Our God, our help in ages past

‘Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations …’ So begins the 90th Psalm in the version most familiar to Isaac Watts, the Heb alone excepted. His paraphrase written around 1714 has become not only a favourite choice for national occasions, anniversaries, the year’s beginning and end, or funeral and memorial occasions, but one of the best known hymns to appear in general collections of verse. In 1999 it entered The Oxford Book of English Verse (traditionally inhospitable to hymns, Wesley being absent from this edn) together with When I survey Many have called it ‘a second national anthem’; Gordon Rupp called it ‘an event in English history, and part of our very national existence’. The powerful word ‘home’ (when not over-used) concludes not only stz 1 but also the whole hymn, as it does in Watts’ version of Ps 23, My shepherd will supply my need. But whereas 1.4 is part of a statement, 6.4 is part of a prayer; both are made in faith, but the distinction should not be lost. The Scripture Psalm is uniquely headed ‘A Prayer of Moses the man of God’; the reason it does not appear among the Psalms in this book (see 90 and notes) is that it does not pretend to paraphrase more than vv1–5 (of a 17-verse text) and that the usual selection of 6 stzs, as here, omits three of even this ‘Pt 1’. It is therefore properly a Psalm-based hymn, like 195 and 196, titled in the 1719 book ‘Man frail; and God eternal’. Stzs dropped are the original 4th (‘Thy word commands our flesh to dust’), 6th (‘The busy tribes of flesh and blood’) and 8th (‘Like flowery fields the nations stand’). The remainder has often been judged to be among the finest of English hymns.

In 1738 John Wesley changed its first word from ‘Our’ to ‘O’, in an alteration which has enjoyed wide support (making it universal and reducing the occurrences of ‘our’ in stz 1 from 5 to 4). Not only does this contradict his own fiercely-stated principles (that no-one should alter another hymnwriter’s texts—or maybe, his own?), but this particular piece of historic editing has recently been reconsidered by others besides the Praise! team. Changes which are adopted, not all uniquely, are ‘Beneath’ and ‘lived’ (for ‘Under’— sometimes disputed but widely accepted—and ‘dwelt’, stz 2); lines 2–4 of stz 5, and line 3 of stz 6, for ‘be thou our guard while troubles last’. Tributes to the hymn are very many; one story has Oxford’s Dr Jowett asking his guests at an academic tea-party to jot down a short list of best hymns, at which they all wrote down this one only. If ‘borrowing’ is a half-hidden tribute, Anne Steele uses stz 3 line 3 in her versions of Pss 90 and 93. In his British Academy lecture in 1943, published as The Century of Divine Songs, George Sampson called it ‘the greatest of all English hymns’. In The English Hymn (1997) J R Watson analyses it on pp157–159, saying ‘The strength of the verses, the beautiful accommodation of the sense to the lines, and the structure of the hymn—beginning and ending with God—demonstrate Watts’ characteristic qualities as a hymnographer at their best’.

Such is the power of the tune ST ANNE when wedded to these words that it takes some effort of mind to imagine them without it. Yet so the text survived for a century and a half. William Croft’s spaciously dignified tune was composed not long before the words were written, appearing with its familiar title in A Supplement to the New Version of the Psalms by Dr Brady and Mr Tate, 6th edition … in 1708. It was set there in the key of D to As pants the hart (Psalm 42); but no-one thought of attaching it to Watts’ 90th until the A&M editors in 1861. The composer’s name did not appear with it until 1720; Croft had been organist of St Anne’s Soho in central London, a Wren building of 1685, which no doubt suggested the tune name. The melody is used in various pieces of classical music, and is played at 4-hourly intervals from the town hall tower clock in Southampton, Watts’ birthplace. Before 1861, tunes in use included BANGOR (824) and ST MARY. In Erik Routley’s posthumous and definitive collection, Watts and Croft jointly contribute this hymn as its first entry, and 164 as its last.

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.