Now, I'll keep this as informal as I can because I think we'll profit more from any questions because there are individual differences in this. But at the outset, the psalmist, Psalm 42, he says, why art thou cast down my soul? And then the answer he gives later is still trust in God. And Alexander McLaren, in his commentary on the Psalms, which is still very good, he calls the Psalm a fight with depression. And David is expressing his thoughts as he's going through this experience. Now, we have to make a difference between, at the outset, depression and spiritual depression. Too many people mix the two up as if they were both the same. Spiritual depression, and we'll come to that later, has some added ingredients. But Christians can get depressed just like any other human being. I tend to think myself, after a lot of research, because I used to lecture on these topics at Edinburgh University, that depression is latent in everybody. but there's some trigger which sets it off. It may be a mental trigger, or it may be a physical one. Because while we're psychosomatic, you know, the soul affects the body, we're also what I would say, soma psychic. The body affects the mind. Your mind isn't going to be up there if your body's exhausted. Just as a soul can bring down the body, energy-wise, well, the mind can be brought down by the body, if the body is exhausted. Stress, prolonged stress can bring down your body and your mind. And the thing about stress is, stress will eat up your vitamins. And that's why a person who is exhausted or suffering from depression, they will tend to get cold sores at the beginning and maybe their eyes will go a bit red. They'll also find it difficult to maintain sleep, a sleep pattern. It will be up in the air really. Either they'll be sleeping during the day or they'll go asleep at night and they'll wake up at 1.30 in the morning and that's them. They're wide awake. Depression means to be pressed down or to be cast down. But the strange thing is, though, that in many depressions, you're cast down because your adrenaline has gone into overdrive. And antidepressants, some of them, are actually to lower your adrenaline. It's like an engine running on the choke all the time, and you're burning yourself up. Now, talking of engines, I mentioned stress, prolonged stress can cause depression because you're wearing yourself out. And I've likened it to a car. You're running a car and the red light goes on or it starts flashing. Now, you stop that car fairly quickly, take it to a garage for repair. It's not a big job. You keep running with that red light on. it will be a massive job. There'll be a lot of destruction. And so when you get the first indications, it's easier to come up from a foot in a trough than six foot in a trough. Early treatment is a good thing. Trouble is, in the church, there's a stigma about mental health. you know, love thy neighbor, but there's a stigma about this. And I actually did my MTH on a Christian psychiatrist called Paul Tournier. And he goes into one of the reasons why Christians can get depressed. And he's got a book called, about false guilt. You can be taught from an early age to be guilty about something about which you should not be guilty. But that becomes ingrained and you get a false standard and you're depressed about certain social expectations or unwritten laws or traditions and that kind of thing. And sadly, up north, for example, there's a fair percentage of Christians in psychiatric units. And a lot of it has to do with a sense of false guilt or unresolved guilt. Even the atheist psychiatrists, especially America, can trace a lot of depression to unresolved guilt. Why art thou cast down my soul? Well, it may be that there's sin in the life which is not confessed, or maybe it's confessed but not forsaken. That brings us a little into the spiritual dimension, spiritual depression. You can have all these other things, but the added ingredient here is your relationship with God. A lot of, shall we say, clinical depression is triggered by your social relationships. Relations are very important to us in this world. And a person can be going along very nicely, mentally, physically, and then something happens in a relationship and they crash. And teenagers are not exempt from this when they perhaps fall in love with somebody and find there's no response and they can go into a depression. Happily, that tends to be just short-lived, but it's like a taste of what could be prolonged and even deeper. But a spiritual depression, it's your relationship with God. You feel perhaps you're not what you ought to be. You feel that there's something in you that's betraying you. You're afraid of hypocrisy, which we touched on tonight, afraid of having a double life and a double standard. You're afraid of what people see of you, and you're afraid that they see right into you that you're not what you are saying you are or acting like that. Perhaps the greatest example was Elijah. Elijah was going well. He ran in front of Ahab's chariot for miles. It shows you the energy of the man. And when you're lifted up and close to God in communion, you do get energy. There's no denying that. But then he ran away. Now, it seems that he was on the edge of a depression there because people who are depressed do irrational things. They make decisions and they're not usually very good decisions. Elijah, having had the protection of God and the blessing of God at Mount Carmel, suddenly runs away because a woman threatens him. And then he lies down. I am no better than my father's. He's a failure. He's let the cause down. Everybody has seen it. And he crashes, mentally