in singular vicissitudes, but which only just before had been sunned in the rays of the courtly magnificence of Paris in that splendid time. Marot’s small collection was completed by Theodore Beza, and the pieces continued long in use among the Reformed Churches; some, we believe, are, with many additions, still sung.

Our chief concern at present is with our own country, but the other reforming peoples of Europe appear to have preceded us in this holy art, although some indications are given of the existence of a very hearty and earnest religious song; in the Zurich Letters, published by the Parker Society, we find, even so early as 1560, the following letter from Bishop Jewel to Peter Martyr; he says: “Religion is now somewhat more established than it was; the people are everywhere exceedingly inclined to the better part; the practice of joining in church music has very much conduced to this; for as soon as they had commenced singing in public in one little church in London, immediately, not only the churches in the neighbourhood, but even the towns far distant, began to vie with each other in practice. You may sometimes see at St. Paul’s Cross, after the service, 6,000 persons, old and young, of both sexes, all singing together and praising God. This sadly annoys the mass priests and the devil, for they perceive that by this means the sacred discourses sink more deeply into the minds of men, and that their kingdom is weakened and shaken at almost every note.”

As time went along in our country, there appeared a race of poets of the highest order; we need scarcely mention such names as Quarles, Vaughan, Herbert, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, John Norris, Thomas Ken, and with these names we certainly ought to include John Milton, who attempted a version of several of the Psalms, one of which is a great favourite with us to this day. Poets not remarkable for sanctity, like John Dryden, were compelled to the service of sacred song, as in the instance of his fine hymn,

Creator, Spirit, by whose aid.

Richard Baxter leaves a beautiful testimony as to the power of sacred hymns over himself; he says, “For myself I confess that harmony and melody are the pleasure and elevation of my soul; I have made psalms of praise in the holy assembly the chief delightful exercise of my religion and my life, and have helped to bear down all the objections which I have heard against church music and against the 149th and 150th Psalms. It was not the least comfort I had in the converse with my late dear wife, that our first in the morning and last at night was a psalm of praise, till the hearing of others interrupted it. Let those that savour not melody leave others to their different appetites, and be content to be so far strangers to their delights.”

With all this it is singular that an amazing prejudice existed until the time of Watts against the indulgence of congregational psalmody. Josiah Conder simply expressed the fact, when he says, “Watts was the first who succeeded in overcoming the prejudice which opposed the introduction of hymns into our public worship.” It is quite remarkable that the prejudice against congregational singing was quite as great with many of our English Churches as amongst the Papists themselves; among the Presbyterians especially, this prejudice obtained a considerable hold and lingered long. “No English Luther,” says Conder, “had risen to breathe the living spirit of evangelical devotion into heart-stirring verse adapted to the minds and feelings of the people. Are we to suppose the want was not felt, or was there anything in the aristocratic genius of the Presbyterian polity that forbade or repressed the free expression of devotion in the songs of the sanctuary?”17

It was about the time that Isaac Watts came to London that some of the assemblies of the saints were shaken by the innovation, of singing. The Baptists appear to have been most indisposed to the doubtful practice; and in the church of the well-known Benjamin Keach, of Southwark, the pastoral ancestor of Charles Spurgeon, when the pastor, after long argument and effort, established singing, a minority withdrew and “took refuge in a songless sanctuary,” in which the melody within the heart might be in no danger of disturbance from the perturbations of song.18 The Society of Friends was not alone in regarding with distaste all the exercises of song in the house of the Lord. Those who are interested in the curious literature of that time may easily discover pamphlets and lectures which show “great searchings of heart” upon the question “whether Christ, as Mediator of the New Covenant, hath commanded His churches under the Gospel in all their assemblies to sing the Psalms of David, as translated into metre and musical rhyme, with tunable and conjoined voices of all the people together, as a Church ordinance, or any other song or hymn that are so composed to be sung in rhyme by a prelimited and set form of words?” The dispute was mainly confined to the Baptist churches. But in 1708 one of the Eastcheap lectures, in a discourse by Thomas Reynolds, replied to the “objections of singing.” A few years before the controversy had run strong and high. Isaac Marlow very angrily maintained the ordinary songless usage, in the year 1696, in his “Truth Soberly Defined” and in the “Controversies of Singing Brought to an End.” Benjamin Keach seems to have been the first to lead on in this suspicious diversion by the publication of his “Breach Repaired in God’s Worship; or, Singing of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs, proved to be an Holy Ordinance of Jesus Christ.” This appeared in 1691.19 The controversy is forgotten now, except by those who explore the more curious nooks and corners of Church history. Among the followers of Christ the Quakers are the only people who have consistently maintained their first profession, a profession, however, in which they do not imitate their founder, George Fox, of whom we especially read that he sometimes led his services with singing.

It was into this state of things that Isaac Watts was introduced. “I almost think,” says Alexander Knox, “that he was providentially appointed to furnish the revived movement of associated piety, which Divine Wisdom foresaw would take place in England in the 18th century, with an unexampled stock of materials for that department, which alone needed to be provided for, of their joint worship. Examine his poetry, and you will find that, though ability to converse with God in solitude is not absolutely overlooked, the sheet-anchor is what he calls the sanctuary. In particular in the Psalms you will find him generally applying to Christian assemblies what David said of the Temple services, as if public ordinances occupied the same supreme place in the inward and spiritual as in the outward and carnal dispensation.” This judgment of Knox is curiously involved, and its latter portion seems to contradict its former. Acquaintance with Watts’ hymns will show that Knox was quite wrong, that Watts by no means overlooked the inward and the spiritual; but his object seems to have been to provide a congregational, joint, and united service. And for this it does seem as if he in an especial manner was raised up by the providence of God; and this becomes more evident as we notice how it is from his day, and apparently very greatly from the method he created that the popular hymnology of our country, which is now surely—may we not dare to say?—the noblest, of any church or of any nation in the world, dates its true original.

