294 THE MOURNING PROPHET. CHAPTER XXVIII. Cowper's complaint and Jeremiah's-Sincerity of Cowper in every expression of Christian feeling-Letter to Mr Rose-Letters to Unwin and Newton-Christian experience in spite of despair-Christian sympathy in others' trials-Poem on the four ages-Mrs Uniwn's illness and Cowper's gloom-Poem to Mary. THE first eighteen verses of the third chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah are a most perfect representation of the belief and experience of Cowper for the greater part of twenty years. "I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath. He hath led me and brought me into darkness and not into light. Surely, against me He is turned; He turneth His hand against me all the day. He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old. He hath hedged me about that I cannot get out; He hath made my chain heavy. Also, when I cry and shout, He shutteth out my prayer. hath filled me with bitterness, He hath made me drunken with wormwood. He hath also broken my teeth with gravelstones, He hath covered me with ashes. And I said, My strength and my hope are perished from the Lord." He But the misery of Cowper was, that in his case, that which, with the afflicted and mourning prophet, was the language of grief and of hopelessness in regard to the over THE MOURNING PROPHET. 295 whelming external desolations that had overtaken his beloved country in God's wrath (and he himself a hopeless sufferer in all those calamities), described a personal despair. The prophet could say, after all this most graphic catalogue of his woes, "The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in Him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for Him: to the soul that seeketh Him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. For the Lord will not cast off for ever; but though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. I called upon Thy name, O Lord, out of the low dungeon. Thou hast heard my voice. Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon Thee, thou saidst, Fear not. O Lord, Thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul, Thou hast redeemed my life." But Cowper's inexorable despair was continually crying, God is against me; I am cut off for ever from the light of the living, from the possibility of His mercy. Actum est de te; peristi: My hope is perished from the Lord for ever! And often he was compelled to cry out with the Psalmist, "While I suffer Thy terrors, I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me, and Thou hast afflicted me with all Thy waves." Yet never did Cowper's confidence in God's goodness fail; and even through all this thick spiritual darkness, he was full of gratitude for the providential mercies of his Heavenly Father while reason remained; nor did any Christian ever take greater delight in observing and recounting the footsteps of God's providence, and the marks of His interposing love. He was always ready to say with Jeremiah, "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Thy faithfulness." Moreover, we have seen at the bottom of all Cowper's complaints some remnant still of hope, some persevering conviction, as obstinate as his despair itself, of the possibility that God might yet interpose in his behalf, and deliver him from what would then and thus be demonstrated to have been the affliction of insanity, an imagination of a banishment from God, the work of an unsettled reason under the buffetings of malignant spiritual foes. And we must bear in mind the anxious sincerity and carefulness of Cowper in every expression of his feelings, not to transcend the limits of his own actual experience in any Christian sentiment to which he ever gave utterance. The exquisite simplicity and transparency of his heart as well as intellect, his freedom from all pretence and guile, and from all affectation of any kind of ability or attainment which he did not possess, are to be remembered in perusing Cowper's letters of sympathy with the sorrows of his dearest friends. When we find him saying in effect, Courage, my brother! we shall soon rejoin our lost one, and many whom we have tenderly loved, "our forerunners into a better country," the consolation is so conveyed that we should feel as if it were almost a deception, if the writer himself were not a partaker of it. Just so, in all those sweet allusions now and then in Cowper's letters to the grounds of a Christian hope; they are so expressed that it is impossible not to feel assured that they do not and can not proceed from a heart that feels as if God were an enemy, or believes that its own sins are not and can CHRISTIAN GRATITUDE. 297 not be forgiven. There is the Christian hope in such expressions, by whatever depths of doubt surrounded. Take, for instance, the close of a letter, in 1791, to the Rev. Walter Bagot. "If God forgive me my sins, surely I shall love Ilim much, for I have much to be forgiven. But the quantum need not discourage me, since there is One whose atonement can suffice for all." Again, the record of Christian experience in a letter to the Rev. Mr Hurdis, in 1793, is not consistent with the entire absence of hope, but intimates both the possession ui a personal faith in the Lord Jesus, and the experience of deep gratitude for the privilege of being permitted to exercise it. Cowper is speaking of the effect of adversity. "Your candid account," says he, "of the effect that your afflictions have, both on your spirits and temper, I can perfectly understand, having laboured much in that fire myself, and perhaps more than any other man. It is in such a school, however, that we must learn, if we ever truly learn it, the natural depravity of the human heart and of our own in particular, together with the consequence that necessarily follows such wretched premises; our indispensable need of the atonement, and our inexpressible obligations to Him who made it. This reflection cannot escape a thinking mind, looking back to those ebullitions of fretfulness and impatience to which it has yielded in a season of great affliction." Our inexpressible obligations. It is clear that Cowper felt them personally; but how could this have been, had he really and truly believed himself shut out, by a solitary and anomalous decree, from the eternal benefit of the atonement? Here, then, an unacknowledged, and almost 298 LIFE IN A VINEGAR BOTTLE. unconscious, yet imperishable hope, contradicted the logic of his despair, as profoundly as his despair itself contradicted the assurances of Scripture and of reason. 66 Every proof of attention to a man who lives in a vinegar bottle," said Cowper to his friend Mr Unwin, "is welcome from his friends on the outside of it." Even in this vinegar bottle, Cowper could make merry with the surrounding world, as seen through the prism of his own melancholy. He told Mr Unwin, in this same letter, that he forgave Dr Johnson all the trivial and superstitious dotage in his diary, for the sake of one piece of instruction, namely, never to banish hope entirely, because it is the cordial of life, although it be the greatest flatterer in the world. He adds, in regard to his own case, "such a measure of hope as may not endanger my peace by a disappointment, I would wish to cherish upon every subject in which I am interested. A cure, however, and the only one, for all the irregularities of hope and fear, is found in submission to the will of God. Happy they that have it." He told Newton, during that same year, 1785, that within eight months he had had his hopes, though they had been of short duration, and cut off like the foam upon the waters. "Some previous adjustments, indeed, are necessary, before a lasting expectation of comfort can have place in me. There are persuasions in my mind, which either entirely forbid the entrance of hope, or, if it enter, immediately eject it. They are incompatible with any such inmate, and must be turned out themselves, before so desirable a guest can possibly have secure possession. This, you say, will be done. It may be, but it is |