1It would be unfair to remember William Cowper (1731-1800) only as a poet. He also left several autobiographical prose writings, which offer relevant insight not so much into his tormented self as into the deeper grounds in which both his literary achievements and his spiritual progress were rooted. Adelphi is a twofold short pamphlet written in 1772, but published posthumously in 1802. In this work Cowper endeavoured to trace back all the main stages of his spiritual evolution up to 1767, the turning-point year when he decided to put an end to his writing; then, in a second, far less developed part, he did the same with his younger brother’s last moments of illness; hence the title Adelphi. As the subtitle has it, this pamphlet is “an Account of the Conversion of William Cowper, Esquire.” Indeed, it reads like a proper conversion narrative, along the lines set by most of his forerunners endowed with a highly religious turn of mind, mainly puritans, with special reference to Bunyan’s Grace Abounding (1666).

2War and peace are pervasively present throughout Cowper’s narrative. Needless to say, these two notions are to be taken here only on a metaphorical level, as the only aim of this pamphlet consistently remains an individual and spiritual one, without any mention ever of any historical or otherwise external contingency. The sustained warlike metaphor actually proves an accurate definition of the usual State of his soul as striving for evidence of election. Such a metaphor really sounds most appropriate, as the point is to convey the constant and crucial antagonism between God and the devil, Christ and Antichrist, good and evil, election and reprobation, as can be traced in the following paragraph:

The Lord said, ‘Peace, be still’, and it was so. Blessed be the God of my Salvation. No trial has befallen me since, nor any temptation assailed me greater than must needs be expected in a State of warfare. Satan, indeed, has changed his battery: before my conversion my appetite for sensual gratification was the weapon by which he sought to destroy me; being naturally of an easy, quiet disposition, I was seldom tempted to anger; yet the passion is at present, of all others, that with which I have the sharpest conflict, and which gives me the most disturbance. But Jesus being my strength I fight against it, and if I am not conqueror, yet I am not overcome. Glory be to His great name! I know that He will get Himself the victory over all my enemies.1

3The main reason why Cowper proved such a close observer of the spiritual warfare which rent his soul apart lies in his own personal whereabouts: it should not be forgotten that Cowper was liable to mental instability, and always about to fall a prey to the English malady of the XVIIIth century, namely psychiatric disorders.

4His mental failure was increased by the gloomy ascendancy of some Calvinism-oriented trends with which he came into contact through the Reverend John Newton (1725-1807), a staunch propagator of the Evangelical movement who also proved a very influential friend to Cowper, and incidentally the first editor of Adelphi in 1802. Those extreme trends imposed on him a heavy strain that increased his almost innate fear that he might be one of the reprobates who should never be admitted to God’s grace, although he was first persuaded that faith had been granted to him by his conversion in 1764.

5As has already been discussed, madness in similar pamphlets is extensively expressed in terms of warfare as illustrative of the constant battle between good and evil in a disturbed brain. Awareness of impending madness is sometimes clearly referred to as part of the devil’s strategy to lure the self into a warped perception of both outer and inner reality. Indeed, Cowper’s example could be studied as a case of religious madness; it might then offer the possibility of a more clinical approach to the symptoms and effects of a specific category of madness. In this case, the body would become the very battlefield on which war is bound to outweigh peace, as long as the writer is considered mad, since, according to this view, war identifies with evil and madness, and peace with good and sanity restored.

6Yet, in the specific case of Adelphi, it may be more illuminating still to focus on the religious and literary testimony originated by the writer’s mental unbalance, since Cowper is not known to have experienced the real physical effects of madness, and did not have to be confined to an actual lunatic asylum, except for a short period when he stayed at St Albans with Dr. Nathaniel Cotton, a friend who specialized in the treatment of mental disorder. In his work, brain disorder very soon meets the religious heritage of predestinarian theology. The cross fertilization is therefore so obvious that it would be pointless to wonder which is the cause of the other: it is beyond doubt that Cowper’s precarious mental State could not but pave the way for the disastrous influence of those extreme Evangelical trends, which in turn were to work a deeper void into his mind.

7Since Adelphi self-purportedly resorts to a definite literary category, namely the conversion narrative, it then becomes more rewarding to see not the body, but the mind itself as the very battlefield on which spiritual warfare could be waged endlessly. Actually, a close study of the metaphors used in this text would serve to show how medicine and religion overlap, in so far as spiritual warfare is often described in terms of physical disorder. This points to an interesting reversal, perhaps typical of a disturbed mind: to Cowper, physical disorder always appears as his metaphorical interpretation of his metaphysical fears, and physical symptoms show once he has expressed his religious trouble, as their very expression indeed. The metaphysical then points to the physical, which eventually shows how reciprocal the interaction may be.

8Apart from Cowper’s poetical work itself, and however chronologically paradoxical this may sound, the best commentary of this pamphlet seems to have been offered a priori, as early as 1621 by Robert Burton in the final section of The Anatomy of Melancholy, entitled “Religious Melancholy.” Despite the obvious gap in dates (1621 vs. 1772) and the subsequent technical improvements in the medical analysis of this form of trouble, Burton’s description still proves remarkably accurate and illuminating when confronted with Cowper’s account of his spiritual condition. What might sound more unexpected than anything is the fact that such a pessimistic mind as Cowper's, obsessed as he was with the darker side of predestination, nevertheless could write a proper conversion narrative.

9From a puritan point of view, conversion basically means full-fledged certainty that one belongs to the elect, one of those happy few for ever admitted to partake in God’s grace. It follows that a conversion narrative is a brief confession conveying a straight evolution from doubt to certainty. The war waged on the devil’s strategy of temptation is to be succeeded by access to God’s peace. As has been characterized by Owen C. Watkins in his critical essay on The Puritan Experience, the typical structure of such a narrative is a peace-disturbance-peace sequence, which can be explained as follows: the soul is first so engrossed in its initial sinful condition that it finds peace and contentment in it, before it feels shaken off its rest into conversion by the effect of divine grace. The final aim is of course to lead it to true eternal peace based on the certainty of salvation and ensuing bliss.

10So what is the balance betweeen war and peace in Cowper’s Adelphi? One should not be content to dismiss this work as a mere Manichean confrontation in which the assaults of the devil might identify with war, and God’s arguments with peace. Cowper’s psychomachia proves much deeper and more subtle than that. It might even be considered a sort of emblem in which the soul might stand both for the target of the fight and the battlefield itself. War seems to overwhelm peace in so far as either party will alternately display its forces. Peace will not possibly follow until the devil has been for ever superseded by God’s counter-attack to protect the Christian soul against his assaults, as religious tradition has it. Of course, this strongly oriented view is reinforced by the retrospect provided by the autobiographical vantage point, which accounts for the strong unity and the straightforward progress related in Adelphi.

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11Along the lines set by Christian tradition, spiritual warfare is initiated by the devil. His main action consists in watching out for a breach in a dedicated Christian conscience, especially in the case of a mentally weak individual. The aim is to work doubt and all forms of temptation into such a mind, by entrapping it within a thick network of physical, psychological and mental delusions. Temptation operates as the incentive through which the devil may re-enact his own fall by initiating that of a Christian soul.

12The devil’s offensive starts on a physical level. In the opening pages of his confessions, Cowper recalls his childhood as a time of constant conflict with his fellow-creatures: “I was singled out from all the children in the school… as a proper subject… for many acts of barbarity” (5). His autobiographical retrospect later allows him to consider this an early harbinger of his predestination to everlasting damnation. Cowper knows that if he ever fails to fight against this view, he will be likely to sink into a biassed paranoid approach that might prove even worse than that developed by his French coeval Rousseau. For instance he writes: “A finger raised against me was now more than I could stand against” (16). Indeed, conflict metaphors pervade his outlooks on his social intercourse which comes close to warfare. Yet he is aware that it is but an early stage of the process to follow. “The capital engine in all the artillery of Satan had not yet been employed against me” (27).

13Other effects, more numerous still, tend to create a sense of alienation, as Cowper’s mental fragility is known to ail, especially to the Fiend: “my mind at this time began to be disordered” (20); “I certainly was given up to a strong delusion” (20), “my conscience scaring me” (32), “disorder and a confused imagination” (32). Thus he himself may well present his enemy with some of his most dreadful weapons by being made to use his own weakness against himself: “Satan furnished me so readily with weapons against myself” (28).

