Cotton Mather Brings Isaac Watts's Hymns to America; Or, How To
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Cotton Mather Brings Isaac Watts’s Hymns to America; or, How to Perform a Hymn without Singing It christopher n. phillips N December 1711, Cotton Mather noted in his diary that I Isaac Watts had sent him a copy of the new, expanded edi- tion of his Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1709). Mather expressed his joy over the gift in terms that strangely remove Watts from the transaction: “I receive them as a Recruit and a Supply sent in from Heaven for the Devotions of my Family.” Mather went on to note that the family setting is where he “will sing them, and endeavour to bring my Family in Love with them”; he also committed himself to encouraging local booksellers to stock the volume and congregants to buy it, “and in this way pro- mote Piety among them.”1 Mather was certainly no stranger to hymns, either as a reader or as a writer. Earlier that month, he recorded in his diary a hymn he had composed while suffering a severe headache, and his library at that time included copies of John Mason’s Spiritual Songs (first published in 1685)aswell as the first edition of Watts’s Hymns (1707) and his collection of poems, Horae Lyricae (1706). Moreover, when he received the updated edition of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Mather had already introduced Watts to American print. His ongoing ef- forts in that regard give new insight into the devotional life of Mather’s New England, the changing nature of congregational My thanks go to Reiner Smolinski, Susan Imbarrato, and the editor and readers at The New England Quarterly for their contributions to the work of this essay. 1The Diary of Cotton Mather, ed.W.C.Ford,2 vols. (1911–12; repr. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), 2:142. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXV, no. 2 (June 2012). C 2012 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 203 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 204 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY worship, the authority of the Massachusetts clergy in the first half of the eighteenth century, and, even more illuminating, the status and use of hymns before their widespread adoption in New England as texts for congregational singing. Much of the scholarship on Watts and his influence in Amer- ica has been the work of musicologists and liturgical historians.2 This is hardly surprising, since congregations have been singing Watts’s words since the second third of the eighteenth century, and his most popular texts have been freely available in Protes- tant hymnals since the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, since authorities no less than Pliny and St. Paul stated that the first Christians sang “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” in their worship together, there seems little cause to question Lewis F. Benson’s statement in his magisterial The English Hymn that “a hymn may or may not happen to be literature; in any case it is something more. Its special sphere is wor- ship, and its fundamental relations are not literary but litur- gical.” Thus, “if the methods of the literary historian are not 2See, e.g., Lewis F. Benson, The English Hymn: Its Development and Use in Wor- ship (New York: George Doran, 1915); Harry Escott, Isaac Watts, Hymnographer: A Study of the Beginnings, Development and Philosophy of the English Hymn (London: Independent Press, 1962); Selma L. Bishop, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707–1748: A Study in Early Eighteenth-Century Language Changes (London: Faith Press, 1962); and Rochelle A. Stackhouse, The Language of the Psalms in Worship: American Revi- sions of Watts’ Psalter (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1997). Although J. R. Watson’s The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Donald Davie’s The Eighteenth-Century Hymn in England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) both make important contributions to un- derstanding Watts as a poet, they both share Benson’s assumption that the poetry is defined by its intended use for singing. David S. Shields (Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the In- stitute of Early American History and Culture (IEAHC), 1997], pp. 227–32), while not focused on the hymns, helpfully posits Watts as a key practitioner of a mode of the “re- ligious sublime” in transatlantic belles-lettres, and both Alan Argent (Isaac Watts: Poet, Thinker, Pastor [London: Congregational Memorial Hall Trust, 1999]) and Jane Gis- come (“Watts and His Readers,” Congregational History Society Magazine 6.1 [2010]: 39–51) have recently contributed to situating Watts’s hymn writing within the larger context of his career as an intellectual and pastoral leader. David Music has made im- portant contributions to updating our understanding of the printing and use of Watts’s hymns in “Isaac Watts in America before 1729,” Hymn 50.1 (January 1999): 29–33,as well as in “Jonathan Edwards and the Theology and Practice of Congregational Song in Puritan New England” and “Jonathan Edwards’s Singing Lecture Sermon,” Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 8 (2004): 103–33, 135–47. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 205 misapplied to Hymnody, they are at least inadequate.”3 In the most definitive response to Benson, literary critic J. R. Watson conceded the main point: “In the sense that it exists in a book, and that book may be held in the hand and read, the hymn is there as writing; but it is only there because it is also music, sacred song, congregational praise.”4 Yet although the Christian hymn has been widely regarded as a text with a corporate function, to be sung by an entire congregation during worship, it appears that for about two centuries in the wake of the English Reformation, English- speaking Protestants instead used hymns for literary edification or private devotion. Even Benson acknowledges that between the early sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, “metri- cal psalms . remained to meet in large measure the needs of devotion, and hence the more special function of the Hymnody was homiletical.”5 Benson was here referring to the status of hymns as supplements in and alongside the psalters used in En- glish Protestant churches before the 1700s, but his point gains a force he did not recognize when we remark that, in New England, Watts’s hymns were first printed not in hymnbooks but as appendices to sermon pamphlets and guides to prayer. This practice, initiated by Mather, was deliberate, a strategy in- tended to reinforce clerical authority,6 and it continued through Jonathan Edwards, ending only with the introduction of formal hymnbooks in the aftermath of the First Great Awakening. It was entirely appropriate that Mather would foster Watts’s entry into American print. As correspondents, the New En- gland Congregationalist and the English Nonconformist mini- sters exchanged news, print and manuscript writings, and plans for mission initiatives in the ever expanding colonies. 3Benson, The English Hymn, p. viii. 4Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study, p. 23. 5Benson, The English Hymn, p. 566. 6The reprintings were, in this light, a forerunner of the Massachusetts clergy’s efforts to consolidate control over corporate worship during the “regular singing controversy,” which is discussed in the next section. On the political implications of the controversy, see Laura L. Becker, “Ministers vs. Laymen: The Singing Controversy in Puritan New England, 1720–1740,” New England Quarterly 55.1 (March 1982): 79–96. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 206 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY In addition to being perhaps the most widely circulated poet in British America during the eighteenth century,7 Watts was also the second most printed author in America—second only to Cotton Mather.8 Watts donated one of the first gifts received by the library of Yale College (characteristically, a set of his own works) and arranged for the first publication of Jonathan Ed- wards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God, the account that helped to internationalize the Great Awakening; even when he issued a corrected version in Boston, Edwards retained the title that Watts had likely coined.9 As a minister, theologian, and liturgical reformer, Watts saw America as a new space for building the Dissenting church, and one of the most influential contributions he made to that effort was his “System 7Isabel Rivers (“The First English Tract Society,” Historical Journal 50.1 [2007]: 1–22) offers a fascinating look at the publishing of Watts’s works by the Society for Pro- moting Religious Knowledge among the Poor. The London-based society distributed Bibles and devotional works at a steeply discounted rate or, occasionally, at no charge. Though mainly focused on prose works in its early years, in the 1750s the society be- gan supplying copies of Watts’s Hymns and Psalms to Presbyterian missionary Samuel Davies, which he distributed among the Virginia slaves he was evangelizing. By 1795, the society had distributed over 34,500 copies of the Psalms and over 33,200 copies of the Hymns. Only John Reynolds’s Compassionate Address (which was also reprinted with a Watts appendix in Boston in 1730) saw more copies pass through the soci- ety’s hands (36,384), but at 37,635 copies, Watts’s children’s collection, Divine Songs, topped Reynolds’s text (see Rivers, p. 21). While most of these copies would have been distributed in Britain, the society’s initial impetus for disseminating Watts’s texts came from America, and many thousands of copies would likely have been imported over the course of the eighteenth century—likely enough to easily surpass the copies of Pope, Thomson, and other popular poets that would have been available in the colonies and early United States.