Joy to the world, the Lord has come

The previous item 362 is an American hymn adopted in Britain; this English paraphrase, at least until recently, has been better known in America. In 1966 the American Martha Wilburn England wrote of Watts, ‘Joy is his key word [cf 300,794 etc] and Joy to the world perhaps his best-known song’. Its rediscovery in Britain has been credited partly to the Moody and Sankey missions of the 1890s, partly to the Salvation Army’s ‘Joystrings’ in the 1960s. As noted at 98A, it is Isaac Watts’ version of the 98th Psalm, or rather, pt 2 (vv4–9 of the Scripture) of his double text. The first part, To our almighty Maker, God, is headed ‘Praise for the Gospel’; this one continues under the title ‘The Messiah’s coming and kingdom’. It is from the author’s classic 1719 collection of Psalms ‘… Imitated in the Language of the New Testament’. Some books (from Methodists, Adventists and Rationalists!) have ventured to reinterpret line 1; following HTC (where more than 100 other hymns separate texts which are here adjacent) except at 2.2 and 3.4, Praise! changes only ‘is’ to ‘has’. Stz 2 adjusts ‘let men their songs employ’, and eases line 3 to accommodate the tune; Watts wrote a mouthful of a list reminiscent of Milton, ‘while fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains …’ Stz 3 defines ‘far as the curse is found’ more exactly, while the repeated lines exhibit a different kind of editorial liberty comparable to those taken with O for a thousand tongues or And can it be (324, 776). Some omit this stz altogether; not so PHRW, which leaves out 4 but intersperses two others, slightly emended, from Watts’ original pt 1.

If the tune NATIVITY is used (by Lahee, 300, an option for this hymn in CH and PHRW), the repetitions are avoided. But ANTIOCH has given the hymn its familiar character and much of its joyful popularity. The descending scales in the first part of the music suggest a peal of bells befitting festive celebrations. Linda Mawson provides the present arrangement of a tune with many other names (including HOLY TRIUMPH, JERUSALEM, MESSIAH, and MEDIA!), sometimes credited to G F Handel but appearing in this form in Lowell Mason’s Occasional Psalms and Hymn Tunes, at Boston in 1836. He there labelled it ‘Arr. from Handel’, and short phrases can be paralleled in Messiah. But it is perhaps better described by Wesley Milgate as ‘a repeating tune in a pastiche of the Handelian style’ with what he calls ‘an engaging simple exuberance’. As for its name, it was in the city of Antioch that Ignatius is said to have introduced antiphonal singing after he dreamed of angels demonstrating the art. With the rare exception of Jerusalem, my happy home, no other words are known to have been matched to this tune, which should be described as ‘CM with repeats’.

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.