We have claimed for Watts already a far higher rank than is implied by the Marot of England, but it is certain that exception will be taken to our judgment when we say that no other writer of this order approaches near to him in the elevation, not merely of expression, but of sentiment; the very grandeur, the majesty of his epithets, the inflamed utterances may be to some more quiet natures a ground of exception. To them they seem sometimes to be open to the charge of inflation. Yet every order and variety of expression, from the loud swelling jubilant rapture to the softest and sweetest strains of tenderness, find fitting utterance in them.

The efforts he made to create a sacred congregational psalmody exposed him, as we know, in his own times to obloquy, singular as it seems, even to contempt, and this contempt has been renewed in our own day. In a paper, understood to be from the pen of John Keble, in the “Quarterly Review,” it is said, “Watts was an excellent man, a strong reasoner, of undoubted piety, and perhaps—a rarer virtue—of true Christian charity; but in our opinion he laboured under irreparable deficiency for the task he undertook—he was not a poet! He had a great command of Scriptural language, and an extraordinary facility of versification; but his piety may induce us to make excuses for his poetry—his poetry will do little to excite dormant piety.” The writer then goes on to remark upon the rude, homely, and unequal strains of Watts, there follows something like a history of psalmody in England, but not another word about our author.20 George Macdonald, the novelist, has condescended to sneer at Watts and to travesty his verses, while another writer in a fierce attack upon evangelicalism—the predominance of which in Watts’ verses we presume to be the spring of the hatred they often inspire—informs us that “most of Dr. Watts’ hymns are doggerel;” and after quoting some passages he considers to deserve this appellation—and which some of them do—he closes by saying, “These may possibly be poetry, but if they are, it is extremely plain that ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘In Memoriam’ are not poetry.” Thus by many it has come to be settled that Watts must take a very low place in English literature, if, indeed, he can be considered in any sense worthy of a place at all. Let us see how the case stands. The man who has no sympathy with Nature is not to be expected to find beauty or melody in the poetry of Burns or Wordsworth. Men who have no sympathy with evangelical truth can scarcely be expected to have much admiration for Watts; yet the gifted nobleman, who was the Mecænas of the past age, was not an indifferent critic, and when called on to cite the most perfect verse in the language he immediately instanced

There shall I bathe my weary soul
  In seas of heavenly rest,
And not a wave of trouble roll
  Across my peaceful breast.

A friend who, to his other attainments adds those of scholar and a critic, suggests how interesting it would be to analyze the verses of Watts, for the purpose of noting how often he evidently thought in foreign languages, and especially the Latin, with which he was so familiar; and hence we have lines which, while to some readers they appear to be doggerel, are indeed illustrations that he was using words in their real etymological sense, and thus imparting to his verse a singular beauty; thus:

  How decent and how wise,
  How glorious to behold,
Beyond the pomp that charms the eyes
  And rites adorned with gold.

Thus, again, of God:

He sits on no precarious throne,
  Nor borrows leave to be.

And thus again:

Let every creature rise and bring
Peculiar honours to our King.

Every poet is to be judged by what he is on the average. Homer has been said to nod; Milton is frequently very turgid, and innumerable passages sink quite below the usual sustained magnificence of the poem; in Shakespeare there are lines, conceits, and redundances which all good taste would wish away. The reader who judged of Keble’s capacity for poetry by his version of the Psalms, or many of his later pieces, would not form a very lofty estimate of his powers. And there are many more expressions and passages than we shall care to count among the psalms and hymns of Watts which are wholly indefensible by any standard of good taste, good sense, or good theology. Upon these, critics, like those to whom we have referred, have pounced, these they have quoted, and to the crowds of passages sublime or pathetic, strong or tender, they have most adroitly closed their eyes or their ears.

Watts has suffered in many ways. Accused by one class of critics of bad taste, and sneered at for the absence of poetic gifts by another class, his theology has been called in question as leaning towards heresy. How this charge could ever have been made by any man who had read for himself Watts’ hymns passes all our conception. But the Unitarians, with a mendacity singularly their own, have in many instances taken his hymns and garbled them to suit their own theology. The Unitarians are clever at taking possession of other people’s property, their churches, their endowments, their books, their great names, and, in Watts’ instance, their hymns. We have even seen the Te Deum adapted to a Unitarian service. The Unitarians are regarded as an exceedingly moral people, and it has often been supposed that what they lack in doctrine they make up in duty, but it is quite true that they are singularly dishonest; and the most eminent Unitarian minister in England in our day, the Rev. James Martineau, does not hesitate to charge such dishonesty upon his community; he shows how the term Unitarian has to be kept out of sight in order that certain property may be obtained. He says, “How could an organization with a doctrinal name upon its face, the Unitarian Association, go into court and plead our right to our chapels, on the ground of their doctrinal neutrality? Accordingly, another association had to be got up specially for the purpose, the Presbyterian Association, in order to evade the inconsistency; and I know it to have been the opinion of the two founders of the Unitarian Association that they committed a disastrous mistake in giving a doctrinal name to the society.” And he says to Mr. Macdonald, to whom he is writing, “Upon what ground can you claim a rightful succession, as you have so nobly done, to Matthew Henry and the founders of Crook Street, if you place the essence of your Church in doctrines which he did not hold!”21 And thus Unitarians have constructed a science of equivocations, and tread a plank of double meanings; it expunges the term Unitarian as designative of their creed, and it takes the words representative of the creed of the great Church through all ages, and, reversing the miracle of our Lord, they use them as vessels in which the wine is turned into water. This is the principle which has governed in Unitarian hymn-books. The selection of many of the hymns from Watts, even his sacramental hymns, have in several instances not been permitted to pass unmutilated; and then, putting the top stone upon the column of injustice, the further indignity, amounting to insolence, of claiming him as a Unitarian.

