The hymns of Isaac Watts are a remarkable blend of biblical, theological, liturgical, poetic, musical, and practical dimensions, some of which have seldom been touched upon in previous studies of the hymn writer. In this book, you will find analyses of Watts’s texts from each of these perspectives. As shown by this study, it is not only these individual factors but their combination that made Watts’s hymns innovative but also effective and long lasting in his own time—and that makes many of them still useful and widely sung today.
David W. Music, D.M.A. (1977), Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is Professor Emeritus of Church Music at Baylor University. His most recent book, co-authored with Scotty Gray, is A Noble Theme, a Skillful Writer: Timothy Dudley-Smith and Christian Hymnody (Hope, 2021).
List of Tables and Figures
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 This Book
2 Sources, Definitions, and Orthography
3 Biography and Hymn Publications
4 Early Life and Education
5 English Congregational Song before Watts
6 The Beginning of Watts’s Hymn Writing
6.1 Horæ Lyricæ
6.2 Hymns and Spiritual Songs
6.3 Divine Songs
6.4 The Psalms of David Imitated
7 Final Years
1 The Bible and the Hymns of Watts
1 The Relationship between Hymns and the Bible
1.1 Hymns and Spiritual Songs
1.2 The Psalms of David Imitated
2 Watts’s Use of the Bible
2 The Theology of Watts’s Hymns
1 Holy Scripture
2 God and the Holy Trinity
3 God’s Eternal Decree
4 Creation and Providence
5 Fall of Humanity, Sin, and Punishment
6 God’s Covenant with Humanity through Christ the Mediator
7 Free Will and the Calling of God
8 Justification, Adoption, Sanctification, and Saving Faith
9 Repentance
10 Good Works
11 Perseverance of the Saints
12 Assurance of Salvation
13 The Law of God
14 The Gospel and Grace
15 Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience
16 Religious Worship and the Sabbath Day
17 The Civil Magistrate
18 The Church
19 The Communion of Saints
20 The Sacraments: Baptism and Lord’s Supper
21 The Soul after Death, the Resurrection, and the Last Judgment
22 Additional Topics
23 General Theological Perspectives
3 Watts’s Hymns and Liturgy
1 Worship at Bury Street Church
2 The Liturgical Functions of Hymns
3 The Sermon Hymn
4 The Lord’s Supper and Baptism
5 Hymns for Other Aspects of Worship
6 Liturgical Texts
7 Public and Private Worship
8 The Liturgical Use of Watts’s Hymns
4 The Literary Dimension of Watts’s Hymns
1 The Functional Nature of Watts’s Writing
2 Hymnic Meter
3 Poetic Meter
4 Rhyme
5 Poetic Devices
5.1 Comparison
5.2 Contrast
5.3 Substitution
5.4 Hyperbole
5.5 Personification and Apostrophe
5.6 Arrangement of Words
5.7 Emphasis
5.8 “Color” Devices
5.9 Figures of Sound
5.10 Isocolon
5.11 The “Sound” of Watts’s Hymns
6 Form
7 Watts’s Borrowings
8 Textual Revision
9 Watts and the Poetry of the Hymn
5 Watts’s Hymns and Music
1 Hymnic Meters and Psalm Tunes
2 Watts and the Singing of Hymns
2.1 Lining Out
2.2 Tempo and the Length of Singing
3 Early Publications of Watts’s Hymns with Music
3.1 Tune Supplements
3.2 Tune Books
4 Watts and the Music of Hymnody
6 An Analysis of Four Hymns from Hymns and Spiritual Songs
1 “Infinite Grief! Amazing Woe!”
2 “God of the Morning, at Whose Voice”
3 How Are Thy Glories Here Display’d
4 Lo, What a Glorious Sight Appears
7 An Analysis of Four Hymns from The Psalms of David Imitated
1 “I Lift My Soul to God”
2 “Great God, the Heaven’s Well-Order’d Frame”
3 Deep in Our Hearts Let Us Record
4 How Pleas’d and Blest Was I
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Scholars and students of Isaac Watts, hymnody, eighteenth-century literature, Christian church musicians and pastors, The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada and The Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland.