William Cowper — Michael Haykin

Our thoughts in this series, this series for the month of November, have to do with areas of Christian spirituality. We want to look at William Cooper, four of his hymns that we're going to look at. The most famous probably, There is a Fountain Filled with Blood, talking about the nature of the Christian life.

Next week we want to think about Andrew Bonner. Also sometimes his name is a bit of a contention as to how to pronounce it. Sometimes pronounced Andrew Bonnar, but it was Andrew Bonner. A Scottish Presbyterian minister whose claim to fame in some respects is his friendship with Robert Murray McShane, who died at the age of 29.

Bonner lived well into his 80s, never forgot his friend. Wrote his friend's life story, which became an immediate spiritual bestseller. But we want to think about Bonner and the whole area of prayer and spirituality.

And then somebody who I hope needs no introduction, at least in terms of his name, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. A very well known Victorian Baptist preacher who died in 1892. And we want to think about something of his ministry and awesome ministry that God gave to this man through the course of about 40 years.

And then we want to focus our thoughts on his reflections upon the Lord's table. Almost alone among 19th century authors, Spurgeon maintained a richer, richer view of the table than most of his contemporaries.

Most of his contemporaries had lost sight of something of the riches of the table. And Spurgeon was able to hold fast, I think, what is a very important truth about the table, because he was reading earlier writers like the Puritans.

And then finally, we want to look at a man named D .A. McGregor, who I suspect none of you have heard of. Only those who have studied Baptist history here in Ontario would have heard of him. He was the second principal of McMaster University when McMaster was still, well actually sorry, Toronto Baptist College, which was part of McMaster University when McMaster was still on Bloor Street.

The building it occupied is now the Royal Conservatory of Music, right next door to the University of Toronto Varsity Arena. And D .A. McGregor died in 1819. We want to think about something of evangelical life here in Ontario.

In his day, it was a rich day for evangelicals in Ontario. Somewhere between 17, maybe 75 percent of people living in Ontario went to an evangelical church during his day. Not that they were all necessarily converted individuals, but it certainly indicates something of the change that has taken place in Ontario in the intervening century.

We want to think about something of the nature of evangelicalism in Ontario. And in particular, we want to spend some time looking at McGregor's life and a hymn that he wrote, Jesus, Wonderous Saviour, which is an absolutely fabulous, fabulous hymn.

William Cowper and the Evangelical Revival

Well, tonight though, we want to think about William Cooper. And I'm stretching it a little because he died in 1800 at the beginning of the 19th century. And so his life touches the cusp of the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries.

And so I'm, as I say, taking some latitude when I, the title of the series was Christian Spirituality in the 19th century. Now, just a little background for those of you who may not have been with us in the previous series, which looked at the 18th century, a little background about what was taking place in that century around Cooper and the environment in which Cooper exercised his ministry of writing hymns and poetry.

The 18th century is a remarkable one. It begins with a Britain in which the Archbishop of Canterbury is complaining that things had never been so low in a Christian country as they were in the 1730s and early 1740s.

A Britain in which the aristocracy generally lived for pleasure, in which both from the prime minister at the time, Robert Walpole, and the early kings of the Hanoverian dynasty, George I and George II, one saw a lifestyle of immorality and sexual license and drunkenness.

And not surprisingly, significant portions of the population of England follow suit. But by the end of the 19th century, there had been, end of the 18th century rather, there had been radical changes take place in British society.

From a people who had little interest largely in the gospel, there had been planted throughout England large communities of God-fearing, Bible-loving people, many of them called Methodists. One thinks of the Wesleys, whom God raises up in the late 1730s and early 1740s at great personal cost and hardship, who rode throughout England with the message of the gospel that had in many pulpits been lost.

As you look at the Anglican church, the state church, in the 1720s through the 1740s, one has to admit that the gospel had been largely obscured. That many of those who filled those pulpits were men who were simply passing the time of day to secure time and money to do other pursuits rather than the care of the various flocks and shepherding of the people of God who were entrusted to their care.

