What shall we learn from the life of William Cowper? The first lesson is this: We fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of his pessimism.

God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm. (Poetical Works, 292)

So begins “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” one of the last hymns William Cowper ever wrote. It appeared in the collection of “Olney Hymns” under the title “Conflict: Light Shining out of Darkness.” Over the years, it has become very precious to me and many in our church. It has carried us through fire.

For years, an embroidered version of this hymn has hung in our living room. It was created and given to us by a young mother who was sustained by it through great sadness. It expresses the foundation of my theology and my life so well that it made me long to know the man who wrote it. I also wanted to know why the author of this poem struggled with depression and despair almost all his life. I wanted to try to come to terms with insanity and spiritual songs in the same heart of one whom I believe was a genuine Christian.

Prelude to the Asylum

William Cowper was born in 1731 and died in 1800. His father was rector of the village church and one of King George II’s chaplains. So the family was well-to-do but not evangelical, and William grew up without any saving relation to Christ.

His mother died when he was 6, and his father sent him to Pitman’s, a boarding school in Bedfordshire. From the age of 10, until he was 17, he attended Westminster School and learned his French and Latin and Greek well enough to spend the last years of his life, fifty years later, translating the Greek of Homer and the French of Madam Guyon.

From 1749, he was apprenticed to a solicitor with a view to practicing law. At least this was his father’s view. He never really applied himself and had no heart for the public life of a lawyer or a politician. For ten years he did not take his legal career seriously but lived a life of leisure with token involvement in his supposed career.

In 1763, when he was 32 years old, he was about to be made Clerk of Journals in Parliament. What would have been a great career advancement to most men struck fear into William Cowper—so much so that he had a total mental breakdown, tried three different ways to commit suicide, and was put into an asylum.

Awakened at St. Albans

So in December 1763 he was committed to St. Albans Insane Asylum, where the 58-year-old Dr. Nathaniel Cotton tended the patients. Cotton was somewhat of a poet, but most of all, by God’s wonderful design, an evangelical believer and a lover of God and the gospel. He loved Cowper and held out hope to him repeatedly in spite of his insistence, wrought from the guilt he felt over his suicide attempts, that he was damned and beyond hope.

Six months into his stay, Cowper found a Bible lying (not by accident) on a bench, where he read the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. There he “saw so much benevolence, mercy, goodness, and sympathy with miserable men, in our Saviour’s conduct, that I almost shed tears upon the revelation; little thinking that it was an exact type of the mercy which Jesus was on the point of extending towards myself” (William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century, 131–32).

Increasingly he felt he was not utterly forsaken. Again he felt led to turn to the Bible. The first verse he saw was this: “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” (Romans 3:25 KJV).

Immediately I received the strength to believe it, and 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 a moment I believed, and received the gospel…Unless the Almighty arm had been under me, I think I should have died with gratitude and joy. (William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century, 132)

He had come to love St. Albans and Dr. Cotton so much that he stayed on another twelve months after his conversion. One might wish the story were one of emotional triumph after his conversion. But it did not turn out that way. Far from it.

Friendship with a Former Slave Trader

Two years after Cowper left St. Albans, the most important relationship of his life began—his friendship with John Newton. Newton was the curate at the church in Olney when he met Cowper in 1767. He had lost his mother when he was six, just as Cowper had. But after being sent to school for a few years, he traveled with his father on the high seas, eventually becoming a slave-trading seaman himself. He was powerfully converted, and God called him to the ministry. He had been at Olney since 1764 and would be there till 1780.

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