Last Sunday I posted a little bit of the story of William Cowper's conversion as background for his hymn There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood. I'd like to be able to tell you that his conversion immediately solved all his problems, but it wasn't so. Cowper continued to suffer bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and his conversion didn't keep him from attempting suicide again, either. He'd come from a family with mental illness in its history, but beyond that, he'd been a sensitive child who had suffered greatly in his younger years. Little William's mother died when he was six, and his father almost immediately shipped him off to boarding school, where he was, by his own account, treated cruelly.
