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

by Edwin Paxton Hood

Watts preached his first sermon on his birthday, July 17th, 1698; he was then twenty-four years of age. He probably mingled with his duties as tutor those of chaplain to the excellent family in which he resided. The ice once broken, he began to preach constantly. Sir John Hartopp and his family were members of the church of Dr. Chauncy, in Mark Lane; and it was, no doubt, greatly in consequence of this friendship that Watts was invited to become the assistant of the doctor.

It is curious to compare the dearth of chapels and preachers in the City in the present day with the many remarkable for their importance at the time when Watts became a pastor. Still a few places stand out, dating from that time; but, for the most part, all have gone, leaving only the memories of certain men of remarkable attainments, wit, and eloquence behind them. To the distinguished circle of ministers, and to the church which had known, before him, men so eminent, Watts, all but unknown, brought a name which was to give to them a crowning reputation. His qualities as a preacher all accounts represent as rather solid than shining. His sermons were beautiful in their clear harmonious symmetry of powers, rather than startling. Surely never a man who poured into his verse so much rich brilliancy of expression—sometimes, it must be admitted, with questionable rhetorical afflatus and pomp of utterance—preserved through all that we know of his public teaching so quiet and equable a flow of language and ideas, so instructive, while so entirely removed from all that can unduly agitate the spirit. In Jeremy Taylor we wonder that the poet seems to abandon every ambitious attempt when he writes verse, while his sermons possess a gorgeous and overwhelming splendour of diction and imagery. In Watts, on the other hand, it is equally surprising that so sprightly and splendid a fancy, so rich a command over sacred verses and images, should express itself with such calmness and modesty in words intended for the pulpit; but this was probably of a piece with his whole character. His hymns are often raptures and ecstasies, but he reserved these for his most private life, for his own heart, for his closet and study. There was nothing in his character bustling, prominent, or obtrusive. In an evening conversation he would shrink as far as possible from taking any prominent part, and would never in ordinary company lead it. In the home circle, among close and well-known friends, he shed around himself a genial atmosphere; but he was too essentially a student and a book-man to be in any high sense a popular preacher. Eminent and eminently honoured, his greatness was not of that order which easily finds itself at home in multitudes. His person was not striking, although we can conceive it to have been very impressive; and his mode of setting forth all things upon which he wrote or spoke was so purely thoughtful, demanded so intimate a sympathy with pensive and meditative moods, and required so close an acquaintance with high and abstract thoughts, that it is not to be wondered at that his fame as a preacher and scholar was rather reserved for the intimate circle than for more extended, not to say vulgar, spheres.

The City of London at present conveys no idea of what it was then; and what it was very materially affects our estimate of the position of Watts as one of its Nonconformist ministers. The City of London was the chief bulwark of English freedom. Happily all the needs and occasions for what it was in those days have long since passed, and England itself has greatly become what London was then. The City of that date calls up the idea of some such spots as the great mediæval cities, the burgher strongholds of the middle ages. Not many years before it had been the refuge of the five members whom Charles I. sought to attach for high treason. It had been committed to the cause of Puritanism, Protestantism, and William; some of its chief men had become martyrs to the cause of civil and religious liberty. The governments of Charles II. and James II. scarcely permitted to active minds and public men a middle way. Nonconformity was imposed by the exactions of tyranny upon spiritually minded men. Hence, leaving the fanes and structures then very pleasantly standing in many a retired close, surrounded by pleasant trees, sequestered places in the midst of the graves of many generations, such persons were compelled to assemble for worship where they best could, in some old guild hall or place of trade, some loft over offices and warehouses.[9] Most of the congregations we now should consider small. No company composed of faithful souls meeting for Divine service beneath the blessing of Him who said, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them,”[10] can be held contemptible; but their congregations were largely composed of persons who had figured prominently in the great actions of the immediately preceding years, officers and soldiers of that great army which had overawed the world by their fame, persons to whom Nonconformity was no mere negation, but the profession of all that was dearest to human freedom or to human hopes, men of substance and position, the most eminent merchants, to whose sense religious and civil liberty were so closely related that it was impossible to do injustice to the one without aiming at the heart of the other, and who knew that to injure either was to hurt the lesser, but still eminent interests of trade and commerce, and industry, and national prosperity. Nonconformity in the City of London has grown in representative wealth and importance; but it may be safely affirmed that it could not show such congregations of noble men as those which thronged its contemptible meeting-houses in Watts’ day.