and physically. Part of the Lord's remedy, remember, for Elijah was to make him sleep and to give him food. But then there's also the mental side. The Lord reassured him that he could still be used and he gave him further work to do. But that spiritual depression, this is this added ingredient to the clinical depression. I said, be careful about the books that you read. Some books are talking about spiritual depression, and they're not. They're just taking chunks out of medical textbooks. I've seen so many of these. They're not getting into the spiritual dimension. And they're also being written, in some cases, by people who have not experienced depression. And they're giving you theory, and they're not able to understand your condition. They're just writing about it on second-hand knowledge. Now, one book, much as I like Dr. Lloyd-Jones, his book on spiritual depression is not entirely about spiritual depression. A lot of it is, like, from a medical textbook. And personally, I think he is too hard on Elijah. Far too hard on Elijah. He's not the only one, of course. B.B. Warfield was quite hard on Elijah. You know, you hear these, what doest thou hear, Elijah? Well, he was there because he was just exhausted. He had crashed, that's why he was there. And the Lord did not write him off and say, you cannot be used anymore. The Lord cared for him and sent him back into the battle, you might say. There's a lot of books, especially in the last couple of years, that are trotting out 10 stages in depression and that kind of thing. And it's all about theory and A, B, C, et cetera. Depression is not really like that. For depression, you need patience with yourself because it will be about two years, about two years before you're back up or beginning to amend after a year and a half at least. Counselling is important and it's good if the church would counsel with ability those who are depressed and have mental health problems. I have been suggesting for years that the Spring Conference should have something about mental health because Christians are not exempt. Somebody might say, well, there's a lot of young people. Well, maybe they haven't had it, but surely it'd be good to prepare them if they ever do have it in the future. One of the best books on it, a real one about spiritual depression, is by John White, and it's called The Masks of Melancholy. I would highly recommend that book. He was a Christian psychiatrist, a missionary out in South America. Another book, if you want to see what depression is like, especially the bipolar kind. There's a book by Susan Jamison, and you spell Jamison, J-A-M-I-S-O-N. American lecturer in psychology, and she crashed. And it's called An Unquiet Mind. And it tells you about how days she was as high as a kite. and making irrational decisions. I mean, she ran up a credit card bill of 50,000. Shopping, of course, shopping, going round the shops. But then she crashed and she couldn't even get out of bed. She couldn't even get to the toilet. It was so bad. Now, that's a first-hand experience. If you're interested in finding out about all the different treatments available, the best book is by Stuart Sutherland. Stuart Sutherland. And his is just called Breakdown. Now Stuart Sutherland has the advantage in that he was a professor of psychology. And he made it into a kind of study. He went round all the different types of treatment. Found that most of them were rubbish. And nothing against the NHS etc, maybe there's some people here, but unfortunately the NHS seems to train people in one way, cognitive behavioural therapy. And I remember talking to a CPN. I've changed their name now, haven't I? It's not Community Psychiatric Nurse. It's something else now. Anyway, the theory of cognitive behavioral therapy is negative thoughts cause depression. So you have to keep a diary and they will encourage you to have positive thoughts about yourself and make plans for the day. And I said to this, she was a lecturer as well, I said, but why can't depression cause negative thoughts? No answer. She only trained up in one way. The Americans are not overboard in cognitive behavioral therapy. Some of the Americans are for the medicine, but there's a lot of them who are on the border, you might say, of psychotherapy. And this is going back to what we said before, this unresolved guilt. I am a sinner. I have let the Lord down. I am a failure. Why did I do that? That's me finished now, that kind of thing. These people have to be encouraged. It needs counseling. Support from other people is very important for the recovering depressed person. To go back to CBT, what's the use of telling a person, today you will do this, this and the other and it will make you feel good if you can't get out of your bed in the morning. You can't do anything, what's the point of making plans? I know people can be against antidepressants, but they're a very good short-term remedy for one thing in particular. They will get you asleep. Because the more you get into sleep deprivation, the worse you're going to get. You will become depressed and your head, you'll probably think you're going mad in some cases. Also, part of depression is you kind of think and act in slow motion. It's as if you were in a diving bell in the bottom of the ocean. Everything is done in slow motion. Your thoughts, your cognitive become sluggish. Your actions, your walk even becomes sluggish. Spike Milligan, who was severely depressed many, many times. Interesting how many comedians are bipolars. Peter Sellers was the same. And he said that, not a diving bell, he said it was like walking about in a duvet. A duvet, you were so muffled