Education

From 1680 to 1690 Watts was educated at the free grammar school in Southampton by a Church of England cleric, John Pinhorne, rector of All Saints', Southampton, and holder of other benefices. In addition to Latin Pinhorne taught the boy Greek, French, and Hebrew ('Memorable affairs in my life', appended to Hood); Watts expressed his gratitude in a Latin Pindaric ode written in 1694 and included in Horae lyricae (English translation in Gibbons, 11–18). Because of his evident precocity a local doctor, John Speed, offered to send him to university; acceptance would have obliged him to conform to the Church of England, but Watts chose to remain a dissenter. From 1690 to 1694 he was a student at the dissenting academy run by Thomas Rowe in succession to Theophilus Gale. Gale's academy was based at Stoke Newington, then a village north-east of London with an established and prosperous dissenting community. Rowe moved the academy to Little Britain in the City of London a few years before Watts's arrival; it is unlikely that Watts's education was at Newington, though this is often stated. The influence of Rowe on Watts's intellectual and religious development was considerable. Watts later wrote an ode to 'the Director of my youthful Studies' subtitled 'Free philosophy': Rowe is thanked for his 'gentle influence' which

bids our thoughts like rivers flow,And choose the channels where they run.

Horae, Works, 7.259Under his direction Watts read widely in a range of subjects including classical and modern philosophy as well as divinity, wrote Latin and English theses (some are in Gibbons, 21–58), and made abridgements of standard works such as Burgersdicius's Institutiones logicae (Watts's brother Enoch gave Gibbons his manuscript volumes). He told Philip Doddridge approvingly in 1725 that 'plain easy books of Divinity [were] recommended to the pupills to be read in their own Closets on Saturdays, from the very beginning of their Studies' (DWL, MS 24.180). He also acquired the habit of interleaving books and adding comments. His interleaved and annotated copy of John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes (7th edn, 1693, in DWL) provides a very useful guide to Rowe's teaching and Watts's reading in the 1690s and early 1700s. His annotations to Martin Clifford's Treatise of Humane Reason were printed by Palmer (Life … by … Johnson, appx 1). Student friends at the academy included the poet John Hughes, Samuel Say, who became a dissenting minister and successor to Edmund Calamy, and Josiah Hort, who conformed to the Church of England and became archbishop of Tuam. In December 1693, towards the end of his time with Rowe, Watts was admitted a member of the Independent church at Girdlers' Hall of which his tutor was minister (Gibbons later held the post for many years after the church had moved to Haberdashers' Hall).

Ministerial career

In June 1694, according to his 'Memorable affairs', Watts returned to his father's house in Southampton for two and a quarter years; here he continued reading intensively and writing regularly, both in verse and prose. This seclusion was unusual—young dissenters trained for the ministry frequently began work straight after leaving their academies. On 9 March 1696 the minutes of the Congregational Fund Board recorded that an endeavour should be made 'that Mr. Watts do go out to the Ministry' (Congregational Historical Society Transactions, 5, 1911–12, 139). On 15 October 1696 he went to live in Newington as tutor to Sir John Hartopp's son, also named John, to whom he later dedicated his Logick (1725). He remained for six years with the Hartopps, who had inherited the house of Elisabeth Hartopp's father, the Cromwellian general Charles Fleetwood. In 'Memorable affairs' Watts noted that he began to preach on 17 July 1698 (his twenty-fourth birthday), after eight years of university studies (presumably including the period in Southampton and at the Hartopps). By February 1699 he was appointed assistant to Isaac Chauncy, minister of the Independent church which met at Mark Lane, London; his association with this church, despite his own initial reluctance, was to last for the rest of his life. The church had a famous history and membership. It was begun by Joseph Caryl following the Act of Uniformity of 1662; after Caryl's death in 1673 the congregation united with that of the Independent leader John Owen. Owen was succeeded in turn by David Clarkson, Isaac Loeffs, and in 1687 by Chauncy. Many of Oliver Cromwell's wealthy descendants and connections such as the Fleetwoods and the Hartopps were members of the congregation (a full list is provided in the church book; see Crippen, 27–30).

