YOU have often heard, I dare-say, of the poet William Cowper. He wrote some of the beautiful hymns we love to sing. One begins,
“Of all the gifts Thy love bestows.
Thou Giver of all good,
Not heaven itself a richer knows
Than the Redeemer’s blood.”
And another hymn which is known far and wide is,
“There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged in that blest flood
Lose all their guilty stains.”
We may judge from these hymns, that William Cowper knew the Lord Jesus as his Saviour, and believed that all his sins were washed away. Would you like to hear how he first learned to know this wonderful truth?
Well, you must know he was a man who had terrible fits of melancholy, when everything around him looked dark, and he could find comfort in nothing.
During one of these terrible attacks, he tells us, that he flung himself into a chair near the window, and seeing a Bible there, ventured, once more to apply to it for comfort and instruction. The first verse he saw was the: 25th verse of Rom. 3, “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God.”
“Immediately,” he says, “I received strength to believe it, and the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made; my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fulness. and completeness of His justification. Unless the Almighty arm had been under me, I think I should have died with gratitude and joy. I could only look up to heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with love and wonder.” But the work of the Holy Ghost is best described in His own words; it is “joy unspeakable and full of glory!” It is one hundred and fifty years since William Cowper was brought to know the Lord, but though everything in this world may be very different now to what it was then, it is a great comfort and blessing to know that God’s word is just the same, and that sinners can come to Him in just the same way as they did then. Still even in these difficult and dangerous times, “There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, Who gave Himself a ransom for all.” 1 Tim. 2:5, 65For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; 6Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. (1 Timothy 2:5‑6).
ML 06/16/1912