In 1556, John Knox issued hisAnglo-Genevan Psalter, based on the 1551 edition of Sternhold and Hopkins, with some alterations and additions. It naturally was greatly influenced by Calvin’sGenevan Psalter. TheAnglo-Genevan Psalteris significant chiefly because of its influence on the Scotch Psalter. Through that, it is the source of some psalms and tunes still in use—notably, “All people that on earth do dwell” and “Old Hundredth” to which the Long Meter Doxology is sung.
The Scotch Psalter developed on a different line. The Psalm editors of the Scottish Church accepted eighty-seven of the Anglo-Genevan Psalms, added and somewhat altered forty-two from the final Sternhold and Hopkins editions, and supplied twenty-one from their own versifiers. It appeared in 1564 and was adopted by the General Assembly as its authorized Psalm book.
In 1600 James I began a revision and himself wrote thirty-five of the Psalms before his death. This psalter was completed by William Alexander and was issued in 1630, being known as theRoyal Psalter. Charles I bound up a revised edition of it with a new liturgy prepared by the Scotch bishops in 1536, and ordered its exclusive use. But the Scotch clergy declined with thanks, having no use for “the mass in English.”
But the question of a revision of this Psalter having been raised, its deficiencies, which had been passively accepted, rose up into consciousness. Rous’ version, adopted by the Westminster Assembly in 1643, and hence widely used in England, was made the basis of the new Scotch Psalter and, after seven years of amending and revision, was adopted in 1650. It is still used in Scotland and in American Presbyterian churches whose eyes look back reverently to Scotland.
Rous’ version was made by Francis Rous, Provost of EtonCollege, Oxford, a Presbyterian lawyer and a man of public affairs. It was an improvement on Sternhold and Hopkins, but still left much to be desired in smoothness of versification and grace of diction, owing to the continued loyalty to the original phraseology of the Psalms. Hence it had some “awful examples,” to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, whose repetition here might amuse but not edify. But it also had some happy stanzas that we still are glad to sing, e.g.:
“The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want;He makes me down to lieIn pastures green; he leadeth meThe quiet waters by.”
“The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want;
He makes me down to lie
In pastures green; he leadeth me
The quiet waters by.”
Compare this with Archbishop Parker’s version of the Shepherd Psalm written in 1557:
“To feed my neede: he will me leadeTo pastures green and fat:He forth brought me: in libertieTo waters delicate.”
“To feed my neede: he will me leade
To pastures green and fat:
He forth brought me: in libertie
To waters delicate.”
But with the blindness of the versifiers to the need of diversifying their meters in the interest of varied and attractive tunes, all the psalms were written in Common Meter.[2]
A new version by two Irishmen, Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady, appeared in 1696. Tate was a literary man, a playwright, a poet, and finally poet laureate. Brady had a rather varied clerical career in Ireland and in England, becoming chaplain to King William. This will partly explain why this version received royal endorsement and gradually replaced Sternhold and Hopkins in the English Church. It was adopted by the Protestant Episcopal Church of America in 1789. The fact that the Nonconformist churches remained faithful to the “Old Version” and to Rous’ version, no doubthad its bearing on the final acceptance of the “New Version” by the Established Church.
This “New Version” was a little smoother than the “Old Version,” and had a little more literary grace, but still was shackled by devotion to “purity”—to the exact thought and phraseology of the Hebrew Psalms. Nevertheless, as Gillman says, “this book contained a plentiful supply of chaff, but perhaps a few more grains of golden corn than Sternhold’s.” “As pants the hart for cooling streams” and “Through all the changing scenes of life” are still highly prized, and Tate’s Christmas Carol, “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” (which appeared in a supplement to the “New Version”) is a masterly adaptation of the Nativity story. On the other hand, Montgomery, in comparing the “New Version” with the “Old Version,” remarks: “It is nearly as inanimate as the former, though a little more refined.” Of the “Old Version” he says: “The merit of faithful adherence to the original has been claimed for this version and need not be denied, but it is the resemblance which the dead bear to the living.” Old Thomas Fuller wittily says of Sternhold and Hopkins that “They are men whose piety was better than their poetry, and they had drunk more of Jordan than of Helicon.” Thomas Campbell even more harshly exclaims: “With the best intensions and the worst taste, they degraded the spirit of Hebrew poetry by flat and homely phraseology, and, mistaking vulgarity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they found sublime.” From the literary point of view these dicta are correct enough, but they overlook what is vastly more important—the high moral and spiritual uses which these homely versions so amply served.
