Studies in the Hymnody of Isaac Watts

"This World is not Conclusion":Dickinson, Amherst, and "the local conditions of the soul" Benjamin Lease (bio) Blessed are they that play, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Emily Dickinson, Letter 690 . . . as the great florist says, "The flower that never will in other climate grow." Emily Dickinson, Letter 1038 . . . whereas in poetry the words themselves lift the poem, in part at least, out of pure play into the sphere of ideation and judgement, music never leaves the play-sphere. The reason why poetry has such a prominently liturgical and social function in archaic cultures lies precisely in its close connection, or rather indissoluble union, with musical recitation. All true ritual is sung, danced and played. We moderns have lost the sense for ritual and sacred play. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens1 My title draws on the opening line of a famous poem by Emily Dickinson —and on a statement by William Carlos Williams about the urgent need for the American writer (as exemplified by Poe) "to originate a style that does spring from the local conditions, not of trees and mountains, but of the 'soul'" (227). Williams is referring not to a religious concept but to the need of a writer to find a voice true to his or her inner self. But it is [End Page 38] useful here to use his phrase to examine Emily Dickinson's discovery of an authentic voice —a voice shaped in part by the music she heard in the First Congregational Church, Amherst; by the definitions (charged with religious meaning and feeling) offered up to her by her treasured lexicon; and by the revelations about nature offered up to her by Amherst's teachers and divines (many of whom were challenging inauthenticity). I want, in what follows, to touch on what was innovative and liberating in what seems to many to be the unrelievedly stern and constricting religious life of Amherst. The world of Emily Dickinson, I suggest, centered on a personal religious experience of music, of language, of nature —an intensely personal experience guided by such highly unconventional and controversial personages as Isaac Watts, Noah Webster, Edward Hitchcock. The enormous popularity of his hymns made Watts a pervasive presence in the Connecticut Valley; Webster and Hitchcock made their towering presences known personally in Amherst. The adventurous innovations of these spiritual leaders help explain the pervasive presence in Emily Dickinson's poems of what Huizinga calls "the sense for ritual and sacred play" (158). 1 Judy Jo Small has made the claim that music was central to Dickinson's practice as a poet —that her business was, in the poet's own words (and emphasis) "to sing" (29-30). Small cites a Mount Holyoke Female Seminary classmate's reminiscence of an open-air spontaneous song session with Emily Dickinson -a session that included hymn tunes in "long metres, short metres, hallelujah metres, et id omne genus . . ." (49).2 I would urge that Dickinson's experience of singing hymns and listening to singing choirs at weekly church services, from early childhood to about the age of thirty, was of crucial importance to her emergence and development as a poet.3 The hymns of Isaac Watts were a rewriting of Holy Scripture into song. Watts did not hesitate to sacrifice accuracy and elegance so that scripture could be sung aloud during a Christian service and experienced emotionally [End Page 39] by each member of the congregation. A great favorite among the several hymn books used at the First Church, Amherst, was Samuel Worcester's editions of The Psalms and Spiritual Songs (familiarly known as Watts and Select Hymns). Dozens of editions appeared from the 1830s to the 1860s when Worcester's son, a professor of rhetoric at Amherst College, expanded his father's earlier compilation —a compilation set apart from others by its elaborate directions for musical expression provided for the guidance of choir leaders and congregants (Watts 4-5). Both in England and New England, Isaac Watts was a highly controversial figure because his free adaptations of scripture into musical verse seemed to some to verge on blasphemy. In New Brunswick, Maine, William Allen (President of Bowdoin College and a former Congregational...

A setting of a Christmas carol by Isaac Watts. For soloists, harp or piano, and SATB chorus.

