William Cowper's depression

April 25 2000 sees the 200th anniversary of the death of William Cowper. Today he is known and loved for his intense, experimental God-centred hymns - and rightly so.

Yet in his own day he was Britain's foremost contemporary poet, and, through his Christian poetry led many people to Christ. This is all the more remarkable when we realise his poetry was written against the background of great spiritual depression, and almost continuous lack of assurance concerning his own salvation.

It is the intensity of Cowper's depression that is both striking and disturbing. Contrary to what has been asserted, he never lost his unshakeable conviction of the truth of Christianity. However, for almost three-quarters of his Christian pilgrimage he had only fleeting moments when he was sure he was a Christian. The rest of the time he knew the anguish of uncertainty, and the last five years of his life seem marked by unremitting spiritual darkness.

Spring

Cowper's life mirrors the seasons of the year. The spring of his life began with his birth to devoted Christian parents in 1731. His early childhood was very happy, but all that changed when he was only six. His mother died shortly after the birth of his brother John. William was sent away to prep school, where he suffered greatly through bullying. He eventually went on to Westminster School and, at his father's insistence, to study law in London, at 18.

During the next few years he suffered increasing bouts of depression, for a number of reasons. He felt unfitted for his chosen career. He knew great guilt because he did little work, preferring instead, the social pleasures of his day. His father died in 1756, leaving him without financial support, and his best friend, William Russell, drowned while swimming in the Thames. On top of all that, he developed an intense love for his highly strung and melancholic cousin, Theodora, but their relationship eventually came to nothing. The final straw came when, urgently needing work to support himself, Cowper allowed his name to go forward for the job of Clerk of Journals for the House of Lords. He couldn't face the public examination for the post, though he was more than capable of doing it, and made a number of feeble, but real, attempts to do away with himself. As a result, instead of working in the House of Lords, Cowper was committed to an asylum in St. Albans.

Summer

However, it was there in 1763 that the brief summer of his life began. Not for the first time, he picked up a Bible, hoping to find comfort. What he found was Romans chapter three and the glorious good news of free grace in Christ. He trusted himself, with all his guilt, to the Saviour, and found intense joy and peace. His insanity was gone.

He grew stronger and left the asylum. He dared not return to London for fear of being sucked into his old way of life, so he moved to be near his brother John in Huntingdon. Finding it impossible to live alone he moved in with the Unwins, a fine Christian family. Two years later, in October 1767, after the death of his landlord, Morley Unwin, Cowper moved to Olney with the widow, Mary Unwin (who became like a mother to Cowper) and her two grown-up children, William and Suzannah.

It was in Olney that Cowper's famous friendship with John Newton blossomed. Newton idolised Cowper for the deeply spiritual man that he had become, and Cowper became his pastoral assistant. They spent the largest part of most days together in conversation, prayer and visiting. Soon they began writing hymns for use at the midweek meetings of the church. The purpose of hymns was to teach new believers the truths of the faith, and to understand their own spiritual experience.

Autumn

Even during these years Cowper was not entirely free from depressions and dark feelings, but in 1773, at the age of 41, he suddenly snapped and entered the autumn of his life. For over a year he lost touch with reality. He thought everybody hated him - including Mary Unwin, his devoted nurse. He believed his food was poisoned. He was convinced that Newton had been replaced by an impostor. He became suicidal. Only gradually, through great kindness and many distractions - including gardening, rearing chickens and taming hares - was he nursed back to health.

The years that followed were ones of intense depression punctuated by periods of great joy. Much of his joy came from friendship and the conviction that he could serve God by writing poetry to challenge the unbelief and self-righteousness of the human heart. His depressions, on the other hand, were triggered by such things as bereavement, Newton's removal to London, the interference of his family in his affairs, and his excessive labour in writing.

Winter

Difficult as the 1780s were for Cowper, things worsened considerably with the arrival of the next decade and the winter of his life. Chief among his torments was watching his faithful nurse, Mary Unwin, suffering strokes that left her an invalid and finally brought her death in 1796. Cowper knew that it was her unstinting care for him that had brought her low, and that left him with a great sense of guilt. On top of that, well-meaning family members moved him about in the last years of his life, so that he felt profoundly lonely and rootless. Eventually he died in great spiritual despair in 1880, utterly convinced that the Lord had cast him off for ever.

Lessons

Five very practical lessons are suggested here.

1. The mentally ill are not beyond the pale of God's grace. Cowper was in an asylum and clearly unhinged when the Word of God entered his heart and transformed his whole being. And God did transform him, and made him an instrument for good for the conversion and strengthening of many. We need to remember that God uses the weak things of this world.

2. Not all a person's problems will be over when they become a Christian. Cowper's conversion delivered him from insanity and brought him peace and hope. But it didn't deliver him from the infirmities of his own constitution. We need to be careful not to present the Christian life as an idyllic cure for all ills.

3. You can be very depressed, indeed, mentally disturbed, and still be a child of God. Surely Newton was right about his friend Cowper. His hymns (and personal letters) reveal him to be eminent in devotion to the Lord, spiritual understanding and true wisdom. Yet he knew such spiritual instability and anguish. He appears to have been schizophrenic, and certainly had great difficulty discerning between his terrible hallucinations and reality. Yet one thing is apparent - mental instability does not prove a person unconverted or unspiritual.

4. Christian friendship is of tremendous value to depressed believers. However tragic Cowper's life was, what would it have been like without the loving care of John and Mary Newton, Mary Unwin and her son, William, or many others? There are many sad and lonely people in Christ's church. We are often tempted to give them a wide berth because we know we cannot solve their problems, but we need to understand that our company, friendship and interest will be a great support (even if this is not always obvious to us).

5. It is a great blessing to be sure that you are a child of God. So much of Cowper's anguish came from the fear that he had never truly been converted. In 1787 he told Newton that he would gladly give up all his literary work and acclaim, and rot in a dungeon, if only he could have hope of being saved. It is a wonderful blessing to know the witness of God's Spirit to your divine sonship, and to be certain in the hardest moments in life that you are loved by God and destined for his presence in glory.