William Cowper, contemporary and friend of John Newton, at Olney, in the eighteenth century, was, in his early years, subject to great depression and fits of melancholy, bordering on madness. It is said, that on one occasion he hired a carriage to drive him to the River Ouse, in which he had planned to drown himself, so as to end his sad and judgment-haunted life. It was nothing else or less, that the fear of meeting God in his sins unpardoned and unpurged that was the real cause of his depression. The driver of the carriage missed his way, and so God overruled events to keep him from his suicidal purpose. Walking through the fields on his way homeward, thinking of what might have been, he composed the hymn beginning:

"God moves in a mysterious way,
   His wonders to perform."

While this providence of God stopped his tendency to suicide, it gave no peace to his soul. He needed the knowledge of Christ as Redeemer and Saviour to give him peace, and this is how it came. Reading in Paul's epistle to the Romans one day, he came to the words in chapter 3, verses 24 and 25, "Christ Jesus, whom God has set forth as a propitiation through faith in His blood." Thus he realized it was not by works or toils of his own, but through a personal trust in the blood of Christ which was shed on the cross to make peace and atone for sin, that he could be right with God. That moment his soul as filled with peace and joy; and it was then or soon after, that he wrote his best-known hymn, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood," in which he describes his own conversion in these lines:

"The dying thief rejoiced to see
   that fountain in his day,
And there have I, though vile as he,
   washed all my sins away."

This is God's way of reconciliation and of peace, and there is no other. Peace has been made "through the blood of His [Jesus'] cross" (Col. 2:20). In the gospel it is proclaimed to all. And all who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ are justified, and have peace with God (Rom. 5:1) here and now.

—Selected