Golden Age of Hymns Issue 31 | 1991 Purchase this issue

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What gave rise to the English hymn in the eighteenth century? What determined its form and the way it worked? Many earlier texts were transformed into congregational hymns (for example, texts from the breviary, from the German tradition, and from Herbert and Milton). Yet the hymns of Watts must be our starting point. The roots of his hymns are the roots of hymnody in English. At least four major roots can be identified.

Hymns, such as this famous one, were born in a “great age of personal piety.”

Throughout the eighteenth century, metrical psalms continued to influence the English hymn. It’s a safe bet that the majority of the singers who sang Watts’s texts knew the bulk of the psalter by heart. We know that Wesley and his singers sang psalms in Church of England worship. The psalms were at least as familiar to eighteenth-century hymn singers as our own Christmas carols are to us.

Images and even lines from the psalms recur in the hymns. When singing “Joy to the World” (Watts’s paraphrase of Psalm 98), the Sternhold-and-Hopkins “Old Version” of the psalm must have been very much in mind especially when psalter tunes were used. If modern congregations are alert to any changes in wording, we can only imagine the critical response to an entirely new hymnody.

While we pretend to discriminate, it’s often hard to distinguish hymns from psalms: in fact, the terms are often used interchangeably. Metrical psalms were updated and hymns were heavily biblical.

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Indeed, the psalms are wonderful expressions of a wide range of devotional attitudes, hardly limited by their pre-Christian composition. They are profoundly “psychological.” Like hymns, they are public and private at once, shaping a wide range of devotional attitudes, from ...