William Cowper

Throughout Mars Hill’s Rebel’s Guide to Joy series, the talented folks in the production department have headed up biographical sketch pieces on famous hymn writers.

A couple months ago, Pastor Tim Smith approached Nate Burke, Joe Day and myself about being a part of the project by researching and writing bios for the respective hymnodists. Our bios were, in effect, the “first draft” of what eventually becomes the spoken part of the respective sketches in the video series. Here’s the bio on William Cowper. See and hear the finished piece on YouTube here.

William Cowper was born November 26, 1731 in Berkhamsted, England and died on April 25, 1800. Cowper-pronounced cooper-was a Westminster School educated English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper wrote about everyday life and scenes of the English countryside and is probably best known for his hymn titled ‘Praise for the Fountain Opened’ which starts “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Emmanuel’s veins.”

Cowper lived during the time of the First Great Awakening and was a contemporary of George Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. Cowper was well known in his time and even received good reviews of his first volume, by Benjamin Franklin. Though he was known internationally, he remained a recluse most of his life and struggled deeply with depression and even tried-unsuccessfully-to commit suicide several times.

Though Cowper was raised in a religious environment as the son of chaplain to George the second, it seems likely he was converted in his early thirties after one of his long bouts of depression.
At the age of 32, Cowper met Jesus in an asylum under the care of his Christian doctor Nathaniel Cotton. He took comfort in reading about Jesus raising of Lazarus from the dead in John 11 and seemed to have Romans 3:23 impressed upon him which reads “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God.” “Immediately I received the strength to believe it” Cowper claimed “the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of His justification.”

In 1767, he became a good friend of John Newton, the writer of Amazing Grace after Newton had ministered to friends of Cowper who had experienced a death in the family. Newton was the curate at the local church in Olney and proved to be a true friend to Cowper throughout the rest of his life. “A sincerer or more affectionate friend no man ever had.” Cowper once said.

Though Cowper seems to have had a genuine conversion as a young man, he still experienced crippling doubt that crept up on him about every ten years. Though it’s not always crystal clear why he was thrown so violently into his depressions, we do have some clues from his life and writings.
When he was only six, his mother Anne died giving birth to his brother, John. His father sent to boarding school and he frequently had trouble with a school bully. According to John Piper’s book The Hidden Smile of God it seems plausible Cowper may have even suffered childhood sexual abuse by this same bully. In addition, while he was a student at Westminster, he fell in love with his cousin Theodora, and they planned to marry. But after several years of courtship, Theodora’s father suddenly forbade the marriage which left Cowper distraught. And though Cowper seemed to write about everyone and everything he had affection for throughout the course of his life, he rarely wrote about his father which may point to what may have been a troubled relationship.

Despite these long periods of debilitating gloominess, his poetry and hymn writing also seems to point to the fact that he had a great hope in the gospel. The aforementioned ‘Praise for the Fountain Opened’ was written in 1771, after some of Cowper’s lowest points in life where he exclaims:

“The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day;
And there have I, as vile as he,
Washed all my sins away.”

So what is to be learned about the life of Cowper? That the overwhelming loss of despair isn’t the final word and that as Cowper wrote “Redeeming love has been my theme, and will be till I die”