Cotton Mather Brings Isaac Watts’s to America; or, How to Perform a without Singing It

christopher n. phillips

N December 1711, 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 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 at that time included copies of John Mason’s Spiritual Songs (first published in 1685)aswell as the first of Watts’s Hymns (1707) and his 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 , the changing nature of congregational

My thanks go to Reiner Smolinski, Susan Imbarrato, and the editor and readers at The 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.

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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 since the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, since authorities no less than Pliny and St. Paul stated that the first Christians sang “, 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 of the English Hymn (: 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 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 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 , 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 , 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 . 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 , 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 of Watts’s works by the Society for Pro- moting Religious Knowledge among the Poor. The London-based society distributed 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. 8According to David D. Hall and Russell L. Martin (“Appendix Two: A Note on Popular and Durable Authors and Titles,” The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, ed. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, vol. 1 of A History of the Book in America [New York: Cambridge University Press / American Antiquarian Society, 2000], pp. 519–21), Mather is the author of 335 imprints of the 3,519 in the North American Imprints Program (NAIP), which covers the years 1640 to 1790, while Watts accounts for 98 entries, the same as for George Whitefield. However, Hall and Martin do not include Watts’s version of the psalms in that count, and they acknowledge that if it were possible to take the size of editions into account, “the relative weighting of authors and titles would change considerably: For example, the press run of a single edition of Isaac Watts’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs equaled the press run of four or five Cotton Mather sermons.” 9There is some question whether Watts or his London colleague John Guyse devised the title for the letter in its printed form; for the history of Watts’s involvement with the of the letter, see George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Press, 2003), pp. 170–73.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 207 of Praise,” his book of hymns and his paraphrases of the psalms that from the 1740s onward were often found bound together in Calvinist churches on both sides of the Atlantic. However, that “System of Praise” as a phenomenon of congregational worship did not begin in America until the 1740s, as Edwards joined revivalists such as George Whitefield and Samuel Buell in introducing the laity to Watts’s works on a scale hitherto unknown.

Rhythms of and Singing in Mather’s New England Mather’s most famous engagement with the liturgical issues of his day was his leadership during the “regular singing con- troversy” of the . Within a few years of the English Ref- ormation, clergymen were introducing their congregations to vernacular singing; the texts were translated Psalms. Given parishioners’ low rates of literacy and book ownership, how- ever, a method known as “lining out” was widely adopted in which a clerk or precentor read out or sang the psalm and the congregation then sang it back to him. In this way, ev- eryone could participate in the language and singing of the psalms regardless of his or her level of literacy, and in the early seventeenth century, Plymouth Separatists, , and other Calvinist groups carried the practice across the Atlantic. In time, the unevenness among congregants’ capabilities in reading and singing, along with the time it took to go through each psalm twice in a service, prompted a group of New En- gland clergymen to launch a print-based campaign advocating “regular singing,” or “singing by note,” to enhance the aes- thetic experience of the congregation and hence the level of devotional intensity inspired by the beauty of the psalms. This new form of singing, which would be led by choirs and (in some cases) organs, placed musical literacy more firmly at the center of liturgical practice.10 Clergy were nearly the sole advocates for

10Watts had begun advocating this approach in print in the preface to his 1719 The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and the English

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 208 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY regular singing, while resistance came mainly from laypeople, who found the new approach not only too innovative but also dismissive of their own personal engagement with the words and music of sung worship. Regular singing initially took root only in eastern Massachusetts, though some outlying congrega- tions, such as the one and then Edwards led in Northampton, were already distinguished for their vocal ap- titude. Throughout the controversy, however, everyone agreed on the texts to be sung: psalms, and only psalms. Although largely regarded as a Puritan feature of worship, psalm singing was promoted by Calvin, who, diverging from Luther, rejected secular tunes and new texts and insisted that the scriptures were the only proper source for congregational praise. Mather’s maternal grandfather and namesake, John Cot- ton, was among those influential ministers who promulgated this view in the New World.11 Following their progenitor’s teachings, New England Calvinists generally sang through the entire psalter “in course,” following the sequence from 1 to 150 without regard either to the calendar or the minister’s sermon text. Because the psalms were disconnected from the minister’s message and were generally sung before and often after the ser- mon,12 it is not difficult to see how they would have become a distraction for a minister such as Cotton Mather, sensitive as he was to the power of language. Mather turned to his sermon pamphlets, mainstays of his prodigious , as the site for experimenting with new combinations of sermon and song texts.