Reviewed by: Isaac Watts: Reason, Passion and the Revival of Religion by Graham Beynon Madeleine Forell Marshall Graham Beynon. Isaac Watts: Reason, Passion and the Revival of Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. viii + 220. $128.00. This is a helpful book for any student of the long, prolific, and varied career of Watts—theologian, preacher, educator, lyric poet, hymn writer, and kindly guide to reasonable Dissenters in Britain, in America, and on the Continent. Mr. Beynon's goal, however, is not to trace this influence but rather to explain how Watts insisted on the compatibility of head and heart (reason and passion) under the direction of the Holy Spirit. He updated "puritanism" by asking that faith make good, clear sense to his contemporaries. He honored the place of the "affections" (passions) and saw them as essential to the Christian worldview. Studies of religious thought can lose even the best-intentioned readers in the dense forests of controversy and denominational politics, often leaving them in the thickets of obscure categories and contending definitions. Mr. Beynon manages to place Watts in the context of religious and philosophical understanding of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries without much trouble or confusion. We are grateful for his remarkably straightforward writing. My resistance to his approach is, I suspect, largely a matter of a different disciplinary orientation. As a literary historian rather than philosophical theologian, I resist the foundational binary that powers the study. The idea that our passions are naturally in opposition to our reason seems simply untrue, if only because all significant literature demonstrates both powerful affect (passion) and coherent clarity (reasonableness); surely the Book of Job encompasses both. And this resistance breeds further doubts. That hymns worked in Watts's day because of a new belief in the natural goodness of humanity is unconvincing if only because of the passionate affect of many of the Psalms. Similarly, conversion was not a seventeenth-century phenomenon but surely grounded in biblical literature, particularly the conversion of Paul. A theologian trying to localize events can and should analyze what it means at any particular time, but a literary historian may summon parallel examples from a much wider range. The suggestion that the positive role of passions is only now, with Watts, on the rise will surely trouble anyone who admires the passions of Donne and his contemporaries. The poetry of Herbert must remind us that the direct, plain (reasonable) style was valued well before the eighteenth century. A related resistance proceeds from a practical problem with the attempt to found everything in philosophy. If preaching, song, and prayer all proceed from reasoned premises, the experiential—and passionate—heart of the matter shrivels and dies. This distortion is anticipated in Mr. Beynon's introduction, where he declares that "It is Watts' modified Puritan position on reason and passion, then, that functions as the driver for his practical works on preaching, praise and prayer." In what devotional or pastoral universe are such foundational activities as preaching, song, and prayer driven by philosophy? Watts admittedly defends and defines his practice, but for most of his congregants, the texts are primary. This is not to fault Mr. Beynon's good work on Watts's "critical adaptation" of Locke mostly having to do with sin, particularly [End Page 113] the sinful body; the Lockean influence on the educational texts is clear. Just so the broad definition of reason and the part it plays in "our recovery from the fall and hence part of God's redemptive purposes" makes helpful sense. One of the real pleasures here is the author's excellent use of Watts's original texts—both prose and poetry. And always, Mr. Beynon carefully contextualizes Watts, comparing him to other theologians of his day, whether Jonathan Edwards or the Pietists of Halle. Literary resistance will not easily be won over, however, and when we read that "Watts is, overall, far more positive about the role of the passions than most of his contemporaries," we must wish that our author had qualified his declaration. Presumably he means only contemporary theologians, not poets, novelists, playwrights, or composers. Bach and Handel are intensely affective, surely. The second half...

