Isaac Watts was an English Christian minister, hymn writer, theologian, and logician.
Background
Watts, the oldest of nine children, was born in Southampton, England in 1674 while his father, also named Isaac, was in prison.
His mother nursed him while sitting on a large stone outside the prison gate, carrying on a silent protest against the unjust treatment meted out to her husband. Watts showed obvious verbal ability as a child.
His parents were Dissenters—that is, they were not members of the Church of England.
Education
His education began with his father and continued at the Free School of Southampton.
By the time he was 16, Watts had impressed a local physician enough to be offered financial support should he decide to attend Oxford University, one of two universities in England at the time.
Watts remained true to his religion and turned the doctor down, choosing instead to attend the Newington Green Academy, a Dissenting institution in London operated by the learned Thomas Rowe.
His course of study prepared him to become a minister, but he did not immediately feel ready to begin preaching after finishing his studies at age 20.
Career
But both Oxford and its counterpart Cambridge were affiliated with the Church of England, and attending would have meant converting to that church—to "conform, " in the language of the day.
Watts wrote poetry and theological texts at the Academy.
He moved back home to his family and continued to read, write, and reflect.
The Hartopps were Dissenters as well, and Watts's convictions deepened.
Watts became the congregation's pastor in 1702.
Part of his success was due to his emphasis on the role of music in worship.
A minister, he felt, should not only write sermons but should seek to involve his congregation in worship through music. Watts backed up his contention with action.
His first hymn, "Behold the Glories of the Lamb, " is said to have been written after he complained to his father about the dull psalm singing at the family's church in Southampton, and his father encouraged him to see what he could do to solve the problem. For several years Watts worked as a tutor to the Hartopp family of Stoke Newington.
After a volume of his poetry, Horae Lyricae: Poems, Chiefly of the Lyric Kind, in Two Books, was published in 1706, he issued the three-volume Hymns and Spiritual Songs the following year.
The original American edition of Hymns and Spiritual Songs was issued in 1741 by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, and Watts's texts were as widely disseminated in the United States as in England.
Watts did not write music.
Psalms and hymns at the time were sung to tunes that would be known to most members of a congregation or choir (the tune might have the name of a town where it was thought to have come from), and that fit the rhythm and meter of the words.
Watts's hymns were often based on psalms, but he put them into a moving new language of personal worship that anyone could understand.
The most immediate impact of Watts's new hymnody was felt among the Dissenting sects, whose members felt new tensions every time the British monarchy changed hands.
The resonances of Hymns and Spiritual Songs and of Watts's later hymns—he wrote about 700 in all—were amplified in the United States, where the passionate emotions of his hymnody fit the temperament of a country founded on dissent.
A Watts text such as "When I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies / I bid farewell to every fear, and wipe my weeping eyes / And wipe my weeping eyes, and wipe my weeping eyes / I bid farewell to every fear, and wipe my weeping eyes" had strong connotations for a group of people striving toward literacy, and served as a springboard for African-rooted religious musical performance.
More often, the mostly anonymous creators of the spirituals worked Watts's imagery into their own original compositions.
For both black and white Americans, the ideas of personal devotion to Jesus Christ and belief in personal salvation through Christ's suffering were given vivid expression in Watts's texts. ," Watts wrote in "When I survey the wond'rous Cross. "
And another verse, "His dying crimson, like a robe / Spreads o'er His body on the tree / Then I am dead to all the globe / And all the globe is dead to me. "
"Joy to the world" was originally published not in Hymns and Spiritual Songs but in a later Watts volume, The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719).
Watts continued to write prolifically for the rest of his life.
He cut back on his preaching after suffering a serious illness in 1712.
Invited to convalesce at the estate of Sir Thomas Abney, the former mayor of London, he ended up staying on with the Abney family for 36 years, until his death in 1748.
He devoted himself mostly to writing.
His Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715) remained in print for over a century and was still well enough known in Victorian England that readers understood and appreciated Lewis Carroll's parody, in Alice in Wonderland, of Watts's couplet "How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour?, " which became "How doth the little crocodile / Improve his shining tail?. "
He died at the Abney estate in Stoke Newington on November 25, 1748.
Religion
On his 24th birthday he gave his first sermon, and in 1698 he became an assistant pastor at the Mark Lane Meeting in London, an Independent (or Congregational) church.
Views
He did not hold the doctrine of the Trinity as necessary to salvation, and he wrote several works on the subject in which he developed views not far removed from Arianism.
Psalm singing, or psalmody, was the main form of congregational musical involvement in services when Watts came on the scene.
Quotations:
Watts wrote for average churchgoers.
In the preface to Hymns and Spiritual Songs he wrote (as quoted on the same website) that "I have aimed at ease of numbers and smoothness of sound, and endeavored to make the sense plain and obvious; if the verse appears so gentle and flowing as to incur the Censure of Feebleness, I may honestly affirm that sometimes it has cost me labor to make it so. "
Personality
Just five feet tall, he was an unprepossessing figure in the pulpit.
Quotes from others about the person
"In effect, " stated the website of the United Reformed Church, "Watts campaigned to evangelize the Hebrew psalms. "