Hymn Writers of the Church

Robinson, Robert, the author of "Come, thou Fount of every blessing," an English Baptist minister, was born in Swaffham, Norfolk, England, September 27, 1735. He received a good grammar school education. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a London hairdresser, but the Lord was preparing him for a higher calling. He was converted among the Methodists in his twentieth year, and became a lay preacher among them, but soon left them and became an Independent. In less than a year, however, he became pastor of the Baptist Church at Cambridge, where he remained as an "open communion" Baptist until the year of his death. He died June 9, 1790, being succeeded in the pastorate of the Church by Rev. Robert Hall. He was a very popular preacher and author of several able works, among them A Plea for the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 1776, a volume which "dignitaries and divines of the Church of England united with Nonconformists in lauding as an exceptionally able, scholarly, and pungently written book," His History of Baptism and the Baptists appeared in 1790. A few months before he died he retired to Birmingham, where he seems to have had friendly fellowship with Dr. Priestley, the noted Unitarian divine. This led some Unitarians to infer and to declare that before his death he came into sympathy with their views. But this inference is unwarranted.