Sermon Tone Analysis

Insanity and Spiritual Songs in the Soul of a Saint

Reflections on the Life of William Cowper

1992 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors

Resource by John Piper Topics: Depression, Biography

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There are at least three reasons why I have chosen to tell the story of the 18th century poet William Cowper at this year’s conference.

One is that ever since I was seventeen — maybe before — I have felt the power of poetry.

I went to my file recently and found an old copy of Leaves of Grass, my high school’s literary magazine from 1964 and read the poems that I wrote for it almost thirty years ago.

Then I looked at the Kodon from my Wheaton days, and remembered the poem, “One of Many Lands” that I wrote in one of my bleaker moments as a college freshman.

Then I dug out The Opinion from Fuller Seminary and the Bethel Coeval from when I taught there.

It hit me again what a long-time friend poetry-writing has been to me.

The Breach

I think the reason for this is that I live with an almost constant awareness of the breach between the low intensity of my own passion and the staggering realities of the universe around me, heaven, hell, creation, eternity, life, God.

Everybody (whether they know it or not) tries to close this breach — between the weakness of our emotions and the wonder of the World.

Some of us do it with poetry.

William Cowper did it with poetry.

I think I know what he means, for example, when he writes a poem about his mother’s portrait long after her death and says,

And, while that face renews my filial grief,

Fancy shall weave a charm for my relief.

There is a deep release and a relief that comes when we find a way of seeing and saying some precious or stunning reality that comes a little closer to closing the breach between what we’ve glimpsed with our mind and what we’ve grasped with our heart.

It shouldn’t be surprising that probably over three hundred pages of the Bible was written as poetry.

Because the aim of the Bible is to build a bridge between the deadness of the human heart and the living reality of God.

The second reason I am drawn to William Cowper is that I want to know the man behind the hymn, “God Moves In a Mysterious Way.”

Over the years it has become very precious to me and to many in our church.

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform;

He plants his footsteps in the sea,

And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never failing skill,

He treasures up his bright designs

And works his sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy, and shall break

In blessings on your head.

Judge not the lord by feeble sense,

But trust him for his grace;

behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

His purpose will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;

the bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,

And scan his work in vain:

God is his own interpreter,

And he will make it plain.

This hymn hangs over our mantle at home.

It expresses the foundation of my theology and my life so well that I long to know the man who wrote it.

Finally, I want to know why this man struggled with depression and despair almost all his life.

I want to try to come to terms with insanity and spiritual songs in the same heart of one whom I think was a saint.

The Context of His Life

Let’s begin with a sketch of his life.

Who was he and when did he live?

He was born in 1731 and died in 1800.

That makes him a contemporary of John Wesley and George Whitefield, the leaders of the Evangelical Revival in England.

He embraced Whitefield’s Calvinistic theology rather than Wesley’s Arminianism.

It was a warm, evangelical brand of Calvinism, shaped (in Cowper’s case) largely by one of the healthiest men in the 18th century, the “old African blasphemer” John Newton, whom we will see more of in a moment.

Cowper said he could remember how as a child he would see the people at four o’clock in the morning coming to hear Whitefield preach in the open air.

“Moorfields (was) as full of the lanterns of the worshippers before daylight as the Haymarket was full of flambeaux on opera nights” (Gilbert Thomas, William Cowper and the Eighteenth Century, Ivor Nocholson and Watson, 1935, 204.).

He was 27 years old when Jonathan Edwards died in America.

He lived through the American and French revolutions.

His poetry was known by Benjamin Franklin who gave Cowper’s first volume a good review (Ibid., 267).

But he was not a man of affairs or travel.

He was a recluse who spent virtually all his adult life in the rural English country side near Olney and Weston.

From the standpoint of adventure or politics or public engagement his life was utterly uneventful.

The kind of life no child would ever choose to read about.

But for those of us who are older we have come to see that the events of the soul are probably the most important events in life.

And the battles in this man’s soul were of epic proportions.

So let’s sketch his seemingly uneventful life with a view to seeing the battles of the soul.

Deep Despair

He was born November 15, 1731 at Great Berkhampstead near London, a town of about 1500 people.

His father was rector of Great Berkhampstead and one of 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 six and his father sent him to Pitman’s boarding school in Bedfordshire.

It was a tragic mistake, as we will see from his own testimony later in life.

From the age of ten till he was seventeen he attended Westminster private school and learned his French and Latin and Greek well enough to spend the last years of his life fifty years later translating Homer and Madame 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 1752 he sank into his first paralyzing depression — the first of four major battles with mental breakdown so severe as to set him to string out of windows for weeks at a time.

Struggle with despair came to be the theme of his life.

He was 21 years old and not yet a believer.

He wrote about the attack of 1752 like this:

(I was struck) with such a dejection of spirits, as none but they who have felt the same, can have the least conception of.

Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror, and rising up in despair.

I presently lost all relish for those studies, to which before I had been closely attached; the classics had no longer any charms for me; I had need of something more salutary than amusement, but I had not one to direct me where to find it.

He came through this depression with the help of the poems of George Herbert (who lived 150 years earlier).

These contained enough beauty and enough hope that Cowper found strength to take several months away from London by the sea in Southampton.

What happened there was both merciful and sad.

He wrote in his Memoir:

The morning was calm and clear; the sun shone bright upon the sea; and the country on the borders of it was the most beautiful I had ever seen...Here it was, that on a sudden, as if another sun had been kindled that instant in the heavens, on purpose to dispel sorrow and vexation of spirit, I felt the weight of all my weariness taken off; my heart became light and joyful in a moment; I could have wept with transport had I been alone.

That was the mercy.

The sadness of it was that he confessed later that instead of giving God the credit for this mercy he formed the habit merely of battling his depression, if at all, by seeking changes of scenery.

It was the merciful hand of God in nature.

But he did not see him, or give him glory.

Not yet.

Shattered on a Brick Wall

Between 1749 and 1756 Cowper was falling in love with his cousin Theodora whose home he would regularly visit on the weekends.

She became the Delia of his love poems.