[Note: I wrote this when I was teaching an elementary level co-op class on music history a while back.  You can read it to your children!]

Isaac Watts was the oldest of nine children.  His father was in prison when Isaac was born in 1674.  That is because he was a nonconformist, a Christian wouldn’t agree with the official teachings of the Church of England.   

Isaac was a very bright child.  He had a habit of speaking in rhyme. When his father scolded him for this, he replied, “Oh, Father, do some pity take, and I will no more verses make.”  Isaac learned many languages: Latin at the age of five, Greek at nine, French at eleven and Hebrew at thirteen!  Wow!

A rich man offered to send smart Isaac to a good college, but to do this, he would have to join the Church of England.  Isaac didn’t want to do this, so he went to a nonconformist Christian school instead.

Once, Isaac complained to his father that the hymns in church were boring.  His father told him, “Then do something about it!”  That afternoon, he sat down and wrote a hymn which was sung at a church service that same evening!  He wrote a new hymn every week for two years!  All in all, he wrote over 600 different hymns.  We still sing many of them today, such as When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Alas and Did My Savior Bleed?, Am I a Soldier of the Cross?, and Joy the the World.

Isaac Watts’s psalms and hymns came to America.  Even Benjamin Franklin published them!  God used them during the “Great Awakening” revival in the 1740s. People loved to sing them during the Revolutionary War.  One time, some soldiers ran out of the paper they needed for loading powder into their guns.  A pastor, Reverend James Caldwell, ran into his church and started tearing the pages out of the hymnals for them to use.  He shouted, “Give ‘em Watts, boys!”

Isaac only grew to be 5 feet tall.  He also had a really big head.  But no matter what he looked like, people loved him! He had small pox when he was 15 years old, so he was often weak and sick.  He didn’t think he could keep his job as a pastor, but the people in his church wouldn’t let him leave!  They just hired an extra pastor to help him so he could stay.

Isaac Watts also wrote poems and songs for children.  Here is one of them from his book, Divine and Moral Songs for Children:

How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour,

And gather honey all the day

From every opening flower!

How skillfully she builds her cell!

How neat she spreads the wax!

And labours hard to store it well

With the sweet food she makes.

In works of labour or of skill,

I would be busy too;

For Satan finds some mischief still

For idle hands to do.

In books, or work, or healthful play,

Let my first years be passed,

That I may give for every day

      Some good account at last.

For more information on Isaac Watts, check out these links:

http://www.wholesomewords.org/biography/biorpwatts.html

http://chi.gospelcom.net/GLIMPSEF/Glimpses/glmps027.shtml