Chauncy proved a very unpopular minister; the church which had flourished under his predecessors was losing members, and on 15 April 1701 Chauncy resigned. The church was much exercised for several months by the problem of replacing him. Watts was considered, but his poor health was a serious obstacle. As he recorded in 'Memorable affairs', he became ill immediately after becoming Chauncy's assistant, and for long periods of time from 1699 to 1701 he was away recuperating at Southampton, Bath, and Tunbridge. On 23 November 1701 he resumed preaching; on 14 January 1702 the church members agreed to call him to the office of minister. On 8 February Watts wrote them an important letter, preserved in the church book, giving as requested an account of his principles of church discipline, in which he set out his view of the respective roles of pastor and people; on 15 February he gave them a letter of dismission from Rowe's church and recommendation to Mark Lane; on 8 March, the day of William III's death, he accepted the call, and on 18 March he was ordained. The ordination sermon was preached by his former tutor Rowe (Crippen, 31–6).

Despite his recurrent ill health, the previously declining Mark Lane Church flourished under Watts (numbers are recorded in the church book; see Crippen, 29–30). 'Though his Stature was low, and his bodily Presence but weak, yet his Preaching was Weighty and Powerful' (Jennings, 32). In 1704 the church moved its meeting place temporarily to Pinners' Hall, and then in 1708 to a new purpose-built meeting-house in Duke's Place, Bury Street, St Mary Axe. Details of the building plans, the funding, and the disposing of pews and places survive (Congregational Historical Society Transactions, 3, 1907–8, 117–25). The Bury Street Church under Watts's guidance was to become an important centre of the evangelical wing of dissent in the first half of the eighteenth century; the best guide to its theological and pastoral concerns is the collection of lectures known as the Bury Street sermons, Faith and Practice Represented in Fifty-Four Sermons … Preached at Berry-Street 1733, by Watts, Daniel Neal, John Guyse, Samuel Price, David Jennings, and John Hubbard, which was supported by the Independent philanthropist William Coward.

Watts was unable to manage the duties of pastor single-handed; Samuel Price (uncle of the philosopher Richard Price) became his assistant in 1703 and his co-pastor in 1713, when a complete breakdown, lasting from September 1712 to October 1716, prevented Watts from performing his public duties. He described the experience in a series of blank verse poems, 'Sickness and recovery' (Reliquiae juveniles, no. 47). In the course of his ministerial and authorial career he was very much indebted to the services of others to enable him to work. In December 1703 he noted in 'Memorable affairs', 'after having intermitted in a great measure a method of study and pursuit of Learning, 4 years, by reason of my great indispositions … (excep^t w: was of absolute necessity for my Constant preaching) … I took a boy to read to me and write for me, whereby my studies are much assisted'. This was his practice for the rest of his life; his last amanuensis, Joseph Parker, who used Watts's system of shorthand, remained with him for over twenty-one years.

A succession of generous friends took Watts into their houses. In late 1702 he moved from the Hartopps at Newington to Thomas Hollis senior, the philanthropist, in the Minories, City of London; at the end of 1710 he moved to a Mr Bowes; and then about 1712 the prominent dissenting whig Sir Thomas Abney invited him for what was initially a week's stay. Watts was to spend the rest of his life in considerable comfort with the Abneys, at Lime Street in the City and at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, and then, after Sir Thomas's death (1722), at Abney Park, Stoke Newington, where he moved c.1733 with Lady Abney and her two surviving daughters. They represented for him the ideal dissenting household. Watts thanked Lady Abney in the dedication to Divine Songs (1715): 'It is to her unwearied Tenderness, and many kind Offices by Night and Day, in the more violent Seasons of my Indisposition, that (under God) I own my Life, and Power to write or think.' Jennings urged that 'wheresoever Dr. WATTS's Works are read, or his Name remembered, that of Abney ought not to be forgotton' (Jennings, 26). Watts acted as tutor to the children—Divine Songs and The Art of Reading and Writing English (1721) were dedicated to them—and continued whenever possible his pastoral duties, but the greater part of his time was spent on his prolific and increasingly successful literary work.

Poet and hymn writer

In the first half of his literary career Watts published four verse collections: Horae lyricae (in two books, 1706; much enlarged and reorganized in three books, 1709); Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707, enlarged 1709); Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language, for the Use of Children (1715); and The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719). He also included some hymns in his Sermons on Various Subjects (1721) and some early poems in Reliquiae juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse (1734); a handful of poems appeared at the beginning of the posthumously published Remnants of Time (1753). As part of these collections he published some very important manifestos: the enlarged preface to Horae (1709); 'A short essay toward the improvement of psalmody', which followed the text of Hymns (1707), but which was not republished in his lifetime; and the prefaces to Hymns and Psalms (the last incorporating some material from the 'Essay').

