40 Facts About Isaac Watts

Isaac Watts was an English Congregational minister, hymn writer, theologian, and logician.

Isaac Watts was a prolific and popular hymn writer and is credited with some 750 hymns.

Isaac Watts is recognized as the "Godfather of English Hymnody"; many of his hymns remain in use today and have been translated into numerous languages.

Watts was born in Southampton, Hampshire, England, in 1674 and was brought up in the home of a committed religious nonconformist; his father, Isaac Watts, had been incarcerated twice for his views.

Isaac Watts displayed a propensity for rhyme from an early age.

Isaac Watts was once asked why he had his eyes open during prayers, to which he responded:.

Isaac Watts received corporal punishment for this, to which he cried:.

Isaac Watts went to the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington in 1690.

Isaac Watts held religious opinions that were more nondenominational or ecumenical than was common for a nonconformist Congregationalist.

Isaac Watts had a greater interest in promoting education and scholarship than preaching for any particular sect.

Isaac Watts took work as a private tutor and lived with the nonconformist Hartopp family at Fleetwood House on Church Street in Stoke Newington.

Isaac Watts eventually lived for a total of 36 years in the Abney household, most of the time at Abney House, their second residence.

Isaac Watts particularly enjoyed the grounds at Abney Park, which Lady Mary planted with two elm walks leading down to an island heronry in the Hackney Brook, and he often sought inspiration there for the many books and hymns that he wrote.

Isaac Watts lived at Abney Hall in Stoke Newington until his death in 1748; he was buried in Bunhill Fields.

Isaac Watts left an extensive legacy of hymns, treatises, educational works, and essays.

Isaac Watts's work was influential amongst nonconformist independents and religious revivalists of the 18th century, such as Philip Doddridge, who dedicated his best-known work to Watts.

Sacred music scholars Stephen Marini, Denny Prutow and Michael LeFebvre describe the ways in which Isaac Watts contributed to English hymnody and the previous tradition of the Church.

Isaac Watts led the change in practice by including new poetry for "original songs of Christian experience" to be used in worship, according to Marini.

The practice of singing Psalms in worship was continued by Biblical command in the New Testament Church from its beginnings in Acts through the time of Isaac Watts, as documented by Prutow.

Isaac Watts was not the first Protestant to promote the singing of hymns; however, his prolific hymn writing helped usher in a new era of English worship as many other poets followed in his path.

Isaac Watts introduced a new way of rendering the Psalms in verse for church services, proposing that they be adapted for hymns with a specifically Christian perspective.

Isaac Watts is credited by many with introducing hymns to the English churches when his Hymns and Spiritual Songs was first published in 1707.

Isaac Watts wrote a textbook on logic which was particularly popular; its full title was, Logick, or The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth With a Variety of Rules to Guard Against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences.

Isaac Watts wrote this work for beginners of logic, and arranged the book methodically.

Isaac Watts divided the content of his elementary treatment of logic into four parts: perception, judgement, reasoning, and method, which he treated in this order.

Isaac Watts was careful to distinguish between judgements and propositions, unlike some other logic authors.

Isaac Watts continues, "when mere ideas are joined in the mind without words, it is rather called a judgement; but when clothed with words it is called a proposition".

Isaac Watts' Logic follows the scholastic tradition and divides propositions into universal affirmative, universal negative, particular affirmative, and particular negative.

Isaac Watts' Logic became the standard text on logic at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, being used at Oxford for well over 100 years.

Isaac Watts followed the Logic in 1741 by a supplement, The Improvement of the Mind.

On his death, Isaac Watts' papers were given to Yale University in the Colony of Connecticut, which nonconformists had established.

The earliest surviving monument to Isaac Watts is in Westminster Abbey; this was completed shortly after his death.

Isaac Watts's much-visited chest tomb at Bunhill Fields dates from 1808, replacing the original that had been paid for and erected by Lady Mary Abney and the Hartopp family.

The first public statue stands at Abney Park, where Isaac Watts lived for more than 30 years at the manor house, and where he died.

The park later became Abney Park Cemetery, opened in 1840; and the statue of Isaac Watts was erected here by public subscription in 1845.

In 1974, the City of Southampton commemorated the tercentenary of Watts' birth by commissioning the biography Isaac Watts Remembered, written by David G Fountain, who like Watts, was a nonconformist minister from Southampton.

One of Isaac Watts' best-known poems was an exhortation "Against Idleness and Mischief" in Divine Songs for Children.

Isaac Watts's parody is better known than Watts' original poem.

The 1884 comic opera Princess Ida includes a punning reference to Watts in Act I At Princess Ida's women's university, no males are allowed.

Many of Isaac Watts' hymns are included in the Anglican Hymns Ancient and Modern, the Oxford Book of Common Praise, the Christadelphian hymnal, the Episcopal Church's Hymnal 1982, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, the Baptist Hymnal, the Presbyterian Trinity Hymnal, and the Methodist Hymns and Psalms.