Presbyterian Thomas Reynolds was advocating regular singing as early as 1708.See Elizabeth Clarke, “Hymns, Psalms, and Controversy in the Sixteenth Century,” in Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales, ed. Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 13–32, 28. 11Clarke, “Hymns, Psalms, and Controversy,” pp. 15–16. Cotton once conceded, though, that a sufficiently gifted person could make a new composition and “sing it before the Church, and the rest hearing it, approving it, may goe along with him in Spirit, and say Amen to it” (quoted in Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for IEAHC, 1982], p. 114n). 12Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, pp. 103–4, 111.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 209 As Charles Hambrick-Stowe has pointed out, the pamphlets were reconstructed from oral performances, and since most preaching was done from notes or memory, sermons became fully written documents only through the process of print pub- lication.13 Sermon pamphlets were, then, removed from the public liturgical space in which they had originated, and Mather may have seen them as somewhat more flexible instruments for conveying his message to the public once those texts were re- moved from the patterned structures of the worship service. As early as 1696, he began including hymn texts as supplementary materials in his sermon pamphlets;14 and between 1696 and 1701, he silently inserted hymns of his own composition into three different sermon pamphlets.15 Because each pamphlet included at least one sermon that had been preached outside a typical Sunday or Thursday service, Mather may have felt espe- cially free to alter, even if slightly, the published sermonic form. Despite the recognized preeminence of the biblical psalms in public worship, in an earlier sermon Mather had allowed that “there are savoury Hymns, of an Humane Composure, which no doubt we may praise God by singing of.”16 The hymns em- bedded in the sermon pamphlets give no explicit indication as to whether or not they were meant to be sung, but they clearly amount to miniature, rhymed versions of the sermons, aids to memory as well as emotionally concentrated summaries of Mather’s discourses. It may not be far from the mark to imag- ine that, in including the hymns, Mather had in mind George

13Hambrick-Stowe, Practice of Piety, pp. 117–18. 14Earlier, in his 1693 Warnings from the Dead, Mather placed an unattributed hymn (possibly his) between the pamphlet’s two sermons. Preaching against giving into lust, Mather offers several practical suggestions for overcoming the temptation, the last resort being to “set your selves to Sing unto the Lord a proper Hymn, that may be a special Antidote against the Infestations of the Fiery Flying Serpents”(p.64). To illustrate the point, Mather offers an example of a hymn (“Oh! Glorious God, who dost Improve”), commenting that “such a Shield as this, has been sometimes held up against such Fiery Darts.” His use of hymns as personal weapons of spiritual warfare is a striking instance of the extraliturgical importance hymns held for the Boston divine. 15Cotton Mather, Christian Thank-Offering (Boston, 1696); Everlasting Gospel (Boston, 1700); and Companion to the Afflicted (Boston, 1701). 16Cotton Mather, The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated (Boston, 1690), p. 16.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 210 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Herbert’s famous line “A verse may find him who a sermon flies.”17

Pearls of Watts The paraliturgical character of the sermon pamphlet is im- portant to keep in mind when examining Mather’s first reprint- ings of Watts. Although in his journal Mather had recorded that he led singing in his own household and encouraged booksellers to stock his correspondent’s hymnbooks, the ser- mon pamphlet—often privately rather than commercially dis- tributed18—became his vehicle of choice for disseminating Watts’s works. Over a four-year period beginning in 1712, twelve of Mather’s printed sermon pamphlets included selec- tions from Watts.19 Though almost all were from the Hymns, the selection “My crimes awake; and hideous fear,” which ap- pears in the appendix to Repeated Warnings (1712), is taken from Watts’s Horae Lyricae, a collection of religious verse not meant to be sung, the second edition of which, like Hymns, appeared in 1709. Evidently Mather classified Watts’s entire

