'Come, Thou Fount's' poor unhappy man

Can you guess what all-time great hymn has this as its last stanza, rarely sung: 

"On that day when freed from sinning

I shall see thy lovely face,
Clothèd then in blood-washed linen
How I’ll sing thy boundless grace."

England native Robert Robinson wrote "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing" at the age of 23 in 1757. His life story has a surprising twist to it, though. It makes his lyrics, "Prone to wander--Lord I feel it--Prone to leave the God I love," seem sadly prophetic.

A widely told (though never verified) story, found in most any account of Robinson's life, is about how he was riding a stagecoach one day and struck up a conversation with a woman he noticed was deeply engrossed in reading a hymn book.

The woman began to hum a hymn and asked Robinson what he thought of it. It was 'Come, Thou Fount.' He said to her through his tears, "Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then."

Robinson, born in the small market town of Swaffham, Norfolk, was raised in a home “devoid of piety, and his parents’ marriage was described as a disaster," according to a well-researched 2019 paper by Regent College (Vancouver) theology professor Bruce Hindmarsh.

"By the time young Robert was entering his teens, his dissolute father was being sued for debts. His father abandoned the family and died soon afterward," writes Hindmarsh. "Although his mother’s family had wealth, lands, and houses, Robert’s grandfather resented the marriage and as a cruel gesture left his daughter only half a guinea (about $100 in today’s terms).

"Robert’s mother could see that her son had some intellectual capacity, so to keep him in school she took in boarders and 'plied the needle' as a seamstress. Soon it was all too much, though, and by the time Robert was thirteen, his formal education had to be given up.

Robinson moved to London to become an apprentice in the barber trade. "This meant he would become the charge and responsibility of his master for seven years, until his apprenticeship was complete," writes Hindmarsh. "He would spend his teen years away from home in the big city.

"One historian talks about 'the guilty apprentice syndrome,' meaning that there were many young men who left the morally reinforcing social structures of the countryside and got into trouble when immersed in the anonymity and temptations of a city like London. When such young men happened upon the evangelical preaching that was spreading throughout the metropolis, their consciences were easily wounded."

*****

According to Christianity.com: "One day Robert's gang of rowdies harassed a drunken gypsy. Pouring liquor into her, they demanded she tell their fortunes for free. She pointed her finger at Robert and told him he would live to see his children and grandchildren. This struck a tender spot in his heart. 'If I'm going to live to see my children and grandchildren,' he thought, 'I'll have to change my way of living. I can't keep on like I'm going now.' "

That same day they visited famed Evangelist George Whitefield’s Tabernacle at Moorfields to heckle the preacher and mock his attendees, but Robinson was haunted by Whitefield’s sermon preached on the text: "O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"

As Hindmarsh tells it, "Day and night he was troubled as he recalled the message. This unrest culminated three years later in his wholehearted conversion. We know this from a cryptic notation he made in Latin on a blank leaf in one of his books. It said that on Tuesday, December 10, 1755, he 'found full and free forgiveness through the precious blood of Jesus Christ.' No wonder he would soon write in his famous hymn:

Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Bought me with his precious blood.

***** 

It was near the completion of his barber apprenticeship that Robinson began to think about entering ministry as a Methodist and "would practice preaching sermons to himself for up to an hour at a time."

A year before writing "Come, Thou Fount," Robinson, now returned to the countryside near his hometown, was "preaching without notes and gathering a society in the village," according to Hindmarsh. "He was soon invited to preach at James Wheatley’s Tabernacle up the road in Norwich. It was in a hymnbook published by Wheatley that Robinson’s famous hymn was first published.

"Though his time in the Norwich area was short, it was significant. It was here that he met and married Ellen Payne, with whom he would have twelve children. Here too his convictions led him to dissent from the Established Church, with whom the Methodists were still closely connected, and to set up an Independent Calvinistic church (editor's note: he later abandoned Calvinism) in town. Then he went on to receive adult baptism. He would be a Baptist ever after.

" . . . His ministry began with 34 people huddled in a 'damp, dark, cold, ruinous, contemptible hovel' in a town that despised Dissenters. Still, he remained faithful to his calling, and in time a new church meeting house was erected, and within 15 years there were 200 families in the church, with morning congregations of six hundred and evening gatherings of eight hundred.

"He reached a thousand more through his itinerant preaching in surrounding villages during the week. At a time when the percentage of Dissenters was falling in most of the counties around Cambridge, Robinson’s influence increased their numbers significantly in Cambridgeshire.

