William Cowper

Frankly, it's tragic for any church, any believer, to look down on other believers who struggle with mental illnesses, as if they are less loved by God, or maybe less faithful, or maybe less diligent in their faith. Frankly, I believe that as you read and as you learn, as you look at the footprints of others who've left their footprints on the sands of time, you discover that some rather heroic believers struggle with mental illness. Have you ever been depressed? If so, you know how debilitating it can be.

It's often accompanied by embarrassment and fear of talking about it, even with people close to you. Today as Stephen Davey continues through his series entitled Legacies of Light, he's going to introduce you to an 18th century English hymn writer named William Cowper. Cowper's life was riddled with bouts of severe depression. He even spent time in asylums.

But God used that time to reveal to Cowper the truth of the Gospel. His life of struggle demonstrates several valuable truths for us today. One of England's most famous poets, his name William Cooper. He was born in England in 1731, died just before his 70th birthday.

His father was a pastor, more than likely unconverted, as many pastors during the time of the Great Awakening were unconverted. His mother was a sweet and devoted mother, suffering the death of five of her children. William would be one of two that would live, but at the age of six years old, she died.

Her death marked William. He never forgot that sorrow and unfortunately his father gave him no sympathy. In fact, two household servant girls used to manipulate him, promising him that if he were a perfect boy, she would come back. You can imagine what this did to this little boy who tried his best to be perfect and she never returned.

He never got over losing her. He was sent off to a boarding school, which is everything you would imagine. It was a terrible experience for this sensitive, artistic boy. He was bullied mercilessly, beaten often by other students, mostly left to himself. He endured seven years of it and finally graduated from that particular system and then entered a system where he would spend the next dozen or so years preparing for a life of politics and law because that's what his father wanted him to do.

At the age of 23, having failed at an interview to enter law, he experienced his first paralyzing depression. It would be the first of four battles in his life. He would experience hallucinations. He would hear voices, have nightmares.

These breakdowns would be so severe, he would do nothing more than stare out a window for months at a time. In his day, there was little treatment. If he were living in our generation, he probably would have been diagnosed as schizophrenic or bipolar and would have had medical treatment or help for his depression. That was embryonic in its understanding in his generation.

So there was little help. He was introduced to the poetry of a believer who'd written poems 150 years earlier, a man I'd never heard of, and that seemed to bring him out of this state, and he eventually was released. He had 10 years of relative health, wandering, couldn't keep a job, struggling.

Eleven years after that internment, he suffered another complete breakdown, and this time, God providentially had him placed in the St. Albans Institute or Asylum for the Insane. And I say providentially because its director, Dr. Nathaniel Cotton, was a 58-year-old passionate follower of Jesus Christ who determined to not only try to help his patients with their medical conditions but deliver to them the gospel. He would often place Bibles throughout the hospital open to certain passages and pray that God would bring just the right patient at just the right time to read that passage of scripture. He engaged William Cooper in long conversations about the Lord, and the gospel was virtually unknown to Cooper, even though being raised in a pastor's home and he was interested in the gospel. One morning, by the grace of God, William Cooper sat on a window bench waiting for breakfast to be served, and next to him on the window ledge fluttering in the breeze was an open Bible. He reached out and he picked it up, and he began reading immediately at Romans chapter 3 and verse 24 and 25, being justified as a gift by his grace, made right not by our perfection but as a gift of God's grace. He read on, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in his blood, a satisfaction, that he endured the wrath of God. He paid the price. Cooper would later write, I saw immediately the sufficiency of Christ's atonement, my pardon sealed in his blood. I believed the gospel. I think I died with gratitude and joy, my eyes filled with tears, and I could only look up to heaven in overwhelmed love and wonder.

Several months later, William Cooper was released from the mad house, they called it St. Albans, but his battles were not over. And one of the reasons that I have read his biography and I wanted to deliver it to you is it is important to understand the fact that when you come to Jesus Christ, you're still fallen and flawed and frail and needy. I'm afraid we provide a bill of sale to an unbelieving culture that if you come to Jesus, everything's fixed.

He's better than any pill, any treatment, or therapy. Come to him and life immediately gets better. And then as a church or as believers were left to struggle personally with why isn't that happening to me? Why hasn't this all disappeared?

Why don't I always see the sun shining? Why do I struggle as Spurgeon admitted one day before his own congregation that he needed to stop gazing into the black hole of his own soul? I don't have the time to really go into details of what would happen next in Cooper's life as a believer. I will tell you at least a little bit that he fell in love with a cousin back in the days when I guess you could marry your cousins. And they were engaged to be married and then her father stepped in and refused. The marriage broke them apart and they never saw each other again, though still in love with one another.

She never married, followed privately his poetic career as he became a household name in England. At one point in his life, destitute, she sent through a friend anonymous financial support on which he lived and he never knew it was her. Well, he knows now, but he didn't know that. Following their breakup, he had another breakdown and sat in front of a window for 16 months without ever smiling. He did write to a friend that in his mind he always seemed to have three threads of despair to one thread of hope. He had that one string or thread of hope, but he was always tangled up into three threads. They would never leave him. He became convinced all over again that God did not love him. In fact, he would write that he would be the only person in the human race that had believed the gospel, trusted in Christ, only to have God reject him after he died.

