God Moves in a Mysterious Way

DESCRIPTION: "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform, He plants his footsteps on the sea (x2), And rides upon the storm (x3)." "Ye fearful saints fresh courage take. "Judge not the Lord by feeble sense." "Blind unbelief is sure to err."
AUTHOR: Words: William Cowper (1731-1800)
EARLIEST DATE: 1774 (Newton, Twenty-four Letters on Mysterious Subjects)
KEYWORDS: religious nonballad storm
FOUND IN: US(MW)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Grimes-StoriesFromTheAnneGrimesCollection, p. 101, "God Moves in a Mysterious Way" (1 text)
NOTES [451 words]: According to Julian, p. 265, "The leading events in the life of Cowper are: b[orn] in his father's rectory, Berkhampstead, Nov. 26, 1731; educated at Westminster; called to the Bar, 1754; madness, 1763; residence at Huntingdon, 1765; removal to Olney, 1768; to Weston, 1786; to East Dereham, 1795; death there, April 25, 1800."
It was a life marked by wild changes in mood. The "madness" mentioned above included three suicide attempts, "with laudanum, knife, and cord," and he developed an extreme belief in his guilt before God. It was in the aftermath of this that he met John Newton, the hymnwriter based at Olney. But in 1773, he suffered another bout of depression. He recovered again, and was able to work with Newton to publish Olney Hymns in 1779 and also Poems by William Cowper in 1782. Benet, p. 250, says that "From his twenty-fourth year on he suffered from a morbid religious mania which manifested itself in a sense of overwhelming guilt and despair and intermittent attacks of insanity.
Cowper clearly suffered from either major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder; on the whole, I suspect the latter. Nor am I alone in this; after I wrote the above, I found on p. 64 of Jamison a table marking him as one of many great eighteenth century poets with bipolar disorder; her summary of his case is "Recurrent psychotic melancholia and repeated suicide attempts. Delusions and hallucinations. First signs of mental instability while in his twenties, confined to asylum in his early thirties. Family history of melancholia."
Benet, p. 250, says that he began writing poetry late in life, "with the production of hymns, didactic verse, and nture lyrics, and intense, introspective religious poetry." He also translated Homer and Milton (?) -- and occasionally translated his own poetry into Latin.
Julian, p. 433, reports of this song, "The commonly accepted history of this hymn is that it was composed by Cowper in 1773, after an attempt to commit suicide in the Ouse at Olney." But after sifting the evidence, Julian concludes, "To our mind it is evident that Cowper must have written this hymn, either early in 1773, before his insanity became so intense as to lead him to attempt suicide in October of that year, or else in April of 1774, when "he used to compose lines descriptive of his own unhappy state.' Of these date the latter is the more probable of the two."
The Olney Hymns is regarded as one of the greatest hymn collections; in this collection, Cowper is responsible for "God Moves in a Mysterious Way" and "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood"; he also wrote "Oh! for a closer walk with God." His one secular song in the Index is "The Sinking of the Royal George." - RBW
Bibliography

Benet: William Rose Benet, editor, The Reader's Encyclopdedia, first edition, 1948 (I use the four-volume Crowell edition but usually check it against the single volume fourth edition edited by Bruce Murphy and published 1996 by Harper-Collins)
Jamison: Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, 1993 (I use the 1994 Free Press paperback edition)
Julian: John Julian, editor, A Dictionary of Hymnology, 1892; second edition 1907 (I use the 1957 Dover edition in two volumes)

Last updated in version 6.4
File: Grim101

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography