By Jean Silvan Evans
(Portrait by an unknown artist)
THIS YEAR of 2024 marks 350 years since the birth of the prolific hymn writer Isaac Watts (1674-1748), the man who introduced hymn singing as we know it today into churches and is known as the Father of English Hymnody.
He is known for writing some of the greatest hymns of all times, including such gems as When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Joy to the World, Our god, Our Help in Ages Past, and Jesus shall reign where’er the Sun. Many of his hymns are still sung today and they have been translated into numerous languages.
It is easy to forget the impact hymn singing had on the life of the church. Previously, congregations just sang metrical psalms – which as a constant diet could become dreary. It was said Martin Luther, the great arbiter of the Reformation, accomplished more in ‘setting all Germany singing’ than he ever did with his preaching. That’s why the hymn has been called Dissent’s greatest gift to the Church. It has become for us, in Bernard Manning’s words, what liturgy is for Anglicans – we sing what we believe!
Isaac Watts was born into a solid dissenting family in Southampton in 1674. It was a time when religion cost. Everyone was expected to ‘conform’ to the beliefs of the Established Church. People who refused to ‘conform’ were denied full civil and educational liberty. They became known as ‘Non-conformists’ and suffered under a harsh penal code.
Isaac’s father was a deacon in the Congregational Church and was twice imprisoned for nonconformity. From birth, the young Isaac was taken down to the jail by his mother, who would sit for hours on a stone by the gate to draw attention to her husband’s unfair imprisonment. Even so, the period of Isaac Watts’ life saw a vast increase in the number of chapels built by the new Nonconformists for worship outside the established Anglican religion.
Isaac was an amazing child. He learnt Latin at four years of age, Greek at nine, French at 11 and Hebrew at 13. When he was 16, a local doctor, who had noted his outstanding promise, offered to fund an Oxford education for him. At that time, Oxford or Cambridge were the only universities in the country – but Dissenters were not allowed to study at either!
Isaac could have chosen to ‘conform’ to the Established Church – but he resolved, as he said, to ‘take his lot with the Dissenters’. He studied at a Dissenting Academy in Stoke Newington, London, one of those remarkable institutions set up by Dissenters to educate their own.
From a young age, Isaac had a facility to speak in short rhymes, something that irritated his father. On one occasion when he was scolded for speaking in rhyme, he smartly replied:
Oh, Father, do some pity take,
and I will no more verses make.
More productively, when the teenaged Isaac complained bitterly to his father about the dreary Psalms sung in church, his father encouraged him to see what he could do ‘to mend the matter’. Isaac went to his room and wrote his first hymn Behold the Glories of the Lamb that was heard it sung at their next church service. He was about 19.
Whether his father spoke from an instinctive knowledge of his son’s genius or possibly from exasperation, is not recorded. But that was the first of around 700 hymns, many of which we are still singing three centuries later! There are about 40 in Rejoice and Sing, the URC’s own hymn book, published for the church by OUP.
Although the rights of Dissenters at Isaac’s time were already so limited, under Queen Anne, the Schism Act was an attempt to erode them even further. It had passed through all the Parliamentary stages and awaited only the signature of the Queen to become law. But before she could sign it – Queen Anne died!
Many Dissenters saw her death as an intervention by God, a true Deliverance. And in a direct response, Isaac wrote his magnificent hymn Our God our help in ages past. In it he gloried that they had indeed found ‘shelter from the stormy blast’. That the terrors had flown ‘forgotten as a dream’. There was great rejoicing among Dissenters. Although Queen Anne’s death marked the end of the worst of the harassment, Dissenters were denied full civil liberties for a century after Isaac’s death.
The hymn Our God our help in ages past was played on radio by the BBC when the Second World War was declared. It was the final hymn sung at a service on the Titanic on the morning of the day it sank. The fears and relief that prompted the hymn are long forgotten. But the hymn, based on Psalm 90, still speaks to us today. It is a wonderful example of how Isaac Watts’ hymns transcend time and place.
Yet, in his own day, Isaac Watts was better known as a theologian and philosopher than as a hymn writer. His book in Logic was the standard text on the subject at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale – universities that he, ironically, was not allowed to attend.
He was also a pioneer in writing for children. With simple language, pleasing rhythms, plus a strong moral message, his poems or songs were published extensively in Britian and America. They included the memorable:
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
that ends with the moral in the last verse:
In books, or work, or healthful play
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.
Sadly for Isaac, the strong attraction of his pen was not matched by his physical appearance. He was only five feet tall, frail and unattractive. The story goes that poetess Elizabeth Singer was greatly excited by his verse. They met and Watts proposed marriage but she declined, saying. ‘Mr Watts, I only wish I could say that I admire the casket as much as I admire the jewel!’ Poor Isaac!
Jean Silvan Evans