14Danger is impending, as Cowper is now weak enough to indulge in a warped interpretation of everything he comes across. For instance, his dreams always prove revealing and ominous, but only to him: he dreams “only to be terrified in dreams” (27). “A sentence of excommunication from all the churches upon earth would not have been so dreadful to me as the interpretation I could not avoid putting upon this dream” (28). He suffers from hallucinations: “I awakened with ten times a stronger sense of my alienation from God than ever. Satan plied me close with horrible visions and more horrible voices. My ears rang with the sound of the torments that seemed to await me” (31). This description actually reads like an accurate illustration of Burton’s symptomatic analysis:

The terrible meditation of hell-fire and eternal punishment… terrifies those poor distressed soules, especially if their bodies be predisposed by melancholy, they religiously given, and have tender consciences… Many of them in their extremity think they hear and see visions, out-crys, confer with divels that they are tormented. possessed and in hell-fire, already damned, quite forsaken of God.2

15As a matter of fact, there is hardly any weapon left to prevent doubt from working its way into Cowper’s soul. For instance, he acknowledges: “I was set to inquire whether I had not been guilty of the unpardonable sin and was presently persuaded that I had” (27). In this sentence, both passive forms “I was set to inquire” and “was persuaded” make it clear what a war machinery he has fallen a prey to. Doubt reaches its climax when Cowper confesses “a doubt whether the Gospel was true or false” (11). He also recalls an eerie vision of “the form of a fiery hand clenching a bolt or arrow of lightning” (36), and his subsequent conclusion reads as follows: “I looked upon it as a rebuke to me for denying the existence of what the Scripture asserted, and as a divine threatening of what would speedily be fulfilled upon me” (36). Logic is not wanting here, but it is obvious that Cowper is mainly reading his own disturbed mind into the omen he has been the only one to perceive and decipher in this way. Yet the only thing he can cling to is self-consistency in his warped reasoning, which may provide him with an illusory sense of peace: “I acquiesced at length in the force of that devilish conclusion” (11).

16The result is overwhelmingly one-sided, as Cowper ends up trying to escape his own self and looking for a shaded shelter, just as if he had already lost his own shadow to the devil, as was to be the case with Chamisso’s novel hero Peter Schlemihl just a few years later (1814): “I always took care to hide myself in the darkest corner of the room” (27). It must be remembered that Burton had already pointed to the risk of self-alienation as a decisive weapon surrendered by the very victim to his tormentor: “I delivered myself over to absolute despair” (29). The last two stages on the way to eternal damnation consist of madness and suicide, as also remarked by the same Burton. Impending madness is contemplated by Cowper as “the only chance remaining” (17). Yet Burton had given a fair warning, which therefore seems to have remained lost on him: “what can these signes foretell otherwise than folly, dotage, madness, a reprobate sense… and a bad end?” (700).

17The final tragedy is therefore an utmost attempt at temptation on the part of the devil. There is even a sense of dramatic acceleration, for “Satan was impatient of delay” (19). As Cowper confesses, “now came the great temptation, the point to which Satan had all the while been drawing me, the dark and hellish purpose of self-murder” (18). This passive helplessness had also been remarked by Burton: “a fearful passion, wherein the party oppressed thinks he can get no ease but by death, and is fully resolved to offer violence unto himself” (714). This view of man as a helpless being subject to passion fits perfectly into the gloomy Calvinistic image of man as a castaway from divine grace, which Cowper fully explored in his last poem which he not surprisingly entitled “The Castaway” in 1799. Yet, as early as the time of Adelphi Cowper pictures himself as one unable to oppose these assaults. Still, Adelphi could not possibly match its conversion-enhancing subtitle if his insistence upon man’s wretchedness far from God’s light were not eventually to be understood as an utmost device to highlight the divine victory to come after a successful divine counter-attack.

18As a first stage, it is therefore necessary that temptation should be basically rooted out, even before any form of peace may successfully be imposed on grounds newly restored to spiritual health. This is the reason why war is also a weapon not reluctantly used by God, according to the word from the Gospel “I came not to send Peace but a Sword” (Matt. 10.34). God’s warfare aims to bring about the necessary upheaval that will lead the reluctant soul to the turning point of its conversion. Accordingly Cowper does not picture God as a one-sided figure of peace. Indeed, the main feature of God is rather wrath, as was to be expected in such a demanding Calvinism-ridden perspective. There follows an accumulation of images of violence and conflict: “[It] seemed to myself to receive a dagger in my heart” (14); “the hand of divine vengeance was in it” (17); “a sense of God’s wrath” (25); “the sword of the Spirit [this weapon is then pointed at the unfaithful Christian]” (26); “divine threatening” (36); “in continual expectation of the fatal moment when Divine Vengeance should plunge me into the bottomless abyss” (37).