In London, for instance, when William Remain, an evangelical minister, goes there in the late 1740s, early 1750s, he knew of no other evangelical minister in the Church of England in the entire city of London, the largest city in the world, the city probably close to a million people at that day.

By the end of Remain's life, he had lived a long life, by the time he came to die in the 1790s, he knew of probably two or three hundred at least in London alone evangelical ministers. And so there was remarkable changes, and William Cooper's life is part and parcel of this evangelical revival, and he becomes one of the great hymn writers of that revival.

Cowper's Family, Education, and Literary Formation

He was born in 1731. He was born amid what one writer has described as great expectations. He came from a family of wealth and position and power. The Coopers were a great family, one of the upper gentry.

They were not necessarily aristocracy, all of them, but they touched the fringe of the upper middle class and the upper class itself. The family on whose estates he was born had about 10 ,000 acres in the heart of Hertfordshire, one of the home counties around the city of London.

His father was a rector, the Reverend John Cooper, who was one of the chaplains to George II. His grandfather, you don't need to necessarily get all the details just to get the larger picture of the background in which he came, his grandfather was Spencer Cooper, who had been in his day a judge, a member of parliament, and a fairly important figure in the political system of England in the mid -18th century.

Spencer's brother, after whom William was named, was William Cooper, who also was known as Earl Cooper. He was an earl and made an earl for some of his political responsibilities. And so law and politics were very much part of the lifeblood of his father's family.

On his father's side, politics, many of them involved in politics and many of them involved in law. It would not be surprising that his father expected his son to follow in the footsteps of his forebears and become a lawyer or become involved in politics.

But William was also born into a very artistic family. His mother was a devotee of poetry of the day. Her maiden name was Anne Donne, D-O-N-N-E, and some of you may know the great 17th century poet, John Donne, and she was distantly related to this great poet of the 17th century.

And a number of William Cooper's family were poets. Ashley Cooper, he'll come into our story in a minute, he's an uncle. He made a name for himself as a poet. One of Cooper's cousins, Martin Madan, M-A-D-A-N, a great evangelical preacher of the day, a man who had quite a ministry after his conversion under John Wesley, whose ministry was ruined in the 1770s when he printed a book defending polygamy.

And we won't go into the reasons as to why he defended it, but he argued that polygamy was a solution to the widespread prostitution in London. He recommended that many of these women could be married off in multiple numbers to men.

And not surprisingly, the book ruined his ministry. But he was a famous poet. In fact, there is in our hymnals, there is sometimes a hymn that is sometimes ascribed to Martin Madan. Maria Cooper, also an evangelical, another cousin of William Cooper, also was a fairly well-known hymn writer in her day.

And she was well-known for her book, Original Poems, on various occasions. And so Cooper is born into a family which has on the one side law and politics. His father will expect him to go into law, and we'll see what comes of that.

But on the other side, there is flowing through the veins of many of his family this interest in literary subjects, poetry, and so on. And it is that that will come out in William's life. His mother and father had seven children.

Only two would survive infancy, not untypical of the period we're looking at. William, and then born six years later, was John. And within a few weeks of John's birth, his mother died. It was the first of a number of shocks to William's system that he really never overcame in some respects.

Down to his dying day, William retained very vivid memories of his mother, even though he was only six when she died. He could say many years later, I can truly say, not a week passes, perhaps with equal veracity, I might say, not a day in which I do not think of her as his mother.

Such was the impression her tenderness made upon me, though the opportunity she had for showing it was so short. His father, who seems to have been a little on feeling as to his son's experiences after the death of his mother, packed him off pretty quickly to a boarding school.

He's got two sons. One is only a few weeks old when the mother dies, and he has to take care of him with a wet nurse. The other son, whom he presumably doesn't really want around, is packed off to a boarding school.

