Composition
"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" (1758) was written by Robert Robinson (1735-1790) at the age of twenty-two, just three years after his conversion under the preaching of George Whitefield. Robinson became a significant Baptist minister in Cambridge, but later in life reportedly drifted from the faith whose expression had produced this hymn - a biographical detail that makes the hymn's famous confession ("prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love") read as prophecy. Set to the American folk tune "Nettleton," it has become one of the most beloved of all English hymns.
Biblical Text
1 Samuel 7:12 - "Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, 'Thus far the LORD has helped us'" - provides the Hebrew word Ebenezer that appears in the second stanza: "Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I've come." The "stone of help" becomes in the hymn a personal memorial: the singer erects a marker at the point of divine rescue, acknowledging that "hither by thy help I've come" and trusting "by thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home."
Romans 7:24 - "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?" - underlies the confession of the wandering heart. Psalm 103:1 provides the opening invitation to bless the Lord.
Creator and Legacy
Robinson's subsequent spiritual wanderings give the hymn a poignant biographical context. A story (possibly apocryphal) has Robinson in a stagecoach overhearing a woman humming the hymn; when she showed it to him and asked his opinion, he reportedly said "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." Whether or not the story is true, it captures the hymn's strange quality: its confession of proneness to wander was simultaneously true at the time of writing and more true than Robinson knew.