“Before Jehovah’s awful throne, Ye nations bow with sacred joy; Know that the Lord is God alone, He can create, and he destroy.” What if John Wesley does add a majestic note or two in the foregoing hymn; the singer of the whole hymn is the noble spirit of little Dr. Watts. Had David himself returned with an English tongue, he could not have reproduced the spirit of the seventy-second Psalm more nobly: “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun Doth his successive journeys run; His Kingdom spread from shore to shore, Till moons shall wax and wane no more.” Solomon’s coronation song (Ps. 72) was no more majestic than this crowning hymn Watts wrote for his Lord. But Watts could not only be majestic; he could be tender: “When I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of Glory died, My richest gain I count but loss, And pour contempt on all my pride.” Is there a tenderer strain in all English hymnody than the third verse? “See, from his head, his hands, his feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down! Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown?” Not in the same exquisite vein of noble tenderness, but perhaps all the more useful for its reduced voltage, is his other hymn of the Crucifixion, “Alas! and did my Saviour bleed? And did my Sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head For such a worm as I!” Its last verse has deepened the consecration of unnumbered millions as they sang the sacred vow: “But drops of grief can ne’er repay The debt of love I owe; Here, Lord, I give myself away— ’Tis all that I can do.” The list of the great hymns that have come down to us from Isaac Watts is too long to be given here, but they enrich the pages of all our hymnals and exalt the spirit of all our church services. The criticism often urged that Watts wrote too much cannot well be gainsaid, but the striking fact confronts us that most of the great hymns were written by men who wrote too much! The same is true of the composers of our greatest music, as, for instance, Mendelssohn and Handel. Much writing develops technic, ease, spontaneity, unselfconsciousness, that make the heights of feeling and expression more accessible. But what Watts needed was not so much to write less, but to have a competent editor like John Wesley to eliminate his vulgar and often grotesque lines.