It is a curious thing to find a writer in the “Wesleyan Magazine” for 1831 boasting that none of the Wesleyan hymns have ever been used for the purpose of Unitarian or Socinian worship, while Watts’ have been thus frequently employed. The writer admits that in such instances they have been altered, but says that “Charles Wesley’s hymns are made of too unbending materials ever to be adapted to Socinian worship.” He was quite mistaken in the fact, they have often been “bent” for this purpose; but it is the very peculiarity of Watts that he rises to the pre-existent and uncreated realms of majesty, of which our Lord speaks as “the glory I had with Thee before the world was.” It would be interesting to know how any Socinian or Unitarian could “bend” that magnificent hymn,

Ere the blue heavens were stretched abroad,
From everlasting was the Word:
With God He was; the Word was God,
And must divinely be adored.

By His own power were all things made;
By Him supported all things stand;
He is the whole creation’s Head,
And angels fly at His command.

Ere sin was born or Satan fell,
He led the host of morning stars:
Thy generations who can tell,
Or count the number of Thy years?

But lo! He leaves those heav’nly forms,
The Word descends and dwells in clay,
That He may hold converse with worms,
Dressed in such feeble flesh as they.

Mortals with joy beheld His face,
The Eternal Father’s only Son;
How full of truth! how full of grace!
When through His eyes the Godhead shone.

Archangels leave their high abode
To learn new myst’ries here, and tell
The loves of our descending God,
The glories of Immanuel.

But, indeed, the sum of the matter is that the theology—the evangelical theology of Watts’ hymns—is the chief reason of the exception taken to the poetry. He is in a very eminent sense the poet of the Atonement; he saw the infinite meanings in that great expression “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” We have heard some quote and speak of what they have called that dreadful verse!—

Blood hath a voice to pierce the skies,
Revenge the blood of Abel cries;
But the dear stream, when Christ was slain,
Speaks peace as loud from every vein!

He saw infinite attributes in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, God manifested in the flesh, and he saw infinite consequences involved in the sacrifice of Christ. It was all to him “the wisdom of God in a mystery,” it was all the great power of God. Thus we have called him the evangelical poet, the poet of the Atonement. Hence those who have a distaste for his doctrine will dislike his verse.

It was the nature of Watts’ theology that it entered more into the heavenly places, the timeless, and the unconditioned purposes of the Infinite and Eternal Mind. He was a student, a real and a hard student, and the speculations of his intellect whenever he betook himself to verse, presented themselves to his mind suffused in the glowing but ineffable lights of eternity; he seemed to be fond of revolving eternal truths. We hope not to be misunderstood if we speak of him as a mystic. Although in his prose writings so little of the mystic appears, in his hymns he is perpetually moving amidst the adumbrations of uncreated mind. What an illustration of this is in that extraordinary hymn,

Lord we are blind, we mortals blind.

Much of the mystic spirit which pervades his verse is perceptible in the fine paradox in the following expressions of the last verse:

The Lord of Glory builds His seat
Of gems unsufferably bright;
And lays beneath His sacred feet
Substantial beams of gloomy night!

It is quite vain work to argue with those who take exception to these expressions. If they are not felt they will not be seen. If we say Watts was a mystic, the expression will astonish some of our readers. The hard abstract lines of cold creeds, and bodies of theology, suddenly in his verse flashed out radiant and visible as planets in southern heavens; and his words expressing truths which seem cold in the creed of Calvin or the rigid framework of the confessions and catechisms of Puritanism, became like wings of ardent fire, tipped with seraphic light. There was even an oriental splendour about his expressions. He was mighty in the Scriptures, and we believe it will not be possible to find a verse or phrase which is not justified by Scriptural expression. His verse—the verse of the man who has been claimed as a Unitarian—was incessantly struggling up to express in glowing metre those sublime flights of thought which have always been at once the prevailing glory and gloom of what is called the Calvinistic theology. We note this in such pieces as

What equal honours shall we bring
To Thee, O Lord, our God, the Lamb?
Since all the notes that angels sing
Are far inferior to Thy name.

Or,

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Or,

Up to the fields where angels lie,
And living waters gently roll,
Pain would my thoughts leap out and fly,
But sin hangs heavy on my soul.

Thy wondrous blood, dear dying Christ,
Can make this load of guilt remove,
And Thou canst hear me where Thou flyest,
On Thy kind wings, celestial Dove!

Or,

Descend from heaven, immortal Dove,
Stoop down and take us on Thy wings,
And mount and hear us far above
The reach of these inferior things.

Or the hymn commencing

Oh the delights! the heavenly joys!

Or that,

Now to the Lord a noble song!

Watts, we have said, has suffered in many ways. No hymns, we will be bound to say, in our language have suffered so much from garbling and mangling; many of them have passed through a perfect martyrdom of maltreatment. Dr. Kennedy, of Shrewsbury, in his “Hymnologia Christiana,” will not admit “When I can read my title clear” to be a hymn, because it is gravely wrong in doctrine; and “There is a land of pure delight” is not admitted, because it is seriously faulty in style. But if an impartial reader should desire to sum up the great merits of Watts, it will perhaps be found that there is no doctrine of the great Christian creed and no great Christian emotion which does not find happy and frequently most faultless expression. His hymns of Praise to God, are frequently among the most noble in our language; for instance:

Sing to the Lord who built the skies,
The Lord that reared this stately frame;
Let all the nation sound His praise,
And lands unknown repeat His name.

He formed the seas, He formed the hills,
Made every drop, and every dust,
Nature and time, with all her wheels,
And pushed them into motion first.

Now from His high imperial throne
He looks far down upon the spheres;
He bids the shining orbs roll on,
And round He turns the hasty years.

Thus shall this moving engine last
Till all His saints are gathered in,
Then for the trumpet’s dreadful blast,
To shake it all to dust again!

Yet, when the sound shall tear the skies,
And lightning burn the globe below,
Saints, you may lift your joyful eyes,
There’s a new heaven and earth for you.

He was fond of singing the uncreated glories of the Son of God, His official and mediatorial Majesty, as in that complete and glowing hymn,

Join all the glorious names.

Or,

Go worship at Immanuel’s feet.