And not untypical of the upper class in England at that time, and some of the upper middle class, was the system of sending sons to boarding schools at a young age. And so William was sent to a boarding school, a place called the Old Vicarage, in which the headmaster was a man named William Pitman, who was a classical scholar.

And it was here in these early years of his primary school education that a love for poetry was sown, because this man took his students through some of the classical poetry, obviously being read in translation.

He emerged from his primary school with a love of poetry, and also, because the headmaster being a classical scholar, those languages, the rudiments of them had begun to be taught to him. And so he emerged with a beginning of what would become a commanding knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and Italian.

It's a very different period of education. But the sciences were not primary in the educational curriculum. What was primary were languages and classical studies. And so it's not surprising he had a number of these languages.

He began to get them under his belt, so to speak, when he emerged from his primary school education. Now the tradition of the family was that he would be sent to Westminster School for his secondary education, that is education in his early and mid-teens.

And so it was, he was sent to Westminster School, where there were about 350 other boys. Typical boarding school. In those days, Westminster was regarded as the finest boarding school for young men in England, much even finer than one that we know the name probably well today, Eton.

And it was designed for those who would be in positions of importance, of power, and influence in British English society when they had come to adulthood. But his experience there was an interesting one, to say the least.

Most of the teachers there were not good teachers. When they turned up to class, their teaching, if they turned up to class, Cooper remembers many occasions when the teachers didn't come to class, or if they did come, they might be drunk.

But when they turned up to class, the teaching was of not a good quality. And so it was that William and a group of other students began to teach themselves. And it was here that he developed a great interest in some of the classical poets of the ancient world, in particular Homer.

And he began reading Homer in the original Greek, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Many years later, in his last probably 10 years of his life, he will spend writing a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which will be published in the 1790s.

And his lifelong love of poetry of the ancient world is shown in his experience at Westminster. Some of the other characteristics that Cooper would have later in life are also evident here. His love of writing.

Cooper's letters are an education in themselves. If you ever have the opportunity to read some of his letters, his letters would become very well known in the 19th century as an example of how to write a letter, so that it not only informs, but educates.

His interest in pets. Newton, rather Cooper, had a great dislike of the barbarity of many aspects of English society in the 18th century. Bull-baiting and bear-baiting were still common practices, although dying out.

Practices where one would put in a pit a bull or a bear and tie it to a stake, and then men would bet on their dogs as to which dog would be able to eventually kill the bear or the bull. Fox-hunting was a major pastime among the aristocracy, and Cooper, who grew up in this aristocratic environment, developed very early on a deep dislike for the treatment of animals by the English upper class, and he has a number of poems in which he's very critical of the way in which the English upper class were cruel to animals.

He had, in his time at Westminster School, he had a pet mouse that he smuggled into his room. Not supposed to have pets in his room, but he smuggled it in and kept it in a drawer. Later in life, he would have a pet hare, which he kept, and he's got a poem called The Hare.

So, many of the characteristics that would be part of Cooper's life begin to emerge during his time at Westminster. Now, by the time that he graduates in 1749, and he now has to make his way in the world, his father was convinced that he was a budding lawyer.

His father was completely, utterly mistaken. Cooper would later write of his father's intent. My father, he wrote, intended to beget a chancellor, a chancellor of the university. He got to be a lawyer first, and then go on to become a chancellor.

Instead, he begat a translator of Homer. It's impossible for the effect to differ more from the intention. He became articles. There were four law courts in London, with names like the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Gray's Inn, and Lincoln's Inn.

And you started in one of these, as it turns out, he started in the Middle Temple, and he was articles as a clerk to a solicitor in London, and then he would work his way up, so eventually he would be called to the bar and become a solicitor, a lawyer himself.

And he was a lazy lawyer. He admits this many years later. Remember, it's important to recognize he is not a Christian during this period of time. He never used his time properly, wasted his talents, had really no interest in law.