17George Herbert, The Complete English Works, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 9. According to Ramie Targoff (Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], p. 118), Herbert’s The Temple was in the library at , Mather’s alma mater, as early as 1636, and a line on the first page of Mather’s A Monitory Letter to Them Who Needlessly and Frequently Absent Themselves From the Publick Worship of God (Boston, 1702)—which was also reprinted posthumously in 1738 with a Watts-text appendix—suggests Mather’s familiarity with the Herbert line “A letter to find those who fly a sermon” (p. 2). 18On Mather’s distribution practices, see Hugh Amory, “Reinventing the Colonial Book,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, p. 33. 19Cotton Mather, Grace Defended (Boston, 1712); Repeated Warnings (Boston, 1712); Seasonable Thoughts upon Mortality (Boston, 1712); A Soul Well-Anchored (Boston, 1712); The Wayes and Joyes of Early Piety (Boston, 1712); The Young Man Spoken to (Boston, 1712); What Should Be Most of All Tho’t upon (Boston, 1713); Adversus Libertinos (Boston, 1713); Advice from the Watch Tower (Boston, 1713); Tabitha Rediviva (Boston, 1713); The Religion of the Cross (Boston, 1714); and Verba Opportuna (Boston, 1715). Music (“Watts in America,” p. 30) previously identified six of these texts as well as the inclusion of an excerpt from Watts’s Horae Lyricae in Man Eating the Food of Angels (Boston, 1710). The Digital Evans database lists sixty-two unique titles by Cotton Mather for the years 1712–15, so the twelve titles that include Watts texts make up over 19 percent of Mather’s output during these years—nearly one in every five texts.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 211 poetic oeuvre as devotional, equally suitable for reading in hym- nic or lyric form. Mather freely disseminated his colleague’s works, but he placed them in service to his own texts. As when reprinting his own hymns in earlier pamphlets, Mather selected texts from Watts that reinforced the main points of his own sermons. As a rule, hymns appeared after the sermon, at the end of the pam- phlet, and prefatory statements tended to present the paratexts as afterthoughts, necessitated not by Mather’s careful planning but by the exigency of filling a sheet of paper with print: Let an Hymn of my Incomparable WATT’s, fill this Vacant Page. To Replenish the two Vacant Pages, Two Hymns of the Ex- cellent Isaac Watts, will be no disagreeable Entertainment. This Vacant Page will be well-filled, with an Hymn of my excellent Friend Mr. WATTS[.] A Vacant Page, richly Supplied, with Notes from the Quill of our most Christian POET, Mr. Watts.20

Yet Mather also understood the hymns as meeting a social need more elevated than the stewardship of printed paper. In 1713, Mather noted in his diary that “the Minds and Man- ners of many People about the Countrey are much corrupted, by foolish Songs and Ballads, which the Hawkers and Pedlars carry into all parts of the Countrey.” To address the ill effects of popular music, spread far and wide by means of printed broad- sheets, Mather suggested, “by way of Antidote,” that he “would procure poetical Composures full of Piety, and such as may have a Tendency to advance Truth and Goodness, to be pub- lished, and scattered into all Corners of the Land. There may be an Extract of some, from the excellent Watts’s Hymns.”21 While there is no evidence that Mather ever attempted to stage a hymnic broadside campaign, his aspiration to infuse spiritual song into colonial American culture suggests why he may have

