Isaac Watts was born in 1674 in Southampton, England, the son of a Dissenting deacon imprisoned twice for his faith outside the Church of England. A frail, unusual-looking boy, he grew up in a home where devotion came at a cost, and worship services were marked by psalms sung without life.
While still young, he complained to his father about the poor quality of the hymns sung in the family church. According to the most widely told account of his life, his father challenged him: then write something better yourself. Years later, Watts answered with his first hymn, Behold the Glories of the Lamb.
Barred from Oxford and Cambridge for being a Dissenter, he studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew at the Academy of Stoke Newington, under his tutor Thomas Rowe. He completed his studies in 1694 and, years later, became assistant pastor and, in 1702, senior pastor of Mark Lane Chapel in London.
In 1707 he published Hymns and Spiritual Songs, a work that broke with the custom of singing only the psalms as they stood in Scripture. There appeared When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, a meditation on Galatians 6:14 that would become one of the best loved hymns in Christian history.
A serious illness in 1712 left him weakened for the rest of his life. Taken in by the family of Sir Thomas Abney, he lived under their roof for thirty six years, until his death, sustained by their hospitality once he could no longer keep up his ministry with regularity.
In his later years, his speculative writings on the nature of Christ raised suspicions among contemporaries that Watts was drifting from traditional trinitarian doctrine, edging toward subordinationist ideas about the Son, and he was accused by some of Arianism and by others of Sabellianism. He always described himself as trinitarian, but the debate over his formulations continues among historians to this day.
He never married: a proposal made to the poet Elizabeth Singer was turned down, according to tradition, because of his frail appearance. He also published Divine Songs for Children in 1715, The Psalms of David Imitated in 1719, with Joy to the World and O God, Our Help in Ages Past, and the manual Logic in 1724.
He died in 1748 and was buried at Bunhill Fields, a Dissenters’ burial ground in London. His roughly 750 hymns, translated into dozens of languages, still shape the singing of churches around the world, many of them planted by missions that carried his Christ-centered faith far beyond England.
