The Father of English Hymns
A BOUT the year 1675, a worthy Deacon Watts who kept a Puritan boarding-school in Southampton, England, was locked up in prison for being an incorrigible Dissenter. It was during the reign of the second Stuart, which Macaulay has well styled “the reign of the strumpets.” Before the door of the good deacon’s cell, his wife used to come and sit while she sang for the comfort of her imprisoned husband, and for the quieting of her eldest born baby, which she held in her arms. The little Isaac must have been drawing in some inspirations of his mother’s music with his mother’s milk. He was a poet from the cradle. His earliest thoughts he shaped into rhyme.
His mother offered a copper prize to the children in her husband’s school for the best bit of poetry they could produce; and Master Isaac, then in his eighth year, won the prize by the following saucy couplet: —
“I write not for a farthing, but to try-How I your farthing writers can outvie.”
At fifteen the precocious lad had made choice of the “better part,” and became a follower of Jesus. He worshipped at the Independent Church in Southampton, of which his father was a deacon; but the preaching edified him more than the service of song. The congregation were endeavoring to praise God every Sabbath in the clumsy, jaw-breaking measures of Sternhold and Hopkins, or the jolting rhymes of Nahum Tate. To the tuneful ear of the young student this saw-filing process in the name of sacred psalmody was utterly beyond endurance. One Sabbath morning (in 1702), after service, he vented his contempt for such ill-conditioned doggerel, and the only reply he received was, “Give us something better, then, young man!” He accepted the taunting challenge, went home, and produced before sunset a hymn which was lined off, and sung at the evening service. It began with the verse —
“Behold the glories of the Lamb,
Amidst his Father’s throne:
Prepare new honors for his name,
And songs before unknown.”
The author was just eighteen years old; but on that Sabbath our English Hymnology was horn, and young Isaac Watts was its father. Well might Montgomery say that he “was almost the inventor of hymns in our language, so greatly did he improve on his now forgotten predecessors in English sacred song.” Richard Baxter had written twenty years before his beautiful —
“Lord, it belongs not to my care,
Whether I die or live.”
But the single seed-corn did not sprout into a hymnologic harvest. Watts had struck the Meribah-rock of melody, and the waters continued to gush forth. In the year 1707 he gave to the churches an original volume, entitled “Hymns and Spiritual Songs,” and for the copyright he received the munificent sum of ffty dollars! If kept to this day, it would have yielded to its owners a solid million. The book of hymns was soon followed by another entitled “The Psalms of David imitated in the language of the New Testament.” In this second volume appeared the famous “Old Hundredth,” which began with the words —
“Nations, attend before His throne
With solemn fear, with sacred joy.”
John Wesley altered these lines to the grander ones, —
“Before Jehovah’s awful throne,
Te nations, bow with sacred joy!”
This stands as the solitary instance in which hymn-tinkering has improved upon the original. The man must indeed rise early in the morning who can improve upon Isaac Watts.
That he ever composed any one sacred song which can take rank beside Toplady’s “Rock of Ages” or Charles Wesley’s “Jesus, Lover oF my soul,” we do not claim. Those two, like the morning and the evening star, ride brightest in the firmament. But Isaac Watts wrote more of the great hymns of our mother tongue than any other man. No lay of Calvary has ever yet approached in pathetic grandeur that offering which Watts laid at his Kedeemer’s feet: —
“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.”
I can imagine that the apostle Paul may have already thanked Isaac Watts in paradise for having taught the church how to sing his own immortal declaration, “God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ!” No funeral hymns either have equalled those which issued from Watts’s pensive spirit. How many of us can recall the first scenes of burial which we witnessed in our early country homes! We seem to see again the rural neighbors gathered on the grass before the door, while the sun shimmered
5» through the trees upon the group around the open coffin. We seem to hear again, to the sweet plaintive strains of ol*” China,” those soul-melting words: —
“Why should we tremble to convey
This body to the tomb?
There the dear form of Jesus lay.
And left a long perfume.”
It is an evidence of wondrous versatility of genius that while Watts composed lines which Daniel Webster murmured on his dying-bed (” Show pity, Lord! O Lord, forgive!”), he also wrote the most perfect child-hymns in our language. Nothing in our modern Sabbath-school collections quite equals the old dog-eared primer which contained, “How doth the little busy bee,” and “Whene’er I take my walks abroad.” Bradbury was good; but the vintage of Watts, nearly two hundred years old, is better still. The only child-hymn of our day, which might have come from Watts’s pen, is that gem of sweet simplicity, —
“Jesus loves me, — this I know;
For the Bible tells me so:
Little ones to him belong;
I am weak, but he is strong.”
The author of “Divine and Moral Songs for Children” was himself childless. He lived a bachelor under the roof of Sir Thomas Abney, in London, whom he went to visit, and lingered there as a welcome guest for thirty-five years. In 1748 he fell asleep in Jesus, leaving as his beautiful posterity seven hundred white- winged hymns. They are flying under the whole heaven. His body rests in Bunhill Fields, the Westminster Abbey of the glorious Puritans. Close by the gate, and not far from Bunyan’s grave, is a plain tomb, which bears the name of Isaac Watts, the father of the English hymn.