He had to vindicate himself during his life for the use of doxologies, or hymns of praise to the Holy Spirit, as in

Eternal Spirit, we confess
And sing the wonders of Thy grace.

Or the invocation,

Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove!

There is an intense and immediate objectiveness about Watts’ hymns; praise, like a clear and glowing firmament, encompasses them all, and the objects of adoration revolve, like the firmamental lights, clear and distinct to the vision; they are often interior and meditative, but they never indicate a merely morbid introspection; they seem to glow in the light of the objects of their adoration: again and again we are impressed by their reverent effulgence. They are not the singular rapture over the worshipper’s own state of feeling, they are not even rapture so much on account of what is seen; they are praise and honour to the objects themselves, and they have indeed to be perverted before they can express any other sentiments than those they originally utter.

Few writers more affectingly set forth the death of Christ:

He dies! the Friend of sinners dies!
Lo! Salem’s daughters weep around;
A solemn darkness veils the skies,
A sudden trembling shakes the ground.

Break off your tears, ye saints, and tell
How high our great Deliverer reigns;
Sing how He spoiled the hosts of hell,
And led the monster Death in chains.

Say, “Live for ever, wondrous King!
Born to redeem and strong to save;”
Then ask the monster, “Where’s thy sting?”
And “Where’s thy victory, boasting grave?”

The hymn, indeed, contains some weak lines, but the first and the three last verses have even great dramatic vigour and strength.

But hymns are not always to shine with splendid lights, they are to soothe and comfort; hence such words as—

Come hither, all ye weary souls.

We remember a venerable minister eighty-eight years of age, who filled a conspicuous place in the Church of his day; while he was dying his daughter said to him:

Jesus can make a dying bed
As soft as downy pillows are,
While on His breast I lean my head,
And breathe my life out sweetly there.

The old man listened as well as he could to the verse, then turned his head on the pillow, repeated the words “my head,” and so died. Perhaps some critic would remark that the versification is slightly inaccordant or defective, but its tenderness has propitiated many a dying pang.

Devotion is the eminent attribute of these hymns,—ardent, inflamed rapture of holiness. Well has it been said “to elevate to poetic altitudes;” every truth in Christian experience and revealed religion needs the strength and sweep of an aquiline pinion; and this is what Isaac Watts has done; he has taken almost every topic which exercises the understanding and the heart of the believer, and has not only given to it a devotional aspect, but has wedded it to immortal numbers; and whilst there is little to which he has not shown himself equal, there is nothing he has done for mere effect. Rapt, yet adoring, sometimes up among the thunder-clouds, yet most reverential in his highest range, the “good matter” is in a song, and the sweet singer is upborne as on the wings of eagles; but even from that triumphal car, and when nearest the home of the Seraphim, we are comforted to find descending lowly lamentations and confessions of sin—new music, no doubt, but the words with which we have been long familiar in the house of our pilgrimage.

Religion never was designed
  To make our pleasures less.

Thou art the sea of love
  Where all my pleasures roll,
The circle where my passions move,
  And centre of my soul.

To Thee my spirits fly
  With infinite desire,
And yet how far from Thee I lie!
  Dear Jesus, raise me higher.

I cannot bear Thy absence, Lord,
My life expires if Thou depart;
Be thou, my heart, still near my God,
And Thou, my God, be near my heart.

Such are the streams of devotion on which we are borne in the verses of Watts.

Some of his hymns are like collects, the compact, comforting little watchwords and creeds of the Church—

Firm as the earth Thy Gospel stands.

Or—

Our God, how firm His promise stands.

Sometimes we have a fine bold trumpet-like tone of Faith:

Begin, my tongue, some heavenly theme,
  And speak some boundless thing;
The mighty works, or mightier name
  Of our eternal King.

His very word of grace is strong
  As that which built the skies;
The Voice that rolls the stars along
  Speaks all the promises.

He said, “Let the wide heaven be spread,”
  And heaven was stretched abroad:
“Abra’m, I’ll be thy God,” He said,
  And He was Abra’m’s God.

How well he has expressed the depths of contrition in his version of the 51st Psalm, what plaintive compassion—

O Thou that hear’st when sinners cry!

And equally well he has depicted the happiness and serenity of “a heart sprinkled from an evil conscience:”

O happy soul that lives on high!

Or—

Lord, how secure and blest are they
Who feel the joys of pardoned sin.

Then how vigorously his notes rouse and stir to the activities of the Christian life:

Are we the soldiers of the cross,
The followers of the Lamb?

Or—

Stand up, my soul, shake off thy fears!

The patriotic lyrics and hymns of Watts have sounded, how in his day they throbbed, with that pulse of prayer for our country:

Shine, mighty God! on Britain shine
  With beams of heavenly grace;
Reveal Thy power through all our coasts,
  And show Thy smiling face.

Amidst our isle, exalted high,
  Do Thou our glory stand;
And, like a wall of guardian fire,
  Surround the favoured land.

And when the Americans held their great “Thanksgiving Day,” Watts’ hymn, always sung to the venerable old tune of St. Martin’s, was, as Mrs. Stowe tells us, the national hymn of the Puritans.22

Let children hear the mighty deeds
  Which God performed of old,
Which in our younger years we saw,
  And which our fathers told.

Our lips shall tell them to our sons,
  And they again to theirs,
That generations yet unborn
  May teach them to their heirs.

The extent to which the verses of Watts entered into all the incidents of the social life of the United States is well illustrated in the “Pearl of Orr’s Island:” in a very striking and pathetic manner the following stanzas often interlace the conversations of that charming story:

Our God, our help in ages past,
  Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
  And our eternal home.

Under the shadow of Thy throne
  Thy saints have dwelt secure:
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
  And our defence is sure.

Before the hills in order stood,
  Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting Thou art God,
  To endless years the same.

Thy word commands our flesh to dust—
  “Return, ye sons of men;”
All nations rose from earth at first,
  And turn to earth again.

A thousand ages in Thy sight
  Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
  Before the rising sun.