Referring back to those times, entering one of the chapels during the time of service, we should, perhaps, be astonished and chilled by the want of animation and ardour, if these are to be tested by the apparent excitement. Indeed, to our taste, the service must have appeared very formal and frigid; not merely in the fact that no instrumental music of any kind would have been tolerated, no response or chant, but, in many congregations, there was no singing at all. To the stricter Puritan sensibility this would have been merely intolerable. We have instances of ministers who were made uncomfortable in their churches, and compelled to relinquish them, because they desired to introduce some religious melody; in other instances it was the minister who disapproved such extravagant piety in his people. The Society of Friends was not alone in its renunciation of all the adornments and flights of religious song. Even where singing was indulged, it was Patrick’s or the Scotch version, or some such literal translation of the words of Scripture. Paraphrases and more expanded religious sentiments had never been heard of, and were regarded, when first introduced, as seditious and dangerous innovations, disturbing the purity of so reasonable a service, which derived all its life and interest from its most perfect conformity to a spiritual order; the simple voice of the minister in prayer, and in preaching, meandering in many instances through roads of uncommon length. We have instances on record of a prayer itself taking the entire length of that time we now ordinarily allot to a public service. This state of things in the congregation must have greatly influenced the religious life of the times where it existed at all. It became cold, remote, and abstract; not that there were wanting instances, both of ministers and congregations, who maintained, in the midst of so much lifelessness, a high spiritual state and intercourse.

The Nonconformists throughout the country were, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, for the most part men disposed to social quiet. They had now recovered in some measure a state of religious tranquillity, and they were rather interested quietly to preserve what they possessed, than to attempt any occupation of new ground, either in principle or in practice. They made few efforts to correct the vices of men, or to convert them from their life of sin. The round of Nonconformist duty and piety was a quiet, staid, and respectable service; nothing, we suppose, could be more unlike the satires so often pronounced upon it. Most of its ministers were men of considerable scholarly attainments, their minds fed by the rich and strengthening food to be found in some of the oldest fathers and the earliest reformers; at the same time they were accustomed to abstractions and questions, which at once enlarged and strengthened the understanding. They had no acquaintance with our large varieties of nature and language; but they were keen observers of human nature, and they submitted their knowledge to the test and use of daily life. As to their people, in many instances, no doubt, they were humble, perhaps even of obscure rank, but this was not always the case. Nonconformity in those times included others than those we should even call the respectable middle classes; it represented an order of political opinion quite as much as religious doctrine and practice, not only as we have seen in London, but in many districts of the country. Some of the highest and oldest families formed the staff and stay of congregations. It was a respectable but cold piety, in many instances with assured tendencies towards Socinianism and Unitarianism. The Nonconformity into which Watts came, and with which during the whole of his life he mingled, is quite removed from that Nonconformity of Methodism and Revivalism which became the great religious movement of the last century. It was a Nonconformity educated, solid, rooted in certain principles and assurances, inclining too exclusively to a life of thought; the religion of intelligent multitudes who could not conform, especially to what the Church of England was, in that coarse and intolerant time, when her nets gathered fish of every sort, among them some chiefly remarkable for their rapacity and impurity.

It was over one of these old City churches, probably the most famous of them, that the youthful Isaac Watts was called to preside as the pastor. The congregation or church contained a number of eminent persons; its pastors had been eminent men; here a few years before ministered Joseph Caryl. From the pulpit of this place probably were poured forth those prelections on the Book of Job, assuredly in more than one sense a monument to the memory of Patience! Vast and mammoth-like, a megatherium of books, the most huge commentary ever written, but a structure of learning, with eloquence and evangelical truth, if large in bulk almost equal in worth. Over this church, more recently, had presided a greater man in the person of the mighty John Owen, the friend of Cromwell, and, during the Protectorate, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. The place of meeting was in Mark Lane, and in the congregation there were present some whose character and lives might a little daunt any preacher, much more a very youthful one. There were many in that congregation able to carry the memory back through the days of England’s fiery trials, through the years of war and of persecution, and the times when the City was alive in its own defence. They had heard the cry, “To your tents, O Israel!” when, in an ill-omened hour, Charles I. came to the City; they had seen the Thames alive with barge and boat as the members were escorted back to Westminster; some had served in the camp with the Ironsides, and some had seen Sir Harry Vane hailed to the scaffold; there were officers of the old Commonwealth army, members of the old Long Parliament, strong merchants and magistrates who had stood up for the liberties of the City and of England; there, in that congregation, scattered over the place were clustering remnants of the immediate members and descendants of Cromwell’s family, none more remarkable than that most singular woman, Mrs. Bendish, Bridget Ireton, the grand-daughter of Cromwell, of whom all contemporaries spoke as hearing just the same relation to her grandfather in character that Elizabeth bore to Henry VIII.—a woman with a most remarkable life; there was Charles Fleetwood, her mother’s second husband; there was Charles Desborough, the brother-in-law to Oliver Cromwell; there was that fine old English gentleman Sir John Hartopp, and Lady Hartopp, who was a daughter of Charles Fleetwood, and thus allied to Mrs. Bendish; there was Lady Vere Wilkinson, and Lady Haversham, a daughter of the Earl of Anglesey, and the wife of John Thompson Earl of Haversham; and there, last as we mention them, but far from least in importance in the life of Watts, Sir Thomas and Lady Abney.

