Text · full lyrics
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;
And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,
Lose all their guilty stains:
Lose all their guilty stains,
lose all their guilty stains.
The dying thief rejoiced to see
That fountain in his day;
And there have I, though vile as he,
Washed all my sins away:
Washed all my sins away,
Washed all my sins away.
E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream
Thy flowing wounds supply,
Redeeming love has been my theme,
And will be till I die:
And will be till I die,
and will be till I die.
Lord, I believe Thou hast prepared,
Unworthy though I be,
For me a blood bought free reward,
A golden harp for me!
It's strung and tuned for endless years,
And formed by power divine,
To sound in God the Father’s ears,
No other name but Thine.
The lyricist
William Cowper
Cowper trained for the law but never practiced; the dread of a required public examination triggered the first of the breakdowns that shadowed his life. He spent his most productive years in the market town of Olney, where the curate John Newton — the former slave-ship captain who wrote "Amazing Grace" — drew him into a hymn-writing partnership and into the Evangelical revival then sweeping rural England. "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood" comes out of that period, around 1771: one of the first hymns he managed after a long descent into depression, built on a single verse from Zechariah about a fountain opened to wash away sin, and originally titled "Praise for the Fountain Opened." Better known now as a poet — of "The Task" and the comic "John Gilpin" — he wrote some of his plainest, most lasting lines in the gaps between one illness and the next.