The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
  With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by the flood,
  And lost in following years.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
  Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
  Dies at the opening day.

Like flowery fields the nations stand,
  Pleased with the morning light;
The flowers beneath the mower’s hand
  Lie withering ere ’tis night.

Our God, our help in ages past,
  Our hope for years to come,
Be Thou our guard while troubles last,
  And our eternal home.

And we are reminded that this grand hymn, which we have heard sung in barns and meeting-houses, in kirks and cathedrals, also comes with tender pathos in one of the affecting scenes of Charlotte Brontë.

What grand expressions of personal faith abound among these verses, what a radiant casting back of the blunted arrows of doubt and unbelief!

Questions and doubts are heard no more;
Let Christ and joy be all our theme;
His Spirit seals His Gospel sure,
To every soul that trusts in Him.

Learning and wit may cease their strife,
When miracles with glory shine;
The Voice that calls the dead to life
Must be almighty and Divine.

What faith in the Saviour’s glorious resurrection and second advent!—

With joy we tell this scoffing age,
He that was dead hath left His tomb;
He lives above their utmost rage,
And we are waiting till He come.

Sabbath songs, songs for the social service at the close of the day, songs for every variety of Christian ordinance, songs especially for the Lord’s Supper, songs of grief as the soul realises the death of the Redeemer, songs of rapture as the salvation becomes apprehensible—

Salvation! O the joyful sound!

Or—

Plunged in a gulf of dark despair.

The first Elegies in our language are among Watts’ hymns. When early manhood has been smitten down in its green prime, how finely swells aloft that grand elegy with its triumphant close, the paraphrase of the text, “He weakened my strength in the way. He shortened my days:”

It is the Lord our Saviour’s hand
Weakens our strength amidst the race:
Disease and death at His command
Arrest us and cut short our days.

Spare us, O Lord, aloud we pray,
Nor let our sun go down at noon;
Thy years are one eternal day,
And must Thy children die so soon?

Yet in the midst of death and grief,
This thought our sorrow shall assuage,
“Our Father and our Saviour live;
Christ is the same through every age.”

Before Thy face Thy church shall live,
And on Thy throne Thy children reign:
This dying world shall they survive,
And the dead saints be raised again.

And when some form more than ordinarily venerable or beautiful, holy or beloved, has been lowered into its resting-place, while they laid wreaths of camellias and evergreens on the coffin, uprose that wonderful elegy:

Hear what the Voice from heaven proclaims
  For all the pious dead!
Sweet is the savour of their names,
  And soft their sleeping bed.

And how often, in similar circumstances, that other sweet requiem:

Why do we mourn departing friends?

Amidst trembling prayers, in the darkened room, in the presence of some sweet shrouded and coffined form, the memory of some soft sealed face and folded hands, and spirit for ever at rest, has rose the hymn into pensive rapture:

Are we not tending upward too,
  As fast as time can move?
Nor would we wish the hours more slow
  To keep us from our love.

Contrasting the evanescence of man, not merely with the eternity of God, but with the eternity of Christ, and the promised prevalence of His salvation everywhere, who has not seen large meetings leap into hearty fervour at the announcement of that noble prophecy:

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Does his successive journeys run.

Who has more triumphantly followed the spirit of the believer into its glorious home and rest? Watts had a singularly bold and majestic manner in striking in the very first words of a hymn the key-note of the whole piece; indeed there was usually a singular fitness and force in the first line.

Give me the wings of faith to rise
  Within the veil, and see
The saints above; how great their joys,
  How vast their glories be!

Some critics have objected to what seems to us the sweet natural pathos of that verse:

How we should scorn the clothes of flesh,
  These fetters and this load,
And long for evening to undress,
  That we may rest with God.

Or that fine piece:

Absent from flesh! O blissful thought!

And the following verses, not so often quoted, or so well known:

And is this heaven? and am I there?
How short the road! how swift the flight!
I am all life, all eye, all ear;
Jesus is here my soul’s delight.

Is this, the heavenly Friend who hung
In blood and anguish on the tree,
Whom Paul proclaimed and David sung,
Who died for them, who died for me?

Creator-God, eternal light,
Fountain of good, tremendous power,
Oceans of wonders, blissful sight!
Beauty and love unknown before.

Thy grace, Thy nature, all unknown
In yon dark region whence I came,
Where languid glimpses from Thy throne
And feeble whispers teach Thy name.

I’m in a world where all is new,
Myself, my God; O blest amaze!
Not my best hopes or wishes knew
To form a shadow of His grace.

Fixed on my God, my heart, adore;
My restless thoughts, forbear to rove;
Ye meaner passions, stir no more;
But all my powers be joy and love.

And one of the most touching of his funeral pieces is that magnificent funeral march for some departed saint, and worthy of the grand air to which it has often been sung—Handel’s Dead March in “Saul:”

Unveil thy bosom, faithful tomb!
Take this new treasure to thy trust,
And give these sacred relics room
Awhile to slumber in the dust.

Nor pain, nor grief, nor anxious fear
Invade thy bounds: no mortal woes
Can reach the forms which slumber here,
And angels watch their soft repose.

So Jesus slept! God’s dying Son
Passed through the grave and blessed the bed:
Rest here, dear saint, till from His throne
The morning break and pierce the shade!

Break from His throne, illustrious morn!
Attend, O earth, His sovereign word;
Restore thy trust—a glorious form
Called to ascend and meet the Lord.

A judicious and compendious arrangement in order of the hymns of Watts, would thus show that every form of expression apparently necessary for public service finds some adequate representation: worship, confession, prayer, expression of faith; and those churches which for nearly a century had no other volume to assist them in their public devotions, do not deserve so much pity as has very frequently been expressed for them. Soon after their publication they came to be used outside of the communion for which they were designed. Ralph Erskine, of Dunfermline, drew a great number of the verses into his most remarkable volumes of divine drollery, sometimes in a most remarkable manner debasing the metre. Should the reader care to see an instance of this he may find it in “Scripture Songs,” Book III., Song III.; but there are many other instances.

