There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood

William Cowper, born into the home of an English clergy man, educated in private schools and earning a degree in law would come across as a very strong willed, and determined young man. Isn’t that how the story always begins?

There is so much story to the life of William Cowper. To put it all into one small article would not do this man justice, but, I’ll give you my best shot.

Despite the fact that William was very intelligent, and very driven, it was the death of his mother when he was six years old that made him an emotionally fragile, and unstable man beneath the surface of all of his success. It was just before William went to take his final bar examination that his hidden anxieties began to surface. Added to his fear of his bar exam he suffered a failed love affair, and as a result of both; had a mental break down from which he never recovered. This led to an unsuccessful suicide attempt, which then led to the next eighteen months he spent in an insane asylum.

First, I would like to briefly paint a picture on what an insane asylum looked like in the 18th century. It was not a place filled with gentle, loving nurses like Whoopie Goldberg from Girl, Interrupted, nor an exciting mystery such as our most recent box office success: Shutter Island.

These were actually places where it was believed that they were locking away the “animals” of society. Asylums were dark, and dirty dungeons where torture treatments were used such as branding their skulls to “bring them to their senses”, or swinging them around by a harness to “calm their nerves”. William, to my understanding, wasn’t exactly getting the type of treatment he needed at the time.

Despite his depression William found a way to treat himself. It was during this time that he began to bury himself in scripture. Though, as a child he had a spiritual upbringing, it wasn’t until this point that William truly began to wrestle with what it meant to have a true relationship with Christ and with his eternal salvation. He was thirty three when he accepted Christ as his savior.

Though William never practiced law again he did find a love for writing and literature.... you see where I’m going with this....

Through a long and beautiful story made short, William ended up receiving the spiritual nourishment he needed from a Reverend Unwin and his wife Mary. It was through this couple that William met....are you ready for this one? .....John Newton.... author of “Amazing Grace!” The two great minds produced together the “Olney hymns”, a book of over three hundred hymns. Among Cowper’s written work, with the spiritual inspiration of Newton, is the hymn that, to him, testified his final peace with his savior. “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood”.

And it wasn’t long after he wrote this hymn that William died on April 25 1800. He left this world having lived a full, and glorifying life liberated from so much pain, and sorrow.

“Redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be till I die”

Come Thou Fount

In 1758 the New Jersey legislature formed its first Indian reservation, George

Washington was admitted to the Virginia house of Burgess, and Haley’s comet

was first sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsh.

That’s all good and well, but now let’s talk about something else.

Also in 1758 a man named Robert Robinson wrote a hymn called “Come

Thou Fount”. A hymn we are all familiar with, and sing regularly in church. But

does one ever wonder what are behind the lyrics of this hymn? “Prone to

wonder, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” These lyrics strike me every

time I hear it, because it is the life and story behind the hymn that now “tune my

heart to sing His praise” whenever I hear it.

It was actually a while before 1758 that the story of this hymn began, when Robert was a young lad in London.

Robert was actually a rebellious, young teenager, his father had passed when Robert was young, and without

knowing how else to control him his mother sent him off to London to learn the skill of barbering.

Robert did not want to learn Barbering.

Instead, Robert learned the skills of excessive drinking, gambling, gang life, and soon found himself wandering

into a fortune tellers lair with a group of his buddies - all in a drunken stupor. It was that night in the fortune tellers

grasp that Robert began to sense a greater force in the world.

Spiritually shaken and disturbed, Robert then suggested their next visit be to a church. It just so happened that

same night one of the most famous religious figures of that time, George Whitefield, was preaching at a nearby

evangelistic event. It also just so happened Robert Robinson was in the same area. Whitefield’s message that night

was on Mathew 3:7, Jesus’ words to the Pharisees on “the wrath to come” left Robert, again, stirred and with a sense

that Whitefield was preaching directly to him that night.

Robert sobered up, was haunted by Whitefield’s words, left with his buddies...and three years passed.

Those years later Robert finally gave his life to Christ and began serving as a

pastor at the Calvinist Methodist Chapel in Norfolk England.

As much as it sounds like a happy ending for Robert, his story, like most of ours,

did not end there. Robert continually struggled on and off with his alcoholic tendencies,

and addictions to gambling. It was within those battles, in the year of 1758 that Robert

sat down to write a hymn for a sermon on Pentecost Sunday.

“Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be,

let thy grace, Lord, like a fetter bind my wandering heart to thee”

The hymn was beloved by his community, and went on to become a favorite among the townsfolk.

Robert was still left struggling, and in a time he’d fallen away, and was on the road traveling by coach a woman

sitting near him in his coach began, ironically, preaching to him. I picture Robert now with a bored, possibly irritated,

yet slightly amused, look on his face as this complete stranger sat by him witnessing her heart out with little

knowledge that this man was a preacher himself. After a while of getting no where with Robert she pulled out a book,

“I want to read you something, and I’d like you to tell me your thoughts” the woman said flipping through her book.

She read him his own hymn...“Madam’” Robert began, “I am the poor fool who wrote that hymn, and I would

give anything to again be as happy as I was then.”

Robert returned to preaching, and was soon invited to preach in Birmingham,England for noted Unitarian Dr. Joseph

Priestly until 1790. He was fifty-four years old when he passed away quietly one night in his sleep.