20Mather, The Young Man Spoken to, p. [44]; Verba Opportuna, p. [47]; Grace Defended, p. [36]; and Adversus Libertinos, p. [50]. 21Mather, Diary, 2:242.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 212 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY chosen his own ready readership as a reliable test market for introducing hymnic texts that were materially detachable from the sermons they complemented. It may be asked why Mather did not use his influence to encourage a New England press to reprint Watts’s work in its entirety. While most , especially those of ten sheets or more, were imported rather than printed in New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Boston editions of Pilgrim’s Progress had appeared as early as 1681, just three years after the London original, and Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted first came off a Boston press (in English) in 1711.22 By contrast, Watts’s Hymns first appeared in London in 1707, followed by the more influential 1709 revised edi- tion, and yet the earliest confirmed date of a New England reprint is a 1742 Boston edition.23 There was possibly an ear- lier edition—Roger Bristol tentatively dated an imperfect copy at the Massachusetts Historical Society to 172024—but even if Bristol is correct, Mather would not likely have been in- volved. The divine showed a pattern throughout this period of arranging for short works by English authors to be printed in Boston with an expectation that the favor would be returned in

22Richard Baxter’s Call, which quickly became one of the most popular of all Dissenting devotional texts following its initial publication in London in 1658,was translated by John Eliot into Massachusett and published in Boston in 1664,witha reprint appearing in 1688. 23David D. Hall (“Readers and Writers in Early New England,” in The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, pp. 125–26) erroneously cites a printing bill from John Draper to Daniel Henchman (who published a number of Watts’s titles as well as some of Mather’s Watts-infused sermons) as indicating a Boston edition of 3,000 copies of Watts’s Hymns in 1727. The earliest confirmed Boston printing of the Hymns, in 1742, is referred to in another of Henchman’s bills; see Rollo G. Silver, “Publishing in Boston, 1726–1757: The Accounts of Daniel Henchman,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 66 (1956): 35. Silver also (p. 31) includes Henchman’s bill for the first full reprint of a Watts work in America, Divine and Moral Songs, in 1730.Asthe 1742 Hymns edition ran to 2,000 copies and the Divine and Moral Songs ran to 1,500, Henchman’s records confirm the popularity of Watts’s hymns and the risks publishers were willing to take in bankrolling unusually large print runs. 24Roger P. Bristol, Supplement to Charles Evans’ American Bibliography (Char- lottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Bibliographical Society of America, 1970), p. 36. Music (“Watts in America,” pp. 32–33) has provided the most thorough discussion of the issues involved in determining the date and American origin of the copy.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 213 London, and there is no evidence that Mather ever asked Watts to be his overseas agent.25 It would seem that Mather’s ambi- tion for Watts’s Hymns extended only to pressing New England booksellers to carry the volume and reprinting excerpts from it. Even as Mather viewed Watts’s hymns as texts to be dis- seminated in print, he was also alive to their musical import. The complex interplay between music and reading that he en- visioned is evident at the outset of the appendix to his 1712 sermon The Wayes and Joyes of Early Piety. He begins by glossing Canticles 2:12, which speaks of the singing of birds, as prophetic of the end times. The consummation of Christ and his church, Mather and his fellow Puritans understood, would proceed much as the love song of Canticles (or the Song of Solomon) unfolds, with the singing of birds in springtime a key metaphorical index of the approaching Parousia. Mather goes on to say that he believes that the end is quickly approaching: “In the Hymns which the Devout and Soaring Pens of men filled with the Dove-like Spirit areoflatemorethaneverfur- nishing the Church of God withal, Methinks, I see the Time of the Singing of Birds coming on.” Hymns, in other words, are evidence of the approach of the Second Coming. However, hymns are useless if not disseminated, if not heard. And so, asserting that “my dear WATTS Excellest ...all”thehym- nists, Mather wishes “my Country fill’d with his Incomparable Hymns; In them, the Voice of the Turtle-Dove would be heard in our Land.” He then inserts two hymns toward that pur- pose. A similar gesture appears in the appendix to Seasonable Thoughts upon Mortality, also published in 1712. “I will Enrich the remaining Pages, with some Strings of Pearls, fetch’d from