19As also abundantly proved through his poetical work, Cowper is consistently obsessed with the fear of God’s vengeance. This is due both to his fragile mental condition and to the subsequent malign Evangelical influence to which he was subject. This is so conspicuous that this so-called conversion account might at any time lapse into its contrary. Indeed, the standard definition of a conversion narrative proceeds through gradual conviction of sin to necessary repentance and a newly acquired certainty of election thanks to justification by faith. No doubt staunch puritans like Bunyan met these requirements, as despair, however real and deep at times, always proved transient in their works. Yet Cowper’s pilgrim’s progress is constantly darkened and impaired by his own personal data. One might therefore wonder whether the strain of an Evangelical approach to salvation was not bound to be intrinsically overwhelming. This confrontation might Sound all the more unbearable in Cowper’s case as his mind is known not to have been equipped with many natural resources to defend itself.

20Still, this view should here mainly remain a glimpse of what was to become increasingly perceptible through the rest of Cowper’s work. Adelphi itself just has to fit into the conversion narrative pattern by showing God’s wrath in a triumphant perspective as a weapon basically pointed at the devil through the poor Christian soul. As also forcibly expressed in “Grace and Providence,” one of his Olney Hymns: “[God’s hand] From Satan’s malice shields my breast, / Or overrules it for the best.”3

21Therefore war is raging. The Christian soul is expected to embark on an ever renewed crusade to protect itself against the devil’s warlike strategy. Cowper heavily relies upon this metaphor again in one of his hymns entitled “Exhortation to Prayer,” published in 1779 as part of his Olney Hymns:

Restraining pray’r, we cease to fight;
Pray’r makes the Christian’s armour bright;
And Satan trembles, when he sees
The Weakest saint, upon his knees.4

22As a careful witness to it, Cowper can make out “critical moments” in his progress. This paves the way for the pathological metaphor which is being increasingly superimposed on the warlike one. The idea is indeed that psychomachia is but a means to express a spiritual disease. When it reaches its climax (a critical moment) it comes up to the surface in the form of pathological symptoms hinting at the spiritual unease, if not disease. This is the reason why either Cowper or his friends attending him so often had to call for a doctor after a major religious crisis had occurred. This recurrent attitude is therefore not poles apart from the underlying ancient idea that excess in humour or a quick shift in its balance was bound to increase physical and psychological disorder. All this cannot but refer the XVIIIth-century reader back to Burton’s insight into “Religious Melancholy.” Again, the constant interaction between physical and metaphysical evolution appears in full light.

23Of course, such a crisis should not be seen only as a physical phenomenon. Its main purpose is no other than to show a spiritual breach. Actually, since St Augustine’s Confessions, any modem spiritual autobiography has tried its best to make out the key moment when the soul may at last be roused out of its sinful rest to the turning point of its conversion. Yet, the way to the truth remains a difficult one. The enduring ordeal the soul has to go through is how to tell God’s truth from the devil’s devices. As progress comes from the interpretation of any circumstance in daily life, it is crucial for a mind prone to madness to remember the warning expressed by Bunyan at the very end of The Pilgrim’s Progress: “By mis-interpreting, evil ensues.”5 Yet the Christian pilgrim is left with one main weapon to free himself from the devil’s assaults and to achieve subsequent recovery: Satan’s arguments should systematically be counterbalanced and outwitted by a true Christian reply. As Burton already advised: “If Satan summon thee to answer, send him to Christ… Christ will protect thee, vindicate thee…, he will overcome the divel” (731). When applied on a physical level, Burton’s advice remains as straightforward as general: “confer the disease and the medicine” (725); when we move to a metaphysical level, it is to be practised as follows: “oppose some opposite parts of scriptures to it” (730). Therefore recourse to the Scriptures turns out to be the main antidote against the devil’s assaults. It is now up to each Christian conscience to make the better use of it, while bearing in mind the dreadful risk of misinterpretation. This is the reason why all conversion narratives are fraught with Biblical quotations. Here is Cowper’s own contribution: “I saw clearly that any case required such a remedy and I had not the least doubt within me but that this was the Gospel of Salvation” (30). The point is to outwit doubt and despair by coming across the appropriate passages from the Bible—preferably without ever having to look for them. Cowper recalls:

Having found a Bible upon a bench in the garden, I opened it upon the 11th of St John's Gospel, where Lazarus is raised from the dead.
I saw so much benevolence and mercy…. Little did I think that it was an exact type of the mercy which Jesus was upon the point of extending towards myself. (38)

