The Poet in the Asylum

In 1763, William Cowper lay on the floor of a London boarding house, having just failed his third attempt to end his own life. The brilliant young lawyer had been crushed by anxiety so severe he could not face a simple examination at the House of Lords. He was committed to St Albans Collegium Insanorum, an asylum where Dr. Nathaniel Cotton treated him with uncommon gentleness during eighteen months of darkness.

Out of those depths, Cowper cried.

One morning in the asylum, he picked up a Bible someone had left on a bench and opened to Romans 3:25. As he read of God's mercy offered freely through Christ, something broke open in him. "Immediately I received strength to believe," he later wrote, "and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me."

Cowper would go on to write some of the English language's most enduring hymns, including "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood" and "God Moves in a Mysterious Way." Yet he was never fully free from depression's grip. The darkness returned, sometimes for years. He knew what it meant to wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning.

What makes Cowper's story so piercing is this: his hope was never grounded in his own emotional stability. It rested entirely in the character of the God who met him on that asylum bench. That is the theology of Psalm 130 — not that we pull ourselves from the depths, but that with the Almighty there is forgiveness, there is unfailing love, and there is full redemption.