Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/55

 THE STORY OF THE HYMNS AND THEIR WRITERS 43

Longfellow introduces Priscilla, in the Courtship of Miles Standish, iii. 40

Singing the Hundredth Psalm, that grand old Puritan anthem, Music that Luther sang to the sacred words of the Psalmist. . . . Open wide on her lap lay the well-worn psalm-book of Ainsworth, Printed in Amsterdam, the words and the music together, Rough-hewn, angular notes, like stones in the wall of a churchyard, Darkened and overhung by the running vine of the verses. Such was the book from whose pages she sang the old Puritan anthem.

��Hymn 3. Before Jehovah s awful throne.

ISAAC WATTS, D.D. (1674-1748).

From The Psalms of David imitated in the Language of the New Testament, 1719.

Watts s version marks the passage from psalm-singing to hymn- singing. Nonconformists felt that in his two books they had such a provision for psalmody as to answer most occasions of the Christian s life. The first two verses ran

Sing to the Lord with joyful voice ;

Let ev ry land His name adore ; The British isles shall send the noise

Across the ocean to the shore.

Nations attend before His throne With solemn fear, with sacred joy ;

Know that the Lord is God alone ; He can create and He destroy.

In his Charlestown Collection, I737 Wesley omitted ver. I, and altered the first part of ver. 2 to the form now adopted

Before Jehovah s awful throne, Ye nations, bow with sacred joy.

Watts s fourth verse is omitted

We are His people, we His care, Our souls and all our mortal frame;

What lasting honours shall we rear, Almighty Maker, to Thy name?

Isaac Watts was born at Southampton, and was the eldest of the nine children of Enoch Watts, a Nonconformist

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