25Mather arranged for the publication of John Quick’s Young Man’s Claim unto the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in Boston in 1700, quickly following up by soliciting Quick to find a London publisher for Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702). During his Watts-reprinting years, Mather did a similar service with Thomas Reynolds’s Practical Religion Exemplify’d (Boston, 1713), in turn asking Reynolds the next year to help him find a publisher for his Biblia Americana. A diary entry from 1713 indicates Mather’s continuing interest in reprinting his own works in London, but there is no mention of Watts or other prospective agents. See Reiner Smolinski, “Editor’s Introduction,” Biblia Americana: America’s First Commentary, vol. 1 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck / Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2010), pp. 40–41, 21–22; Mather, Diary, 2:260.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 214 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the Incomparable HYMNS of that Sweet-Singer, Mr. Isaac Wats [sic],” Mather announces, “HYMNS which if more gen- erally taken into our Houses, would Contribute more than a littletoturnanHowling Wilderness, into a Pleasant Land.”26 With Watts’s inspirational lyrics and in the privacy of their own homes, New England’s faithful might sweeten their days and raise their voices in celebration of the impending millennium.

Watts in the Home—Song or Poetry? While I have thus far considered Watts’s hymns as texts to be sung and as accessible aides de memoir for more com- plex sermonic messages, they seem to have served yet a third function. Mather first included Watts’s hymns not in a sermon pamphlet but in Family-Religion Urged, a 1709 manual instruc- ting heads of household how to conduct family prayer, which appeared simultaneously in London and Boston. Following a series of arguments for the necessity of regular family prayer and pointers on how to go about praying in a group, Mather included without comment a series of “Hymns and Spiritual Songs.” From their context, they appear to have been intended as models for family worship leaders who felt uncomfortable praying extemporaneously. Family-Religion Urged was, in fact, an expansion of a similar manual Mather had first prepared in 1703 and that was reprinted in 1707.27 The only significant difference between Family-Religion Urged and its antecedent is the inclusion of hymns, three taken from John Mason’s Spir- itual Songs (the most popular English hymn collection before Watts’s) and six from the 1707 edition of Watts’s Hymns.In this work, hymns are merely guides to prayer, though excel- lent enough to follow the list of scripture passages Mather had just enumerated. These hymns may have been sung—and certainly would have been by the musically inclined, like the

26Mather, Seasonable Thoughts, p. 57. 27Family-Religion Urged would appear in at least one more edition, printed in 1747, but listed as the “third edition” on the title page; the shorter Family-Religion Excited and Assisted went through three more , including a side-by-side Massachusett/ English edition.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 215 Mathers—but in Family-Religion Urged, the printed texts are to be rendered into speech and thereby into shared devotion, prayer, and spiritual renewal. For Mather, Watts’s hymns were powerful because they were available to all: they did not have to be appreciated as or rendered into song to “promote Piety” among Mather’s readers. Mather’s use of hymns as formal, spoken prayers was not new. Baxter had silently placed one of his own hymns along- side several “psalms” in Poor Mans Family Book, a catechesis and prayer guide designed to condense all of practical divinity into a single volume for impoverished families. In that volume’s preface “To the Rich,” Baxter pleaded with landowners to pur- chase and distribute copies of his text to their tenants, just as the Massachusett translation of Mather’s Family-Religion Urged was freely given to Indians.28 In Family-Religion Urged, one of Mather’s first suggestions to householders was to pray upon points recalled from the week’s sermon during the course of family devotions. With the sermon-pamphlet, this guide to prayer could be personalized even further. Although the title page of or introduction to the sermon pamphlets generally indicated where and when the originating address had been delivered, the transition to print allowed Mather to reconceive the use of a sermon: it was no longer merely a performance tied to a traditional liturgy and a specific audience and specific occasion but a text matched to related texts to create a synergy between poetry and prose that could be experienced individually, in solitude. Hymns, then, allowed Mather to think anew about the place of reading in private worship and to bring religion into all aspects of each person’s life—public worship, domestic devotions, and private reading and reflection. Bringing hymns into the family setting opened the way for attracting a new class of hymn readers, one that would have a profound influence on the hymnbook market throughout the century: children. In 1715, the same year Watts’s Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children appeared