Rivers’s study of the printed materials disseminated by Protestant dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals in the eighteenth century (1720–1800) is an encyclopedic work. This magnificent cornucopia of information on religious print explores with a fine comb and a magnifying glass several generations of British authors’ and printers’ labors of reaching out to a public whose desire for salvation they hoped to kindle and keep alive through reading matter.The overarching question that holds together the leviathan formed by these laborers in the field of faith stems from the paradox presented in The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Bunyan’s cultural landmark, which was explicitly intended to convert its audiences through story, the true Christian refuses to be embroiled in commercial transactions. Nevertheless, readers have to enter the marketplace and spend money to buy the book in order for it to communicate its message. Intrigued by this paradox, Rivers is interested in exploring the extent to which dissenting and evangelical print culture struggled with the difficulty of touching hearts while engaging with physical objects of various sizes and paper quality, many of them requiring readers first to touch their purses.The resulting story in three parts (“Books and their Readers,” “Sources,” and “Literary Kinds”) gives a comprehensive account of printers by denomination, publishers, and editorial decisions. What stand out are the moments of tacit acknowledgment of fellowship in an occasionally joint effort, despite denominational differences, to transform diverse audiences (the poor, families, educated individuals prone to grow cold in their faith) into pilgrims ready to pursue the Celestial City. Devotional writers put out abridged and rearranged Bibles with copious commentaries, sermons, prayers (in spite of early dissenters’ contempt for scripted prayer and preference for a spontaneous personal address to God), devotional handbooks, collections of lives, letters, diaries and journals, poems and hymns.One learns from Part I, “Books and their Readers,” who the major and minor printers were for each denomination, what was their output and how likely they were to engage with the books produced by other denominations. Rivers’s precise but charitable glance reveals that such moments of openness were frequent. It turns out that publishers’ patience could be tested not only by outsiders but also by members of one’s own group. Hence Wesley’s wrath when a fellow Methodist, Robert Spence, published in 1799 the eleventh edition of his own Pocket Hymn book, Designed as a Constant Companion for the Pious, which seemed to compete with Wesley’s hymn book.Dissenting and evangelical voluntary associations also reveal the fact that their members not only spent their own money in order to reach the souls of their neighbors but also tended to reach out of their denominational bubble. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) served as a model for The Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor (SPRKP), founded in 1750. The SPRKP was interdenominational—some of its members being also members of SPCK—and included “laypeople, ministers, and clergy, of an evangelical, moderate Calvinist persuasion.”While the wealth of information on printers and books (their size and cost) will be invaluable for researchers, the chapters devoted to reading offer fascinating information both on what readers did with books and what publishers ardently hoped that they would do. Dissenters and evangelicals involved in the publishing business offered abundant advice for readers of all sorts (“ministerial, lay, male, and female”) on how to read, what to read, even where to read. Isaac Watts’s “A Serious Address to the People,” incorporated in the second part of An Humble Attempt toward the Revival of Practical Religion (1731), creates a fascinating image of readers who, urged to find closets, secret chambers, or places of retirement “wherein to retreat from the World, and converse with God and your own Hearts,” find themselves not alone with printed paper, but “addressed by the Dead and the Living, in their practical and pathetick Writings, with the kindest Exhortations to Virtue and Piety.” Her chapter on reading ends with a fascinating section on readers reading an astonishing variety of texts for long hours. The Methodist preacher George Story stands out, who in Armenian Magazine “claimed to have read the Bible through several times by his sixth year,” and who, before he was sixteen, had read over 600 volumes of all genres, primarily secular. While Story was converted to Methodism through debate, others were converted through reading good books, such as Law’s Serious Call, Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, and The Whole Duty of Man. Many maintained their zeal through long hours of reading. Rivers brings to light one of Philip Doddridge’s letters from 1726, in which the minister describes his proposed reading schedule for one day as starting at five in the morning with a study of the epistle to the Romans, followed by Demosthenes, Virgil, Tillotson, and Brandt and in the afternoon by Pliny and Cradock. Doddridge was planning to set aside the evening for writing and preaching.Along with detailing what dissenting and evangelical authority figures told readers to do with books, Rivers also demonstrates the freedoms editors themselves took with previously printed material, including the Bible. The Bible was cut up, reordered, adapted, and abbreviated in order to meet readers at their own level of understanding; Pilgrim’s Progress was likewise heavily edited and annotated “so that the reader should be left in no doubt how to profit from the narrative.” One sees a ferocious and proprietary view of the book in John Wesley’s alterations of the text to suit his doctrinal views and William Mason’s objections to Wesley, expressed through the intermediary of his own notes.The name that runs as a thread throughout the book is Isaac Watts: poet, sermon writer, editor. Watts’s Divine Songs, we learn, was the only non-biblical text distributed by SPRKP and that “taken together, his books reached a larger audience than all the others distributed by the Society, including the Bible.” “True poetry,” Rivers shows, “was not deemed to be antithetical to piety.” Watts’s Hymns and Psalms thus played an important devotional role in private and in public in various communities, giving voice to the feelings and hopes of children and adults, of the well, the sick and the dying. It was only in 1825 that James Montgomery, a hymn writer, differentiated between poetry and hymn and forever separated Isaac Watts, the hymn writer, from William Cowper, the poet.

The book is about an under-researched but highly significant group of educators and writers in the Puritan tradition of moderate nonconformity. It explores the sociable character of dissenters’ teaching and writing in the eighteenth century by focusing on manuscript cultures and publishing projects. It highlights the significance of letters: how they enact and reflect friendship and learning, how they were used to construct communities, and how transatlantic epistolary networks operated. Isaac Watts (1674–1748) and Philip Doddridge (1702–1751) were two of the most frequently published religious authors of the eighteenth century. Both wrote across numerous genres—including poetry, lectures, sermons, historical analysis, books for children and educational guides—and their works circulated in manuscript as well as print. Though each man’s identity as a Protestant dissenter was an important aspect of his intellectual reputation, their literary, educational, and religious works reached readers far beyond their own Congregationalist denomination. By considering the two men in relation to their mentors, students, friends, and readers, this book emphasizes the importance Watts, Doddridge, and their associates attached to personal relationships in their private interactions and in print. It attends not just to a small coterie of dissenters but also accounts for the strong influence they exerted on religious and literary culture in the period 1720–1800.

