No more, my God, I boast no more

No more, my God, I boast no more. Isaac Watts* (1674-1748). This appeared in Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707), with the title ‘The Value of Christ and his Righteousness, Phil. iii. 7-9’. The text is a powerful and close interpretation of the passage from the epistle. In Britain it has not been widely used, perhaps because of its apparently stark and uncompromising quality. The Companion to RS (1999) describes it as ‘not a hymn for casual use; it addresses the need of the person who has known the meaning of failure, and found no inner strength with which to meet it; to that need it offers the only word that can reassure those who have lost faith in themselves’ (p. 471). Yet the text is...