Watts had begun writing poetry as a child; in 1691, at seventeen, he wrote a Latin poem to his brother Enoch (Horae, book 2) and Pindaric elegies for the deaths of his infant sisters (Divine Songs, appx 3). A few of the poems in Horae were dated 1694 and 1695, the year after he left Rowe's academy, and it was also during this period that he composed most of his hymns. Watts told Gibbons that he thought it better to send his lyric poems into the world before his hymns—if the former were accepted then the hymns would be more likely to be so, and if not then it would be prudent to withhold the latter, 'in which, in condescension to the plainest capacities, he had purposely reduced his poetry to a lower strain' (Gibbons, 255). In the preface of 1706 to Horae lyricae (that is, 'Lyric hours', so called to show that 'Poesy is not the Business of my Life') he said that the devotional poems in that collection were a small part of 200 hymns ready for public use (Divine Songs, appx 1, 103–4). The topics of the three-book version of Horae, in which there is much experimentation with verse form, were 'Devotion and Piety', 'Virtue, Honour and Friendship', and 'The Memory of the Dead'; most of the poems in the last two books are addressed to friends in his dissenting circle, several of them Cromwell connections, but they also include poems in praise of John Locke, William III, and Queen Anne (in 1721 Watts added a note retracting his optimistic picture of her reign: Watts, Works, 7.253).

Watts essentially regarded poetry as a divine gift which should be dedicated to God but which had been profaned. In the revised preface to Horae he invoked the example of the Old Testament poets and associated himself with the principles and practice of John Dennis, Abraham Cowley, Richard Blackmore, John Norris, and John Milton, arguing that the Christian preacher could find abundant aid from the poet. His hymns and psalms clearly illustrated this principle. According to Gibbons (the story originated with Watts's co-pastor Price), Watts complained about the quality of the hymns sung at the meeting at Southampton (perhaps by William Barton), and his father told him to mend the matter, which he did with great success (Gibbons, 254). His brother Enoch in a letter of March 1700 criticizing existing hymns and versions of the psalms urged him to publish his own (Milner, 176–9); the success of Horae evidently encouraged him to do so.

Watts divided his Hymns into three books, the first paraphrases of biblical texts, the second on general divine subjects, and the third designed for the Lord's supper. In the preface he said that he had sunk the metaphors 'to the level of vulgar capacities', though he hoped 'not to give disgust to persons of richer sense, and nicer education' (Works, 7.122). His work on the hymns and psalms was closely related: the 1706 edition of Horae and the early editions of the Hymns contained several psalms, which he moved to the collected Psalms in 1719. Psalm 114 appeared in The Spectator (no. 461, 19 August 1712). In a note to 'Sickness and recovery' (Watts, Works, 7.364) he explained that he had written only half by 1712–13 and after his recovery applied himself to finishing them. His version of the Psalms was not intended as a translation: as the title made clear, they were 'Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and applied to the Christian State and Worship'. This meant bringing David up to date, and substituting Jesus for Jehovah and Britain for Israel. One of Watts's best-known hymns, 'Jesus shall reign where'er the sun', is an imitation of Psalm 72, part 2; another, 'Our God our help in ages past', is based on Psalm 90: 1–5 (it was later altered by John Wesley to 'O God our help'). From Hymns the best-known are 'Come let us join our cheerful songs' (1.62, based on Revelation 5: 11–13) and 'When I survey the wondrous cross' (3.7). Watts was unequivocal about the value of his religious poetry and the revolution he had brought about in congregational worship: in a note dated 3 March 1720 in the seventh edition of Hymns he said of his two books of hymns and psalms: 'if an Author's own Opinion may be taken, he esteems it the greatest Work that ever he has publish'd, or ever hopes to do for the Use of the Churches' (Escott, 136).