The Pilgrims brought with them from Leyden Ainsworth’s version of the Psalms, published in Amsterdam—Genevan rather than English in character. Its use was largely confinedto the Pilgrims and their descendants. Presently the copies of both versions became rare and the service of song depended on the “lining out” of the verses.
The first book printed in America was theBay Psalm Book, an independent version of the Psalms made by Thomas Welde, Richard Mather, and John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, a committee appointed in 1636. It was proposed to make it more scriptural than either of the previous versions used. It appeared in 1640. Its preface consisted of a discourse urging that psalm-singing was both lawful and necessary. During the next century and a half no less than seventy editions were printed. It was improved by Dunster and Lyon and reprinted in Great Britain, eighteen editions being called for in England and twenty-two in Scotland. This was America’s first contribution to the song service of the Mother Country, but by no means the last.
It may be interesting to see just what literary style thisBay Psalm Bookcould display, and a few specimens are herewith given. The one hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, for instance, was given the following form:
1.“The rivers on of BabilonThere when wee did sit downe:Yea, even then wee mourned whenwee remembred Sion.
1.“The rivers on of Babilon
There when wee did sit downe:
Yea, even then wee mourned when
wee remembred Sion.
2.Our Harp wee did hang it amidUpon the willow tree,Because there they that us awayled in captivitee,
2.Our Harp wee did hang it amid
Upon the willow tree,
Because there they that us away
led in captivitee,
3.Required of us a song and thusask mirth: us waste who laid,sing us among a Sion’s songunto us then they said.
3.Required of us a song and thus
ask mirth: us waste who laid,
sing us among a Sion’s song
unto us then they said.
4.The Lord’s song sing can wee? beingin stranger’s land. Then letloose her skill my right hand, if IJerusalem forget.
4.The Lord’s song sing can wee? being
in stranger’s land. Then let
loose her skill my right hand, if I
Jerusalem forget.
5.Let cleave my tongue my pallate onif minde thee doe not Iif chief joys or’e I prize not moreJerusalem my joy.”
5.Let cleave my tongue my pallate on
if minde thee doe not I
if chief joys or’e I prize not more
Jerusalem my joy.”
Cotton Mather’s rhymeless version was much more sensible in its form, for it eliminated the chief handicap in producing a literal version in metrical form.
As in the Psalm versions of England and Scotland, there was a vivid consciousness of literary and poetic shortcomings; but the sense of obligation to supply a literal translation of the Hebrew overrode all impulses toward a smoother rendering. The preface frankly states the position of the committee: “If therefore the verses are not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire or expect; let them consider that God’s altar needs not our polishing (Ex. 20), for we have respected rather a plaine translation, than to smooth our verses with the sweetness of any paraphrase, and soe have attended Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry, in translating the Hebrew words into English language and David’s poetry into English meetre.”
There were other American Psalm versions, but the only versions worth considering are the revisions of Isaac Watts’ Psalms, which will come up in introducing American hymnody later.
In smiling over this rude psalmody of England, Scotland, and America, it is always to be remembered that these versions were not a literary endeavor. Their ambition was to secure ‘purity,’ loyalty to the rather prosaically conceived doctrines of the originals. There was no thought of poetry or of literary finish. The meter and rhyme were practical devices to make congregational singing possible.
Just as Gregory the Great did not create the music that bears his name, nor Luther the congregational hymnody, so Isaac Watts did not originate the English hymnody of which he is often termed the father. The Lollards, or Wickliffites, sang metrical psalms, and also hymns, in the Low Countries, as well as in England, long before Luther, or Marot, or Sternhold.
Moreover, the emphasis of the Psalms was an ecclesiastical, clerical attitude, while the people at large to whom the Scriptures had been a closed book, and the Psalms an unknown language, sang such vernacular hymns as sprang up among them; so, while we cannot doubt but that they sang some metrical psalms, based on the Wickliffe English Bible, the body of their singing was presumably hymnic.
Indeed, we must go back much farther to find the spring of religious song that was to become a great river of praise. Caedmon, a monk, originally a swineherd, of the early seventh century, supplied the earliest recorded English hymns:
“Now must we hymn the Master of heaven,The might of the Maker, the deeds of the Father,The thought of his heart.”
