One of the most shocking poems in Protestant hymnbooks is William Cowper’s “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood.” A 1772 meditation about the crucifixion by a man who struggled with depression all his life, the hymn dwells on Christ’s gory death and evokes the metaphor of sinners bathing in blood. “There is a fountain filled with blood, / Drawn from Immanuel’s veins; / And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, / Lose all their guilty stains.” The hymn, reprinted in hymnbooks since the late 18th century, is still sung by many Presbyterian and Baptist congregations in the U.S. and the U.K. So abrasive are its words and affecting its tune that the agnostic and irreverent journalist H.L. Mencken recalled it as a favorite of Sunday school kids in his boyhood.