He was convinced of that. It was a battle that he would wage his entire life, but in the midst of it all, William Cooper would write poems about faith and grace and redemption that the church is still singing nearly 300 years later. Well, let me kind of back up and start over again and try to summarize his life. I'm going to structure it around five principles that we can observe and believe and follow. The first is this. Personal frailties may be unrelenting, but they do not signify the displeasure of God. It's kind of long.

You'll need to know that for the quiz, so let me say it again. Personal frailties may be unrelenting, but they do not signify the displeasure, and I might add, and the rejection of God. Frankly, it's tragic for any church, any author, any believer to look down on other believers who struggle with mental illnesses as if they are less loved by God or maybe less faithful or maybe less diligent in their faith.

Frankly, I believe that as you read and as you learn, as you look at the footprints of others who've left their footprints on the sands of time, you discover that some rather heroic believers struggled with mental illnesses. Beloved, the brain is as fallen as your arthritic shoulders and knees, and what do you do about it? You go and you get therapy and you get medicine and you get help, and then you talk to everybody about your aches and pains.

In fact, you gather in groups of people who had this surgery or have that ache and pain or whatever. If we were all honest today, we would all admit to periods of discouragement and even despair, certainly defeat. The person who thinks that those mature in faith will never struggle ought to go visit Job, sitting on the ash heap, who said in his despair with 29 physical ailments, having experienced the deaths of his children, the loss of his finances, and he would say to those men who attempted to be his counselors, I wish I had been stillborn.

I wish my mother had miscarried me. God has abandoned me. We'd probably try to slip him a verse and add him to our prayer list.

He obviously doesn't have any faith. Study the lives of Moses and Elijah and Jeremiah and Jonah. In fact, have you ever thought about the fact that the two men who come back and they're standing with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, remember when Jesus reveals the glory, kind of pulls back the curtain, and they're robed in splendor and Jesus is talking to Moses and Elijah and Peter wakes up and sees what's going on and tries to build a shrine.

Remember that story, that narrative? Has it ever occurred to you that those two men that are standing there talking to Jesus had this in common? Both of them had asked God to kill them. They had said, we want to die.

Well, Cooper was there often. In fact, he went further in his own struggle and despair. He attempted to take his life several times. On one time, occasion, he tried to drink poison but couldn't get his fingers to open the bottle no matter how hard he tried.

On another occasion, he tried to hang himself, but just after passing into unconsciousness, the rope broke and he revived. I mean, you talk about despair and depression, instability, but God had not forsaken him. In fact, over the years, God would speak through him and today, without even knowing it, we'll quote a line from a poem.

We'll sing a hymn that he wrote while despairing. Let me give you a second principle. Personal friends may not eliminate your battles, but they can share them. I don't mind you meeting in a cluster of people who had that surgery or we talk about the second pain and we gather together.

That's fine. In fact, I think that's wonderful, sharing the battles. Without medical knowledge or treatment, God would bring him to points of sanity and reason largely through the influence and encouragement of friends. In fact, on one occasion when he was released from, I think it was his second internment at St. Albans, he rented space in the home of an older woman who became, to him for the rest of his life, sort of a mother figure to him, giving him what he had longed for and never had, having lost his mother. And by the providence of God, she happened to live next door to the village pastor who was also a poet, a man who at one point in his life had been a slave trader and never quite got over the shame of it.

We sing his song all the time, amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. They became fast friends. In reading several biographies in fact of Cooper, I learned more about John Newton than I expected to learn. I did find out that according to John Newton, right or wrong, he believed that the solution to any problem was work.

And so he immediately put Cooper to work. He made him visit all the people in the parish and help and with his hands and carpentry skills and whatever it was. Get involved in the lives of people and no doubt this had a tremendous encouraging impact as he served others. In fact, centuries later, a famous unbelieving psychiatrist by the name of Menninger, you probably heard of, would teach basically the same thing. He once said that if you felt depression creeping in, you should immediately lock up your house, drive across the railroad tracks to a poor area of town, find someone in need and give your resources and energy in helping them.

In other words, take your eyes off the black hole of your soul. Well, this was Newton's practical philosophy. He also encouraged Cooper to keep at his poems and Cooper did. In fact, he would write some 68 poems and then add them to Newton's 200 poems and then they published that collection in a hymnal. They call it the Olney from the village of Olney, O-L-N-E-Y, Olney Hymn Collection in 1779. In fact, now historians say that was the most influential hymnal that sort of kept that great awakening singing, the most influential hymnal for nearly a century.

Let me quickly add another principle, number three. Painful struggles might not eliminate ministry opportunities, they may enlarge them. His suffering provides a kind of depth and a kind of insight that would find unusually deep and insightful statements in his hymns. He wrote a poem entitled The Task and all it did was describe ordinary life but he integrated into that poem the gospel and that poem would be purchased by England. It made him famous, it made him rich as he introduced people to the gospel. Following the publication though of that poem, he had another dark episode. He lost sight of God's ability to forgive him and once again was tormented that God had cast him away. In fact, he would write this, God who made me regrets that he did. He decided to drown himself but when he arrived at the bridge from which he was going to jump, a man was sitting in the place he wanted to jump from and that distracted him and took the coach back home and then realizing God had spared his life again, sat down and wrote a poem that to this day is probably one of the best descriptions of the providence and sovereignty of God. He probably heard some of it.