He found himself pushed by his father into a profession that did not attract his interest at all. The real essence of his life was a group of men that he hung out with, if I can use contemporary jargon, in London, who called themselves the Nonsense Club.

And these were a number of men, some of whom he would later recognize as ne 'er-do-wells, men who had enough money to live a kind of rakish life, not bothering where their income came from, because their parents had left them significant money, or put their significant money away for them to live on.

And they would meet each Thursday night where they'd drink and eat dinner together, and share their literary concerns. And this was the heart, really. This is what made Cooper tick. So on the one hand, you've got him during the day, plunged into the world of law, despising it.

And also, really, from his constitution, unable, as we will see, to cope with the demands a public life demanded. On the other hand, this kind of second life of his, this group of men, the Nonsense Club, also being the main focus of his interests.

Cowper's Unrequited Love and Mental Distress

It's during this period of time, in the 1750s, he falls in love. Having been raised in an all-male environment at these boarding schools, he had had little time to get acquainted with the opposite sex.

And so it is that he's now suddenly out in the world, and he has opportunity. He falls in love with his cousin. And this is the daughter of the uncle I mentioned earlier, Ashley Cooper, who was a poet.

And Ashley Cooper had three daughters. Harriet, who would become known as Lady Hesketh, she would marry a man who had some title. And she would play, and I'm not going to go into it, she would play an important part in Cooper's later life.

She would become his literary executor, when he experiences deep bouts of depression, and most writers will agree, times of insanity. And she would become his literary executor. She never liked his evangelicalism, and actually destroyed parts of his literary heritage, to prevent it being seen how evangelical a man he was.

So there was Harriet, that's the older sister. There was a younger sister, the younger sister was called Elizabeth, but it was a middle sister, Theodora, whom young William fell in love with. She would die about 24 years after William.

She died when she was 90. He would die, as I had mentioned, in 1800. She appears to have loved him, and both of them appear to have made plans to get married. But actually, Theodora's father refused to allow them to get married.

He gave his ostensible reason, two reasons. One is, first of all, they were cousins. And as cousins, he felt they shouldn't get married. Cousins in that day, and since that day have gotten married, and I'm not sure how strong a reason this was from his point of view.

More important from his point of view, was he was convinced William didn't have any money. He was right, William didn't have any money. And he observed closely that William didn't have really much skill in being a lawyer, and therefore he figured that William was never going to make a lot of money, and his daughter had been used to significant wealth.

And he didn't want his daughter marrying a man who, as far as he was concerned, would end up a pauper. The real reason was probably Ashley's wise realization that on both sides of the family, there ran a history of mental illness.

And he was fearful that any children they had would be mentally insane. Ashley himself wrestled with deep depression, sometimes for weeks on end, and he shut himself up in his study. And when he didn't shut himself up in his study, people said he was a very odd character in some of his actions.

William Cooper himself, at this period of time, was going through a period of depression. And Theodora also showed signs of being mentally unbalanced at times. Cooper, though, would take it very difficult.

This was the second major shock to his system. The first was the death of his mother. The second would be the frustration of his love, as it were, for Theodora. He wrote a poem in 1754. It is important to note that even at the, sometimes in the depths of despair that Cooper would be plunged, even at times when we would describe him as insane, he was still able to write powerful, powerful poetry.

Here is the poem he wrote in 1754 when he was forced apart with Theodora. He called her Delia, D-E-L-I-A. The heart of a lover is never at rest with joy overwhelmed or sorrow oppressed. When Delia is near, all is ecstasy then, and I even forget I must lose her again.

When absent, as wretched as happy before, despairing I cry, I shall see her no more. Once he was parted from her, he never saw her again in this world. And neither of them, it would appear, recovered from the shock in some respects.