Educator and philosopher

As an educational writer Watts had an extraordinary capacity to address a very wide range of audiences, from infants and schoolchildren to students in academies and universities, while as a philosopher he engaged in a number of pressing contemporary debates. 'Every man', observed Samuel Johnson, 'acquainted with the common principles of human action will look with veneration on the writer who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making a catechism for children in their fourth year' (Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 1905, 3.308). Watts's works for children were both secular and religious. The first category included The Art of Reading and Writing English (1721), cast in what was to become a favourite question-and-answer form. Religious works included the Catechisms (1730), written in response to 'a multitude of requests' (letter to Samuel Say, 11 April 1728, Milner, 458) and dedicated to the parents belonging to the Bury Street congregation; this was prefaced by 'A discourse on the way of instruction by catechisms', and included a catechism for a three- or four-year-old as well as an explication of the Westminster assembly's shorter catechism for twelve- or thirteen-year-olds. Several of the short texts which composed Catechisms were sold separately (Green, 738–9). A work designed for a wider audience was the substantial Short View of the Whole Scripture History (1732), also cast in question-and-answer form, which was written for 'persons of younger years, and the common rank of mankind' (Works, 4.345).

Watts gave a great deal of thought to the principles and methods of education; his most important works on the subject for students and teachers are Logick: or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1725) and its sequel, The Improvement of the Mind (1741, with a second part published posthumously in 1751). These works provide helpful advice, from an evangelical perspective, on reading, writing, and interpretation, and are designed to combat dogmatism and foster the rational testing of ideas. The long-lasting success of Logick as a textbook is attested by the increasing number of editions in the later eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth. A Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth (published posthumously in 1753) is an interesting attempt to reconcile the traditional values of the dissenting community with liberty of thought. In philosophy Watts described as 'a favourite employment of my thoughts' the relation between soul and body and the function of the sensations, appetites, and passions (preface to Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects, 1733; Works, 6.481). His most important works on these topics, in addition to the Philosophical Essays, are The Doctrine of the Passions and Discourses of the Love of God, and the Use and Abuse of the Passions in Religion (1729), and Self-Love and Virtue Reconciled Only by Religion (1739). Watts objected to Locke's attack on innate ideas and supported the existence of the moral sense, provided it was regarded as 'reason exercising itself' (Works, 6.526), but for religious reasons he strongly disapproved of Shaftesbury. His interest in the passions was closely related to his concern with the ways in which the preacher might work on them for religious ends.

Pastor and theologian

Watts's religious writings were aimed at a range of audiences, from his Bury Street congregation and other dissenting churches to protestants in general and doubting and heterodox Christians; they included sermons and other exhortatory works, defences of the political status of dissent, and explorations of Christianity's most difficult doctrines. His standing was recognized by the award of the DD in 1728 by the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. As a dissenting minister he was concerned with the growing breach between the evangelical and rational wings of dissent, epitomized in the Salters' Hall debates of 1719 over the principle of demanding subscription to orthodox trinitarian doctrine; Watts voted against subscription not because his views about the Trinity were doubtfully orthodox but because he espoused the Lockian principle of freedom of religious worship (set out fully in the last work he published, The Rational Foundation of a Christian Church, and the Terms of Christian Communion, 1747). He was also exercised by the problem of the decay of the dissenting interest, addressed in 1730 in a provocative essay by Strickland Gough; Watts's reply, An Humble Attempt towards the Revival of Practical Religion among Christians (1731), emphasized that the essence of religion as the dissenters' puritan fathers had known it lay in the proper relationship between minister and congregation. He recommended to preachers John Jennings's Two Discourses (1723, for which he wrote a preface), in which the puritans are held up as models for their skill in moving the passions. Watts's ideal minister Ergates in The Improvement of the Mind 'makes the nature of his subject, and the necessity of his hearers, the great rule to direct him what method he shall choose in every sermon, that he may the better enlighten, convince and persuade' (Works, 6.336). Whereas in his view the preachers of the established church and the rational wing of dissent delivered moral essays in their pulpits, Watts in his Sermons on Various Subjects (1721, 1723, 1729), The World to Come (1739, 1745), and Evangelical Discourses (1747) preached an experimental and affectionate religion but with a rational framework that would defend him against the charge of enthusiasm.

