How bright these glorious spirits shine

This hymn, constructed upon the latter part of Revelation 7, is the last of many genuinely composite texts in the book, bearing the marks of more than one builder. Isaac Watts’ basic text, beginning These glorious minds, how bright they shine, appeared in his Hymns and Spiritual Songs of 1709. Following another strikingly headed ‘The Business and lessedness of glorified Saints, Revelation 7:13 etc’, its 6 stzs were introduced as ‘The same; or, The Martyrs glorified’. However, the editors of the unpublished Scottish Translations and Paraphrases in 1745 (when the now revered Watts had just turned 70), were not quite satisfied with it, and produced a major revision which was itself recast in 1751, and which finally emerged in a new form in the 1781 Scottish Paraphrases. William Cameron (b1751) was named by his daughter as the author of this version, which remained a standard text for 2 centuries.

Now, however, further adjustments seem desirable, and in this text adapted from the Jubilate version, 1.2–3 loses ‘Whence’ and ‘the blissful seats’. Stz 2 was ‘Lo! these are they from … / who came to … / and in the blood of Christ have washed/ those robes that shine so bright’; 3.1,3, had ‘triumphal’ and ‘amidst’, 4.3 ‘cheering’; and stz 5 read ‘The Lamb, who dwells amidst the throne,/ shall o’er them still preside,/ feed them with nourishment divine/ and all their footsteps guide’. Cameron’s ‘pastures green’ in stz 6 reminds us, as it no doubt did him, of the Scottish Psalm version at 23B, just as the Gk of Revelation 7 echoes the earlier Heb. Omitted stzs are ‘His presence fills each heart with joy …’ and ‘To him who sits upon the throne …’ Stz 5 here is unchanged from HTC, which otherwise has significant variations of its own. The whole hymn bears comparison with Frances Cox’s popular translation from the German, Who are these like stars appearing, and Charles Wesley’s What are these arrayed in white, his ‘Funeral’ treatment of the same Scripture in 77 77 D metre, which PHRW is now almost alone in including (much changed, as ‘Who are these …’). Among 20th-c hymns is Christopher Idle’s Here from all nations. But for a comparable account of textual progress from Scripture (by John) to Scotland and beyond (via Watts), see notes to 780.

George Thalben-Ball composed ARDEN for O for a thousand tongues (324). The committee planning the 1951 BBC Hymn Book, where it first appeared, often met in the Arden district of Warwicks. The Baptist Hymn Book (1962) used this for 2 other hymns, and as it has scarcely rivalled existing tunes for Wesley’s text, this seems a good use of its expansive breadth. One other suggested option is the variously named tune at 560; others are BEATITUDO or SENNEN COVE (605, 741).

b Lochaber, nr Ballater, Aberdeenshire 1751, d Kirknewton, nr Livingston, W Lothian (Midlothian) 1811. A farmer’s son from the parish of Glenmuick, he graduated from Marischal Coll in the Univ of Aberdeen (MA 1770) and became a Licentiate of the Ch of Scotland—short of full ordination. On appreciating Cameron’s poetic gifts, the Aberdeen Prof James Beattie (1735–1803, author of the unfinished and ‘proto-Wordsworthian’ The Minstrel) probably then recommended him to the committee appointed to revise the Scots metrical Psalter. Together with John Logan and others, he shared (unofficially) in the 1775 revision of the Translations and Paraphrases of 1745–51. He is credited with drafting 34 of these versions, for some of which he is best-known in hymn-books; these are a classic (and now historic) example of the authorised recasting and updating of texts which were not at that time very old. He was belatedly ordained in 1786, and from then until his death was the parish minister at Kirknewton. Before he was 30 he published Poems on Various Subjects in 1780; his Poems on Several Occasions appeared posthumously in 1813. In recent edns of the Scottish Church Hymnary, however, his name does not appear, as the paraphrases are printed anonymously. He also wrote The Abuse of Civil and Religious Liberty (1796) and A Review of the French Revolution (1802). No.974*.

