Isaac Watts: Something Better to Sing

In the winter of 1688, England turned upside down. On 5 November a Dutch prince, William of Orange, landed with an army on the coast of Devon. Within weeks the Catholic king, James II, had lost his nerve and his friends, and before the year was out he had fled to France. Bells rang. Bonfires were lit. In towns all along the south coast of England, people argued in the streets about what would happen next.

In the port town of Southampton, a very clever boy of fourteen was having an upheaval of his own. His name was Isaac Watts. Years later, in a private list he kept of the chief events of his life, he set down what happened to him that year in a single line. In 1688, he wrote, he “fell under considerable convictions of sin.”

That is all he tells us. He does not say what he had done, or what he was reading, or who he was listening to. He describes no sermon and no scene. The next year’s entry is just as short. In 1689, when he turned fifteen, he “was taught to trust in Christ, I hope.”

Read that line again, slowly. Not “I was saved.” Not “I gave my life to God on such-and-such a night.” I was taught to trust in Christ, I hope. Someone taught him. What he was taught was to trust, not to achieve. And he finished with two small words that some would call a lack of faith, and others would recognise as the voice of a thinking person who knew how easily the human heart fools itself.

This is a chapter about a boy who asked questions: about his family’s suffering, about whether his own faith was real, and about why the church sang what it sang. His answers are still being sung all over the world.

Born Beside a Prison

To understand the fourteen-year-old, you have to know the world he was born into.

Isaac Watts was born in Southampton on 17 July 1674, the eldest of what became a large family. His father, also called Isaac, was a clothier, a dealer in cloth, and a leading member, by most accounts a deacon, of the town’s Independent church. The family were what the English called Dissenters or Nonconformists: Protestants who would not “conform” to the Church of England, its prayer book and its bishops, because they believed a church should be a gathered company of believers ordering its worship by the Bible alone.

In the 1670s and 1680s that belief was against the law. Dissenters could be fined for holding their own services, banned from living near the towns where they had been ministers, and thrown into gaol. Isaac’s father was imprisoned for his convictions more than once, including in the year his son was born. There is a family story, told by the earliest writers about Watts, that while his father was in prison, his mother used to sit on a stone near the gaol door with her baby in her arms. Nobody can now prove it, and stories like that can grow in the telling. But the world it describes is real. The boy was born into a church that met in secret, in fear of the knock on the door.

When Isaac was nine, in 1683, his father was locked up again, for about six months. According to Isaac’s own notes, after his release he had to leave his family and live away from home, in hiding, for about two years. Think about that from the point of view of a boy of nine or ten. Your father is gone, not because he has done anything wicked, but because of the way he worships God.

And in 1685, when Isaac was eleven, things grew darker still. A rebellion against the new king broke out in the West Country and was crushed. The judge sent to punish the rebels, George Jeffreys, became infamous for the number of people he sentenced to death in what were called the Bloody Assizes. At Winchester, about twelve miles from Southampton, an elderly widow named Alice Lisle, who had sheltered two men fleeing the battle, was condemned and beheaded in the town’s market place. For a Dissenting boy in Southampton, that was not history. It was the news.

It would be natural for a boy like that to ask: is it worth it? Would it not be easier to go to the parish church like everyone else and keep quiet? We do not know if Isaac asked that out loud. We do know what he decided, because a few years later he had to decide it for himself.

The Cleverest Boy in Southampton

Whatever was happening at home, at school Isaac was astonishing.

From the age of about six he went to the free grammar school in Southampton, where the master was a Church of England clergyman named John Pinhorne. By the usual account, which comes from Watts’s own notes as his early biographers reported them, Isaac had begun Latin with his father at four, Greek at about nine, French at about eleven, and Hebrew at about thirteen. Years later, as a grown man, he wrote a poem in Latin in honour of Pinhorne. A Dissenter’s son praising a Church of England schoolmaster may not sound like much, but in that bitterly divided town it says something good about both of them.

He was also a rhymer. One early piece has come down with his name on it: an acrostic, a poem in which the first letters of the lines spell out a name, said to have been written when he was a small child, with the lines beginning with the letters of ISAAC WATTS. Its first line is “I am a vile polluted lump of earth.” We cannot be certain how old he was when he wrote it, or whether it is entirely his. But if it is, this was a boy who, very young, was already turning his questions about himself and God into verse.

Convictions of Sin

Now we can come back to 1688, and the line in his notebook.

What does it mean to fall under “convictions of sin”? It is an old phrase, but the experience is not old-fashioned. It means that the things you have always heard about God stop being things you know and become things you feel. You do not just know that God is holy; you realise that he is holy and you are not. You do not just know that sin is wrong; you begin to see your own pride, selfishness, lying and coldness, and you find you cannot shrug them off. For some people it comes with terror; for others, as a slow weight that will not lift.

Isaac does not tell us which it was for him, or whether a sermon started it, or a book, or nothing in particular. He had grown up with Bible teaching his whole life. He knew the right answers. Like many young people who grow up in church, he may have discovered at fourteen that knowing the answers is not the same as having peace with God.

