Who Was Isaac Watts? The Father of English Hymns, Pastor and Preacher
Isaac Watts was an English pastor, preacher and hymn writer who lived from 1674 to 1748. He wrote about 750 hymns, among them "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross," "Alas! and Did My Saviour Bleed," "Joy to the World" and "O God, Our Help in Ages Past." Before Watts, most English churches outside the Church of England sang only the Psalms, in close, often clumsy verse. Watts argued that Christians should also sing the gospel in their own words, and his books of hymns and Christian psalms changed church singing in English for good. That's why he's often called the father of English hymnody.
He was also a pastor in London for most of his life, a careful preacher, and the author of books on theology, logic and the Christian life. Here's a fuller look.
A Southampton boyhood
Watts was born in Southampton on July 17, 1674, the eldest of nine children. His father, also named Isaac, ran a boarding school and was a firm Dissenter, one of the Protestants who would not conform to the Church of England. Under Charles II that was a crime, and his father was jailed for it. The old accounts say his mother sometimes sat on a stone by the prison door with the baby Isaac in her arms.
The boy was quick. One story says that before he could speak plainly he would ask for "a book! a book!" whenever someone gave him money. He began Latin at four, under his father, and went on to Greek, Hebrew and French at the Southampton grammar school. Dissenters couldn't attend Oxford or Cambridge, so in 1690 he went to a Dissenting academy at Stoke Newington, near London.
How the hymns began
At twenty he came home to Southampton for two years. The church there sang the old metrical psalms, and young Watts complained to his father about how dull and awkward they were. His father told him to try to do better. He did. The church asked for a second hymn, then a third and a fourth, until he had enough for a book. According to the memoir printed with his Works, the hymns "were so little to his judgment and taste, that he could not forbear complaining of them to his father," who "bid him try what he could do to mend the matter."
Tradition says the first was "Behold the glories of the Lamb," which still opens his hymnbook:
Behold the glories of the Lamb Amidst his Father's throne Prepare new honours for his name, And songs before unknown.
Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book 1, Hymn 1
Pastor in London
Watts worked for a time as tutor in the family of Sir John Hartopp, and in 1698 he preached his first sermon. The same year he became assistant to the pastor of the Independent church in Mark Lane, London, and in 1702 he became its pastor. He stayed with that congregation for the rest of his life.
His health was never strong. Around 1712 a long illness left him unable to preach for years. Sir Thomas Abney, a godly London alderman, invited him to his home for a short stay. Watts lived with the Abney family, at Theobalds in Hertfordshire and at Stoke Newington, for thirty-six years. He liked to joke that he had come for a week and stayed thirty years. Lady Abney answered that it was the shortest visit her family ever had. In that quiet home he wrote most of his books.
The hymns and the psalms
In 1707 he published Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in three books: hymns drawn from Scripture, hymns on divine subjects, and hymns for the Lord's Supper. The same year he defended the idea in A Short Essay Toward the Improvement of Psalmody, arguing from Colossians 3:16 that the church may sing hymns that tell the clearer light of the gospel.
His great communion hymn comes from that book:
When I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of Glory dy'd, My richest gain I count but loss, And pour contempt on all my pride.
Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book 3, Hymn 7
In 1719 came The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament. Watts didn't simply put the Psalms into rhyme. He sang them as a Christian would, with Christ in view. His preface explains how:
Where he speaks of the pardon of sin, through the mercies of God, I have added the merits of a Saviour.
The Psalms of David, Preface
That book holds "Joy to the World" (from Psalm 98) and "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" (from Psalm 90). Some people at the time thought it bold, even wrong, to change the words of the Psalms. In time almost every English-speaking church came to sing Watts.
He also wrote Divine Songs for children (1715), a textbook on logic (1724) that was used in schools for generations, and The Improvement of the Mind (1741).
The preacher
Watts the hymn writer has crowded out Watts the preacher, but his sermons are clear, warm and full of Scripture. He wrote much about the love of God and about death and heaven. He believed true religion engages the heart as well as the head:
Cold reasoning, without passion, would have no such sovereign and powerful effects.
Discourses on the Love of God, Discourse III, The Use of the Passions in Religion
And he wrote with the steadiness of a man who often lived close to death himself:
Death finishes our state of labour and trial, and puts us in possession of the crown and the prize.
The Works of the Rev. Isaac Watts, Sermon XLIII, Death a Blessing to the Saints
His death and legacy
Watts died at the Abney home in Stoke Newington on November 25, 1748, at seventy-four. He was buried in Bunhill Fields in London, and a monument to him stands in Westminster Abbey. His hymns crossed the Atlantic and were sung in the Great Awakening and in the camp meetings that followed. They're still in nearly every hymnbook in English.
Where to start
TheWay Library has eight of his books, all free to read. Start with Hymns and Spiritual Songs, the book that changed church singing. Then read The Psalms of David (our copy holds only part of the collection) and his Short Essay on psalmody to see why he wrote as he did. To meet Watts the preacher, try The World to Come, his sermons on death and heaven, or the first volume of his Works, which opens with a memoir of his life.
Our guide to Isaac Watts's books explains what each one holds, and our collection of Isaac Watts quotes gathers his best lines from the hymns and sermons. All his books are on the Isaac Watts author page.