Hymns are beautiful and powerful tools. Like any good tool, you need to know when to best apply them. The right tool can make a seemingly impossible job a task done with ease. Can the same be true about hymns? I’ve always been struck with the fact that hymns, like tools, can seem to help tighten the screws of my heart when the uncertainties of life leave me unsettled. There seems to be no hymn quite as classic as “Amazing Grace” written by John Newton.
What you may not know is that John Newton was good friends with another hymn writer named William Cowper. Cowper may not be as famous a name but his hymns have certainly endured the test of time. One of his more famous hymns includes “Walking with God.” However, his most famous hymn is “There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” If you are unfamiliar with this hymn the title may come across as macabre. But the language sung reveals a heart knowing its need for grace.
The 4th verse of this tune sheds a bit more light on the man himself: “E’er since by faith I saw the stream; Thy flowing wounds supply, Redeeming love has been my theme, And shall be till I die…” That last line is repeated a total of four times. Cowper was a man remembered for sorrow. His own bouts with depression were so powerful and chronic that it inevitably led him to attempt to take his own life several times. His lifelong fight with depression, or what was then known as melancholy, was debilitating. It grasped hold of his life and seemingly would not let him go.
Cowper’s own love for the Lord would provide moments of elation and escape from the dread horrors of his own fear of God’s condemnation. His lifelong struggle with depression led him to St. Albans, an asylum for the mentally ill. In God’s providence, he was invited to Olney, England under the recommendation of John Newton. Newton and Cowper collaborated in various musical works penning a hymnbook for the church.
In his waning years, Cowper did not become “cured”. He struggled painfully with his sorrows all his days. In the year before his death, Cowper penned a poem titled “The Castaway”. In this work, we are granted a window into this sorrowful saint. Of the hopelessness of his estate, Cowper wrote, “No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone; When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’ed in deeper gulfs than he.”
What do we make of such individuals? Is the Christian faith only for those whose smiles seemingly span for weeks on end? Or does the cross still bear the weight for those who struggle day in and day out to get out of bed, to restrain anxiousness at work, to not spiral into an endless circle of “what if’s”? The Gospel penetrates even into the darkness as we found with Cowper and his tale.
The glimmers of the Gospel shine most brightly in the darkness, as the stars and planets do in the evening. It is only against such a backdrop of melancholy that hope can appear most clear. The weakness of our flesh does not impede the gospel, and neither the weaknesses of our minds. The melancholy of Cowper sought to pull his hand away from the Saviour, but it was Christ’s nail pierced hands which reminded him in the end, “My grip is stronger.” This is our abiding hope, our testimony strong and sure. That our hope in heaven above, and fleeing Hell’s shores are rooted in Him above; nothing less, nothing more. We do well to remind ourselves of this especially as the days are dark. It is the love of Christ which shines in the darkness. He is a savior of sins past, present, and future.
Rev. George Robertson once delivered a funeral sermon for a young man who had professed faith in Christ and committed suicide. He too looked on the life of William Cowper and especially his friendship with John Newton. Robertson pointed to a play performed by Webster University on the life of Cowper. It is the final scene is worth considering where Newton repeatedly tries to comfort his friend Cowper with God’s boundless and amazing grace. Yet he passed from death to life, Cowper died fearful and hopeless in uncertainty. Yet Robertson recalled Newton’s response in this play to the death of his dear friend, “Newton pauses for a time, then looks up to heaven and says, “See, Cowper, I told you so.” To which Robertson concluded, “What could not be communicated or repaired here will be there.”
Perhaps we too must learn to rest in the hope that our God offers to us in the face of tragedy however it manifests itself. Our world is full of all sorts of pain and horror, from depression to its acerbic fruit, suicide. However, suicide, though sinful, is not the unpardonable sin. As the Heidelberg Catechism so famously wrote, “What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins…” (HC 1)