Like a sun-burst, opening a brighter era, came the Wesleyan movement, and in the same period the hymns of Dr. Isaac Watts. Whatever the effect of the exuberant singing of the Methodist assemblies may have had upon a cultivated ear, it is certain that the enthusiastic welcome accorded by the Wesleys to popular music as a proselyting agent, and the latitude permitted to free invention and adoption of hymns and tunes, gave an impulse to a purer and nobler style of congregational song which has never been lost. The sweet and fervent lyrics of Charles and John Wesley struck a staggering blow at the prestige of the “inspired” psalmody. Historians of this movement remind us that hymns, heartily sung by a whole congregation, were unknown as an element in public worship at the time when the work of the Wesleys and Whitefield began. Watts’s hymns were already written, but had as yet taken no hold upon either dissenters or churchmen. The example of the Methodists was a revelation of the power that lies in popular song when inspired by conviction, and as was said of the early Lutheran choral, so it might be said of the Methodist hymns, that they won more souls than even the preaching of the evangelists. John Wesley, in his published directions concerning congregational singing, enjoined accuracy in notes and time, heartiness, moderation, unanimity, and spirituality as with the aim of pleasing God rather than one’s self. He strove to bring the new hymns and tunes within the means of the poor, and yet took pains that the music should be of high quality, and that nothing vulgar or sensational should obtain currency. The truly beneficent achievement of the Wesleys in summoning the aid of the unconfined spirit of poesy in the revival of spiritual life found a worthy reinforcement in the songs of Isaac Watts (1674-1748). Although his deficiencies in the matter of poetical technic and his frequent dry, scholastic, and dogmatic treatment have rendered much the greater part of his work obsolete, yet a true spiritual and poetic fire burns in many of his lyrics, and with all necessary abatement his fame seems secure. Such poems as “High in the Heavens, eternal God,” “Before Jehovah’s awful throne,” and “When I survey the wondrous cross” are pearls which can never lose their place in the chaplet of English evangelical hymnody. The relaxing prejudice against “uninspired” hymns in church worship yielded to the fervent zeal, the loving faith, the forceful natural utterance of the lyrics of Watts. In his psalms also, uniting as they did the characteristic modes of feeling of both the Hebrew and the Christian conceptions, he made the transition easy, and in both he showed the true path along which the reviving poetic inspiration of the time must proceed.