There Is A Fountain

© Copyright 2013 PJ Stassen

All Rights Reserved

   My anxious desire is that every time I preach, I may clear myself of blood of all men; that if I step from this platform to my coffin, I may have told out all I knew of the way of salvation.                                                                                                                                     

                            - Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

   “God moves in many a mysterious way His wonders to perform.”  I suppose that many a reader will recognise this idiom so familiar within society today.  But I also suspect that few readers will realise that it was penned in the eighteenth century by William Cowper in his poem ‘Light Shining out of Darkness’.

   Cowper, once considered one of the forerunners of romantic poetry and described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the time as the ‘best modern poet’, was once so concerned about his own eternal salvation that his distress over the condition of his soul was actually diagnosed as ‘insanity’ by the physicians of his day (He reportedly attempted suicide three times).  
   In retrospect, I find it difficult to comprehend how a person concerned about the salvation of his soul can be considered insane at all … I mean, who performed the diagnosis, and how much did that individual know about the Christian faith and Salvation-theology?  In my book, a person concerned about the salvation of his soul represents the highest form of sanity one can ever hope to achieve on this planet.

   Cowper nevertheless (apparently) came into contact with John Newton, author of the hymn Amazing Grace, and some time afterwards wrote There Is A Fountain, with the tune according to tradition derived from an earlier American melody (I quote from two verses only):

YouTube

There Is A Fountain

(William Cowper, 1731-1800)

There is a fountain filled with blood

Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

CHORUS: Lose all their guilty stains,

Lose all there guilty stains;

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

When this poor lisping, stam-m’ring tongue

Lies silent in the grave,

Then in a nobler, sweeter song,

I’ll sing Thy power to save.

CHORUS: Lose all their guilty stains,

Lose all there guilty stains;

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

Piet Stassen

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Bibliography

1.  CyberHymnal.  William Cowper.  Accessed At <http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/c/o/w/cowper_w.htm> [online> 2013
2.  Comfort, Ray (2005) Spurgeon Gold. Bridge-Logos. 
3.  Wikipedia. ‘There Is A Fountain’. Accessed At < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper> [online] 2013