17. Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

The Story Behind the Hymn

Robert Robinson wrote this hymn’s text at just twenty-two years old, in 1758, not long after his own turbulent path to Christian conversion. By his own later account, that path had begun in genuinely unpromising circumstances.

As a teenager in London, Robinson had been drawn into a rough local gang. He reportedly attended a sermon by the famous evangelist George Whitefield initially as something close to a mocking dare among his companions, intending to make fun of the preacher rather than to listen seriously.

Instead, Whitefield’s sermon that day unsettled Robinson far more deeply than he had expected. It took roughly three more years of ongoing inner struggle before he finally experienced what he considered his genuine conversion, at age twenty.

He went on to become first a Methodist, then a Baptist, and eventually an Independent minister, pastoring congregations in Norfolk for many years. He also worked as a respected historian and writer on Baptist church history, later in his career.

Despite this outwardly successful ministry, Robinson struggled, by several later accounts, throughout much of his adult life. Contemporaries described recurring periods of spiritual doubt, discouragement, and what they called a wandering away from the fervent faith of his youth, including reported associations later in life with theologically unorthodox circles that concerned some of his former colleagues.

The hymn’s striking third verse contains its now-famous admission: ‘prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.’ Hymnologists widely read this line as an almost eerily prophetic anticipation of exactly this later struggle.

A confident twenty-two-year-old, writing exuberantly about God’s grace, was apparently already sensing and naming in advance the very temptation toward spiritual drift that would trouble him for decades afterward.

According to one frequently repeated but unverified anecdote, Robinson was traveling by stagecoach many years later, in a season of deep discouragement. A fellow passenger began humming this very hymn’s tune, not recognizing its author sitting beside her.

When she asked what he thought of the song, Robinson is said to have replied, with evident sadness, that he was the man who had written those words many years before. He said he would give a great deal to feel now the same freedom of spirit he had felt then.

True or embellished, the story captures precisely the tension between the hymn’s confident, thankful praise and its author’s more complicated later life. That tension has not diminished the hymn’s enduring popularity, still commonly sung today at baptisms and services of Christian commitment.