A glorious sight appears

In his lifetime, Isaac Watts published four books of poetry: Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (once very famous, and famously parodied in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland), the Psalms of David: Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Apply'd to the Christian State and Worship (his paraphrases of the psalms, about which I hope to write at a later date), Hymns and Spiritual Songs, and Horae Lyricae: Poems, Chiefly of the Lyric Kind. Somewhat remarkably, he did this in a span of a dozen years.

His Hymns and Spiritual Songs is a significant source for songs in The Sacred Harp. The poems were of three types: songs based on some biblical text, “hymns whose form is mere human composure” (that is, Christian poetry not based on a biblical text), and a specialized selection of hymns for use during the celebration of the Lord’s supper.

In Hymns and Spiritual Songs, there is not a lot of poetry based on the Psalms; these he mostly reserved for his Psalms of David. The most common text he uses is the prophetic book of Isaiah; as Watts does with the Psalms, he generally views Isaiah through a lens of prophecy about the coming of Jesus Christ.

It surprises me somewhat that the second largest number of poems from Hymns and Spiritual Songs comes from the book of Revelation, the last, weird, apocalyptic book of the Bible. Watts’s poetry is often deeply emotional, but he doesn’t come across as an eighteenth-century millennialist⁵ . Really, though, Watts treats Revelation much as he does the Psalms; as he writes in his introduction: “To [the Lord Jesus Christ] also, even to the Lamb that was slain and now lives, I have addressed many a song, for thus does the Holy Scripture instruct and teach us to worship, in the various short patterns of Christian psalmody described in the Revelation.” That is, he has a christocentric view of Revelation, just as he has for the entirety of the Bible.

Still, Watts is looking forward to the culmination of history, and the marriage of heaven and earth. We sing some of his poem based on Revelation 21:1-4 in 155 NORTHFIELD, 299 NEW JERUSALEM, and 409 PROMISED DAY.

Here is the full version of Watts’s poem, which is hymn 21 in Hymns and Spiritual Songs in the tenth edition of 1728, and has six verses, which I am numbering here.

Hymn 21
A vision of the kingdom of Christ among men, Rev. 21:1-4

1. Lo, what a glorious sight appears
   To our believing eyes!
   The earth and seas are pass'd away,
   And the old rolling skies.

2. From the third heav'n, where God resides,
   That holy, happy place,
   The new Jerusalem comes down
   Adorn'd with shining grace.

3. Attending angels shout for joy,
   And the bright armies sing,
   "Mortals, behold the sacred seat
   Of your descending King.

4. The God of glory down to men
   Removes his bless'd abode;
   Men the dear objects of his grace,
   And he the loving God.

5. His own soft hand shall wipe the tear
   From ev'ry weeping eye,
   And pains, and groans, and griefs,
   And death itself shall die."

6. How long, dear Saviour, O how long!
   Shall this bright hour delay?
   Fly swifter round, ye wheels of time,
   And bring the welcome day.

Watts follows the Revelation passage closely, with one important change. Both Revelation 21 and A vision of the kingdom of Christ among men begin with a vision of the earth, the seas, and the heavens disappearing. For John, this was a singular vision: I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For Watts, the whole of the church sees it in their mind’s imagination: our believing eyes. Watts assumes, I think, that the reader will understand that a new heaven and earth come in their place. Then, in both there is a vision of the holy city, the new Jerusalem, descending out of heaven to the new earth. John says the city is adorned as a bride for her husband; Watts says the city is adorned with shining grace³ .

John then has an auditory vision, a clairaudient experience, in which a great voice from heaven — probably one of the angels speaking to John — declaiming that God has come to reside with humanity, healing all hurts; pain will be a thing of the past. Watts imagines a bright army of angels joyfully declaiming this news, inviting us to behold the throne as God descends to earth to live with us; as in Revelation, God comes to heal all hurts and to see death itself die.

Watts adds a final verse: a desire that this day would come soon, that wheels of time would fly swifter round in order for the welcome day to arrive. How long … O how long! expresses his longing for Jesus to come quickly, echoing the penultimate verse of Revelation and the whole of the Christian Bible: He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

The three versions in the 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp⁶ mix and select these verses a bit. Both 155 NORTHFIELD and 409 PROMISED DAY start with the last verse of Watts’s poem, which expresses the longing that time would speed up and the bright hour of Christ’s returning would come soon.

155 NORTHFIELD focuses on the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, descending to earth, while 409 PROMISED DAY focuses on the presence of God with humanity and its resultant healing of the world. 209 NEW JERUSALEM uses the first two verses of Watts’s poem and thus act as metonymy, or part-for-whole for the entirety of Watts’s poem⁴, if we know it. And now we do.

Appendix

155 NORTHFIELD

How long, dear Savior, O how long
Shall this bright hour delay?
Fly swift around¹ , ye wheels of time,
And bring the promised² day.

From the third heav’n where God resides,
That holy, happy place,
The New Jerusalem comes down,
Adorned with shining grace.

299 NEW JERUSALEM

Lo, what a glorious sight appears
To our believing eyes;
The earth and seas are passed away,
And the old rolling skies!

From the third heav’n where God resides,
That holy, happy place,
The New Jerusalem comes down,
Adorned with shining grace.

409 PROMISED DAY

How long, dear Savior, Oh, how long
shall this bright hour delay?
Fly swift around, ye wheels of time,
And bring the promised day.

The God of glory down to men,
Removes His blest abode;
Men, the dear object of His grace,
And He, the loving God.

His own soft hand shall wipe the tears
From ev’ry weeping eye;
And pains and groans, and griefs and fears,
And death itself shall die.

Notes

Thanks to Linda Selph for consultation on songs based on this text.

1  Originally “swifter round.”

2  Originally, “welcomed day”

3  It’s not as if Watts doesn’t like the image of the church being the bride of Christ; in fact, the next most common book of the Bible that Watts mines for imagery is the Song of Solomon, which he interprets as an allegory of Christ and the church as the groom and bride of the Song.

4  It’s perhaps worth noting that in the latest revision of The Sacred Harp, Revised Cooper Edition (“the Cooper book”), 155 HOW LONG, DEAR SAVIOUR has five verses of Watts’s poem, leaving out verse 4, “The God of glory down to men.” As in the 1991 Edition, the last verse is used to start the song.

5  This is not Babylon is Fallen⁷ .

6  Verse 6 (How long, dear Savior) also shows up as a “wandering verse” in 330t HORTON, but I am not really counting it here.

7  Although Watts did write two hymns based on the fall of Babylon: Great Babylon, that rules the earth, / Drunk with the martyrs' blood, / Her crimes shall speedily awake / The fury of our God.