20. When I Survey the Wondrous Cross

The Story Behind the Hymn

Isaac Watts, often called the father of English hymnody for the sweeping transformation he brought to English-speaking congregational singing, worked as a Congregationalist minister but suffered from such chronic ill health for most of his adult life that he was frequently unable to preach regularly, relying instead on assistant ministers while he continued writing prolifically from bed or from the home of his longtime patrons, the wealthy Abney family, who hosted him for over three decades.

Before Watts began publishing his own hymns in the early 1700s, most English-speaking Protestant congregations, particularly within the Calvinist and Puritan traditions, sang only direct, literal metrical translations of the biblical Psalms, out of a deeply held theological conviction that only scripture's own words were appropriate for congregational worship. Watts controversially argued instead that Christians should also be free to compose and sing entirely new hymns reflecting explicitly Christian, New Testament faith in Christ — a position that met with real resistance in some congregations — and he wrote hundreds of hymns himself specifically to demonstrate what such hymns could look like in practice.

He wrote this hymn to be sung specifically before the taking of Communion, meditating on the crucifixion in unusually intimate, first-person terms rather than through detached historical narration. Rather than simply recounting the external events of the crucifixion as they happened, the hymn repeatedly turns the story back onto the singer personally, asking what such a sacrifice demands in response, and famously concluding that even the gift of 'the whole realm of nature' — meaning literally everything a person could possibly own or offer — would remain an entirely inadequate response to a love of that scale.

Many hymnologists and literary critics across the centuries since, including scholars entirely outside the Christian tradition studying it purely as English literature, have long considered this among the finest hymns ever composed in the English language, prized as much for its unusually disciplined literary craftsmanship — its tight, controlled imagery and its refusal of easy sentimentality — as for its theological content, making it a rare hymn admired with roughly equal seriousness by ordinary congregations singing it in worship and by scholars of English poetry studying it as a literary text in its own right.