His supreme merit, in this definite onslaught on the rigid literalism of the churches, was that he not only brought destructive criticism, but supplied an adequate substitute for that which he condemned. Watts denied the obligation to sing the Bible. The Scriptures were the Word of God to the soul and the hymn was the work of the soul in response to God. He further denied that the Book of Psalms was given as a hymnbook for the Christian Church. It was not even adapted to its use, for it was distinctly Jewish and not Christian in ideals and spirit. “Some of ’em are almost opposite to the spirit of the Gospel; many of them are foreign to the state of the New Testament and widely different to the present circumstances of Christians.” Before they can be sung in a Christian service they must be rewritten as if David were a Christian and not a Jew. Even allowing that there was an obligation to sing the Word of God, Watts denied that the metrical Psalm was the pure Word of God. The demands of meter and rhyme so refashioned and even mutilated the Psalms that they no longer were the words of the Scripture, nor even its ideas. Its inspiration suffered a total eclipse under the hands of the versifiers, and the metrical Psalm became a work of “human composure” with none of the vital spirit of the free hymn. Watts could not understand why “we under the Gospel should sing nothing else but the joys, hopes, and fears of Asaph and David.” He declared that “David would have thought it very hard to have been confined to the words of Moses and sung nothing else on all his rejoicing days but the drowning of Pharaoh in the fifteenth of Exodus.” He complained that even in those places where the Jewish psalmist seems to mean the Gospel, excellent poet as he was, he was not able to speak it plain, by reason of the infancy of that dispensation, and longs for the aid of a Christian writer. He set aside the prevalent “superstitious reverence for the letter of the Jewish Scriptures,” and in an almost defiant spirit declared, “Though there are many gone before me who have taught the Hebrew Psalmist to speak English, yet I think I may assume the pleasure of being the first who hath brought down the royal author into the common affairs of the Christian life, and led the Psalmist of Israel into the Church of Christ, without anything of the Jew about him.” Whatever devotional value we may assign to the Psalms, we must accept Watts’ fundamental idea that they are not the exclusive formulary of the use of song in the worship of God and in the life of the Church. His further contention that not all the Psalms, nor all parts of them, are adapted to Christian use, we cannot now gainsay. The Jews themselves only used about forty of them. It was not until centuries after the Apostolic Age had elapsed that, due to monkish superstition, all the Psalms were recognized as of equal exclusive use.