Admirers of Wesley are fond of citing against Watts the well-known saying attributed to him, that he would have given all he had written for the credit of being the author of Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Come, O thou Traveller unknown.” It has been truly said, his excessive modesty often gloomed his greatness; Gibbons makes some such remark; it, at any rate, kept all power and disposition to self-assertion in the shade; but it is no reason why his admirers now should imitate, with reference to himself, that virtue, and be indifferent to his great powers as a sacred poet.

No hymn-writer has suffered so much from mutilation as Watts. Sometimes the attempts at improvement have been ludicrous. We remember a specimen of many:

The little ants, for one poor grain
  Exert themselves and strive.

Instead of—

Labour and tug and strive.

But such emendations are innocent when compared with those in which the entire doctrine of the hymn has been expelled.23 Lord Selborne (Sir Roundell Palmer) has said, “Watts altered some of Charles Wesley’s hymns, much to his brother John’s discontent, as he testifies in the preface to his Hymn Book.” We have very little hesitation in assuring his lordship that he is mistaken, and that he will find no instance in which Watts altered, however slightly, Wesley’s hymns. In two or three instances he altered and appropriated from Tate and Brady and Patrick, and acknowledged the extent of his alterations in notes, a courtesy never extended to himself.

Before Jehovah’s awful throne, is Watts altered, and admirably altered, by two words in the first line, but the entire hymn was appropriated; but indeed it was impossible that Watts could alter Wesley. Watts’ work was all done, and had long been done, before Wesley appeared. Literary plagiarism we believe to be a much less common sin than many suppose. Minds on the same plane of thought and feeling are likely to discover the same images, and to indulge in the same expressions. Certainly Mr. Milner, in his “Life of Watts,” is wrong when he says (page 276) that Watts’ well-known lines:

The opening heavens around me shine
  With beams of sacred bliss,

were probably suggested to Watts by Gray’s—

The meanest flow’ret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.

Watts’ lines were published nine years before Gray was born!

Comparing the two great hymn-writers, Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley, an adequate sense may be arrived at, if the very important distinctions are noticed between the work proposed in the verses of the two admirable men. It is our conviction that while Watts has, in the stricter term of the word poet, included in himself Charles Wesley, the purpose of Wesley’s verse was especially to describe frames, feelings, and experiences, to set these to a sweet strain of popular melody, such as might rouse the thousands for whom they were intended. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrasted sense Watts and the Wesleys entertained of their performances. The preface published to the Wesleyan Hymn Book, in 1779, is one of the most extravagant efforts of conceit in our language; it is somewhat wonderful that the good taste of the Wesleyan Conference does not omit it from the editions now in the course of circulation. “Here,” it says, “is no doggerel, no botches, nothing put in to patch up the rhyme, no feeble expletives; here is nothing tinged or bombast, or low and creeping; here are no cant expressions, no words without meaning; those who impute this to us know not what they say.” “Here are,” it continues, “the purity, elegance, and strength of the English language, and the utmost simplicity and plainness suited to every capacity.” It goes on to assert that “in the following hymns is to be found the true spirit of poetry, such as cannot be acquired by art or labour, but must be the gift of nature. By labour a man may become a tolerable imitation of Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton, and may heap together pretty compound epithets, such as pale-eyed, meek-eyed, and the like; but unless he be born a poet he will never attain to the genuine spirit of poetry.” How remarkably all this is in contrast to the spirit of the writer whose hymns had been before the world nearly half a century before this first collected edition of the Wesleys’ hymns was published. John Wesley included many of Watts’ hymns in his own hymn book, but their authorship was not acknowledged; and many others were vigorous translations from the German of Zinzendorf, Paul Gerhardt, etc.; Watts’ hymn book was entirely and wholly his own.

It is ungracious work to bring into the rivalry of comparison or contrast two singers who have so sacredly served the Church. Yet we will dare to say it here, in the hymns of Watts there is that peculiar accent, that note of pain, that majesty and melody of the deep minor chord—that sounding of a deeper experience—that ineffable something which testifies to a capacity of agony, as well as to the assurance of ecstasy which is the true poet’s prerogative and power. We would even say the very test of Watts’ genius and experience is that many of his pieces, and some of his very highest, are unfitted for more than the select experience. Wesley’s are more easy, common-place, and popular. The hymns of Watts, however, will stand a far higher test than that of the suffrages of large congregations or ecclesiastical communities—the sighs of the sick-room, the death-bed, the bereaved chamber, the private closet of heart devotion. With these verses on their lips refreshing their hearts, how many pilgrims have approached the

        Land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign.

Most of what has gone before applies to the hymns; but some especial reference should be made to the version of the Psalms. Palmer, in his “Life of Watts,” says, “This is generally allowed to be his capital production in poetry, with which, in point of utility, none of his other pieces will bear comparison.” From this verdict there will be many dissentients. It is certainly true that in some of the pieces he rises to the highest rendering of the evangelical sense of the Psalter. His object was to interpret the Psalms of Christ; it is not therefore very remarkable that when a young minister inquired of an elder which was the best commentary on the Psalms, he replied, “Watts’ version of them.” This judgment was not so singular as it seems.

Watts’ may be called the Messianic version of the Psalms; he felt that without this construction they must be very greatly inexplicable. The unfolding this idea popularly was an immense boon to the churches. We are to remember that the Book of Psalms was the great Hebrew Psalter; it was the Book of Common Prayer and Praise, and when the Christian Church arose, it still continued the use of these divine airs for the expression of its experiences and its faith. Jerome says: “The labourer, while he holds the handle of the plough, sings Alleluia, the tired reaper employs himself on the Psalms, and the vine-dresser, while lopping the vines with his curved hook, sings something out of David; these are our ballads in this part of the world; these, to use the common expression, are our love songs.” Chrysostom has a noble panegyric upon the use of the Psalms in the service of the Church. “If we keep vigil in the Church, David comes first, last, and midst. If early in the morning, David is first, last, and midst.” Again, he goes on to declare how, “in the funeral solemnities for the dead, or when the girl sits at home spinning, and not in cities alone, and not alone in churches, but in the forum and in the wilderness, and even in the uninhabitable desert, David excites to the praises of God.” And this has continued true ever since.