“Now must we hymn the Master of heaven,
The might of the Maker, the deeds of the Father,
The thought of his heart.”
Undoubtedly the times before Caedmon were resonant withearlier songs, for the Venerable Bede (673-735) in the next generation records the fact of a great deal of singing among the people. Indeed, he himself wrote hymns in Anglo-Saxon, as well as in Latin. Patrick and Colombo sang psalms and hymns and made them a means of converting the pagans of Ireland and Scotland.
The urge, not only for versifying all parts of the Scriptures, including genealogies, but of actually singing them with fervor, submerged the native impulse of song. The religious loyalty to the letter of the Scriptures that followed closed the door against the development of the English hymn.[1]
Professor Reeves in hisThe Hymn as Literatureremarks: “As vigorous and variegated and prevalent as this union of popular poetry and popular music was in England, it strangely weakened and paled at the one time in English history when it might have been expected most to flourish. The Reformation, born of that new freedom of thought and worship which produces the best hymnody, did not in England, as it gloriously did in Germany, speak out richly in the native vernacular hymn.”[2]
But it was not only the blight of a narrow bibliolatry that prevented the development of the English religious lyric. English poetry had lost its spontaneity and its gracious simplicity in a self-conscious devotion to false literary ideals.
The conception of a congregational hymn did not exist among the literary men of the Reformation and later. Indeed, that Reformation among the cultured and intellectual classes was not so much a religious transformation as a political and cultural repudiation of clerical bonds, and an enjoymentof new liberties. There was some religious feeling, of course, but it was expressed in elaborate forms, not in spontaneous simple lyrics that the people could sing.
The technic of the singing hymn had not been developed, nor its limitations recognized. It took nearly a century before even an approximation could be reached to the practicability of the Lutheran hymns, which were written, not by literary connoisseurs, but by men in close touch with the people, men who had with singleness of mind striven to win and edify them. As we study the English lyrics, written, not to be sung, but simply to express the personal feelings of the writer in the current style and in complicated measures, we see how far English poets had to go before a practicable singing hymn could be written.
The conceptions of poetry, the prevalent grandioseness of style, the studied phrasemaking, the excessive Latinity of vocabulary among distinctively literary men, made the simplicity needed in a congregational hymn impossible. Despite Mr. Horder’s enthusiasm over the possible use Luther would have made of John Milton, the German hymnody creator could have done nothing with the ponderous large-planning author ofParadise Lost, with his wealth of classical allusions and mythology, and his phrasing rich with preciosity. Milton’s Psalm versions, fine as they are, were simply not singable by the commonalty of his time who were to be depended on to do the singing. He was a writer of odes, not of singing hymns.
Here is a literary hymn—balancing phrases, piling up antitheses, consciously seeking striking and euphonious combinations of words:
“I praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love is His;While Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.Love’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired Light,To love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.”
“I praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love is His;
While Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.
Love’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired Light,
To love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.”
The writer of the foregoing, Robert Southwell, a Romanist martyr, writing in prison, could write simple lyrics out of the fullness and genuineness of his religious experience, but it was not in the accepted fashion. What Protestant dare refuse to sing this simple hymn of his?
“Yet God’s must I remain,By death, by wrong, by shame;I cannot blot out of my heartThat grace wrought in his name.”
“Yet God’s must I remain,
By death, by wrong, by shame;
I cannot blot out of my heart
That grace wrought in his name.”
All these writers, and many others that might be mentioned, had not acquired the technic of congregational hymn writing. They either did not recognize the limitations of the singing hymn, or refused to be hampered by its restraints.
But presently the idea of the singing hymn defined itself. Thomas Campion in 1613 issued a number of lyrics that combined spiritual insight, literary grace, and practical availability to a hitherto unattained degree. Dr. Benson characterizes his
“Never weather-beaten sailMore willing beat to shore,”
“Never weather-beaten sail
More willing beat to shore,”
as “among the loveliest of the lyrics expressing the heavenly homesickness.” Campion was a musician as well as a poet, which partly accounts for the singability of his hymns.