28Richard Baxter, The Poor Man’s Family Book (London, 1674), sig. A3r-v.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 216 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in London, Boston bookseller Samuel Gerrish produced a col- lection titled Honey Out of the Rock, Flowing to Little Children That They May Know to Refuse the Evil and Chuse the Good.A mere twenty-four pages, this little pamphlet consisted of, as the title page put it, “Certain Select HYMNS, For the Use of such, taken from those of the Excellent Mr. Isaac Watts, as more peculiarly adapted for their Instruction.” More precisely, the publication included twenty-two selections from Watts’s 1709 Hymns as well as Cotton Mather’s “The Body of Divinity Ver- sify’d,” which had earlier appeared at the end of his The A, B, C. of Religion in 1713. The pamphlet treated the hymns as ped- agogical texts, tools for teaching morality to young people, per- haps offered as a more attractive alternative to the catechisms flooding the New England book market. Gerrish’s collection, issued without Watts’s knowledge or input, had no overlap with the Divine Songs but included three hymns that had already ap- peared in Mather’s sermon pamphlets, two of which had been published by Gerrish, who would later be Mather’s primary publisher during the regular singing controversy.29 Although it is not known who collected the hymns for Honey Out of the Rock, it is likely that either Gerrish or Mather did so. In any case, Gerrish clearly thought that he would profit from printing the collection, and the fact that his rival, Daniel Henchman, brought out a reprint of Divine Songs in 1730 (twelve years before the first verified reprint of the Hymns) suggests that de- mand for collections of children’s hymns was early and steady in New England. Yet in yoking hymns to children’s religious and linguistic literacy, the collections treated them above all as texts, not as liturgical performances. Whatever Mather’s involvement in producing Honey Out of the Rock may have been, his relationship with Gerrish undoubt- edly fostered this new direction in the dissemination of hymns he had called for in his journal entries. In a letter dated 27 September 1715—the same year as the publication of Honey

29On Gerrish’s involvement in the regular singing controversy, see J. Terry Gates, “Samuel Gerrish, Publisher to the ‘Regular Singing’ Movement in 1720s New England,” Notes, 2nd ser., 45 (1988): 15–22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 217 Out of the Rock and of Mather’s last sermon pamphlet to in- clude a Watts text—the Boston divine wrote to the hymnist that his “excellent composures have been much dispersed and valued, and some of them reprinted, in this country, by means of the friend who now tells you so.”30 Mather (and Gerrish) had made excellent use of Watts’s gift of the 1709 Hymns, and Mather wanted to make sure that his correspondent knew it.

From Reading to Singing: Mather’s Legacy in the Northampton Church Mather’s use of Watts proved influential, at least among the clergy. By 1740, no fewer than nine other Massachusetts pastors—some of them luminaries of their day, such as John Prentice and Joseph Sewall—had published sermons that in- cluded Watts texts.31 The title page of William Cooper’s Con- cio Hyemalis announced that the printed sermon participated in the tradition of Family-Religion Urged, as it was “Pub- lish’d (from the notes of the sermon) for the use of fami- lies”; in that regard, it proclaimed the devotional and domestic reach of the sermon and its paratexts. Likewise, when Jonathan Edwards’s congregation began to show signs of unusual revival,

