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

by Edwin Paxton Hood

Nor borrows leave to be.

And thus again:

Let every creature rise and bring

Peculiar honours to our King.

Every poet is to be judged by what he is on the average. Homer has been said to nod; Milton is frequently very turgid, and innumerable passages sink quite below the usual sustained magnificence of the poem; in Shakespeare there are lines, conceits, and redundances which all good taste would wish away. The reader who judged of Keble’s capacity for poetry by his version of the Psalms, or many of his later pieces, would not form a very lofty estimate of his powers. And there are many more expressions and passages than we shall care to count among the psalms and hymns of Watts which are wholly indefensible by any standard of good taste, good sense, or good theology. Upon these, critics, like those to whom we have referred, have pounced, these they have quoted, and to the crowds of passages sublime or pathetic, strong or tender, they have most adroitly closed their eyes or their ears.

Watts has suffered in many ways. Accused by one class of critics of bad taste, and sneered at for the absence of poetic gifts by another class, his theology has been called in question as leaning towards heresy. How this charge could ever have been made by any man who had read for himself Watts’ hymns passes all our conception. But the Unitarians, with a mendacity singularly their own, have in many instances taken his hymns and garbled them to suit their own theology. The Unitarians are clever at taking possession of other people’s property, their churches, their endowments, their books, their great names, and, in Watts’ instance, their hymns. We have even seen the Te Deum adapted to a Unitarian service. The Unitarians are regarded as an exceedingly moral people, and it has often been supposed that what they lack in doctrine they make up in duty, but it is quite true that they are singularly dishonest; and the most eminent Unitarian minister in England in our day, the Rev. James Martineau, does not hesitate to charge such dishonesty upon his community; he shows how the term Unitarian has to be kept out of sight in order that certain property may be obtained. He says, “How could an organization with a doctrinal name upon its face, the Unitarian Association, go into court and plead our right to our chapels, on the ground of their doctrinal neutrality? Accordingly, another association had to be got up specially for the purpose, the Presbyterian Association, in order to evade the inconsistency; and I know it to have been the opinion of the two founders of the Unitarian Association that they committed a disastrous mistake in giving a doctrinal name to the society.” And he says to Mr. Macdonald, to whom he is writing, “Upon what ground can you claim a rightful succession, as you have so nobly done, to Matthew Henry and the founders of Crook Street, if you place the essence of your Church in doctrines which he did not hold!”[21] And thus Unitarians have constructed a science of equivocations, and tread a plank of double meanings; it expunges the term Unitarian as designative of their creed, and it takes the words representative of the creed of the great Church through all ages, and, reversing the miracle of our Lord, they use them as vessels in which the wine is turned into water. This is the principle which has governed in Unitarian hymn-books. The selection of many of the hymns from Watts, even his sacramental hymns, have in several instances not been permitted to pass unmutilated; and then, putting the top stone upon the column of injustice, the further indignity, amounting to insolence, of claiming him as a Unitarian.

It is a curious thing to find a writer in the “Wesleyan Magazine” for 1831 boasting that none of the Wesleyan hymns have ever been used for the purpose of Unitarian or Socinian worship, while Watts’ have been thus frequently employed. The writer admits that in such instances they have been altered, but says that “Charles Wesley’s hymns are made of too unbending materials ever to be adapted to Socinian worship.” He was quite mistaken in the fact, they have often been “bent” for this purpose; but it is the very peculiarity of Watts that he rises to the pre-existent and uncreated realms of majesty, of which our Lord speaks as “the glory I had with Thee before the world was.” It would be interesting to know how any Socinian or Unitarian could “bend” that magnificent hymn,

Ere the blue heavens were stretched abroad,

From everlasting was the Word:

With God He was; the Word was God,