Surrounding me in all I do

A little more enduring Watts hymn than the one last week – “The All-seeing God,” in Long Meter, is Isaac Watts’s “First Part” of Psalm CXXXIX (139). It is found beginning on page 365 in The Psalms of David: Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Apply’d to the Christian State and Worship. It includes pauses of reflection on the omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience of God – in light of which fact these thoughts should “possess my breast.”

1. Lord, thou hast search’d and seen me through,
Thine Eye commands with piercing view.
My rising and my resting Hours,
My Heart and Flesh with all their Powers.

2. My Thoughts, before they are my own,
Are to my God distinctly known;
He knows the Words I mean to speak
E’re from my opening Lips they break.

3. Within thy circling Power I stand;
On every Side I find thy Hand;
Awake, asleep, at home, abroad,
I am surrounded still with God.

4. Amazing Knowledge, vast and great!
What large Extent! what lofty Height!
My Soul with all the Powers I boast,
Is in the boundless Prospect lost.

5. O may these Thoughts possess my Breast,
Where’er I rove, where’er I rest!
Nor let my weaker Passions dare
Consent to Sin, for God is there.

Pause I.

6. Could I so false, so faithless prove,
To quit thy Service and thy love,
Where, Lord, could I thy Presence shun.
Or from thy dreadful Glory run?

7. If up to Heaven I take my flight,
’Tis there thou dwell’st enthroned in Light;
Or dive to Hell, there Vengeance reigns,
And Satan groans beneath thy Chains.

8. If, mounted on a Morning Ray,
I fly beyond the Western Sea,
Thy swifter Hand would first arrive,
And there arrest thy Fugitive.

9. Or should I try to shun thy Sight
Beneath the spreading Veil of Night,
One Glance of Thine, one piercing Ray,
Would kindle Darkness into Day.

10. O may these Thoughts possess my Breast,
Where’er I rove, where’er I rest!
Nor let my weaker passions dare
Consent to Sin, for God is there.

PAUSE II.

11. The Veil of Night is no disguise,
No Screen from thy All-searching Eyes;
Thy Hand can seize thy Foes as soon
Through Midnight-shades as blazing Noon.

12. Midnight and noon in this agree,
Great God, they’re both alike to Thee;
Not Death can hide what God will spy,
And Hell lies naked to his Eye.

13. O may these Thoughts possess my Breast,
Where’er I rove, where’er I rest!
Nor let my weaker passions dare
Consent to Sin, for God is there.

This psalm has been set with many different tunes. The best-known, at least to me, is Federal Street by Henry Kemble Oliver (1800-1885). He wrote hymns, music, and served as organist in several churches. Oliver served in several civic duties, including as a mayor, a member of the Massachusetts State House of Representatives, as well as Adjutant General and Treasurer of the state of Massachusetts.

In The Sacred Harp (1991 Revision), the tune Akin (472) uses the third stanza of Watts’s Psalm 139.