Isaac Watts and Psalms Sung in Gospel Light

In the early eighteenth century, English churches sang, but their singing had grown thin. For generations, Protestant congregations had bound themselves to one form of worship in song. They sang the Psalms, and only the Psalms, set into stiff metre and laboured rhyme. The words were holy, but the verse had gone grey, and many a worshipper mouthed the lines with a heavy tongue and a wandering heart. Into that world came a young man named Isaac Watts. Frail in body, sharp in mind, and unwilling to accept that the songs of God's people should be dull.

The story is remembered like this. Isaac was a teenager, walking home from his church in Southampton, and he complained about the singing. The psalmody was crabbed, he said, and the verse was poor, and it carried none of the joy he felt the gospel should bring. His father, a stern and serious man, did not soften the rebuke. If you think you can do better, then do it. So Isaac did. For the very next service, by the account that has come down to us, the boy wrote a fresh hymn. And the people sang it.

That was the spark. From it came a flood. Watts went on to write hundreds of hymns and to reshape the Psalms themselves, not by discarding them, but by singing them in the light of Christ. When he took up the ninetieth Psalm, the one that names God the dwelling place of all generations, he gave the church the words, Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. When he set his eyes on the cross, he wrote, When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the Prince of glory died. When he reached for the joy of the incarnation, he gave the world, Joy to the world, the Lord is come.

Understand what this cost. To touch the Psalms was, to many faithful people, to touch something sacred and settled. There were those who resisted Watts, and they were not lazy or cold. They were guarding the place of Scripture in worship. They feared that human words might crowd out the inspired ones. That fear deserved respect, and Watts knew it. He did not throw the Psalms away. He read them as a Christian, as a man who believed the Hebrew songs pointed forward to the Messiah he loved. He sang the old words toward their fulfilment, and he did it carefully.

Here is the heart of what Watts understood. A congregation does not only sing what it believes. It comes to believe what it sings. The hymn lodges in the memory long after the address is forgotten. It is there at the cradle and at the graveside, on the lips of the dying and the doubting, when no other words will come. Watts knew that to put words in the mouth of the church was to teach its very soul. So he laboured to make those words true, and rich, and reverent, and plain enough for an ordinary believer to carry through an ordinary week.

Isaac Watts died in 1748, weak in frame to the last, having spent years as a guest in a friend's household because his health would never let him hold a steady pulpit. He left behind no empire and no monument of stone. He left behind songs. And those songs are still sung today, in languages he never spoke, by people he never met, in churches that have forgotten his name but not his lines. He took the complaint of a teenage boy and turned it into a gift for the whole church. He proved that a song can be both new and faithful, both fresh on the tongue and ancient in its truth. What endured was not the argument on the walk home. It was the breath of a people who learned, through him, to sing the gospel and to mean it.