The case being so, why was it that, alike in Hebrew and in Christian days, the Book of Psalms has had such a sovereign power over holy souls? The personality of David has even obscured the higher personality and the Messianic symmetry; it is forgotten that in the Hebrew language David signifies the beloved, the darling, the chosen one, and that many of the Psalms, regarded as personal to him, are rather to be apprehended in the same manner in which his name occurs in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in which we have “the key of David,” “David, a leader and commander to the people,” in “the sure mercies of David,” terms the fulness of which is lost sight of by their being associated with the Hebrew prince, rather than with Him who is the infinitely beloved of God and man. Thus in numerous Psalms to which the prefix is given, “A Psalm of, or by, David,” a stricter reading would be, “A Psalm to, or for, David;” in some instances this sense comes out with great force, and thus they illustrate that text in Ezekiel, penned hundreds of years after David’s death, “I will set one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David (i.e. the Beloved). He shall feed them and be their shepherd.” What a different fulness of meaning is given to such innumerable passages as those in the 123rd Psalm, “For thy servant David’s sake turn not away the face of thine anointed;” “The Lord hath sworn unto David, Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne:” if we substitute the Beloved one for David in many such passages, and what a rich meaning is unfolded! David was perhaps the author of all these; but in that wonderful spirit of the Hebrew playing upon words, just as he rose from his own occupation to exclaim, “The Lord is my shepherd,” so he rose from his own name, transforming it into a Divine synonym, searching for its origin and filling it out with divine and elevated ideas.24 This was the spirit in which Watts in his version restored the Psalms to Christ, and removed them from the lower and more contracted circle of human personality to the suffering and reigning Messiah. Most readers were thankful for the noble restoration of the evangelical regalia to their rightful owner; and only here and there one or two, like the indecent and insolent Bradbury, took exception to the performance as “robbing them of their book of Praise,” as that rash and vehement man, referring to the version of Watts, said, “David is no longer suffered to be our Psalmist.”

This, then, is the spirit in which Watts translated the Psalms, to the Christian sense preserving, as we have said, the Messianic idea throughout, as in that stirring call to Christian service:

Arise, O King of Grace, arise
  And enter to Thy rest!
Lo! Thy church waits with longing eyes
  Thus to be owned and blest.

Enter with all Thy glorious train,
  Thy Spirit and Thy word;
All that the Ark did once contain
  Could not such grace afford.

The aim of Watts in his Book of Psalms was to translate the Old Testament phraseology into a New Testament language and experience. James Hamilton has illustrated this by an anecdote which it can scarcely be impertinent to quote here; he says: “I cannot tell it accurately, but I have heard of a godly couple whose child was sick and at the point of death. It was unusual to pray together except at the hours of ‘exercise;’ however, in her distress, the mother prevailed on her husband to kneel down at the bedside and offer a word of prayer. The good man’s prayers were chiefly taken from the best of liturgies, the book of Psalms; and after a long and reverential introduction from the 90th and elsewhere, he proceeded, ‘Lord, turn again the captivity of Zion; then shall our mouth be filled with laughter and our tongue with singing.’ And as he was proceeding, ‘turn again our captivity,’ the poor agonized mother interrupted him: ‘Eh, man, you are aye drawn out for thae Jews, but it’s our bairn that’s deein’,’ at the same time clasping her hands and crying, ‘Lord, help us; oh, give us back our darling, if it be Thy holy will; and if he is to be taken, oh take him to Thyself!’ And fond as I am,” continues James Hamilton, “of scriptural phrases in prayer, I am fonder still of reality. It is a striking fact that the prayers addressed to Christ in the Gospels are hardly one of them in Old Testament language; just as New Testament songs embed in a language of their own Old Testament phrases;” and, as we may add, just as the woman and her husband had the same purpose in their prayers.

And it is in this way Watts seems to apologize for his attempts when he says, in his introduction to his version of the Psalms:

HEBREW MELODIES CHRISTIANIZED.

“But since I believe that any Divine sentence, or Christian verse, agreeable to Scripture, may be sung, though it be composed by men uninspired, I have not been so curious and exact in striving everywhere to express the ancient sense and meaning of David, but have rather expressed myself as I may suppose David would have done, had he lived in the days of Christianity; and by this means, perhaps, I have sometimes hit upon the true intent of the Spirit of God in those verses farther and clearer than David himself could ever discover, as St. Peter encourages me to hope (1 Peter i. 11, 13) where he acknowledges that the ancient prophets, who foretold of the grace that should come to us, were, in some measure, ignorant of this great salvation; for though they testified of the sufferings of Christ and His glory, yet they were forced to search and inquire after the meaning of what they spake or wrote. In several other places I hope my reader will find a natural exposition of many a dark and doubtful text, and some new beauties and connections of thought discovered in the Jewish poet, though not in the language of a Jew. In all places I have kept my grand design in view, and that is to teach my author to speak like a Christian. For why should I now address God my Saviour in a song, with burnt sacrifices of fatlings, and with the fat of rams? Why should I pray to be sprinkled with hyssop, or recur to the blood of bullocks and goats? Why should I bind my sacrifice with cords to the horns of an altar, or sing the praises of God to high-sounding cymbals, when the Gospel has shown me a nobler atonement for sin, and appointed a purer and more spiritual worship? Why must I join with David in his legal or prophetic language to curse my enemies, when my Saviour in His sermons has taught me to love and bless them? Why may not a Christian omit all those passages of the Jewish psalmist that tend to fill the mind with overwhelming sorrows, despairing thoughts, or bitter personal resentments, none of which are well suited to the spirit of Christianity, which is a dispensation of hope and joy and love? What need is there that I should wrap up the shining honours of my Redeemer in the dark and shadowy language of a religion that is now for ever abolished, especially when Christians are so vehemently warned in the Epistles of St. Paul against a Judaizing spirit in their worship as well as doctrine? And what fault can there be in enlarging a little on the more useful subjects in the style of the Gospel, where the psalm gives any occasion, since the whole religion of the Jews is censured often in the New Testament as a defective and imperfect thing?”