Isaac Watts (1674–1746), an early popularizer of psychological ideas and a promoter of self-improvement, argued that in a number of ways astronomy was an ideal vehicle to enlarge the mind's capacity, one of the major goals of mental culture.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) argued that the passions, understood synonymously with the affections, were an essential component of the Christian experience. Watts designed a system of hymnody which allowed the worshipper to excite, cultivate, and express their passions. This paper traces the history of the passions and affections in those who were to influence Watts’ thought, before considering the ways Watts’ hymns allowed the passions to be experienced and articulated.

Chapter 2 examines the features of Isaac Watts’s hymn-writing that reflect his loyalty to the dissenting tradition, and that make it unmistakably that of a non-Anglican. This is demonstrated in his firm adherence to the Independent church and its members (‘the saints’), in his interpretation of the Bible, and in his exploration of the experience of the believer in pilgrimage. The chapter argues that the tradition of a gathered church, strengthened by former persecution but now celebrating a degree of toleration, is the context in which Watts’s hymns and metrical psalms must be seen. A particular importance is attached to the Lord’s Day, and to the congregation of the saints, who are to rejoice in the freedom to worship granted by the Hanoverian dynasty.

Book Review: <scp>Isaac Watts</scp>. By A. P. Davis. Independent Press. 8s. 6d; <scp>Isaac Watts's A Guide to Prayer</scp> Abridged and edited by Harry Escott. Epworth Press. 5s; <scp>William Law</scp>. By Henri Talon. Rockcliff. 8s. 6d; <scp>Charles Simeon</scp>. By H. C. G. Moule (first published in 1892). Inter-Varsity Fellowship. 6s

The pedagogy of Isaac Watts, a self‐styled devotee of Locke, is defined by a preoccupation with the dimensions and relative accessibility of human interiority. His instructional texts for children and adults centre on the transmission of information between the reader's interiorised self and the external world. While Watts's texts for adults stress the voluntary nature of this transmission, his texts for children suggest that the conduit between interior and exterior may be wilfully obstructed. Using the figure of the lying child, I explore the possibility that child interiority was, for Watts, an object of fear.

This essay traces in Isaac Watts’ philosophy of affectionate religion the emergence of the category of affections as a category of emotion distinct in kind from the passions. I argue that the discrepancy between the confidence, clarity and conviction of the mode Watts uses to represent the affections and the opacity of the information supplied about what they signify registers an unacknowledged anxiety about what affections are and what is at stake in their recommendation. I analyze how Watts’ writing about the affections produces a palpably morbid pathos by implying that the affections are realizable only through death, but advocating their pursuit nonetheless.

Dr. Williams' Library in London has a copy of Bishop John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, interleaved with pages on which the divine and hymn-writer Isaac Watts made hundreds of notes — concerning the books he studied at Thomas Rowe's Dissenting academy in London, the comments of leading figures in London's nonconformist circles, and his own maturing opinions and judgments. Dates on various notes range from 1690 to 1709. The document should be of interest to all students of English religious nonconformity in the seventeenth century; it is in effect a manuscript record of an education for the Dissenting ministry, written by one of the foremost ministers of the age, which further reveals the influence of that education on his thinking and his pastoral activities in the most active years of his public leadership. Through a combination of circumstances, Watts' copy of Wilkins has remained obscure, unidentified and virtually untouched in the Dr. Williams archives for well over a century. Now that it has come to light again,2 and has been identified as Watts's,3 perhaps it can gain the attention it merits