As we have said already, the Independent churches of the City were in that day greatly composed of such characters as these. Look into any one, and you will see such persons of rank and influence, although probably a kind of Cromwell clannishness gave distinctness and importance to the little church in Mark Lane; there was a respectability and dignity about those churches in general which we should in these days but little appreciate. They were snug little spiritual corporations, held together by several bonds which have ceased to be distinctive now; a strong faith in certain great first principles in religion; a strong faith also in certain political principles, quite essential to the freedom of their faith and their religious life and its usages. Nor can we conceal from ourselves that there was also a conservative spirit of an aristocratic flavour; there was nothing in the communion which savoured of our modern more heterogeneous assemblies: the members were usually persons of strong character, considerable culture, and thought. Their idea of liberty was no more cut out after the modern type than was their theology; indeed both were ideal. If the Harringtons and Sidneys dreamed their republics, not upon the wild democratic inclusiveness of complete suffrage, the proclamation of the sanctity of ignorance, and the wisdom of vice, but upon the models of classical times,—these for the most part idealized the republic of the saints, and formed their conceptions of church life and political freedom upon the unattainable standard of the college of the apostles, and the traditions of the community of the saints. Yet it is very easy to perceive how, ensconcing themselves in religious life as in a comfortable arm-chair, while perfectly faithful themselves, they became the parents of that large declension of such churches to Arianism and the cognate Socinian ideas which in the later periods of his life vexed the spirit of Watts, and led his thoughtful philosophic nature into an arena of mild, but not the less earnest conflict.

Watts, accepting the charge of the church, was ordained over it March 8th, 1702, the day on which King William died. The young minister’s immediate predecessor was Dr. Isaac Chauncy, who, like most of his coadjutors in the ministry of that period, was a gentleman of good and ancient family; originally coming over with the Conqueror, settled at Yardley, Berkshire, in the time of Elizabeth, and by the drift of circumstances conducted to considerable eminence among the Puritans and Nonconformists. The father of Isaac Chauncy had been professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge, and vicar of Ware, in Hertfordshire. He took up his testimony for Nonconformity when the “Book of Sports” was published, commanding him to desist from preaching on the Sabbath afternoon, that the people of his parish might indulge themselves in profane amusements; he fell beneath the vengeance of Archbishop Laud, and was twice cited before the Court of High Commission; he made a recantation, which he afterwards so regretted and bewailed that he threw up everything and withdrew to New England. His son Isaac held the living of Woodborough, in Wiltshire, from whence he was ejected, and after ministering a short time in Andover came to London, intending to practise as a physician, when the church in Mark Lane called him to become its minister; but he was not popular as a preacher, however eminent in other qualifications.

The congregation had exhibited signs of decline when Watts was called in, probably as one on whom the eyes of leading Nonconformists were fixed, especially as the friend of Sir John Hartopp. Although so young, his knowledge of mathematics, of the classics, of Church history, of theological science, especially his piety, must have made him already well known in Nonconformist circles. This knowledge extended back to the early part of 1698, so that for nearly two years he must have been the preacher, and it may be presumed very considerably the pastor of the church before, upon the resignation of Dr. Chauncy, he succeeded him in his office: the members of this distinguished church must have invited him with their eyes completely open to all that he was as a preacher and as a man. But he gave no indications of ability to enforce by his bodily powers the manifestations of his genius—his health appeared to be constantly failing. For some months before his ordination he had been laid aside from preaching, and in search of health had, by the advice of physicians, visited Bath. And then again we find him for some time resting at home at his father’s house, now, no doubt, a comfortable residence, a flourishing school, and released from all the terrors which had shadowed it in his infancy. And from thence again by physicians we find him sent to Tunbridge Wells, so that he says, “I was detained from study and preaching five months by my weakness, except one very short discourse at Southampton in extreme necessity.” He was of a slight and most fragile frame throughout his life. His works constitute an amazing monument of industry. But during the years he had been tutor in Sir John Hartopp’s family he must have performed these duties in a spirit of remarkable conscientiousness, for he prepared some of the works which afterwards delighted and instructed the world, as the necessary means of the course he was pursuing in the education of the young man, his pupil. Very remarkably this is the case with his “System of Logic,” which when it was published many years after was adopted and continued to be until recently the text-book for the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge; this appears also to have been the case with his “Scheme of Ontology.” He refers to many of his writings published at a much later period of his life, as for the most part the productions of these his earlier years. We shall have occasion to speak of these again; at present it is sufficient to refer to this persistency of mental labour and assiduous industry as not only the sufficient cause for the illness which suspended him from labour, but the foundation of future years of painful infirmity which accompanied him through life.

There must have been much about him not only to command respect but to enchain affection. Long hesitating as to whether he should accept the proffered pastorate, he had not long entered upon the real responsibilities of his office before he was again seized with a painful and alarming illness; almost immediately he was compelled again, in July, 1702, to renew his rest in Southampton, and then returning to London he mentions, in the memoranda we have already quoted, that he was “seized with violent gaundise and colic three weeks after my return to London, and had a very slow recovery, eight or nine weeks’ illness. From September 8th, or thereabouts, to November 27th or 28th. This year, viz., 1702, by slow degrees removed from Newington to Thomas Hollis’s, in the Minories.”