Cowper's damnation was real to him; its cause remains disputed
He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin.
Calvin and Gilpin stand for a constricting theological system and Cowper's liberating comic invention. Gilpin is the subject of Cowper's famous ballad, published in 1782. Yet the biographical evidence complicates the claim that predestination drove him into illness. Leslie Stephen's account in the original Dictionary of National Biography series (1885–1900), inspected in its Wikisource transcription, traces the 1763 crisis through dread of a public examination for a House of Lords post and suicide attempts, followed by a conviction of damnation. Stephen explicitly treats the religious terrors as an effect rather than the cause of that illness; he also records playful verse among Cowper's recreations after recovery. The Cowper & Newton Museum similarly identifies the examination as the immediate trigger and places his evangelical conversion during recovery. These accounts support Chesterton's contrast between religious despair and restorative creative activity, but not his confident single-cause explanation. They do not establish that poetry cured Cowper or that Calvin's theology caused his condition.
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