42. There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood

The Story Behind the Hymn

William Cowper was an English poet widely regarded by literary historians as one of the finest and most influential English-language poets of his era, a genuine precursor to the Romantic poetry movement that would follow him, and yet he struggled throughout the greater part of his adult life with severe, recurring depression and acute religious anxiety, including several serious and nearly successful suicide attempts and repeated extended stays in private asylums for treatment — a level of personal suffering that stood in painful, ongoing tension with the deeply devout religious convictions he also held throughout his life.

Cowper found some real measure of relative stability, though never full or lasting peace, living for many years as a close friend and something close to a member of the household of the evangelical clergyman John Newton — the former slave-ship captain and author of hymn 1 in this collection, 'Amazing Grace' — in the small English town of Olney, where the two men collaborated closely on a large joint hymn-writing project. That project resulted in the published collection known as the Olney Hymns, released in 1779, containing several hundred individual hymns contributed by each man, written originally for the parish's own regular weekly prayer meetings rather than for wider publication.

This particular hymn, based directly on Zechariah 13:1's prophecy of 'a fountain opened… for sin and for uncleanness,' was among Cowper's individual contributions to that larger joint collection. Written by a man who, by his own repeated and anguished private admission, struggled his entire adult life to feel any personal, felt assurance of God's mercy specifically toward himself, even while believing firmly and without apparent doubt in the theological reality of that same mercy as available to others, the hymn reads on close examination almost as an argument — insistent, repetitive, building toward its own conclusion — that Cowper seems to have been making as much to his own persistently troubled and anxious conscience as to any actual congregation that might one day sing it alongside him.

Cowper died in 1800 still wrestling, by most biographical accounts, with periods of that same religious despair that had shadowed him for decades, having spent his final years largely withdrawn from public life under the care of relatives. That his hymn about a fountain capable of washing away 'all its guilty stains' has since brought genuine comfort and assurance to countless singers over more than two centuries, even though its own author reportedly struggled his entire life to feel that same assurance fully applied to himself, remains one of the more poignant and frequently noted ironies in the history of English hymnody.