We can see something of how he thought about it from the little songs he wrote for children many years later, which you can read for yourself on Ochorus. In one of them, called “Seeing God,” a child prays, “Lord, at thy feet ashamed I lie, / Upward I dare not look; / Pardon my sins before I die, / And blot them from thy book.” That was written by a grown man in 1715, not by a fourteen-year-old. But a man does not usually write like that about something he has never felt.

“I Hope”

Then came 1689. That year the whole country changed again. Under the new king and queen, William and Mary, Parliament passed a law that came to be called the Toleration Act. For the first time, Dissenters could meet openly for worship without being fined or imprisoned, as long as their meeting houses were registered. The knock on the door was over. Isaac’s father, who had paid for his convictions with years of his life, could now worship freely in his own town.

And that same year, his son “was taught to trust in Christ, I hope.”

Who taught him? Isaac does not say. Perhaps it was the minister of the Southampton church. Perhaps his father. Perhaps it was a book. What we do know is what he came to believe, because he spent the rest of his life putting it into words that ordinary people could sing. He believed that he could never make himself right with God by being good enough, clever enough or religious enough. He believed that Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, had taken human flesh and died on the cross for sinners, bearing the punishment they deserved, and had risen again. And he believed that the way a guilty person is forgiven is simply by trusting Christ: leaning the whole weight of your soul on what he has done, instead of on what you have done.

In another of his children’s songs, “Praise to God for our Redemption,” he put it like this: “He honour’d all his Father’s laws, / Which we have disobey’d; / He bore our sins upon the cross, / And our full ransom paid.”

So why the “I hope”?

Some readers find it unsettling. Should a Christian not be sure? But listen to it again. Isaac is not saying, “I hope Christ is able to save.” He is saying, in effect, “I hope that what happened to me was the real thing.” He was a teenager who knew how good he was at words, how easily feelings come and go, and how possible it is to fool yourself about your own heart. He did not want to claim more than he could see. His confidence was in Christ; his caution was about himself. That is not the opposite of faith. It is what faith looks like in an honest mind.

That is freeing for anyone who has worried that their own conversion was not dramatic enough to count. As far as we can tell, Isaac’s had no thunderclap. It had a boy, a gradual weight of guilt, a slow learning to trust, and an honest “I hope.” Out of that quiet beginning came one of the most confident voices in the history of Christian worship.

A Door He Would Not Walk Through

At about sixteen, Isaac faced a real choice.

His brilliance at school had been noticed by people with money. A Southampton physician, Dr John Speed, and others are said to have offered to pay for him to go to university. In England that meant Oxford or Cambridge, and the road to a comfortable career. There was one condition, and it was not written by Dr Speed but by the law: to study at the universities, a young man had to conform to the Church of England.

Isaac turned the offer down. The writer Samuel Johnson, who wrote a short life of Watts later in the eighteenth century and was no friend of Dissenters, recorded simply that the young man declared his resolution to take his lot with the Dissenters.

Think about what that cost. The Toleration Act had made Dissenters safe, but it had not made them equal. They still could not take degrees at Oxford or Cambridge, or hold many public offices. To stay a Dissenter was to accept, at sixteen, that some doors would always be shut. We do not know exactly how he reasoned it through. But having seen what his father had suffered for his conscience, he was not going to trade his own conscience for a degree.

So in 1690 he went instead to a Dissenting academy at Stoke Newington, then a village just north of London, run by an Independent minister named Thomas Rowe. These academies were the Dissenters’ answer to being shut out of the universities. Isaac threw himself into study so hard, by most accounts, that he damaged his health, which was never good. He read philosophy, logic, history, languages and theology. He filled notebooks. He wrote Latin verse. By his own notes, in 1693, when he was eighteen, he joined Thomas Rowe’s church as a member, which meant making a public profession of his faith. The “I hope” of fifteen was becoming something he was willing to stand up and own.

Something Better to Sing

In 1694, at twenty, Isaac came home to Southampton for about two years. It was then, according to a tradition told ever since, that the most famous thing he ever did began with a complaint.

In the Independent chapel at Above Bar in Southampton, as in most Dissenting churches of the time, the congregation sang only the psalms of the Old Testament, turned into rhyming verse so that they could be sung to a handful of tunes. Many of these versions were clumsy, and the way they were sung was often dreary: often a clerk would read out a line, the congregation would drag it back to him, and then he would read out the next. The story goes that Isaac grumbled to his father about how dull the singing was, and that his father, perhaps tired of hearing it, told him that if he could do better, he should. And so, the story says, Isaac went away and wrote a hymn, and the church sang it, and liked it, and asked for another.

We should be careful here. This story is a tradition, passed down in the family and among Watts’s admirers, not something he wrote down himself, and the details vary from teller to teller. It may have been tidied up over the years, as good stories usually are. But two things in it are certainly true. The hymn usually named as his first, “Behold the glories of the Lamb,” is built on Revelation 5, where heaven sings to the Lamb who was slain. And Watts really was troubled by the singing of the churches, and he said so in print.