In 1623 George Withers issued a complete hymnbook for the Established Church. It was made up of Scriptural paraphrases and hymns for special occasions. The hymns are superior to previous attempts in structure and method, in their simple piety and practical purpose, and in their availability for actual congregational singing. But in the midst of admirable lines there were strange lapses in taste. The hymn whose first verse began so auspiciously,
“Come, oh, come, in pious laysSound we God Almighty’s praise;Hither bring in one consentHeart and voice and instrument,”
“Come, oh, come, in pious lays
Sound we God Almighty’s praise;
Hither bring in one consent
Heart and voice and instrument,”
makes the singing congregation a conductor directing a vast chorus:
“From earth’s vast and hollow wombMusic’s deepest bass may come;Seas and floods, from shore to shore,Shall their counter-tenors roar,” etc.
“From earth’s vast and hollow womb
Music’s deepest bass may come;
Seas and floods, from shore to shore,
Shall their counter-tenors roar,” etc.
Clever in a way, but hardly devotional!
Withers’ “Musicians’ Hymn” has a very practical hint to the “singers’ gallery,” as well as to the congregation:
“He sings and playsThe songs which best Thou lovest,Who does and saysThe things which Thou approvest.”
“He sings and plays
The songs which best Thou lovest,
Who does and says
The things which Thou approvest.”
What Withers’ influence on subsequent English hymnody might have been we can only conjecture: the Company of Stationers boycotted his book because he had secured the king’s order to bind it up with the Psalter and shut it out from the regular channels of trade. His second collection, “Hallelujah,” was even more practicable and candidly didactic in style. But Withers had but a slight, if any, influence, for Sternhold and Hopkins still ruled the worship of the churches.
His immediate successors in hymn writing, Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan, were not influenced by his practical spirit and sang to please themselves, not to lead the congregation.
George Herbert (1593-1633) was a devout soul, full of a usually charming fantasy and fertile in imagery; but antithesis was still an allurement to poets in his generation. His “Antiphon” makes an effective hymn, but the inevitable contrast is still there:
“The heavens are not too high,His praise may thither fly;The earth is not too low,His praises there may grow.”
“The heavens are not too high,
His praise may thither fly;
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.”
Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan all share in the quaintness of Herbert and also in his general hymnic impracticability.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674), the singer of rather worldly songs, but a literary artist withal, in his “Litany to the Holy Spirit” reaches more nearly up to the ideal of the singing hymn:
“In the hour of my distress,When temptations me oppress,And when I my sins confess,Sweet Spirit, comfort me.”
“In the hour of my distress,
When temptations me oppress,
And when I my sins confess,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me.”
But when in the second stanza he descends to a description of a feverish sleepless night,
“When I lie within my bedSick in heart and sick in head,And with doubts discomforted,Sweet Spirit, comfort me,”
“When I lie within my bed
Sick in heart and sick in head,
And with doubts discomforted,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me,”
a doubt of its congruity on the lips of a crowd of worshipers begins to rise. But when in the fourth and fifth verses one is asked to sing,
“When the artless doctor seesNo one hope but of his fees,And his skill runs on the lees,Sweet Spirit, comfort me.
“When the artless doctor sees
No one hope but of his fees,
And his skill runs on the lees,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me.
When his potion and his pill,His or none or little skill,Meet for nothing but to kill,Sweet Spirit, comfort me,”
When his potion and his pill,
His or none or little skill,
Meet for nothing but to kill,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me,”
one understands why, despite some fine lines, hymnal editors hesitate to use it.
Richard Baxter (1615-1691), chiefly remembered by hisSaints’ Everlasting RestandCall to the Unconvertedand amass of other most useful writings, prepared a metrical psalter which found little response; he also wrote some poetry, but, as a child of his age, delighted in antithesis. One of his books of poetry had as its subtitleThe Concordant Discord of a Broken-healed Heart. His hymns, however, are simple in style and make a close approach to the practicable type. Two of them are still largely in use: “Lord, it belongs not to my care” and “Ye holy angels bright.” Had the churches in his day given a fair opportunity, or furnished the inspiration of demand, Baxter might have been one of our great hymnists, superior to Watts in his deeper spirituality.
John Austin (?-1669) wrote some excellent hymns for a book of “Devotions” for family use. Among them is
“Blest be Thy love, dear Lord,That taught me this sweet way,Only to love Thee for ThyselfAnd for that love obey,”
“Blest be Thy love, dear Lord,
That taught me this sweet way,
Only to love Thee for Thyself
And for that love obey,”
which still finds a worthy place in our hymnals.