And, again, he says on the—

SPIRIT OF THE HEBREW PSALMS.

“Moses, Deborah, and the princes of Israel; David, Asaph, Habakkuk, and all the saints under the Jewish state, sung their own joys and victories, their own hopes, and fears, and deliverances, as I hinted before; and why must we, under the Gospel, sing nothing else but the joys, hopes, and fears of Asaph and David? Why must Christians be forbid all other melody but what arises from the victories and deliverances of the Jews? David would have thought it very hard to be confined to the words of Moses, and sung nothing else on all his rejoicing days but the drowning of Pharaoh of the fifteenth of Exodus. He might have supposed it a little unreasonable, when he had peculiar occasions of mournful music, if he had been forced to keep close to Moses’ prayer in the ninetieth Psalm, and always have sung over the shortness of human life, especially if he were not permitted the liberty of a paraphrase; and yet the special concerns of David and Moses were much more akin to each other than ours are to either of them, and yet they were both of the same religion; but ours is very different. It is true that David has left us a richer variety of holy songs than all that went before him; but, rich as it is, it is still far short of the glorious things that we Christians have to sing before the Lord; we and our churches have our special affairs as well as they. Now, if by a little turn of their words, or by the change of a short sentence, we may express our own meditations, joys, and desires in the verse of those ancient psalmists, why should we be forbidden this sweet privilege? Why should we, under the Christian dispensation, be tied up to forms more than the Jews themselves were, and such as are much more improper for our age and state too? Let us remember that the very power of singing was given to human nature chiefly for this purpose, that our own warmest affections of soul might break out into natural or divine melody, and that the tongue of the worshipper might express his own heart.”

The following well expresses his modest estimate of his work: “I must confess I have never yet seen any version or paraphrase of the Psalms, in their own Jewish sense, so perfect as to discourage all further attempts. But whoever undertakes the noble work, let him bring with him a soul devoted to piety, an exalted genius, and withal a studious application; for David’s harp abhors a profane finger and disdains to answer to an unskilful or a careless touch. A meaner pen may imitate at a distance; but a complete translation or a just paraphrase demands a rich treasury of diction, an exalted fancy, a quick taste of devout passion, together with judgment, strict and severe, to retrench every luxuriant line, and to maintain a religious sovereignty over the whole work. Thus the psalmist of Israel might arise in Great Britain in all his Hebrew glory, and entertain the more knowing and polite Christians of our age. But still I am bold to maintain the general principle on which my present work is founded; and that is, that if the brightest genius on earth, or an angel from heaven, should translate David and keep close to the sense and style of the inspired author, we should only obtain thereby a bright or heavenly copy of the devotions of the Jewish king; but it could never make the fittest psalm-book for a Christian people. It was not my design to exalt myself to the rank and glory of poets, but I was ambitions to be a servant to the Churches and a helper to the joy of the meanest Christian. Though there are many gone before me who have taught the Hebrew psalmist to speak English, yet I think I may assume this 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 a Jew about him. And whensoever there shall appear any paraphrase of the Book of Psalms that retains more of the savour of David’s piety, or discovers more of the style and spirit of the Gospel, with a superior dignity of verse, and yet the lines as easy and flowing and the sense and language as level to the lowest capacity, I shall congratulate the world, and consent to say, Let this attempt of mine be buried in silence.”

This chapter must not be closed without some slight reference to the wonderful history and anecdote connected with these hymns; verses from them have been murmured from innumerable death-beds, have shone out as memorial lines on innumerable tombstones, and have proved, in how many instances, to be the converting word, the power of God unto salvation. When the great orator and statesman of the United States, Daniel Webster, lay dying, almost the last words which fell from those eloquent lips which had so often moved in the Senate with thrilling and overwhelming power, were those words of Watts’ 51st Psalm; and he repeated them again and again:

Show pity, Lord: O Lord, forgive;
Let a repenting rebel live;
Are not Thy mercies large and free?
May not a sinner trust in Thee?

And the gravestone of the great shoemaker, scholar, linguist, and missionary, William Carey, in Bengal, contains beside the name and date only that final confession of faith:

A guilty, weak, and helpless worm,
On Thy kind arms I fall.

The late beautiful and beloved William Bunting used to tell a story of a poor blind woman, in Liverpool, brought to a sense of sin and salvation at a Wesleyan service held in connection with the national fast upon the first visit of cholera to this country. Her impressions had been stirred by Watts’ hymn—the 224th of the Wesleyan Selection—“I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath.” The next morning she called on the Rev. R. McOwen, and asked if he could procure for her the book in which was the hymn with those lines, also Watts’,

The Lord pours eyesight on the blind,
The Lord supports the sinking mind.

It also was in the Wesleyan Hymn Book, which Mr. McOwen placed in her hands. Her memory was soon stored with the hymns which she delighted in repeating. By her talent in shampooing she earned a respectable livelihood. For this purpose she attended on the old Earl of Derby, the grandfather to the present Earl. She repeated one of her hymns to him. The old Earl liked it, and encouraged her to repeat more. But one day, when repeating the hymn of Charles Wesley, “All ye that pass by,” she came to the words:

The Lord in the day of His anger did lay
Your sins on the Lamb, and He bore them away,

he said, “Stop, Mrs. Brass, don’t you think it should be—

“The Lord in the day of His mercy did lay?”

She did not think his criticism valid; but it showed she was not repeating her verses to inattentive ears, and other indications showed that the blind woman was made a blessing to the dying nobleman. But such anecdotes might be multiplied and extended to many pages.