Some of it goes like this. 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 minds of never-ending skill, he treasures up his bright designs and works his sovereign will. Judge not the Lord by feeble sense but trust him for his grace. Behind the frowning providence, he hides a smiling face.

Let me give you another principle worth practicing. Number four, personal interaction with nature can't replace God's word but it can enlighten and encourage you. During one period of recovery, children in the only village brought him little rabbits who needed tending and he took care of them and they thrived and then multiplied and soon he had a lot of rabbits. He became sort of a repository in this little village for unwanted animals or animals that needed care and he took them in and then he planted a garden to help feed them. It wasn't long before he was growing melons and cabbages and cauliflower and broccoli and all those things that are really great for animals to eat in my opinion. But eventually he had this large collection of guinea pigs, rabbits, a squirrel, pigeons, two canaries, two goldfinches, two dogs, several cats, hens, ducks and some geese. And he wasn't just feeding them or tending to them, he was observing them. He began to draw analogies between them and truths from God's word, characteristics of God's care and creative design. He began writing about them in his journal. He sort of dove in with great passion in his little greenhouse he made and where he would grow all of these vegetables along with myrtles and pineapples and flowers. There's a little doubt that although William Cooper suffered without friends and service to others and a growing fascination with the creation of God, he would have suffered so much more. He was living at a time when there was no medicinal help. On one occasion he even wrote to a friend and said this, he said, caring for animals and plants and working as a gardener helps me fight off melancholy and hypochondria.

Interesting. He began to refer to himself as God's under gardener in paradise. The principle is simple and yet it's profound. Take your eyes off yourself.

Go out and serve someone else. Take care of an animal. Tie what you observe in nature to scripture, the Lord's creative handiwork, the Lord's character, his grace, his design. Maybe write out the analogies like he did, drawing them out, thinking them through as they related to scripture. In very practical terms, maybe today the best thing you could ever do is go take a walk.

He would walk two hours a day. Put up a bird feeder. Do it. Watch them. Feed them. Plant some flowers. Get a dog or two dogs.

I almost slipped there but caught myself. Go out in the yard. Plant some things. Maybe you're saying I don't have a yard.

You can come to my yard and plant flowers anytime you like, okay? Let me give you one more principle. Powerful faith does not guarantee freedom from suffering but it does provide a guided tour through it, weak as it is. As an older man, Cooper once remarked to a friend that God had marked him out for misery and his friend said, no, God has marked you out for mercy, an object of mercy. To this day, we sing of God's gospel of grace and mercy because of what Cooper struggled with and through, what he doubted in his despair but he still clung to that one strand even though tangled up with the others. His greatest hymn, we sang it earlier today, there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stain. See, the reason we're singing that today is because it's filled with despair. It speaks the truth and then turns the corner and shows the satisfaction of Christ on our behalf so that we can believe by faith what God gave us, what converted William Cooper that we are justified as a gift by his grace. We will never be perfect.

We will never measure up. It's a gift of his grace to sinners because of the satisfaction of Christ. So Cooper would summarize it in that hymn when he would write a stanza like this one, the dying thief rejoiced to see that fountain in his day and there may I though vile as he wash all my sins away. There you have that transparent blend of despair and deliverance.

The wrath of God and the favor of God. At the age of 69, William Cooper died in his sleep. One of his friends who saw him just after he died remarked that William had an expression on his face that could only be described with the word surprised. I love that. Surprised. What could it mean in that brief transition between earth and heaven? Perhaps surprised that he was being escorted into a place he felt he would be rejected from.

That God was actually satisfied with Christ and Cooper was in Christ. Surprised maybe that he is singing what he prophesied in his hymn that he doubted deeply he would ever do in that one stanza or stanza we've been singing now for nearly 300 years. Here's what he dared to write as he struggled. When this poor, lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in the grave, then in a nobler, sweeter song, I'll sing thy power to save. I'll sing thy power to save. I'll sing thy power to save. Then in a nobler, sweeter song, I'll sing.

And by the way, Cooper's still singing it. And we, because our satisfaction is in Christ who satisfied the wrath of God, we will sing with him this same prophetic truth now fulfilled in all of our lives, no matter our frailties, our disabilities, our failures, our doubts. We cling to Christ and we shall one day sing his power to save. Thanks for joining us today on Wisdom for the Heart. Stephen Davies' lesson on the life of William Cowper is part of a series of Christian biographies called Legacies of Light. Perhaps as you were listening, you realized that one of your friends or loved ones could benefit from hearing the encouraging story of William Cowper and how God used his struggles. I encourage you to share this lesson. It's on our website so you can send them the link if you go to wisdomonline.org. Thanks again for joining us and join us next time for more wisdom for the heart.