Isaac Watts

Isaac Watts was an English Congregational minister, hymn writer, theologian and logician, credited with some 750 hymns, among them When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Joy to the World and Our God, Our Help in Ages Past. Born in Southampton to a nonconformist family, he was barred from Oxford and Cambridge, then restricted to Anglicans, studied at the Dissenting Academy at Stoke Newington and became pastor of the Mark Lane Congregational Chapel in London. His Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) and his metrical psalter of 1719, which rendered the Psalms in the language of the New Testament, helped bring new hymns into English worship. His Logick (1724) was printed in twenty editions.