She never married, vowing that she had loved only William and could never love another. And she stayed true to that love for him. Many, many years later, when he found himself in poverty and trying to live like a gentleman, a man who had been raised to kind of a, in a middle, upper middle class home, but he didn't have the resources to live that way, and he was really in poverty, he began to receive anonymous gifts of money.

He never found out who his benefactor was. It turned out to be a benefactress. It was none other than Theodora, who regularly sent anonymous gifts of money to him until he died in 1800. She would not die until 1824.

Cowper's Conversion and Assurance of Salvation

Now nothing influenced William Cooper's poetry more than his faith, and thus his conversion plays a major role in all that subsequently came from his pen, and we need to take some time in looking at his conversion.

Fortunately for us, Cooper has left us a fairly detailed written account of it in a document called The Memoir, which thankfully was in other hands than Harriet Hesketh's. If she had gotten her hands on it, she would have destroyed it.

In which he records how God brought him to a saving knowledge of himself. The breaking of the relationship with Theodora certainly was a key aspect that God used on the road to Cooper's conversion. That took place in around 1754 -1755.

Two years later, his best friend, a man named Sir William Russell, was drowned, and that was another shock to his system. He wrote these words on Russell's death, Doomed as I am in solitude to waste the present moments and regret the past, Deprived of every joy I valued most, My friend torn from me, and my mistress lost, See me neglected on the world's rude coast, Each dear companion of my voice lost, Nor ask why clouds of sorrow shade my brown, Ready tears wait only leave to flow, Why all that soothes a heart from anguish free, All but delights the happy, pause with me.

Between 1757 and 1763, when Cooper does experience an evangelical conversion, the poetry that he's left, and the writings that he's left, some of the letters that date from this indicate an increasing sense of despair, an increasing sense of conviction of sin, an increasing sense of his own worthlessness.

He sank lower and lower in spirits. The last straw comes in 1763. He was to take a very important job in the House of Lords, and there was a public examination that was part of the position. His whole family was banking that he would be able to successfully make this examination, and repay all of the efforts that they had done into encouraging, well, sending him initially to Westminster, the prime school for secondary school in England, and then providing for his training in law at the inner, the middle, and then the inner temple.

But Cooper was a very shy person, and the idea of having to go through a public examination in law for a number of hours drove him to despair. He was convinced he couldn't pass the tests, and he would utterly dismay his family.

He felt he only had one alternative, which was suicide. He purchased, and he tried, as we will see, killing himself in three ways. He purchased a large, what he thought was a sufficient quantity of lardanum, which is a liquid form of opium.

He downed it, but it didn't do the job. Finding himself still living, he then took a knife, and tried to pierce his chest with it, but again he failed to kill himself that way. Finally, he figured he'd hang himself, and took his darter, and hung himself up to one of the rafters in the room in which he was in.

He awoke to find himself still alive. His maid had discovered him, the belt had broken, and he had collapsed to the floor. By this time, he was almost, what we would describe as insane. His family, realizing the strain he had been under, the fact that he had been pushed to the length of trying to kill himself, committed him to an insane asylum.

One gets the sense, before we look at who was running that, and what God did with him there, we get a sense of his feeling of remorse about what he had tried to do in this poem, lines written during a period of insanity.

As I say, it's fascinating that he could write rich, deep poetry in the midst of dreadful despair. The second verse of this poem goes like this, and he's talking about what he feels, how God feels about him.

Damned below Judas, more abhorred than he was, who for a few pence sold his holy master, twice betrayed Jesus' name. In other words, he's convinced that the crime that he had done was far worse than Judas' and that he would be damned for it.

And then again, this is the way the poem ends. Him, that is Judas, the vindictive rod of angry justice sent quick and howling to the center, that is hell, headlong. I, fed with judgment in a fleshly tomb, am buried above ground.

And this is poetry. Cooper excelled in what we call free verse. And I spent very much time going through this because you need to get a glimpse of where Cooper was and what God does for him. And how Cooper, there is a constitutional problem that Cooper will wrestle with all of his life.