In his letter to the Mark Lane Church of 8 February 1702, Watts reminded them that 'When You first called me to minister the Word of God among you, I took the freedom to acquaint you That, in the chief Doctrines of Christianity, I was of the same mind wth your former Revd Pastor Dr Jno. Owen' (Crippen, 32). In the course of his preaching career of over forty-eight years, Watts modified his position of Calvinist orthodoxy. In Orthodoxy and Charity United (1745, but written twenty or thirty years earlier) he identified orthodoxy as consisting of the doctrines of the fall, sanctifying grace, the atonement, repentance of sins, justifying faith, obedience, and the resurrection, and he addressed himself to the differences between men of moderation, distancing himself from the high-flyers on either side (Works, 2.403, 433). He knew that such a stance provoked hostility: 'a moderator must expect to be boxed on both ears' (Gibbons, 146). In a number of works, from The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity (1722) to the late The Glory of Christ as God-Man Displayed (1746) and the posthumously published 'The author's solemn address to the great and ever-blessed God', the last work in Remnants of Time (1753), he struggled to find a way of explicating the doctrine of the Trinity that would keep him within the bounds of orthodoxy, but these attempts aroused the suspicions of the rigidly orthodox, including William Coward, and long after his death encouraged Unitarians to think erroneously that he had joined them.

Religious and literary relationships

Despite his sheltered and sickly life, Watts had a wide range of friends and visitors and a large and important correspondence, among members of the established church as well as dissenters, and in New England and Germany as well as at home. He was a close friend of Elizabeth Rowe (née Singer), whom he is thought to have courted unsuccessfully; she married instead the nephew of his tutor Thomas Rowe. He included an ode in Horae in praise of the poems of Philomela; in turn, she wrote a commendatory poem for the 1709 edition under that name, and she left him the manuscript of her Devout Exercises of the Heart, which he published in 1737 with a preface treating her religious transports with some caution. He dedicated Reliquiae juveniles (1734) to her Anglican friend the countess of Hertford (who refused the dedication of Devout Exercises), and included some of the countess's poems under the name Eusebia (no. 63, 'Piety in a court.—To Philomela').

Watts's most important dissenting friend and correspondent was Philip Doddridge, in whose Northampton academy he took great interest from its inception at Harborough onwards, and whose immensely popular The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745) was written at Watts's request. He was known to or corresponded with most of the principal Anglican figures in the evangelical revival, including John Wesley, George Whitefield, James Hervey, and the countess of Huntingdon, though he had doubts about aspects of Methodism. His mainstream Church of England correspondents included Thomas Secker, who had started out a dissenter, and for whom he found a place at Samuel Jones's academy at Gloucester (Milner, 232–7); Watts regularly sent him his books in later years, and as bishop of Oxford Secker thanked him for The Improvement of the Mind, 'which is peculiarly well adapted for the direction and improvement of students in the university, where your Logic is by no means the only piece of yours that is read with high esteem' (19 June 1741, Milner, 664–5). Watts similarly sent books to Edmund Gibson, bishop of London: his anti-deist The Strength and Weakness of Human Reason (1731) chimed with Gibson's Second Pastoral Letter of 1730 (Works, 2.7–8; Milner, 490–91), and at the other end of the religious spectrum he shared Gibson's doubts about Whitefield (Milner, 638).

Watts also played an important role in religious developments in New England. He corresponded with a number of American ministers and educators, including Cotton Mather (who disapproved of his views on the Trinity), Elisha Williams, Thomas Prince, and especially Benjamin Colman. He made gifts of forty-nine of his books to Yale, where many still survive; an appreciative reader of his Philosophical Essays wrote in it, 'the man that Liketh not this Book is a Whippleswick' (Pratt, 25). In turn Mather, Colman, Prince, and others sent him copies of their sermons, many of which survive in Dr Williams's Library. Through Colman, Watts followed Whitefield's transatlantic evangelizing with some misgivings. A significant outcome of this correspondence was that Watts and John Guyse published a cautiously edited version of Jonathan Edwards's account of the beginning of the revival in New England, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737), after receiving the manuscript from Colman. A similar pattern of reciprocal influence in Germany resulted from Watts's friendship with Anton Wilhelm Boehm (characterized as Bohemus in Reliquiae juveniles, no. 52), translator of works by the pietist A. H. Francke. Francke arranged for Watts's Death and Heaven (his funeral discourses for the Hartopps) to be translated into German with a preface by J. J. Rambach; in 1736 a new English edition included this preface (Works, 2.139). A collection that brought together the writing and interests of English, German, and New England pietists and evangelicals was Instructions to Ministers (1744), which contained John Jennings's Discourses, with Watts's preface, Francke on preaching, translated by David Jennings, and the life of Cotton Mather, abridged by David Jennings with a recommendation by Watts.

