SOURCE: Escott, Harry. “Revolutionary Manifesto.” In Isaac Watts, Hymnographer: A Study of the Beginnings, Development, and Philosophy of the English Hymn, pp. 121-31. London: Independent Press Ltd., 1962.

In the following essay, Escott discusses the content of Watts's work A Short Essay Toward the Improvement of Psalmody and its relationship to the preface to his Hymns and Spiritual Songs.

Chronologically Isaac Watts was a hymn-writer before he turned his attention to the reform of metrical psalmody. This was an accident. His early sporadic hymnody at Southampton supplied the immediate need of a local congregation, with more advanced ideas of the nature of congregational praise, and which seems to have already used hymns in its worship. However, such sporadic hymn-writing could not long satisfy Watts's philosophic mind. He wished to commend the Christian hymn to the Church as a whole; and such a purpose demanded a full-dress apologia of an...