“NOW TO THE LORD A NOBLE SONG.”
When Watts finished this hymn he had achieved a “noble song,” whether he was conscious of it or not; and it deserves a foremost place, where it can help future worshippers in their praise as it has the past. It is not so common in the later hymnals, but it is imperishable, and still later collections will not forget it.
Now to the Lord a noble song,
Awake my soul, awake my tongue!
Hosanna to the Eternal Name,
And all His boundless love proclaim.
See where it shines in Jesus' face,
The brightest image of His grace!
God in the person of His Son
Has all His mightiest works outdone.
A rather finical question has occurred to some minds as to the theology of the word “works” in the last line, making the second person in the Godhead apparently a creature; and in a few hymn-books the previous line has been made to read—
God in the Gospel of His Son.
But the question is a rhetorical one, and the poet's free expression—here as in hundreds of other cases—has never disturbed the general confidence in his orthodoxy.
Montgomery called Watts “the inventor of hymns in our language,” and the credit stands practically undisputed, for Watts made a hymn style that no human master taught him, and his 58 / 34 model has been the ideal one for song worship ever since; and we can pardon the climax when Professor Charles M. Stuart speaks of him as “writer, scholar, thinker and saint,” for in addition to all the rest he was a very good man.