His question went deeper than “This is boring.” When his first great collection, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, came out in 1707, he explained in its preface that he had watched whole congregations singing with dull, thoughtless faces, and wondered how much the words meant to them. Part of the problem, he believed, was the words themselves. The psalms were God’s word, and he loved them. But Christians were singing them exactly as an Israelite would have sung them, centuries before Jesus came, as though the cross and the empty tomb had never happened. His question, in effect, was this: why should the church pray to Christ, preach Christ and read about Christ, but only sing as if it were still waiting for him?

Plenty of older Christians thought that question dangerous. To them, singing words written by a mere human being in church, instead of the inspired words of the Bible, was close to arrogance. Watts did not throw the psalms away. He did two things. He wrote hymns of his own, drawn from the whole of Scripture, in which a Christian could speak to God in his or her own voice. And later he rewrote the psalms themselves as a Christian who had seen the cross might sing them.

In Revelation 5:9, the scene behind that first hymn, the living creatures and elders around the throne “sang a new song: ‘Worthy are You to take the scroll and open its seals, because You were slain, and by Your blood You purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.’” That was what Watts wanted: a new song about the Lamb who was slain. Not because the old songs were wrong, but because the church now knew how the story turned out.

What Came After

In 1696 Watts went back to Stoke Newington as tutor to the son of Sir John Hartopp, a leading Dissenter. He preached his first sermon on his twenty-fourth birthday, in 1698. In 1702 he became pastor of the Independent church at Mark Lane in London, one of the most respected Dissenting congregations in the city, and he stayed its pastor, as it moved to new buildings, for the rest of his life.

In 1707 he published Hymns and Spiritual Songs. Among them was a hymn written for the Lord’s Supper, headed “Crucifixion to the World by the Cross of Christ,” based on Galatians 6:14. It began, “When I survey the wondrous cross.” Its second line first read “Where the young Prince of Glory died”; a few years later he changed it to the line most people sing today, “On which the Prince of glory died.” It ends with a Christian standing before the cross and answering in his own words: “Love so amazing, so divine, / Demands my soul, my life, my all.” In 1719 came The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, in which Psalm 90 became “Our God, our help in ages past” and Psalm 98 became “Joy to the World,” which Watts wrote about Christ’s reign over the earth, not about Christmas at all.

His health broke down badly in 1712, and for about four years he could hardly preach. Sir Thomas Abney, a former Lord Mayor of London, and his wife invited him to stay at their house in Hertfordshire to recover. He came intending to stay a week, and stayed with the family for the rest of his life, about thirty-six years. He never married. There he wrote Divine Songs for Children (1715) and a long line of other books, including a Logick (1725), an introduction to clear thinking that was used for generations, even at the universities whose doors had been closed to him as a Dissenter. The boy who asked hard questions became the man who taught others how to reason.

He kept asking questions as an old man, and not all of them came out neatly. For years he struggled to find a way to explain the doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three persons, that satisfied both his reason and his Bible, and some of his ideas troubled his friends. Near the end of his life he wrote a prayer, published after his death, in which he brought those hard questions to God himself, on his knees. It is a good picture of a thinking believer: not a man who stopped asking, but a man who learned to do his asking in the presence of God rather than away from him.

He died at Stoke Newington on 25 November 1748, aged seventy-four. Friends remembered him saying in his last years that he believed the promises of God enough to venture an eternity on them. He is usually credited with about seven hundred and fifty hymns and psalm versions, and people all over the world still sing them, often without knowing whose they are.

In Their Own Words

“When we devote our youth to God,

‘Tis pleasing in his eyes;

A flower, when offer’d in the bud,

Is no vain sacrifice.”

— Isaac Watts, “The Advantages of Early Religion,” Divine Songs for Children (1715)

Think It Through

1. Isaac described his conversion in two short lines, ending with “I hope.” Is that a sign of weak faith or of honesty? Can a person be sure of Christ and still be careful about claiming too much for themselves?
2. At sixteen, Isaac turned down a university place because it would have meant going against his conscience. What doors might you be tempted to walk through by quietly giving up something you believe?
3. Watts questioned the way his church sang, and some older Christians thought he was arrogant. When is it right for a young person to question how things have always been done in church, and how can they do it well?
4. Watts’s faith began quietly, with no dramatic scene. Why do you think so many people feel their own story “doesn’t count” unless it is dramatic?

Read More on Ochorus

Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs for Children is in the library: the little book of songs he wrote in 1715, including “Seeing God,” “Praise to God for our Redemption” and “The Advantages of Early Religion,” quoted in this chapter. It was written for young children, but read with older eyes it shows you, in a few lines at a time, exactly what the grown-up Watts believed. His great hymnbooks are not in the library, but his full biography is on his author page, including the story of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past.”