Death and afterlife

Though he was widely loved, Watts's later years were at times difficult: he was on bad terms with some members of his family, quarrelled with his former ministerial friend Thomas Bradbury, and became increasingly ill. He died at Abney Park on 25 November 1748 'without a struggle or a groan', as his amanuensis Joseph Parker told his brother Enoch (Gibbons, 318). He was buried on 5 December in Bunhill Fields in the City of London, attended at his request by two ministers from each of the three dissenting denominations, Independent, Presbyterian, and Baptist. He wrote his own inscription for his grave, defining himself as pastor and successor to Caryl, Owen, Clarkson, and Chauncy (Gibbons, 345). Nathaniel Neal, one of his executors, sold the copyright of his works in 1749 for £600 (Nuttall, Calendar, no. 1549); Watts sold that of the Hymns for £10 in 1709 (Wilson, 1.300–01). He left his manuscripts to David Jennings and Doddridge; in due course they published the second part of The Improvement of the Mind (1751) and included some new material in his Works in six volumes (1753, following Doddridge's own death in 1751). Among subscribers to the Works, in addition to prominent dissenters, were Archbishop Secker, the countess of Huntingdon, and the president of New Jersey College.

In his funeral sermon David Jennings said that 'there is no Man now living of whose Works so many have been dispersed, both at Home and Abroad, that are in such constant Use, and translated into such a Variety of Languages' (Jennings, 28). In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was considerable interest in Watts's theology, with recurring disputes over his views on the Trinity and attempts to capture him for rival camps. On the evangelical side, William Cowper wrote in 1766, 'I know no greater names in Divinity than Watts and Doddridge' (Letters and Prose Writings, ed. J. King and C. Ryskamp, 1979, 1.143). John Wesley, who in The Doctrine of Original Sin (1757) defended Watts's The Ruin and Recovery of Mankind (1740) against the Arian John Taylor, warned in 1788 against Watts's dangerous speculations on the glorified humanity of Christ (Letters, ed. J. Telford, 1931, 89–90). The Unitarian Joseph Priestley published Watts's Historical Catechisms (1783) with the Calvinist principles altered. The Independent Samuel Palmer was the first to attempt to clarify his views on the Trinity and the nature of his surviving manuscripts (Life … by … Johnson, appx 3), and in Dr Watts No Socinian (1813) he defended Watts from appropriation by the Unitarian Thomas Belsham.

It was as poet and hymn-writer that Watts made his most lasting impact. In 1779, on Samuel Johnson's recommendation, Horae lyricae and Divine Songs … for Children appeared as volume 46 of Works of the English Poets, followed by the life in volume 8 of Johnson's Prefaces (1781). In Watts's lifetime the success of his hymns and psalms was partly owing to the Methodists. John Wesley included a large number (with modifications) in his first hymnbook, A Collection of Psalms and Hymns (1737), and Watts's hymns kept their central place in several later collections by Independents, Methodists, and Anglicans, often described as supplements to Watts. James Montgomery in the introductory essay to The Christian Psalmist (1825) explained why Christians found Watts's combined collection, Psalms and Hymns, so powerful: they 'include and illustrate every truth of revelation, throw light upon every secret movement of the human heart' (1828 edn, xix). The sales of Psalms and Hymns in the English-speaking world in the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century were phenomenal, and in the same period the Divine Songs, imitated and parodied in very different ways by William Blake in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland (1865), reached the height of their fame. Watts's extraordinary success is in some ways paradoxical. As an early eighteenth-century Independent he belonged to an exclusive minority:

We are a garden wall'd around,Chosen and made peculiar ground,

he wrote in Hymn 1.74 (based on the Song of Solomon, 4 and 5; Works, 7.137), and in his cool, rational approach to the psychology of religion he distrusted emotional indiscipline, yet his warm, affectionate, practical writings were a powerful impetus to the evangelical revival of the eighteenth century and continued to shape the growing evangelicalism of the nineteenth.