About this time (1616) the long poem, “Hierusalem, my happie home,” appears to have been written. Only the initials F. B. P. are attached to the manuscript, now in the British Museum. It is conjectured that they stand for Francis Baker Priest. Out of it have been fashioned two very useful hymns: “Jerusalem, my happy home,” by Joseph Bromehead in 1795, and “O mother dear, Jerusalem,” by an unknown hand. The debt of the original to the Latin is quite evident, but it has original values as well. Aside from its length, a common fault in its time, it approaches the final type of the congregational hymns very nearly in its simplicity, devoutness, and in its practicable measure.
Closely allied to the Herbert school of religious lyrics, Bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711) had the advantage of belonging to a later generation in which the conception of the congregational hymn had begun to crystallize into a definite form.His Morning and Evening Hymns are both simple in structure—in Ambrose’s iambic long meter—free from affectations and bizarre rhetoric, easily comprehensible, and devout and spiritual. They have been accepted as among the best hymns in the language.
The doxology with which the two hymns close has been sung more frequently and with greater elevation of mind and heart than any other four lines in all earth’s literature. There is in this doxology a nobility, a majesty, a comprehensiveness of praise which have not been approached elsewhere outside of the choruses found in the Book of Revelation. English hymnody had at last found its voice, its spirit, and its model.
The conception of the congregational hymn had now been clearly defined and, from Bishop Ken on, English hymnody was established as a distinct department of English lyrical poetry. Hymn writers thenceforward were content to accept the mediocrity Montgomery later called for. The difficulty was that the English Protestant churches, still psalm-fanatic, were not ready to sing the hymns they needed so much for their highest spiritual development, and which now began to be supplied.
That the idea of singing hymns of “human composure” was making progress is evidenced by the issue in 1659 of the first collection of hymns,A Century of Select Hymns, by William Barton (1603-1678). He had issued a collection of versified Psalms in 1644 and a little book of Psalms and hymns of thanksgiving in 1651. A little later he published a review of the current Psalm version discussing its “errors” and “absurdities.” He issued six collections during his lifetime, most of whose content we would recognize as hymns. His work has little interest to us except as it, as well as that of Wither, Baxter, and Mason, helped to clarify the ideas of the young man Watts.
It was the lack of preparation on the part of the churches, rather than any essential inferiority to Isaac Watts, that prevented John Mason (?-1694) from being recognized as the father of English hymnody. Watts’ superiority lay in his having an intenser consciousness of the greater value of the free hymn and the strength and ability to force the issue to a final conclusion.
Mason’s hymns were the first to be used in regular congregational worship. Twenty editions of hisSpiritual Songswere issued; considering the times and the small population, this was a marvelous success. This collection may be considered the thin edge of the wedge, later driven by Watts, between the churches and psalmody. Horder in hisHymn Loverdeclares that “rarely did Watts rise to the height of thought and beauty of expression which are found in Mason’s hymns.”
One of Mason’s most widely used hymns is
“Now from the altar of my heartLet incense flames arise;Assist me, Lord, to offer upMine evening sacrifice.
“Now from the altar of my heart
Let incense flames arise;
Assist me, Lord, to offer up
Mine evening sacrifice.
Awake, my Love! awake, my Joy;Awake, my Heart and Tongue:Sleep not: when Mercies loudly call,Break forth into a Song.”
Awake, my Love! awake, my Joy;
Awake, my Heart and Tongue:
Sleep not: when Mercies loudly call,
Break forth into a Song.”
High authority claims that Mason’s hymn, “Thou wast, O God, and Thou wast blest,” is one of the best in the language. Its third verse is particularly noble:
“To whom, Lord, should I sing but Thee,The Maker of my tongue?Lo, other lords would seize on me,But I to Thee belong.As waters hasten to their sea,And earth unto its earth,So let my soul return to Thee,From whom it had its birth.”
“To whom, Lord, should I sing but Thee,
The Maker of my tongue?
Lo, other lords would seize on me,
But I to Thee belong.
As waters hasten to their sea,
And earth unto its earth,
So let my soul return to Thee,
From whom it had its birth.”
His influence on Watts was very considerable. George MacDonald says of Mason’s hymns: “Dr. Watts was very fond of them; would that he had written with similar modesty of style.” Mason was made to supply many a good line to the hymns of Watts, we are told by those who have compared the hymns of the two writers.[3]
The hymns are good, because the writer was good! Richard Baxter styled him “the glory of the Church of England,” saying that “the frame of his spirit was so heavenly, his deportment so humble and obliging, his discourse of spiritual things so weighty, with such apt words and delightful air, that it charmed all that had any spiritual relish.”
