We have few particulars of Watts in his pastoral work. From the first days of his pastorate his health was a frequent source of interruption to his activity. The hymns and poems frequently expressing the experience of pain, weakness, and weariness are no fancies; they express a very devout spirit of resignation, with regret, as he expresses it, that “many other souls are favoured with a more easy habitation, and he hoped with a better partner, accommodated with engines which have more health and vigour;” but he instantly recovers his spirits to exclaim, “Shall I repine then, while I survey whole nations and millions and millions of mankind that have not a thousand’s part of my blessings?” He was laid aside by sickness for five months soon after he became assistant to Dr. Chauncy, 1698; he was the subject of another illness soon after his settlement in the pastoral charge in 1701; a violent fever seized him in 1712, his constitution was shattered by it, his nerves weakened and unstrung, and he prevented from returning to his public work until October, 1716; we find from his own record that he was confined by illness in 1729; and many other occasions might be discovered of these sharp bodily afflictions. Life around him was usually beautiful and serene; he seems to have possessed a very large revenue of love, but he unquestionably possessed this “thorn in the flesh,” nor can we doubt that such experiences to such a faith as his, gave personal meaning to his hymns. He sung very often as one stretched on a rack, and not the least of his pains must have been that his incessantly active nature, his constant design and desire to carry out some purpose or to pursue some task found itself checked and arrested. Dr. Gibbons quotes a paragraph from a very beautiful letter to a friend, a minister, in affliction, through which there runs a vein of true spiritual friendship, and a pathos which his own experience of trials would very naturally inspire: “It is my hearty desire for you that your faith may ride out the storms of temptation, and the anchor of your hope may hold, being fixed within the veil. There sits Jesus our Forerunner, who sailed over this rough sea before us, and has given us a chart, even His Word, where the shelves and rocks, the fierce currents and dangers are well described, and He is our Pilot, and will conduct us to the shores of happiness. I am persuaded that in the future state we shall take a sweet review of those scenes of Providence which have been involved in the thickest darkness, and trace those footsteps of God when He walked with us through the deepest waters. This will be a surprising delight, to survey the manifold harmony of clashing dispensations, and to have those perplexing riddles laid open to the eyes of our souls, and read the full meaning of them in set characters of wisdom and grace.”