Chapter 6: Loving Those Who Cannot See the Light

Overview

For most people passing through the dark night of the soul, the turnaround comes because God brings unwavering lovers of Christ into their lives who do not give up on them. Baxter’s sermon on melancholy is strewn with counsel to the church about carrying the burdens of the depressed: often set before them the gospel truths fittest to comfort them; read them informing, comforting books; live with them in a loving, cheerful manner. If depressed saints cannot read the Bible or a good book, we should read it to them.

The Amazing Grace of John Newton’s Care for Cowper

John Newton, the English pastor who wrote “Amazing Grace,” was one of the healthiest, happiest pastors of the eighteenth century. He had drunk deeply at the fountain of grace—the cross of Christ—and was filled with joy that overflowed toward those who were not. He once described his daily outlook: there are two heaps in the world, of human happiness and misery, and if he could take even the smallest bit from one heap and add it to the other—wiping away a child’s tears by replacing a dropped halfpenny—he had done something. A knock on his study door he received as a message from God.

In 1767, at thirty-six, the poet William Cowper entered Newton’s life at Olney. Cowper had already suffered a total mental breakdown and attempted suicide three times. At St. Albans asylum God had met him through the loving care of Dr. Nathaniel Cotton and a converting encounter with Romans 3:25; he later described how the full beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon him as he saw the sufficiency of the atonement, his pardon sealed in Christ’s blood, and the completeness of his justification. After his release he lived with the Unwin family, and when the father died Newton came to console them; so helped was Cowper that he and Mrs. Unwin moved to Olney to join Newton’s church. For thirteen years Newton tended the tangled garden of Cowper’s soul. Cowper said of him, “A sincerer or more affectionate friend no man ever had.”

Yet at Olney Cowper fell into a spiritual despair in which he felt utterly God-forsaken and lost—a despair that lasted most of the rest of his life. There were repeated suicide attempts, each time providentially prevented. Newton stood by him throughout, once sacrificing a vacation so as not to leave him alone. When Newton moved to London in 1780 for a twenty-seven-year pastorate, he did not abandon the friendship, though that would have been emotionally easy; instead there followed an earnest exchange of letters for twenty years, and Cowper poured out his soul to Newton as to no one else.

There was no happy ending. In March 1800 Cowper told his doctor, “I feel unutterable despair.” On 24 April, offered refreshment, he replied, “What can it signify?”—his last words; he died the next afternoon. To the end Newton remained his pastor and friend, writing and visiting again and again. He did not despair of the despairing. After one visit in 1788 Cowper wrote that he had found the old comforts of their friendship in part restored, and knew Newton “for the same shepherd who was sent to lead me out of the wilderness into the pasture where the Chief Shepherd feeds His flock.”

There Is No Wasted Work in Loving Those without Light

You cannot argue a depressed person out of the conviction that he has been utterly rejected by God. But you can stand by him. You can keep soaking him, as Newton did Cowper, in the benevolence, mercy and sympathy of Jesus, the sufficiency of the atonement, and the completeness of Christ’s justification. He may say, as Cowper did, that these comforts are wonderful but do not belong to him. Yet in God’s time such truths may be given power to awaken hope and beget a spirit of adoption—or, even without visible evidence of peace, may be used in some mysterious way to sustain a mustard seed of faith too small to be seen.

Piper does not claim to know the outcome of Cowper’s fight for joy. But he does know that true saints enter dark seasons, and that dying in the midst of one is no sure sign that a person was never born again or was not sustained by the sovereign hand of grace. God has his reasons for leaving one of his children feeling forsaken; he left his own Son forsaken on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)—and his reasons were full of love. He has reasons even for the martyrdom of his closest friends: Jesus told Peter that he would one day “stretch out his hands,” a death by which he would glorify God (John 21:18–19). Peter’s death would not be in vain.

Often, though, we cannot see the detailed reasons for a season of darkness. Gaius Davies recounts that Winston Churchill, dogged for much of his life by depression—his “black dog”—was thereby prepared, at sixty, to rally a nation that felt overwhelmed by the Nazi threat. But Cowper did not live to lead a nation. He died miserable. What was his black dog good for? It is not for us to render final judgment; but Piper bears one small testimony. Without his struggles Cowper probably would not have written “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” which has brought hope to thousands who fear they have sinned their lives away, nor “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” which has helped Piper and many others through a hundred thickets of discouragement.

A Legacy of Severe Mercy

There is a legacy of severe mercy in writings such as these. The words are costly, and so they prove precious—as does everyone who stands beside a melancholy saint and helps him fight for joy. Cowper himself testified that this legacy came to him from another embattled poet-pastor, George Herbert, who died at thirty-nine in 1633: Herbert was the only author he delighted to read, and though he found in him no cure for his malady, it never seemed so much alleviated as while he was reading him.

Fittingly, then, the book closes where it began, with Herbert’s poem “Bitter-sweet.” Piper asks readers to read it twice—once for the flow, and once aloud, as poetry is meant to be read, for its beauty and meaning—and not to stumble over the old spelling. The poet’s resolve to “complain, yet praise … lament, and love” is, in the apostle Paul’s words, the posture of every saint who fights for joy in a fallen world: “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10).