"Robinson was unquestionably a beloved and effective pastor for three decades in Cambridge. This was his principal ministry. We don’t know a lot about his continued use of hymns, but there is a note in the church book that will seem familiar to anyone today who has met with conflict over styles of music in church: 'Heady people . . . found fault with certain tunes.' These were the so-called 'sprightly tunes' introduced in the Sunday evening lectures, designed to reach a wider 'town and gown' audience. Evidently some church members did not like Robinson’s 'seeker friendly' methods."

Hindmarsh's account continues:

"In the mid-1770s, Robinson was increasingly drawn into public activism to defend religious and civil liberties. He was keenly aware that the laws of the land still imposed disabilities on Dissenters. Robinson was driven to study church history to defend the cause of Nonconformists. For him, the Reformation was principally about freedom of conscience, rather than doctrinal statements. 'The right of private judgment,' he wrote, 'is the very foundation of the Reformation.' He came to dislike the binding of anyone’s conscience by a statement of faith.

"In the political sphere, he was an active voice for parliamentary reform (and was mentioned by name in the House of Commons by Edmund Burke). He was also an early opponent of slavery and the slave trade, preaching and petitioning against it. He stated clearly that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. On the same principal of liberty, he welcomed the American and French Revolutions. In fact, he was visited by General Reed, Washington’s second-in-command, who offered him passage to America and land if he would drop everything and come.

"Robinson was a man open to other viewpoints and tolerant — perhaps to a fault. He was friendly with political and theological radicals, including Unitarians and others who denied Christ’s divinity (Socinians). There was a small Socinian group in his congregation in Cambridge, and he refused to take sides against them when division opened up over the question.

"Like many others before and since, Robinson wanted to appeal only to the Bible and not to any statements of faith or creeds. But there is always a danger that this way of thinking can lead to an unhealthy elevation of private judgment."

*****

In its 2014 article entitled, "The Strange Case of Robert Robinson," the Baptist Bible Tribune reveals, "It was no small accomplishment for an unschooled Baptist pastor to draw the hypercritical college crowd to hear him, but Robinson was ever the diligent student (he learned four or five languages) and a zealous reader, even from his youth, and he was a public speaker of no small ability.

"Besides his Cambridge congregation, Robinson had some 15 preaching stations in the villages around Cambridge. Weekdays found him evangelizing the residents in these locations.

"For a time, Robinson had been engaged by the Baptist pastors of London to undertake research at the British Museum with a view to writing a history of the Baptists. When the theological drift of Robinson away from orthodoxy toward the end of his life was discovered, this sponsorship was quickly withdrawn.

"Robinson continued these labors on his own behalf after he obtained permission to make use of the university library in Cambridge. The fruit of this research was two immense volumes, both published posthumously, namely, The History of Baptism (1790), and Ecclesiastical Researches (1792), the latter of which is highly prized by some Baptists, though it is throughout a defense of the orthodoxy of Unitarianism.

"Though Robinson had published a vigorous defense of the Deity of Christ in 1776, he soon became enamored with Socinian and Arian errors (denials of the Deity of Christ and of the Deity and personality of the Holy Spirit), influenced in part by Joseph Priestly (a staunch Unitarian).

"Once having abandoned Trinitarianism, Robinson became increasingly brazen in his attacks on this orthodox doctrine. The last sermon he ever preached was in Priestly’s meetinghouse in Birmingham, in which sermon Robinson ridiculed and mocked the doctrine of the Trinity with sarcasm and invective far stronger than anything Priestly, by his own admission, had ever said or written. The following Tuesday, Robinson was found dead in bed in the home of William Russell, a prominent member of Priestly’s church, where he had been staying."

Hindmarsh concluded his paper this way:

"We should also remember with some sympathy that Robinson was, late in life, a broken man. By 1790, the year he died, he was physically and mentally ill. His sermons became incomprehensible, and some described him as insane. He never recovered from the death of his 17-year-old daughter Julie in 1787. He faced a financial crisis that could have sent him to debtors’ prison. And many of his friends had turned against him.

"Thinking of his suffering at this distance, the final verse of his great hymn takes on more poignancy. The verse isn’t sung much anymore, but we can perhaps imagine Robinson at the end singing its first quatrain, trusting, as we all must, in Christ’s 'boundless grace' as the ultimate hope in the face of death:

On that day when freed from sinning
I shall see thy lovely face,
Clothèd then in blood-washed linen
How I’ll sing thy boundless grace.