Nicole’s e-Pistle “Isaac Watts”

October 7, 2026

Greetings, Friends

This Sunday, we will sing our opening hymn, “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past,” the text of which was written by Isaac Watts. Watts grew up in the late seventeenth-century England in a family of non-conformists, meaning they did not hold with the Church of England. One of Watts’ grandmothers was a Huguenot. His father spent several stints in jail for his nonconformity. Religiously and politically, his people were known as Dissenters, and Watts even attended the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington.

This was the time of Queen Anne’s reign, second daughter to James II and younger sister to Mary, reigning queen alongside William of Orange. Queen Anne was a strong proponent of the Church of England, despite her father’s Catholic heritage. In fact, during her reign, the Tories sought to silence the Dissenters and remove their ability to serve in the educational sphere. According to the Oxford Companion to British History, The Schism Act of 1714 sought to “stamp out dissent by preventing nonconformists and catholics educating their children in their own schools. Teachers (except in the universities and those who taught the young at home) had to apply for licences, which would only be granted if they had taken the Anglican sacrament within the previous year, had sworn the oaths of allegiance, abjuration, and supremacy, and had made the declaration against transubstantiation. A licensed teacher who subsequently attended non-Anglican worship was to be disqualified.” However, the act was set to go into effect the day that Queen Anne died, and her successor, King George I, refused to enforce it. It was later repealed in 1719.

In the meantime, while the Schism Act was being debated, Isaac Watts wrote the text to our hymn, including three additional verses that John Wesley later removed in his 1737 Collection of Psalms and Hymns. Each of the three verses reinterprets the individual, spiritual feel of Psalm 90:1-5, regarding the fleeting nature of life and time, to a larger context of the fleeting existence of the nations of this world. The missing verses read as follows:

  1. Thy word commands our flesh to dust,

Return, ye sons of men:

All nations rose from earth at first,

And turn to earth again.

  1. The busy tribes of flesh and blood

With all their lives and cares

Are carried downwards by the flood,

And lost in following years.

  1. Like flow’ry fields the nations stand

Pleas’d with the morning-light;

The flowers  beneath the Mower’s hand

Lie withering e’er ‘tis night.

These verses, which would renumber the verses in our own hymnal as 1-2-3-5-7-9, lend greater depth to the final verse nine, “Our God, our help in ages past, Our hope for years to come, Be thou our guard while troubles last, And our eternal home.”

As we encounter yet another contentious election season, may we all look to the God who transcends time and space. The God of Anglicans and Dissenters alike… the God of Republicans and Democrats and Independents alike… the God of all nations… the Creator of the very air we all breathe. May we turn our eyes to our Creator when conversations become heated, and may each of us respond to the Spirit that tugs at our own hearts and our consciences, never shrinking from the call to love and serve both God and neighbor.

Blessings and peace, my friends!