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

by Edwin Paxton Hood

The life of Dr. Watts must be illustrated rather from his works than from its incidents. It is remarkable that so little is recorded of him; his powers of conversation seem to have been considerable, and his reputation for wit was what we might naturally suppose from the liveliness of many of his prose writings. But he was certainly unfortunate in his first biographer. Dr. Gibbons was an accomplished man, a correct and fine scholar, but surely the last thing for which he was ever intended, either by nature or by grace, was to write a biography. His contains many noticeable and acute remarks, and some passages which almost dilate into beauty; but it is strange that, constant as was his intercourse with his friend, he has preserved scarcely anything either of anecdote, conversation, or description illustrating their intercourse; and it seems certain that Watts’ life would have well repaid the assiduity of a Boswell. His mind was remarkably full, and Gibbons testifies how, on any and every occasion, he was able to express himself at once with great force, propriety, and elegance. But his biographer only tells us how his life, from the time of his earliest studies, afforded little variety, and consequently has few subjects for narration—it “flowed along in an even, uniform tenor; one year, one month, one week, one day being, in a manner, a repetition of the former.” Like some other eminent men, it somewhat appears as if he finished the furnishing of his mind when in his youngest years, and devoted all the after period of his life to the unfolding, amplifying, expounding, and popularizing the stores he had amassed and acquired. Dr. Gibbons refers to the fact that his “Treatise on Astronomy and Geography” was most probably prepared for the tuition of Mr.—afterwards Sir John—Hartopp; when published in 1725, in the dedication to Mr. Eames, he says that: “The papers had lain by him in silence above twenty years;” and as to his “Logic,” we have already referred to it; and the dedication in which he tells his former pupil that “it was fit that the public should receive, through his hands, what was originally written for the assistance of his younger studies, and was thus presented to him.” And thus we are assured that the work which met with so large a reception and distinguished applause was prepared in days when he was himself little more than a youth, to serve his own purposes of tuition. Such was the life of this interesting man—it was a fountain of life and power. In the spacious chapel-walk in Southampton there is a pavement-stone marked with the letter W—it stands for Watts; but, as Mr. Carlyle says in his interesting paper on Watts, it might stand for Watts’ Well; it was once the property of Isaac Watts, and the well has a long story, well authenticated in the church records of the Above Bar congregation. That well of clear, beautiful water was purchased by old Isaac Watts from his friend, Robert Thorner, the founder of the Southampton Charity. It was on, and constituted a part of, the tenement known by the name of the Meeting-house; then it was leased to the church, then it was purchased by the church. It was known in Southampton two hundred years ago. It is now a fountain sealed, but still it is known, and proudly the pastor says, “Our father Isaac gave us this well, and drank thereof, himself and his children.”[44] Watts’ Well is no inapt symbol or emblem of Watts’ life and labours. Even lost to sight, sealed over, its springs still pour along their refreshing, cooling, and transparent streams; nor have the crowds who hurry thoughtlessly by power to interfere with the useful freshness of its pure blessings.

“The last days are the best witnesses for a man.” “Blessed,” says old Robert Harris, “shall he be that so lived that he was desired, and so died that he was missed.” Isaac Watts illustrated in a remarkable manner power in weakness.

CHAPTER XV.
Death and Burial.

He died in 1748, at the age of seventy-four, in ripe years, and hoary with the honours of holiness. We are dependent upon his friend and biographer, Dr. Gibbons, for almost all that we know of his last days and hours, but it is very pleasant to find that the author of “The World to Come” himself went down to the grave with all the calmness and confidence which the words he has uttered have so often imparted to others in the outlook towards the better country. He says, “It is a glory to the Gospel when we can lie down with courage in hope of its promised blessings; dying with faith and fortitude is a noble conclusion of a life of zeal and service.” “Death in the course of nature,” he says, “as well as by the hands of violence, hath always something awful and formidable in it; flesh and blood shrink and tremble at the appearance of a dissolution; but death is the last enemy of all the saints, and when a Christian meets it with sacred courage he gives that honour to the Captain of his salvation which the saints in glory can never give, and which we can never repeat; it is an honour to our common faith when it overcomes the terrors of death, and raises the Christian to a song of triumph in the view of the last enemy; it is a new crown put upon the head of our Redeemer, and a living cordial put into the hands of mourning friends in our dying hour when we can take leave of them with holy fortitude, rejoicing in the salvation of Christ.”