24It is clear from this extract that this occurred at a time when Cowper had not yet grown fully aware of the analogical foreboding that might lie hidden there for him to decipher. His last sentence shows that his clear-sightedness is only due to the retrospect he is writing. Yet, just a little later, at the beginning of the climactic moment of conversion proper, Cowper proves more open to a further hint offered by Providence:

I flung myself into a chair near the window seat, and, seeing a Bible there, ventured once more to apply to it for comfort and instruction. The first verse I saw was the 25th of the third chapter to the Romans where Jesus is set forth as the propitiation for our sins. (39)

25The way to peace at last seems to lie open, as shown by the use of “propitiation” in the latter sentence. Yet, it should be remembered that despite this worthy attempt to achieve retrospective insight into his spiritual progress, God will for ever remain incomprehensible to Cowper, just as to every other human being: “the way of salvation was, however still hid from my eyes” (39). But autobiography offers him a chance to develop a retrospectively optimism-oriented approach to his evolution, which may therefore be considered a traditional Christian sequence of trials making up his own Way of the Cross (encapsulated under the heading “war”):

How wonderful are the Works of the Lord and His ways past finding out! Thus was He preparing me gradually for an event which I least of all expected —even for the reception of His Blessed Gospel. Working by means which in all human contemplation must needs seem directly opposite to that purpose, but which in His wise and gracious disposal have, I trust, effectually accomplished it. (16-17)

26Cowper is now left with just a few more stages to go through on his way to salvation. As all his forerunners in the conversion narrative genre, he first remains indifferent to God’s warnings to move him into awareness of sin:

At so early a period of my life my heart was become proof against the ordinary methods which a gracious God employs for our chastisement…. Neither during the course of [disorder] nor on my recovery had I any sentiment of contrition, any thought of God, or eternity. (7)

27Then his indifference gradually gives way to growing conviction of sin. “Conviction of sin” and “despair of mercy” are phrases recurring throughout his account, until he at last realizes how urgent repentance has become: “I thought likewise on the necessity of repentance… I perceived something like a glimpse of hope dawning in my heart” (29). After all these preparations for conversion have been completed, God’s victory now lies beyond doubt:

“Thus did the Almighty convert an ineffectual endeavour upon my life” [with reference to Cowper’s latest attempt to take his life] into the means of preserving it for the future, and Satan was made to defeat his own purpose. (34)

28The long looked-for remedy for the metaphysical crisis and its physical expression is now within reach: “the only thing that could promote and effectuate my cure…. an experimental knowledge of the Redemption that is in Jesus Christ” (37). Such are both the aim and the very definition of the conversion experience indeed. If any further hint is dropped that peace is still beyond Cowper’s reach, it is now only to be understood as God’s call for him to strive on for further, more secure peace, to be based on clearly Christian grounds. This is the reason why Cowper constantly needs the help of his friends to bring him comfort through their better use of the Scriptures: “I could not rest at a distance from him whom I had found so capable of pointing out to me my disorder and its only remedy” (30). Yet what sounds particularly ironical and ominous in this statement is that the friend he mentions here, his cousin Martin Madan, is no other than one of those who contributed to develop a frightening approach to religion by constantly entertaining him with spiritually-oriented conversations and lavish readings from the Bible. But Cowper never grew fully aware of this form of dramatic irony, and was only too grateful to his friends for helping him with his conversion when he wrote Adelphi.

29Yet, the spiritual change operated by conversion is expressed as a sense of no longer being overwhelmed by a burden to carry along: “I felt the weight of all my misery taken off” (9). One will remember Bunyan’s image of his pilgrim Christian loaded with a heavy burden standing for earthly sins. Symbolically, access to spiritual peace is also conveyed through the image of “light shilling out of darkness,” as the title of one of Cowper’s Olney Hymns goes. In Adelphi, Cowper grows aware that “the Blessed God was preparing me for the clearer light of his countenance by the first dawning of that light upon me. A sweet calm and serenity of mind succeeded this season” (40).

30After conversion has occurred, several more sentences convey this new peaceful mood: “God had ordered everything for me like an indulgent father, and had prepared me a more comfortable place of rest than I could have chosen for myself” (42). Cowper even spontaneously uses one of the most commonplace metaphors that pervade conversion narratives when calling the place where he was to stay after his conversion “the place of my second nativity” (42), with obvious reference to the Pauline idea of “infants in Christ” (Cor. 3.1). This image is taken up in a hymn called “The New Convert,” which belongs to Book 3 of Olney Hymns, a section entitled “On the Rise, Progress, Changes, and Comforts of the Spiritual Life.” It reads parallel with the prose account of Cowper’s conversion. This of course can be forcefully supported by a period in his life when Cowper felt tempted to a quietist view of religion which might have made the contemplated mystical union of the soul with God possible to him. He translated into English hymns by the XVIIth-century French quietist Jeanne Guyon, in which images of rest and peace are omnipresent. The soul is as passive as ever, but this is no longer emblematic of Calvinistic despair, but of the quiet union of the faithful soul with God as achieved through the experience of total surrender and liability to God’s intervention.