Before closing this chapter, mention must be made of Joseph Addison (1672-1719), who is so widely known because of his connection with the famousSpectator, a weekly devoted to essays on various topics, literary and otherwise. While his essays are his chief claim to literary honor, he wrote five hymns, three of which are found in most of our larger hymnals: “The spacious firmament on high,” “When all thy mercies, O my God,” “How are thy servants blest, O Lord.” These hymns are all most thoughtful and felicitously expressed. They are admirably adapted for the worship of God, but they too unanimously ignore the higher attributes of the divine nature as manifested in Jesus Christ, and the salvation he wrought out for fallen and needy humanity, to take a high place in Christian Hymnody. The same is true of Psalms, of course, but they were written before Christ appeared.
We have now reached the point in the development of the English hymn where the shortcomings of the metrical versions of the Psalms were keenly realized, and where the conception of the practicable congregational hymn was clarified and the model definitely established.
Someone of combative courage and of organizing ability was needed who would break down the wall of mere usage and custom in the churches—of the sheerly mechanical tradition and mental inertia; all the better, if he could replace the outworn Psalm versions with practicable congregational hymns that would more intelligently and efficiently voice the faith and the experience of God’s people. He needed to be a man of clear vision of the essential lyric needs of the church, of a clear conception of the type of hymns best fitted to supply those needs, of literary culture and adaptativeness, and of a high moral courage to face and overcome the extreme conservativeness that seems to be inherent in all ecclesiastical organizations.
In the distinct providence of God, the man appeared, exactly fitted for the important task. Isaac Watts was born at Southampton, England, July 17, 1674, the son of a very intelligentand devout schoolmaster, who during the reign of Charles II was imprisoned and exiled from his family for his nonconformity. Isaac was extraordinarily precocious, studying Greek and Hebrew at the age of eight years, writing verses when a mere child, and attempting Latin and English poetry in his schooldays. His brilliant scholarship brought him offers of a career at one of the universities, but he refused, being staunch in his nonconformity.
He became a Nonconformist minister in 1698 and pastor of the Independent Church, Berry Street, London, in 1702. His health being frail, owing to his excessive study as a student, he was given an assistant, Rev. Samuel Price, with whom he spent “many harmonious years of fellowship in the Gospel.”
Visiting Sir Thomas Abney, a staunch Dissenter living at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, for a week, Watts was persuaded to remain with him and his wife permanently, making his home with them the rest of his life. He never married. His health was always precarious, and his pastorate at the Berry Street Independent Church, which ended only with his death, was largely nominal.
We rarely think of Isaac Watts as anything more than a hymn writer, but his intellectual activities were wide and his writing outside of hymnody extensive. He wrote a number of treatises on Theology. His textbooks on Geography, Astronomy, and Logic were used in the English universities, and at Yale and Harvard.
Watts had been recognized from childhood as having a talent in the making of verses. Returning from a church service in Southampton, he sharply criticized the hymns of Barton—an inferior contemporary of John Mason. His devout father, a deacon in the church, playfully, perhaps seriously, replied that he should try his skill in supplying a better one. The challenge was accepted and he brought his father the hymn:
“Behold the glories of the LambAmidst his Father’s throne;Prepare new honors for his name,And songs before unknown.”
“Behold the glories of the Lamb
Amidst his Father’s throne;
Prepare new honors for his name,
And songs before unknown.”
He little realized that it was his life’s most illustrious task to fulfill the exhortation of the last two lines.
The success of the new hymn when lined out to the congregation and sung by them led to a demand for more. Thus unconsciously and unpretentiously was ushered in a new epoch in the devotional singing of the Christian Church. Presumably this occurred in his twenty-first year, for this and the succeeding year were spent at home in Southampton in varied studies and in writing hymns.
These hymns seem to have remained in manuscript for some years, despite the earnest protest of his younger brother, who declared that “Mason now reduces this kind of writing to a sort of yawning indifference, and honest Barton chimes us asleep.” This literary judgment of young Enoch must not be taken too seriously, except as expressing his eagerness to have his brilliant brother’s hymns brought before the public.