And he does illustrate for us that some Christians, those even after conversion, wrestle sometimes with nervous or fearful constitutions. That things are not always made, as it were, perfect after conversion.

Thankfully, William was put in a place where those who were insane were, that was run by a Christian. A man named Nathaniel Cotton, who was a friend of another great hymn writer of the 18th century, Philip Doddridge.

And Cotton began to try to care for him and share the gospel with him. In the early days when Cooper was there, all he would do is walk around the ground saying this, I'm damned, I'm damned, I'm damned.

He was convinced that his attempt to commit suicide had put him outside the pale of God's mercy. One day, however, Cooper found a bible lying on a garden bench. And he opened it and began to read of the raising of Lazarus from the dead.

He began to become hopeful. And he says that he saw so much benevolence and mercy and goodness and sympathy in Christ's dealing with Lazarus and with Lazarus' family. He began to hope, maybe there was hope for him.

It was a few weeks later, he was reading the scriptures. Nathaniel Cotton has got him reading the word of God. He reads this verse from Romans 3, verse 25. I'm talking about Christ, whom God has set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are passed through the forbearance of God.

The passage speaks richly about how through faith in Christ, and Christ as the substitution for sinners, for all their sins, that a man or a woman can enter into peace with God. Cooper said, would say upon reading this, immediately I received strength to believe and the four 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. He would stay another year in Nathaniel Cotton's care.

Basically, he has a sufficient sense to realize that he needs to grow stronger mentally before he can go back out into the world as it were. But he's being converted. A number of years later, he would write this poem.

And it's part of a group of poems we're going to look at in the second hour called the Old Me Hymns. It's based on Revelation 21 .5. Behold, I make all things new. How blessed thy creature is, O God, when with a single eye he views the luster of thy word, the day spring from on high.

Through all the storms that veil the skies and frown on earthly things, the sun of righteousness he eyes with healing on his wings. Struck by that light, the human heart, a barren soil no more, sends the sweet smell of grace abroad where serpents lurked before.

The soul, a dreary province once of Satan's dark domain, feels a new empire formed within and owns a heavenly reign. The glorious orb, and he's since first obedient to thy word, he started from the gold, has cheered the nations with the joys his orient rays impart.

But Jesus, it is thy light alone can shine upon the heart. We see here in this, what some would regard as a hymn, but probably is better described as a poem, his description of what God had done for him.

He'd taken him from a position where he had been in Satan's dark domain, where he had felt that his heart was barren, that serpents lurked there, and God had shined upon him. And now he was filled with God's grace, and Jesus had shone upon his heart.

Cowper, John Newton, and the Olney Hymns

But four years after this, between 1763, that's a place in 1763, his conversion. Between 1763 and 1767, he was led by God to live with a family called the Unwins. And the father was a minister of the gospel, an evangelical man.

And he received much spiritual care living in this household. In 1767 though, Reverend Unwin died suddenly. And Cooper would decide to live on with the family. The woman, and his name was Mary Unwin, was about 10, 12 years older than he.

And the son was a man named William Unwin, who was a very close friend of Cooper's. In 1767, the family met John Newton, and would move to a place called Olney. And let me say a little bit about Newton, so you understand something of the quite dramatic background, the dramatic contrast, rather, between Newton and Cooper.

Cooper is, and would remain all of his life, a shy individual, a man who wrestled with a delicate, really a delicate constitution to some degree. Newton is the complete opposite, a man who was a very powerful man physically, a man who had been raised in a godly home, but again, whose mother died young, and whose father had encouraged him to go to sea when he was about 12.

And he'd worked his way up through the ranks of merchant marine ships in the Navy. He'd spent some time on a British man-of-war, a warship, but then had been able to escape from that, and spent most of his life on merchant ships.

