Isaac Watts; his life and writings, his homes and friends

by Edwin Paxton Hood

He teaches and very much elaborates, as Southey says, the doctrine of Milton:

—What, if earth

Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein

Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?

Southey somewhat naturally finds an occasion for humour in that Milton beheld in heaven a place for armies, the review of bright brigades, and illustrious cohorts with keen swords and long bright spears, and so he remarks, “The Heaven of Watts’ imagination was coloured by his earthly pursuits, and whether there were to be reviews of armies or not there were to be sermons.” “For,” says Watts, “not only is there the service of thanksgiving here and of prayer, but such entertainment as lectures and sermons also, and there all the worship that is paid is the established worship of the whole country.” But the conceptions formed by Watts of the heavenly state are majestic in the main. “For the Church,” he says, “on earth is but a training school for the church on high, and is, as it were, a tiring-room in which we are dressed in proper habit for our appearance and our places in that bright assembly.” Thus he beholds “Boyle and Ray pursuing the philosophy in which they delighted on earth, contemplating the wisdom of God in His works; and Henry More and Howe continuing their metaphysical researches with brightened and refined powers of mind.” It is singular that Watts, who speculated so keenly and clearly into the nature of metaphysical substance, should have thus somewhat embarrassed his views of the heavenly state by discriminating so much the pursuits of a pure and perfect soul, by characteristics which partake of the faulty views of an earthly understanding; but we are to remember that he wrote for useful purposes, and we may believe that some of those excursions of the fancy, while scarcely consistent even with his own metaphysics, added not a little to the pleasant horizon spread out before the view of those readers unable or indisposed to follow him into more abstract and pure regions of thought. Interestingly and curiously he seeks to trace the progress of the soul from the visible to the invisible world; we know this world by Space and Substance, the solution of these in connection with our existence in that future world to come is not less a trouble to Watts than it has been to the rest of us. Space he endeavoured to annihilate, Substance also, and he argues, as Isaac Taylor has argued since in his “Physical Theory of Another Life,” that as disembodied spirits cannot exist everywhere, and do not probably exist anywhere, philosophically they may be said to exist nowhere.[41] The question then is whither does the soul depart when it is separated from the body? Perhaps it may be furnished with some new vehicle of a more refined matter, which will remind readers of Abraham Tucker’s singular chapters in his “Light of Nature,” on the “Vehicular State;” and it is very suggestive to find him intimating that it may abide where death finds it, not changing its place, but only its manner of thinking and acting, and its mode of existence, and without removal finding itself in heaven or in hell according to its own consciousness, and that is, according to its own previous training or education, and then he says, “I may illustrate this by two similitudes, and especially apply them to the case of holy souls departing.” They may remind the reader of Henry Vaughan’s beautiful verse:

If a star were confined in a tomb,

Its captive light would e’en shine there;

But when it bursts it dissipates the gloom,

And shines through all the sphere.