Thou to Thy chosen dost afford:
When Thou return’st to set them free,
Let Thy salvation visit me.
O may I worthy prove to see
Thy saints in full prosperity;
That I the joyful choir may join,
And count Thy people’s triumph mine.
Dr. Watts and the Wesleys did not scruple to borrow from the New Version, and Watts, with characteristic modesty, is content to yield them ‘the preference of’ their ‘poesy’ in some of their compositions.
Whatever its intrinsic merit or demerit, the New Version rendered an important service in breaking the monopoly enjoyed by the Old Version, and thus preparing the way for a larger view of Christian psalmody.
One condemned to tread the waste of metrical Psalters will consider it an advance on its predecessors, suffering more from its own success than comparison with them.... They asserted successfully, and with an emphasis scarcely known before, literary and poetical excellence (according to their light) as a principle of translation, and the precedent thus set was seldom ignored afterwards.[91]