There is a land of pure delight

If ever a hymn required (and rewarded) silent meditation followed or preceded by solemnly joyful singing, this penultimate item is it. Yet its story, like most of the rest, is worth the telling. It illustrates the author’s use of names in his hymns, a study in itself, and more pronounced in an age when most people knew them. Bernard L Manning (1937) drew attention to Watts’ ‘perfect mastery’ of words which ‘awaken that historic memory which only proper names can command’; ‘community memory’, he might have added. Israel, Canaan, and Jordan in two lines of stz 3; what a history is here!—except that Watts wrote ‘the Jews’ for the first. Jordan and Canaan are repeated before the end, and Moses makes his crucial appearance only in stz 6. But we are expected to pick up the clue to Deuteronomy 34 in stz 3 onwards; the Hebrew leader is looking across to the promised land he will never set foot in. But the Christian believer will. How so? The strangely absent name is that of Jesus; which is why we need to read the hymn in the context of the whole Bible, of a whole corpus of Isaac Watts texts beginning at 486, a whole hymn book arranged in some sort of order, and of course a whole service or meeting of the ‘saints’—‘we’ for the author. To quote Manning again, from a letter of Feb 1931, ‘We had, however, “There is a land of pure delight��?; which is quite indescribably good, and alone would “almost persuade��? me to be a Christian’.

The hymn was written c1706 and possibly prompted by views from the author’s native city across the Southampton Water to Netley (somewhat changed now by the concrete of Totton), or possibly from a little further S, across the Solent to Cowes. It was published in Hymns and Spiritual Songs in 1707. It was headed ‘A Prospect of Heaven makes Death easy’. At least one other Watts hymn, Death cannot make our souls afraid, has a similar theme (‘Might I but climb to Pisgah’s top’ etc) but does not reach the eloquence of this one. While perhaps a little too comfortable for the way some believers have to face dying and death (cf 223 stz 3), like 963 it honestly faces the reality of human fears, and was penned long before its writer secured much earthly ease. Changes found necessary and made reluctantly here are: 3.1 (changing ‘swelling’); 4.1,4 (from ‘timorous … and fear’); 5.1,4 (‘Oh! could we make … unbeclouded …’); and stz 6 (‘Could we but climb … / … the landscape o’er/ … should fright us …’) With the exception of 6.2, where HTC has ‘and fear that view no more’, this is the Jubilate version; an 11th-hour plea secured its inclusion there, and the preservation of ‘shore’ as its final word. It is absent from Hymns of Faith, PHRW, MP and Sing Glory. Among occurrences in general literature, the ‘sweet words’ of stz 3 are heard from the ‘steady notes’ of Captain Bildad in Melville’s classic 1851 novel Moby Dick, as the whaling ship ‘Pequod’ gets under way; his sister Charity ‘had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth.’

We may regret that such a text has no widely-agreed tune, though each persuasion or congregation may stick to its favourite. Like GH, Praise! has chosen Edward C Walker’s ST MARGUERITE (see 613) with SELFLESS LOVE (841) as its alternative. Honourable mention may be made of both the evocative MENDIP which Cecil Sharp collected and adapted (as in EH, The Baptist Hymn Book, Christian Worship, HTC etc) and the equally lovely BEULAH by George M Garrett (A&M, Methodist Hymn Book, Anglican Hymn Book and others). The Methodist Hymns and Psalms (1983) has both of these. The Companion to that book (1988), which pertinently quotes Erik Routley, also says ‘This is not Watts’ most famous hymn, but is surely his most beautiful’. The choice of music can greatly enhance that assessment and experience.

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.