Such were his words; such honour have not all the saints; some who have looked forward through life with triumph to that hour have fainted when it came, and some who feared it most have felt it least: peculiar temperaments and special forms of pain and disease sometimes make death dreadful; and an old writer says, “We are not glad to feel the snake, even when we know its sting is drawn.” Thomas Walsh, one of the holiest and most eminent of the early Methodists, was very angry against John Fletcher, the seraphic vicar of Madeley, because he heard him say that some comparatively weak believers might die most cheerfully, and that some strong ones, for the further purification of their faith, or for inscrutable reasons, might have severe conflicts. “Be it done unto you according to your faith,” said Walsh, “and be it done unto me according to mine.” But when the hour came to Walsh it was clouded, and those eyes which had “looked out of the windows were darkened;” only at the last moment he exclaimed, “He is come! He is come! My beloved is mine, and I am His for ever!” And so he passed. But Fletcher died in a rapture. “I know thy soul,” said his wife, “but if Jesus is very present with thee, lift up thy right hand.” Immediately it was raised. “If the prospects of glory sweetly open before thee, repeat the sign.” The hand was raised a second time, and so his soul breathed itself away. Faith survives the presence of sensible comforts. An aged believer in Southampton, on her death-bed, complained of the absence of sensible comforts to her pastor, the Rev. W. Kingsbury, but so strong was her faith that she said, “It is against the whole scope of Divine revelation that my soul should be lost.” Old Thomas Fuller, having surveyed the various modes of death, arrived at the short, decisive conclusion, “None please me.” “But away,” he adds, “with these thoughts; the mark must not choose what arrow shall be shot against it.” The happiness of a clear, calm departure was given to Watts, his closing days were serene and happy; with all the imaginative glow of his mind, he had naturally a calm character. He had well grounded his convictions; he had long lived like a sunbeam amidst sunbeams in the light. Dr. Gibbons, speaking from his own knowledge, says, “Although his weakness was very great, he knew no decay of intelligence, and was the subject of no wild fancies.” His biographer adds, “He saw his approaching dissolution with a mind perfectly calm and composed, without the least alarm or dismay, and I never could discover, though I was frequently with him, the least shadow of a doubt as to his future everlasting happiness, or anything that looked like an unwillingness to die; how I have known him recite with self-application those words in Hebrews, ‘Ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye may receive the promise;’ and how often have I heard him, upon leaving the family after supper and withdrawing to rest, declare with the sweetest composure, that if his Master was to say to him that he had no more work for him to do, he should be glad to be dismissed that night. And I once heard him say, with a kind of impatience, perhaps such as might in some degree trespass upon that submission we ought always to pay to the Divine will, ‘I wonder why the great God should continue me in life, when I am incapable of performing Him any further service?’”

The death-beds of great and eminent men are often hung round with curious fables and inventions; one is mentioned even to our own day, although Dr. Gibbons denies the whole story in the very first edition of his biography. Somebody conveyed it to Mr. Toplady, who says, “That little more than half-an-hour before Dr. Watts expired he was visited by his dear friend, Mr. Whitefield; he, asking him how he found himself, the dying doctor answered, ‘Here am I, one of Christ’s waiting servants.’ Soon after a medicine was brought in, and Mr. Whitefield assisted in raising him upon the bed that he might with more convenience take the draught; on the doctor’s apologizing for the trouble he gave Mr. Whitefield, the latter replied, with his usual amiable politeness, ‘Surely, my dear brother, I am not too good to wait upon a waiting servant of Christ!’ Soon after, Mr. Whitefield took his leave, and often regretted since that he had not prolonged his visit, which he would certainly have done could he have foreseen that his friend was but within a half-an-hour’s distance from the kingdom of glory.” There is not a word of truth in the whole story; Dr. Gibbons says it is entirely fictitious. “Mr. Whitefield never visited the doctor in his last illness or confinement, nor had any conversation or interview with him for some months before his decease. It were to be wished that greater care was practised by the writers of other persons’ lives, that illusions might not take place and obtain the regards of truth, and lay historians who come after them under the unpleasing necessity of dissolving their figments, and thereby, in consequence, evincing to the world how little credit is due to these relations.”

His dying sayings are recorded, and they were all of them of a quiet and peaceful nature. Dr. Jennings, who preached his funeral sermon, and saw him on his death-bed, mentions, that while for two or three years previous to his death his active and more sprightly powers of nature had failed, his trust in God, through Jesus the Mediator, remained unshaken to the last. To Lady Abney he said: “I bless God I can lie down with comfort at night, not being solicitous whether I awake in this world or another.” And again he said: “I should be glad to read more, yet not in order to be confirmed more in the truth of the Christian religion, or in the truth of its promises, for I believe them enough to venture into eternity on them.” When he was almost worn out and broken down by his infirmities he said, in conversation with a friend, that he remembered an aged minister used to say, that the most learned and knowing Christians, when they come to die, have only the same plain promises of the Gospel for their support as the common and the unlearned. “And so,” said he, “I find it; they are the plain promises of the Gospel that are my support, and I bless God they are plain promises, which do not require much labour or pains to understand them, for I can do nothing now but look into my Bible for some promise to support me, and live upon that.” Dr. Gibbons naturally regrets that he did not commit to writing the words of his dying friend; it is wonderful that he did not; but Watts had an amanuensis who had been with him upwards of twenty years, and who, as Gibbons says, was “in a manner ever with him;” to him and to Miss Abney, or, as she is generally called, Mistress Elizabeth Abney, the eldest daughter and successor to the Abney property, we are principally indebted for the record of his dying words. When he found his spirit tending to impatience, he would check himself, saying: “The business of a Christian is to bear the will of God as well as do it. If I were in health I could only be doing that, and that I may do now; the best thing in obedience is a regard to the will of God, and the way to that is to get our inclinations and aversions as much modified as we can.” Some of his expressions were such as the following: “I would be waiting to see what God will do with me; it is good to say as Mr. Baxter, what, when, and where God pleases. If God should raise me up again I may finish some more of my papers, or God can make use of me to save a soul, and that will be worth living for. If God has no more service for me to do, through grace I am ready; it is a great mercy to me that I have no manner of fear or dread of death. I could if God please lay my head back and die without terror this afternoon or night; my chief supports are from my view of eternal things, and the interest I have in them. I trust all my sins are pardoned through the blood of Christ; I have no fear of dying; it would be my greatest comfort to lie down and sleep, and wake no more.” Dr. Gibbons a short time before his death came into his room, and finding him alone sat down for conversation with him; he said not a word of what he had been or done in life, but his soul seemed swallowed up with gratitude and joy for the redemption of sinners by Jesus Christ. His visitor thought he realized the description of the apostle, “Whom having not seen ye love; in whom, though now ye see Him not, yet believing ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.”