b Southampton 1674, d Stoke Newington, Middx 1748. King Edward VI Grammar Sch, Southampton, and private tuition; he showed outstanding early promise as a linguist and writer of verse. He belonged to the Above Bar Independent Chapel, Southampton, where his father was a leading member and consequently endured persecution and prison for illegal ‘Dissent’. Some of the historic local landmarks in the family history, however, have question-marks over their precise location. But for Isaac junior’s undoubted first hymnwriting, see no.486 and note; the Psalm paraphrases then in use often were, or resembled, the Sternhold and Hopkins ‘Old Version’, described by Thos Campbell as written ‘with the best intentions and the worst taste’, or possibly the similarly laboured versions of Thomas Barton. His solitary marriage proposal to the gifted Elizabeth Singer was not the only one she rejected, but they remained friends, and her own hymns (as ‘Mrs Rowe’) were highly praised and remained in print until at least around 1900. After further study at home, in the year after Horae Lyricae (published 1705) and at the age of 32, Watts became Pastor of the renowned Mark Lane Chapel in the City of London and private tutor/chaplain to the Abney family at Theobalds (Herts) and Stoke Newington. Chronic ill health prevented him from enjoying a more extensive or prolonged London ministry, though with the care of a loving household he lived to be 74.

In 1707 came the 3 books of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, and in 1719, The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Applied to the Christian State and Worship. As he is acknowledged as the father of the English hymn, so he became the pioneer of metrical Psalms with a Christian perspective. He is acknowledged as such by Robin Leaver who once added, a touch prematurely, that he was equally the assassin of the English metrical Psalm! His own ‘design’ was ‘to accommodate the Book of Psalms to Christian Worship…It is necessary to divest David and Asaph, etc, of every other character but that of a Psalmist and a Saint, and to make them always speak the common sense of a Christian’. His ‘Author’s Preface’ from which this is taken is a brief apologia for his aim and method; he desires to serve all ‘sincere Christians’ rather than any one church party, and he explains the careful omissions and interpretations of hard places. Above all, he is ‘fully satisfied, that more honour is done to our blessed Saviour, by speaking his name, his graces and actions, in our own language…than by going back again to the Jewish forms of worship, and the language of types and figures.’

Not always accepted by his contemporaries, he nevertheless laid the foundations on which Charles Wesley and others built. Some of his hymns and Psalm versions are among the finest in the language and still in worldwide use; Congregational Praise (1951) has 48 of his hymns, and CH (2004 edn), 59. Many of these are found in the early sections of a thematically-arranged hymn-book, under ‘God the Father and Creator’ or similar category.

With his best-selling Divine Songs attempted in Easy Language, for the sake of Children (1715) he was the most popular children’s author in his day (and well into the 19th c); those who understandably recoil today at some of them would do well to see what else was on offer, even 100 or more years later. Watts, too, was a respected poet, preacher and author of many doctrinal prose works. He corresponded as regularly as conditions then allowed with the leaders of the remarkable work in New England. A tantalisingly brief reference in John Wesley’s Journal for 4 Oct 1738 (neither repeated nor paralleled, and less than 5 months after JW’s ‘Aldersgate experience’), reads: ‘1.30 at Dr Watts’. conversed; 2.30 walked, singing, conversed…’. Dr Samuel Johnson and J Wesley used his work extensively, the former including many quotations from Watts in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. His work on Logic became a textbook in the universities from which he was barred because of his nonconformity. The current Oxford Book of English Verse (1999) includes 5 items by IW including his 2 best-known hymns. Further details are found in biographies by Arthur P Davis (1943), David Fountain (1974) and others, the 1974 Annual Lecture of the Evangelical Library by S M Houghton, and publications of the British and N American Hymn Societies (by Norman Hope, 1947) and the Congregational Library Annual Lecture (by Alan Argent, 1999). See also Montgomery’s 4 pages in his 1825 ‘Introductory Essay’ in The Christian Psalmist, where he calls Watts ‘the greatest name among hymnwriters…[ who] may almost be called the inventor of hymns in our language’; and the final chapter of Gordon Rupp’s Six Makers of English Religion (1957). The 1951 Congregational Praise is rare among hymn-books for including more texts by Watts than by C Wesley. Nos.5*, 122, 124, 136, 146, 163, 164, 171, 189, 208, 214, 231, 232, 241, 255, 260, 264, 265, 300, 312, 363, 401, 411, 453, 486, 491, 505, 520, 549, 557, 560, 580, 633, 653, 692, 709*, 780, 783, 792, 794, 807, 969, 974*, 975.