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

by Edwin Paxton Hood

“How easy it will be for our blessed Lord to make a full accomplishment of all His predictions concerning His kingdom; salvation shall spread through all the tribes and ranks of mankind, as the lightning from heaven in a few moments would communicate a living flame through ten thousand lamps or torches placed in a proper situation and neighbourhood.”

He had an eminent power in description; the following meditation is a rich illustration of this. The whole meditation is far too long to quote—his descriptions of the awakening life of leaves, and birds, and insects—but he closes:

THE FIRST OF MAY.

“’Tis a sublime and constant triumph over all the intellectual powers of man, which the great God maintains every moment in these inimitable works of nature, in these impenetrable recesses and all mysteries of Divine art; and the month of May is the most shining season of this triumph. The flags and banners of Almighty wisdom are now displayed round half the globe, and the other half waits the return of the sun to spread the same triumph over the southern world. The very sun in the firmament is God’s prime minister in this wondrous world of beings, and he works with sovereign vigour on the surface of the earth, and spreads his influence deep under the clods to the very root and fibre, moulding them in their proper forms by Divine direction. There is not a plant, nor a leaf, nor one little branching thread above or beneath the ground, which escapes the eye or influence of this beneficent star. An illustrious emblem of the omnipresence and universal activity of the Creator.”

The following strikes us as very pleasing:

ON DISTANT THUNDER.

“When we hear the thunder rumbling in some distant quarter of the heavens, we sit calm and serene amidst our business or diversions; we feel no terrors about us, and apprehend no danger. When we see the slender streaks of lightning play afar off in the horizon of an evening sky, we look on and amuse ourselves as with an agreeable spectacle, without the least fear or concern. But lo! the dark cloud rises by degrees; it grows black as night, and big with tempests; it spreads as it rises to the mid-heaven, and now hangs directly over us; the flashes of lightning grow broad and strong, and, like sheets of ruddy fire, they blaze terribly all round the hemisphere. We bar the doors and windows, and every avenue of light, but we bar them all in vain. The flames break in at every cranny, and threaten swift destruction; the thunder follows, bursting from the cloud with sudden and tremendous crashes; the voice of the Lord is redoubled with violence, and overwhelms us with terror; it rattles over our heads as though the whole house was broken down at once with a stroke from heaven, and was tumbling on us amain to bury us in the ruins. Happy the man whose hope in his God composes all his passions amid these storms of nature, and renders his whole deportment peaceful and serene amidst the frights and hurries of weak spirits and unfortified minds.”

Many pages might be filled with such passages in which the compactness of the proverb, or the pleasantry of the fancy, or the richness of the description, is remarkable. It comes out of such characteristics as we have noticed, that he reformed the preaching of his day, especially as to the structure of sermons; it was the age of, what he calls very felicitously, “branching sermons;” and even John Howe, as both Robert Hall and Henry Rogers[50] have remarked, “far outwent many of his most extravagant contemporaries in minute and frivolous subdivision; we have sometimes heads arranged rank and file, half a score deep.” Henry Rogers continues, “If any would wish to see the full extent to which Howe carried this fault, they may look into the ‘scheme’ (a very accurate one), which his publishers prefixed to the first edition of the ‘Delighting in God,’ and by the time the student has thoroughly digested and mastered that, he will find little difficulty I apprehend in any of the first books of Euclid.” It was the characteristic of nearly all the great Puritan preachers before Watts. He speaks of some who would draw out a long rank of particulars in the same sermon under one general, and run up the number to eighteenthly! or seven and twentiethly! until they cut all their sense into shreds, so that everything they say of anything is a new particular; and he says, he has sat under this preaching until he has thought of Ezekiel’s vision in the valley full of bones, “behold they were very many and very dry.” He adds, “A single rose bush, or a dwarf pear, with all their leaves, flowers, and fruit about them, have more beauty and spirit in themselves, and yield more food and pleasure to mankind, than the innumerable branches, boughs, and twigs of a long hedge of thorns.” In the same manner he satirizes another kind of preaching, in which there are no breaks and pauses. “Is there no medium,” he says, “between a sermon made up of sixty dry particulars, and a long loose declamation without any distinction of the parts of it? Must a preacher divide his works by the breaks of a minute watch, or let it run on incessantly like the flowing stream of sand in the hour-glass?” And thus he inquires, “Can a long purling sound awaken a sleepy conscience? Can you make the arrow wound where it will not stick? Where all the discourse vanishes from the remembrance, can you imagine the soul to be profited or enriched? When you brush over the closed eyelid with a feather, did you ever find it give light to the blind? have any of your soft harangues, your continued threads of silken eloquence, ever raised the dead?” Very happily he says, “Preachers talk reason and religion to their auditories in vain, if they do not make the argument so short as to come within their grasps, and give a frequent rest to their thoughts; they must break the Bread of Life into pieces to feed children with it, and part their discourse into distinct propositions, to give the ignorant a plain scheme of any one doctrine, and enable them to comprehend or retain it. The auditors of the first kind of preacher have some confusion in their knowledge, the hearers of the last have scarce any knowledge at all.”

The reader will not fail to notice, in this nervous passage, the happy imagery by which the writer gives point to his ideas.