It was nearly or quite ten years after the first hymn that a collection of hymns and odes and other poems,Horæ Lyricæ, was issued, in 1706. It contained twenty-five hymns, four psalm paraphrases, and eleven religious songs in varied measures and meters. It also contained elegies, odes, and blank verse of a purely literary character. In his preface he suggests the spirit and methods which should later be more fully developed. “The hymns were never written to appear before the judges of wit, but only to assist the meditations and worship of vulgar Christians.”[1]
In 1709 the second edition of theHoræfurnished an increased number of hymns. In the preface of this edition he confesses that in the hymns of theHoræ“there are some expressions which are not suited to the plainest capacities, anddiffer too much from the usual methods of speech in which holy things are proposed to the general part of mankind.”
The hymns contained in the more popularHymns and Spiritual Songsin 1707, and in the augmented edition of 1709, were of a plainer type for “the level of vulgar capacities.” The edition of 1709 contained two hundred and fifty-five hymns, seventy-eight paraphrases, and twenty-two communion hymns. The hymns were in only three meters, Long, Common, and Short. Watts had an eye single for practicability.
The four Psalm versions contained in hisHoræ Lyricæhad a prefatory note, “An essay on a few of David’s Psalms translated into plain verse, in language more agreeable to the clearer revelations of the Gospel,” which makes certain that he had already clearly in mind the evangelical psalter which, despite his absorption in other tasks and his long illness in 1712, finally appeared in 1719, “The Psalms of David imitated in the language of the New Testament and apply’d to the Christian state and worship.” Watts excluded twelve Psalms entirely and omitted passages from some of the one hundred and thirty-eight that were retained, because they were not adapted to Christian use.
Although he never married, Watts was very fond of children. In 1715, in the midst of his program for the public service of song, hisopus magnum, he prepared his “Divine Songs, attempted in easy language for the use of children.” It was to be used in connection with the “Catechism” he had prepared for their use. It was the first collection of its kind and was the forerunner of the immense supply of children’s songs that was to grow out of the activities of the Sunday school. One is amazed that the writer of “When I survey the wondrous cross,” or “Our God, our help in ages past,” could write so tender and graceful a lullaby as
“Hush, my babe, lie still and slumber,Holy angels guard thy bed!Heavenly blessings without numberGently falling on thy head.”
“Hush, my babe, lie still and slumber,
Holy angels guard thy bed!
Heavenly blessings without number
Gently falling on thy head.”
However kindly we may estimate the value of Watts’ hymns and of his evangelical metrical versions of the Psalms, we must recognize that his service as the protagonist of the free hymn is quite as great. His hymns and evangelical psalter would likely have suffered the fate of those of Wither and Mason, his immediate predecessors, had he not written attractive and practicable congregational hymns and versions, and not accomplished two other results essential to the substitution of the free hymn for the often grotesque Psalm versions.
He did not simply write a miscellaneous lot of religious lyrics and shoot them like arrows into the air; he had a clear and efficient theory of church song, recognizing not only the varied needs, but the psychology underlying those needs, and produced “a system of praise” that supplied those needs and conciliated current prejudices.
Again, in his prefaces and in hisEssay towards the Improvement of Psalmody, he laid hymnological foundations that not only prepared the way for the introduction of his own hymns and versions, but also for such a fresh consideration of the whole subject as led to the revolution in the English song service; from these have come the freedom and spontaneity, genuineness and sincerity, definiteness of purpose, and deepening of personal experience which have blessed succeeding generations.
His supreme merit, in this definite onslaught on the rigid literalism of the churches, was that he not only brought destructive criticism, but supplied an adequate substitute for that which he condemned.
Watts denied the obligation to sing the Bible. The Scriptures were the Word of God to the soul and the hymn was the work of the soul in response to God. He further denied thatthe Book of Psalms was given as a hymnbook for the Christian Church. It was not even adapted to its use, for it was distinctly Jewish and not Christian in ideals and spirit. “Some of ’em are almost opposite to the spirit of the Gospel; many of them are foreign to the state of the New Testament and widely different to the present circumstances of Christians.” Before they can be sung in a Christian service they must be rewritten as if David were a Christian and not a Jew.
Even allowing that there was an obligation to sing the Word of God, Watts denied that the metrical Psalm was the pure Word of God. The demands of meter and rhyme so refashioned and even mutilated the Psalms that they no longer were the words of the Scripture, nor even its ideas. Its inspiration suffered a total eclipse under the hands of the versifiers, and the metrical Psalm became a work of “human composure” with none of the vital spirit of the free hymn.