These notes do not constitute a critical analysis; that would be a task for someone other than myself. Rather, they amount to a sort of log of work's evolution, a post-compositional exercise which in fact I have not attempted with any of my other pieces. The reaction of some students, colleagues, and performers, to whom I have shown them, persuaded me they may be worth sharing. This cycle of six psalm-settings for a-cappella chorus1 had a number of causes. First, in my head for a long time was a vague notion of setting some psalm-texts, from old Book of Common Prayer version, as a tribute to my mother, often used to quote favourite phrases (my cup runneth over, who going into vale of misery useth it for a well, the mountains skipped like lambs), and with whom I sang them in a church choir many years ago. Second, in 1 982 1 heard Elmer Iseler Singers perform on two occasions Monteverdi's Lagrime d'amante, and was struck by intense effect of close to half an hour of acappella choral music, and by unexpectedly wide range of colors and textures. Third, I had, over a period of twenty years or more, delved into early psalmody and hymnody, especially in their Canadian aspects, had taught this material to my students, and in 1984-5 was actively engaged in editing an anthology of tunes from early Canadian collections.2 Further, I had composed two choral works based on traditional hymn tunes - Sharon Fragments (1966) and Three Motets on Swan's 'China' (198 1)3 - and found continuing interest in beauty of this literature and in its potential for variational and other kinds of treatment. The fourth cause was one which really ignited enterprise. Late in 1984, a good friend from college days, Rev. R.F. Shepherd, was elected Anglican Bishop of British Columbia, and asked me to compose a piece to be sung at his installation. I responded with a setting of Psalm 65, which now forms first movement of Harp of David; it was performed by choir of Christ Church Cathedral in Victoria (where I used to sing as a boy) under direction of Michael Gormley. Ronald Shepherd had approved text, one of several possibiUties we considered in consultation: blessing is called on the man whom thou choosest, spirit of a happy, laughing earth seemed appropriate, and rain images accorded especially well with West Coast locale. The following spring I set Psalm 80, now fourth movement. Shortly afterwards I drafted a plan for cycle, chose further texts, and composed successively Psalms 122 and 87 (together; now sixth movement), Psalm 148 (now No.5), Psalm 1 (No.3), and Psalm 130 (No.2). The first two movements (1 and 4) drew respectively on a Scottish psalm tune (London New, 1635) and a tune from earliest hymnal of Wesley an Methodism (Foundery, 1742). For other four movements, I borrowed tunes from other periods and from traditions with comparable pertinence in Canadian terms - for No.2, Aus tiefer Not, Lutheran, 1524;forNo.3,Psaume 1, Calvinist, 1542; for No.5, Beautiful River, U.S., 1864; and for No.6, Remembrance, New Brunswick, 1816. The texts for all six movements are those of Book ofCommon Prayer of 1562. But in each movement except No.5 I added portions of corresponding verseparaphrases, juxtaposing these with prose in various ways; and again these verses are all taken from different historical sources (some older bibles printed them as a supplement): that in No. 1 from first North American collection, Bay Psalm Book, 1640; those in Nos. 2 and 3 from same sources as their melodies, first Lutheran songbooks and Geneva P salter respectively; that in No.4 from Isaac Watts' The Psalms of David imitated in language of New Testament, 1722; and that in No. 6 from Methodist poet John Newton. The BCP texts are each set in full - with only two modifications. In No. 5, last few lines are slightly re-arranged. …

On November 25, 1948, the churches of the English speaking world celebrated the bicentenary of the death of Isaac Watts. In the sifting process of two hundred years it is possible to view his contribution in perspective; and as one seeks to estimate what is permanent and abiding in his work, one becomes convinced that he is an important figure by any standard, and in the field of hymnology he is outstanding.

Born on 7 June 1860 in Broseley, Shropshire, William Whitehead Watts was the elder of two sons (and only children) of Isaac Watts, a music master, and Maria Watts (née Whitehead). His paternal grandfather, also Isaac Watts, was a schoolmaster, and his maternal grandfather, John Whitehead, a farmer. After some preliminary training (including a year in a dame school) he attended successively Bitterley Grammar School (1869-1870), Shifnal Grammar School (1871-1873) and Denstone College, Staffordshire. As he took pride in stressing, his parents, although not well off, considered no sacrifice too great to ensure that their sons should have the best education within their reach. According to Watts himself, his first essay in science took the form of firework making, to which he devoted the greater part of at least one term while at Bitterley Grammar School. His taste for science thus presumably engendered was encouraged at Denstone College by the mathematical master, the Rev. David Edwardes (later headmaster) who inaugurated a chemical laboratory almost immediately after the school was opened in 1873. Watts must have joined the College (which was the first Woodard School to be opened in the Midlands) at or shortly after its foundation. Coached by Edwardes in physics and chemistry for a Cambridge scholarship and doubtless aided by his own discoveries in a chemical laboratory which he enthusiastically fitted up at home, he gained a £40 Exhibition to Sidney Sussex College; to this award the school authorities added an Exhibition of £20 as a mark of the first occasion on which a scholar had obtained an open Exhibition at a university. The Exhibition was converted by the College into a Scholarship, which was further augmented in due course by additions and prizes.