329. When I Can Read My Title Clear

The Story Behind the Hymn

Isaac Watts published "When I Can Read My Title Clear" in 1707 in his Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book II, under the heading "The Hopes of Heaven our Support under Trials on Earth" — a title that states the hymn's purpose almost as plainly as its text does. It appeared originally in four stanzas of four lines each, without the repeating refrain sung with it today.

That refrain, "I'm going to trust in the Lord till I die," entered the hymn later, through the American camp-meeting and folk-hymn tradition, paired with the tune PISGAH — an anonymous American melody first printed in Ananias Davisson's Kentucky Harmony around 1816. The addition transformed a fairly restrained eighteenth-century hymn of assurance into a rhythmic, repeatable camp-meeting song, closer in feel to the shape-note singing tradition than to Watts's original London congregation.

The text itself has undergone several rounds of revision since Watts first wrote it, most notably by hymnal editors Edward Bickersteth and Charlotte Elliott in the 1830s, whose alterations to the fourth stanza in particular became widely adopted in later hymnals. Watts's hymn has proven durable enough to be reshaped repeatedly across more than three centuries without losing its essential argument.

That argument rests on a single legal metaphor carried through the whole text: reading one's "title" clear, as one might read a deed or claim to property, to a heavenly inheritance. Once that title is secure, the hymn argues, no earthly trial — fiery darts, a frowning world, a wild deluge of cares — can any longer threaten what has already been settled.