30Cotton Mather, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. Kenneth Silverman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), p. 188. 31Israel Loring, The Nature and Necessity of the New-Birth (Boston, 1728;repr. 1740); Joshua Gee, The Strait Gate and the Narrow Way (Boston, 1729); Samuel Phillips, Advice to a Child (Boston, 1729); Joseph Sewall, The Orphan’s Best Legacy (Boston, 1730); John Prentice, King Jehoshophat’s Charge to the Judges (Boston, 1731); Jonathan Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light (Boston, 1734); Deuel Pead, The Door of Salvation Opened (Boston, 1734); William Cooper, Concio Hyemalis (Boston, 1737); Thomas Vincent, True Christian’s Love (Boston, 1739); Samuel Phillips, Chil- dren Well Imployed (Boston, 1739). The last text shared elements with Family-Religion Urged, including prayers and an essay titled “Advice to heads of families” (p. 85). I have traced the practice of including Watts texts in sermon pamphlets up through 1759, and though the practice was rare outside New England, Ebenezer Prime’s ASer- mon Preached in Oysterbay (New York, 1744) is the earliest I have seen from another colony. The practice was also employed by printers and editors in posthumous reprints, including Reynolds’s Compassionate Address, Daniel Campbell’s Sacramental Medita- tions (Boston, 1740), and a 1738 reprint of Mather’s Monitory Letter. , Cotton Mather’s nephew, emulated the earlier practice of including self-authored hymns in his sermon pamphlets three times: A Discourse on the Present Vileness of the Body (Boston, 1732); God Glorious in the Scenes of Winter (Boston, 1745); and The Flourish of the Annual Spring (Boston, 1769).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 218 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY he published his 1734 sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light as a reminder to his people of the blessings they had received since he had preached it. On the pamphlet’s final page, Ed- wards included a hymn by “the Excellent Dr. Watts”thatdealt with the same biblical text the sermon had interpreted. Follow- ing Mather’s lead, Edwards encouraged his congregants to use hymns to meditate upon the religious message embodied in the printed sermon, a devotional practice undoubtedly familiar to them. Edwards’s approach to church singing and its proper texts was apparently rather orthodox, at least through 1736.That year, he preached a little-known sermon that seems to have opened the door, if only a crack, to the liturgical revolutions of the later eighteenth century. The sermon, which survives solely in draft form and has been transcribed by David Music,32 was composed for a “singing lecture.” Such sermons were given during the festival conclusion of a singing school, which would have featured students demonstrating the new skills they had mastered in their multiweek training sessions.33 As Mu- sic points out, the June 1736 lecture was “almost certainly” not the first one given in Northampton, for evidence suggests that the congregation had previously sponsored several singing schools, possibly even before Edwards’s tenure as pastor. In A Faithful Narrative, Edwards heralded his congregation’s superb singing, which suggests a ready familiarity with part-singing.34 During worship services, the congregation seems to have been restricted to psalms when joining their voices in praise to God,

32Music, “Edwards’s Singing Lecture Sermon.” 33Singing schools began in New England around 1720, as the “regular singing controversy” was starting. These schools, usually taught by itinerant singing masters using relatively inexpensive tunebooks, became a key social event in New England life, particularly for young people, and they acclimated many churches in the region to more sophisticated styles of congregational singing, which led to the demise of lining- out. For a brief, modern overview of the musical and social importance of singing schools, see Nicholas E. Tawa, From Psalm to Symphony: A History of Music in New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), pp. 26–29; for a more detailed treatment of the history of singing schools, see Edward B. Birge, History of Public School Music in the United States, rev. ed. (Washington: Music Educators National Conference, 1966), esp. pp. 8–35. 34Music, “Jonathan Edwards and Congregational Song,” pp. 118, 131.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 219 for Edwards’s gloss in the singing lecture of the phrase “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” from Colossians 3:16 indicates that he found psalms and other scriptural texts the only appropriate vehicles for corporate singing in that venue.35 Thus, the Watts hymn that appeared at the end of A Divine and Supernatural Light would have been intended for devotional purposes only, either in reading or in private singing. Despite his orthodox view of the proper place of song in the worship service, Edwards saw a surprisingly deep inter- connection between reading and singing. He considered public singing to be a sacred duty instituted by Christ and conveyed as a commandment through Paul and other scriptural witnesses, an outward expression of the “internal melody” that both in- creases devotion and gives literal voice to a reverent spirit’s love for God.36 To align internal and external piety, soul and body, more perfectly, Edwards recommended that parents instruct their children, or seek instruction for them, not only in textual but also in musical literacy. He explained, “They [parents] offer their children to baptism as members of the visible church and therefore certainly they ought to take care that they be brought up as members of the visible church, viz., so as to be capable of performing that worship that is required of us in the visible church. ’Tis as real a duty for Christian parents to take care that their children be taught to sing as that they be taught to read.”37 Reading, that famously fundamental skill in Protestant life, had been mandated by law in most New England colonies in the seventeenth century;38 by elevating the Christian duty of singing to a level with reading, Edwards pointed toward not only shared importance but also synergy: what better way to “teach and admonish one another,” as St. Paul had urged, but by singing the text of scripture together? Such a pairing pre- sented new opportunities for hymns. If hymns had already been

