engaged in the slave trade. He soon became a ship captain, and made several voyages to Guinea. One of his cargoes of human freight was landed in Charleston, South Carolina.

He then regarded the slave trade as an appointment of Providence and as a respectable occupation, although, as he tells us, he shrank from its bolts and bars and chains, and prayed earnestly that for the gaining of his daily bread he might be transferred to a service more kindly and more Christian.

Afterwards, when his eyes were fully opened, he wrote concerning this iniquitous trade, "I know of no method of getting money, not even that of robbing for it upon the highway, which has so direct a tendency to efface the moral sense, to rob the heart of every gentle and humane disposition, and to harden it, like steel, against all impressions of sensibility."

His six years as a slave trader were followed by nine years in Liverpool, spent in office work, study, and occasional religious ministrations of rare fervor and effect. At the age of thirtynine he was ordained a clergyman of the Church of England. He died at the age of eighty-two, after forty-three years of very successful ministerial service. As Goldwin Smith puts it, "The iron constitution which had carried him through so many hardships enabled him to continue in his ministry to extreme old age. A friend at length counselled him to stop before he found himself stopped by being able to speak no longer. 'I cannot stop,' he said, raising his voice. 'What!-shall the old African blasphemer stop while he can speak?"

He was

Cowper was six years younger than Newton. born in his father's rectory at Berkhampstead. His relatives were persons of distinction, belonging to the Whig nobility of the robe. His great-uncle had been Lord Chancellor; his mother was a Donne, of the race of the poet, and with royal blood in her veins. He came into the world, as did Newton, in a time of abounding iniquity. As one of his biographers truly says: "Ignorance and brutality reigned in the cottage. Drunkenness reigned in palace and cottage alike; gambling, cockfighting and bull-fighting were the amusements of the people.

*

* Of humanity there was as little as there was of

religion. It was the age of the criminal law, which hanged men for petty thefts, of lifelong imprisonment for debts, of the stocks and the pillory, of a Temple Bar garnished with the heads of traitors, of the unreformed prison-system, of the press-gang, of unrestrained tyranny and savagery at public schools. That the slave trade was iniquitous hardly any one suspected; even men who deemed themselves religious took part in it without scruple. But a change was at hand, and a still mightier change was in prospect. At the time of Cowper's birth, John Wesley was twenty-eight years old, and Whitefield was seventeen. * * * Howard was born, and in less than a generation Wilberforce was to come."

When Cowper was six years old his mother died. This was to him a loss dreadful and irreparable. A child too sensitive for this world's ordinary blasts, he was sent to a large boarding-school, where barbarity surrounded him and cruelty almost drove him mad. Then came the experiences of a great public school, and afterwards his training as an attorney. When he was twenty-five years old his father died; when he was thirtytwo there came to him a first attack of insanity. With this attack there were attempts at suicide; but, as a biographer says, "Most happily, indeed, and most mercifully, for himself and for others, they were only attempts, for it was the will of a gracious Providence not only to preserve his life for the exercise of a sound and vigorous mind, but to make that mind an instrument of incalculable benefit to his country and, we may almost say, to the world, by advancing and promoting the best interests of mankind, morality and religion."

With returning health there came a marked religious experience, concerning which he afterwards wrote: "Blessed be the God of my salvation; the hail of affliction and rebuke has swept away the refuge of lies. It pleased the Almighty, in great mercy, to set all my misdeeds before me. At length, the storm being past, a quiet and peaceful serenity of soul succeeded, such as ever attends the gift of a lively faith in the allsufficient atonement, and the sweet sense of mercy and pardon purchased by the blood of Christ. Thus did He break me and bind me up; then did He wound me and make me whole."

U

The friendship of the Unwins followed, and, with it, years of religious enthusiasm and devotion. Through the Unwins an intimacy began with John Newton, which grew rapidly when these two holy men became next door neighbors at Olney and fellow workers unto the kingdom of God. Cowper's power in extemporaneous prayer is said to have been wonderful. His activity in ministering to the poor was great. And so the happy days passed by for eight useful years. Then came the delusion that it was the will of God "he should, after the example of Abraham, perform an expensive act of obedience and offer, not a son, but himself." From this he was providentially turned aside. His later years were the most distinguished of his life. Larger work in poetry, splendidly done, won national recognition. He died, honored and renowned, in the sixty-ninth year of his age.

The Olney hymns were in number three hundred and forty-eight. Of these Cowper contributed sixty-eight and Newton two hundred and eighty. But for failing health, Cowper, no doubt, would have written more.

Those which he did write have found general and large acceptance.

Perhaps the best known of Cowper's hymns are the following:

I.

593 There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel's veins;

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains.

The dying thief rejoiced to see

That fountain in his day;

And there may I, as vile as he,

Wash all my sins away.

Dear, dying Lamb, Thy precious blood
Shall never lose its power,

Till all the ransomed Church of God
Be saved to sin no more.