When congregational singing developed in England in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, Thomas Cranmer and other English reformers took less inspiration from the hymn-singing Lutherans, and more from the exclusive psalm-singing Calvinists. English dedication to psalmody was strengthened in the wake of Mary I’s reign. A devout Catholic, she attempted to bring the Church of England, founded by her father Henry VIII, back under the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Many English Protestants fled to Calvinist countries like the Netherlands to escape persecution, and when they eventually returned to England, they brought back the Calvinist singing tradition of metrical psalm texts, sung to short, memorable tunes.
The practice of congregations singing metrical Psalms exclusively became so entrenched in English worship that by the 17th century, the commonly used psalter, Sternhold and Hopkins’s Whole Booke of Psalms (1562), was frequently bound right into volumes of the Geneva Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. By the time Isaac Watts was born in 1674, the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter was more than a century old, and firmly entrenched in English worship.
Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
Isaac Watts was born to parents who did not fear to stand for their beliefs: in fact, during Isaac’s infancy, his father was imprisoned for his Nonconformist preaching. As a teenager, Isaac Watts displayed his own religious rebellion when he complained about the psalter’s archaic, stilted poetry. Watts the elder suggested that if Isaac thought he could do better, he ought to try, and Isaac clapped back with his first original hymn text: “Behold the Glories of the Lamb.”
This hymn is inspired by the book of Revelation. As Isaac Watts grew to follow his father’s footsteps as a minister, and to develop as a poet, bringing the New Testament into Christian song remained one of his primary objectives. In the preface to his first hymn collection, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707), Watts argues that limiting worship to Old-Testament language causes a disconnect between Christians and concepts clarified in the New Testament, such as “the Wonders of [Christ’s] redeeming Grace,” and “the New Commandment, of loving our enemies” (the emphasis is Watts’s).
The hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” from last Sunday’s Ascension Parish playlist, comes from Watts’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Like many of the poems in the collection, it adapts and comments upon a New Testament Scripture passage: in this case, Galatians 6:14: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (I quote from the NASB). Watts’s poem offers both a warm sermon on Christ’s redeeming love, and words to help the Christian express a personal connection with Christ’s sacrifice.
In 1712, Watts was forced to semi-retire from his position as minister of Park Lane Independent Church in London due to chronic illness. He accepted the hospitality of friends Sir Thomas and Lady Abney, staying as a guest at their home for the rest of his life. Hampered in his ability to preach as much as he would like, Watts turned more of his attention to poetry. In 1719 he published a controversial collection entitled The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.
This collection was not so much another set of metrical Psalms, as Psalms re-imagined entirely through a New Testament lens. Though initially criticized by exclusive Psalmodists, Watts’s “Imitated Psalms” have become some of the most beloved entries in our English hymnals, including “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past” (based on Psalm 90), “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun” (based on Psalm 72), and a version of Psalm 98 so completely filtered through the New Testament that we associate it with Christmas: “Joy to the World.”
By the time of his death in 1748, Watts had published across many genres: he wrote an essay on the importance of education for the poor, textbooks on grammar and logic, and a book of hymns for children. His work as a hymnodist helped begin an outpouring of English-language sacred poetry, inspiring poets as diverse as Charles Wesley, William Blake and Emily Dickinson. In the preface to Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Watts expressed his own hope for the legacy of his hymns, or as he diffidently refers to them, “composures:”
“I humbly hope that his Blessed Spirit will make these Composures useful to private Christians; and if they may but attain the honour of being esteemed pious Meditations to assist the devout and the retired Soul in the Exercises of Love, Faith and Joy, ‘twill be a valuable Compensation of my Labours; my heart shall rejoice at the Notice of it, and my God shall receive the Glory.”