He'd become a slave trader. He'd been a participant in that horrible slave trade, where ships would leave ports like Bristol and Liverpool, and would sail down, around Spain, and down the coast of Africa to West Africa, the Gold Coast, where they would sell trinkets to African chiefs to purchase slaves, and then transport slaves across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, or southern United States, where they would sell them, again, for goods that they would transport back to England.

And Newton had been part of that. In fact, he had been caught up in a situation where he himself had been a slave. He had gone ashore, he'd been captured by a man who was running a slave plantation in Africa, and for a while he was a slave himself.

You'd think that would cure him of the horrible job, but it did not. And in the late 1740s, once, on one occasion, when his ship had sold slaves in the Caribbean, and they were heading back to England, they had run into a horrific storm, and Newton, who'd been a godless man, cried out to God that if God got them through, then he'd think better of his life.

And God got them through. And Newton started to be shocked that maybe there is a God who'd answered his prayer. And he began to read the scriptures, and he came to Liverpool in the late 1740s, and was there, became part of an evangelical congregation, and used to go and hear George Whitfield preach.

And in time, during the 1750s, began to be convinced that God was calling him to pastoral ministry. And so it was in the early 1760s, when Newton was in his early 30s, he was called to the church at a place called Olney in Buckinghamshire.

And he would be the minister of the church for about 17 to 18 years in Olney. And it's in this context that William Cooper meets him. And Newton is enjoying God's blessing in that church. Olney was a town of about 3 ,000 people, most of them lace workers, men and women who worked in little factories in their homes, where they made lace doilies and other lace products.

It was very tiresome work. They'd be up from a morning, from sunrise to sunset. And for many of them, as the years went on, it was a crippling sort of work, because it was very fine, very delicate. And if you didn't have your vigor and strength as you got older, it would be very difficult to maintain that occupation.

But it was among these sort of people that Newton had a rich, rich ministry. And his church was filled. Probably somewhere between 800 to 1 ,000 on a Sunday morning would listen to him preach. He wasn't the greatest of preachers.

But he had a powerful grasp of what God had done for him. He was a great spiritual mentor. He became a spiritual guide to many in the area. And so it was, Cooper was introduced to him. And he was perfect for Cooper.

Newton, the extrovert, the man who had lived all his rough and ready life, who'd had a radical conversion. Cooper, a very delicate man, a man who'd been trained to the life of a country gentleman in England, but also who had had a radical conversion.

And Newton, for a number of years, was a balm to Cooper's soul. He would take him with him on his visits, pastoral visits. He got Newton to lead in prayer sometimes, in the service. On other occasions he got Newton sometimes to take prayer meetings.

Historically, as some commentators who have not been Christians have looked at Cooper's life, they've argued that Newton pushed him too far. In fact, Newton was the cause of Cooper's insanity. That's completely wrong.

Cooper had already had a serious breakdown long before he met Newton. And if anything calmed Cooper's mind, it was his evangelical faith. It was his link with Newton that produced the great only hymns, about 200 hymns or more, that they published in a hymnal in 1779.

In the late 1760s, Newton, who'd been writing hymns for quite a while, suggested to Cooper, you're a poet, why don't we collaborate on a hymnal? And so it was, they produced the only the only hymns, the most famous of which has to be Amazing Grace.

That great hymn that was based on a passage out of First Chronicles, interestingly enough. But we're not doing Newton, so I'm going to pass that by. The hymnal was to appear in the early 1770s. It did not appear until 1779.

We're going to look at four of the hymns that were in it in the second hour. And the reason it didn't appear in the early 1770s was because Cooper had another relapse. There are three major periods of insanity in Cooper's life.

The first one in 1763 is the one that leads to his conversion. The second one in 1773 will leave him shattered in a number of ways. And then there was a third one in the late 1780s, which will stay with him on and off to the end of his life.

In 1773, he had a dream. He never told anyone what the dream was about, but he said this, the recollection of this dream, before the recollection of this dream, all consolation vanishes, and as it seems to me, must always vanish.