Watts could not understand why “we under the Gospel should sing nothing else but the joys, hopes, and fears of Asaph and David.” He declared that “David would have thought it very hard to have been confined to the words of Moses and sung nothing else on all his rejoicing days but the drowning of Pharaoh in the fifteenth of Exodus.” He complained that even in those places where the Jewish psalmist seems to mean the Gospel, excellent poet as he was, he was not able to speak it plain, by reason of the infancy of that dispensation, and longs for the aid of a Christian writer.
He set aside the prevalent “superstitious reverence for the letter of the Jewish Scriptures,” and in an almost defiant spirit declared, “Though there are many gone before me who have taught the Hebrew Psalmist to speak English, yet I think I may assume the 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 the Jew about him.”
Whatever devotional value we may assign to the Psalms, wemust accept Watts’ fundamental idea that they are not the exclusive formulary of the use of song in the worship of God and in the life of the Church. His further contention that not all the Psalms, nor all parts of them, are adapted to Christian use, we cannot now gainsay. The Jews themselves only used about forty of them. It was not until centuries after the Apostolic Age had elapsed that, due to monkish superstition, all the Psalms were recognized as of equal exclusive use.
So many versions of individual Psalms make such satisfactory hymns and so many hymns are such faithful transcripts of passages from the Psalms, or echoes of their sentiments, that the distinction between psalm versions and hymns in individual cases might well be set aside entirely, as having no actual basis or value.
While Watts laid the strongest emphasis on the awkwardness and absurdity of much of the Psalm paraphrasing, he was also impressed with the unavailability of the literary hymns of his predecessors, or even of some of his own in his first book. The common people would not sing them, they were out of their reach; moreover, they were not in practicable meters and measures, and did not fit the accepted tunes the people knew. Watts accepted the current Psalm version meters, Long Meter, Common Meter, and Short Meter, and the Psalm tunes at once became hymn tunes. It was quite a handicap to a literary hymn writer, but essential to the practical use of the hymn.
Watts deliberately avoided distinctly literary quality in his hymns, seeking only lucidity and plainness of expression, all within the capacity of the common people. To quote from his prefaces, he “endeavored to make the sense plain and obvious.... The metaphors are generally sunk to the level of vulgar capacities.... Some of the beauties of poesy are neglected and some wilfully defaced.”
Dr. Benson, whom it is always profitable to quote, says: “Watts’ work earns a place in the literature of power, the literature that leaves esthetic critics cold while it moves men.” Palgrave included nothing of Watts in hisGolden Treasury, but elsewhere speaks of him as “one of those whose sacrifice of art to direct usefulness has probably lost them those honors in literature to which they were entitled.”
The offensive lines in Watts must be judged with due regard to their background. The Sternhold and Hopkins version was vastly worse. It was a time of dry doctrinal preaching and of a literal interpretation of the Bible which to the preachers was largely a mere collection of isolated proof texts. In these matters he was speaking in the idiom and with the accent of his own generation. In the two centuries that have since passed, the sand and gravel and debris have been washed away, and our hymnals contain the pure gold of his verse for our edification and delight. Outside of the hymnbooks of the Wesley brothers, where can we find such a placer mine of spiritual wealth?
At his best Watts wrote hymns of majesty and ecstatic adoration that have never been excelled:
“Our God, our Help in ages past,Our Hope for years to come;Our Shelter from the stormy blast,And our eternal Home.”
“Our God, our Help in ages past,
Our Hope for years to come;
Our Shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal Home.”
How he has made the Long Meter measure sound like the great Open Diapason of the pipe organ in the following lines!
“Before Jehovah’s awful throne,Ye nations bow with sacred joy;Know that the Lord is God alone,He can create, and he destroy.”
“Before Jehovah’s awful throne,
Ye nations bow with sacred joy;
Know that the Lord is God alone,
He can create, and he destroy.”
What if John Wesley does add a majestic note or two in the foregoing hymn; the singer of the whole hymn is the noble spirit of little Dr. Watts.
Had David himself returned with an English tongue, he could not have reproduced the spirit of the seventy-second Psalm more nobly:
“Jesus shall reign where’er the sunDoth his successive journeys run;His Kingdom spread from shore to shore,Till moons shall wax and wane no more.”
“Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His Kingdom spread from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.”
Solomon’s coronation song (Ps. 72) was no more majestic than this crowning hymn Watts wrote for his Lord.
But Watts could not only be majestic; he could be tender: