The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Isaac Watts
1674–1748EnglishIndependent (Congregational)
Told his father the church songs were dull, was told to write better ones, and wrote about 750.
Summary
- Lived 1674–1748, English.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists and The Hymn Writers.
- Tradition: Independent (Congregational) / Dissenter.
The life
Isaac Watts grew up in Southampton with a father who had been jailed twice for refusing to conform to the Church of England. English congregations in his youth sang metrical psalms and little else, often badly. The story his family told is that the teenaged Watts complained about the singing and was told that if he thought he could do better he should try, and he did, week after week, for years.
His achievement was twofold: he wrote hymns of free composition at a time when many thought only Scripture could be sung, and he rewrote the Psalms in the language of the New Testament, so Psalm 72 became Jesus Shall Reign and Psalm 98 became Joy to the World. He pastored an Independent congregation in London until poor health made it impossible, and spent his last thirty-six years as a guest of the Abney family, still writing, hymns, children's verse, and a logic textbook the universities used for a century.
What was happening while he lived6 moments · 1600–1730
- 1675Spener's *Pia Desideria*Philipp Jakob Spener, a pastor in Frankfurt, publishes six plain proposals: more Bible in laypeople's hands, believers meeting in small groups, faith that shows up in life, gentler argument, ministers trained for godliness, preaching aimed at the heart. The book names a movement: Pietism.
- 1678*The Pilgrim's Progress* is publishedBunyan had spent twelve years (1660–1672) in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelace tags to feed his family, including a blind daughter. Out of those years came the dream of a man with a burden on his back, running toward a distant light.
- 1679–1688Scotland's Killing TimeCovenanters who kept preaching in open fields after outdoor worship was outlawed are hunted across the moors of the southwest. Richard Cameron falls at Airds Moss in 1680; James Renwick, the last of them executed, dies in 1688.
- Oct 1685The Edict of Nantes is revokedLouis XIV cancels the protection French Protestants had held since 1598. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots flee France for England, Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, the American colonies, and the Cape.
- 1698Francke's orphanage opens at HalleAugust Hermann Francke had started a school for poor children in 1695 with a few coins left in a parish box. Halle grows into orphanage, schools, hospital, and a Bible press that will put Scripture into ordinary German hands by the hundreds of thousands.
- 1707Watts publishes *Hymns and Spiritual Songs*Isaac Watts, a dissenting pastor with a weak body and an enormous ear, argues that Christians may sing new words and not only metrical Psalms. The book carries "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" and effectively begins English hymn-singing.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Isaac Watts at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Complained that church singing was dull, was dared to do better, and gave English Christians about 750 hymns.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you. Hangs on The Hymn Writers: The poets who taught the church to sing what it believes.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.