35Music, “Jonathan Edwards and Congregational Song,” pp. 112–13. 36Music, “Edwards’s Singing Lecture Sermon,” pp. 137, 141–42. 37Music, “Edwards’s Singing Lecture Sermon,” p. 144. 38Hall, “Readers and Writers,” pp. 119–20.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 220 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY recognized as proper devotional texts that could be read and sung in private, then why not carry the talents and reverence thereby cultivated into a public space, the worship service, where, as St. Paul had advised, each individual could serve as an example to his neighbor? Edwards’s embrace of the “regu- lar singing” that Mather and others had advocated in the 1720s thus prepared the way for the hymn-as-text to find a new role, the hymn-as-liturgy. Over the next decade, the private reading and singing of Watts’s hymns were increasingly supplemented by the singing of hymns in revival meetings led by itinerants such as George Whitefield. The effect achieved in these highly theatrical, emo- tionally charged spaces was remarkable, galvanizing supporters and opponents alike. In Northampton, supporters dominated the debate. Writing to Boston minister Benjamin Colman, Ed- wards noted that while he had been away for a time in 1742,his congregation had decided (without his input) to sing Watts in their services and “neglected the Psalms wholly.”39 The young revivalist Samuel Buell, who not only impressed the Northamp- ton congregation with the verve of his hymn singing but trans- ported Edwards’s wife, Sarah, when he read the hymns to her at her home, had instigated the practice.40 Edwards drily com- mented, “When I came home I disliked not [the congregation’s] making some use of the Hymns: but did not like their setting aside the Psalms.”41 The pastor negotiated a settlement with his flock. Hymns could be sung at Sunday afternoon services during the summer, while the psalms were reserved as the ap- propriate texts for Sunday morning and other congregational exercises. Still, tensions remained. In fact, Edwards did not write to Colman until 1744, two years after he had discovered Buell’s liturgical transgressions, when a few of his anti-hymn congre- gants informed Edwards that Colman had objected to the use

39Jonathan Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. George S. Claghorn, vol. 16 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 144. 40Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 244–45. 41Edwards, Letters, p. 144.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00183 by guest on 25 September 2021 MATHER AND WATTS 221 of hymns in church.42 By 1744, the Massachusetts clergy were grievously concerned about church splits, regional disputes over ordination, and doubts about the spiritual authenticity of the increasingly chaotic revivals that had swept the region. To pit Colman against Edwards on the matter of hymns was to exploit a growing divide between the Northampton minister and many of his Boston colleagues over the role of emotion in religious experience. Hymn singing presented a dramatic example of tra- ditional practice being trumped by emotional authenticity and vivacity. Edwards’s earlier use of hymns to intensify a sense of unity and pastoral authority in A Divine and Supernatural Light had transmogrified into an invitation to controversy, even rebel- lion, within his own congregation. Edwards would be dismissed by his congregants in 1750 over a separate matter, but the rad- ical leveling that many historians have described as an element of the Great Awakening—in contrast to earlier revivals—was partly set in motion by bringing into public spaces the Watts texts that Massachusetts clergy had for decades recommended for private use. The emotional impact of poetry experienced in the privacy of one’s own home, paired with the most cere- bral and public of Protestant rituals, the sermon, had in fact already shattered a barrier that would eventually open the way for evangelical hymns such as Watts’s to be adopted almost universally in worship. Mather’s sermon pamphlets remind us, however, that these texts were originally experienced as text in Protestant America and that understanding the place of hymns in early New England must take us beyond both the hymnbook and the church as we seek to recover lost modes of reading.

42Edwards, Letters, pp. 144–45.

Christopher N. Phillips is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. His work in American historical poetics has ranged from epics to hymns, and his book Epic in American Culture, Settlement to Reconstruction (2012) has just been published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

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