31Yet, to Cowper, this view seems to have remained mainly an ideal image of peace, which he himself was hardly ever allowed to indulge in. He was only the translator, not the author, of those hymns, and even his own devotional poetry is far from being consistently pervaded with similar peace imagery. One of the least ambiguous examples to be found in his work is the second hymn appended to his first part of Adelphi, once conversion has apparently been ensured:

Far from the World, o Lord, I flee,
From strife and tumult far,
From scenes where Satan wages still
His most successful war.
The Calm retreat, the silent shade,
With prayer and praise agree;
And seem by Thy sweet bounty made,
For those who follow Thee.
There, if Thy Spirit touch the Soul.
And grace her mean abode;
O with what peace, and joy, and love,
She communes with her God!6

32Cowper later decided to work this hymn into his collection of devotional verse known as Olney Hymns in 1779. This hymn now appears under the title “Retirement.” “This apparently serene tone is echoed in many other hymns which, for obvious reasons, had to emphasize the prospect of peace at the end of a successful pilgrim’s progress through life. One of Cowper’s translations from Mme Guyon, significantly entitled” The Entire Surrender,” also reads:

Renounce all strength but strength divine,
And peace shall be for ever thine:
Behold the path which I have trod,
My path, till I go home to God. 200: 7-12

33All things considered, what sounds most surprising is the fact that Cowper proved able to meet the requirements of such an optimistic profession of faith as a conversion narrative, with straightforward progress from war to peace as the achievement of Christ’s victory over Antichrist within a Christian soul. Yet, Cowper’s apologetic contribution definitely remains rooted in many deep-reaching ambiguities which still want clarifying after Adelphi. On the one hand, it seems beyond doubt that Adelphi pictures God’s wrath as a powerful and effective weapon to outwit devilish devices through a successful crusade; just as well, insistence on sin actually results in repentance and conversion, as expected here.

34Still, on the other hand, it remains that this very notion of sin and guilt was also likely to trigger off a whole ominous process of conviction of predestination to hell and subsequent alienation, both from God’s grace and potentially from the self as well. This risk had already been recalled by Bunyan at the very end of The Pilgrim’s Progress: “There is a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven” (212). One might sum up this point by taking up the pathological metaphor noticed before, as Cowper obviously was not the right man to achieve and keep so subtle a balance between the poisonous evil and its antidote. This is more than conspicuous from the overall evolution of his work. Therefore, Adelphi’s Christian victory also needs some qualifying, as Cowper himself suggested: “[I felt] easier, but far from easy” (30). Indeed, war seems to have remained his permanent spiritual State of mind. and peace tends to turn into an ever receding prospect, an ideal.

35Cowper’s triumph over the devil and madness seemed consistent enough until the date he chose to put a provisional end to this narrative, namely: February 14, 1767. This turning point corresponds to the time when he began to indulge in his Evangelical period, which was to bring him both new mystical yearnings for God and increasing conviction of predestination. The lighter side of this influence may be felt throughout Adelphi due only to his retrospective vantage point. So this deliberately optimistic perspective may usefully be contrasted with his far more tragic Spiritual Diary, which of course was left unfinished at Cowper’s death, and soon revealed the overwhelming threat of silence.

36The ever reduced length of his fragments points in a different way to the potential dangers of the excesses of religion to his fragile mind and soul. In a prospective hint in Adelphi, Cowper already described his life to come after 1767 as “long intervals of darkness interrupted by short returns of joy, and peace in believing” (40). It would therefore be necessary to qualify the successful impression left by Adelphi. Indeed, when this pamphlet went through its first posthumous edition in 1802, it met with a suspicious response to the excessive strain that had been imposed on him by the Evangelical revival to which he had just offered such an unfortunate contribution.

37Yet, for obvious reasons of self-consistency with the open purpose of this work, peace will have the last word here, as Cowper concludes by offering his blessing to the reader: “Peace be with thee, reader, through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ” (46).

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