and numbed all the time. It's as if you couldn't touch or see things properly, and you weren't hearing things properly. And Spike tried all the different kinds of remedies, every one of them. And you know what he thought was the best? The electric shock treatment. It gave him the best recovery, or the longest recovery, before unfortunately he went back into it again. There is one, you might say, frightening statistic, if we take it one way, and that is every depressed person, the relapse rate is 50%. One in two are gonna get it again. But the good thing about that, I know it sounds dreadful, but the fact is, once you've got it, you could have it again. But the good thing is, when you get it the second time, you won't be as frightened. And you will know what to do. And you will know it's a patient slog. Many people think, oh, a few pills, a bit of sleep, change the environment, I'll get out of it in a month or two. 18 months is the minimum. the minimum you will need to get back up there. So there's all these different looks at depression. And that's why I'm saying it's better if you ask questions because everybody has a different ingredient in their experience. For some people, it's triggered as a reaction. It may be, for example, a bereavement, a loss, For others, it could be a crisis at work that could trigger it. For others, it could be falling out with somebody. And sometimes the most beneficial thing to do about the work in particular, and there's a lot at work, and what do you call it, occupational health or whatever it is at work, has got many, many patients, more than we realize. Best thing to do is get away from there. It's a bit like behaviorism, stimulus response. Well, if that is making you like that, get away from that and get somewhere else. Change your job, go to a different place, even move house if you have to. If you come to the conclusion that your environment is triggering this, then although it will take a while to recover, the first step is get away from it. Now, Depressed people don't have much energy, but as you can see with Elijah, sometimes it helps, not always, but sometimes it helps if you give them something to do. It may not be a great thing to do, but what do they like? What are they interested in? Try to focus their mind on something, because if you don't, it won't focus on anything. and they will just withdraw. They don't like mixing with people. Another symptom is what they call ahedonia. In other words, whatever you took pleasure in before, suddenly you're not interested. Things that you really enjoyed. For a Christian, for example, it might be the Bible or a favorite book, and now you just can't take yourself to it. Perhaps you're struggling in prayer. And as I mentioned today, if you're struggling in prayer, take a psalm and just recite it if you need to. But the Lord cared for Elijah. And there are many, many others, Christians, who are cast down in their soul. The world says, while there's life, there is hope. The Christian says, no, while there's hope, there's life. As long as there's a hope in Christ, you're alive and you will stay alive. But quite frankly, medically speaking and spiritually speaking, a person without hope cannot live. It is despair. Now you might say, what about the world? They have no hope. Well, yes, they have. It's not in Christ. But a false hope will keep you going. A false hope will keep you going. But sometimes some of the world will find out that their false hope was false. And then that is despair. But for the Christian, perplexed but not in despair. Now, the depressed person may have, like Elijah, a desire to die. But Elijah would not do anything to himself, remember. He wanted the Lord to take him. And perhaps he wanted a way so that he wouldn't be a burden, so that he wouldn't fail again, because the confidence will go in depression. And you'll say to the person, well, you'll be all right. It'll take a while, but you'll be all right. They won't believe you, because they think there's no way they're going to get out of this. Now I've seen one or two people who have been on the edge of despair, the very edge of despair. It's not a pretty sight, let's put it that way. But they did come back. They never thought they would, quite honestly, they never thought they would get back up, but they did. And God will restore the soul. But you cannot neglect your body at the same time. You neglect your body, it will bring down the soul. And if the body's exhausted, it'll bring down the mind with it. So common sense in some cases, but as said, there are things in the world, and we're finished now, but there are things in the world that we cannot control and they can trigger us into a depression, totally unexpectedly. And I'm sure young people grow up and they've seen people and they think, well, I won't be like that. Thing is, many of them are like that. And to be prepared, to understand something is a good part of the remedy to get better. So the best book I would say is John White, The Masks of Melancholy. William Bridge still has a very good book, The Lifting Up of the Downcast, but it can be quite heavy going, whereas John White is more readable. I'll leave now to questions. It's just a brief summary. Well, we want to thank Mr. Clark, but as we said, you will have an opportunity to I was just going to ask you, I know you said you didn't think cognitive therapy was particularly helpful, but would you not argue that in the scripture we see a form of it, maybe not what the NHS would prescribe, but there's a sense that in many of the psalms, the psalmist speaks truth to himself in the midst of despair. Even him saying, oh, why are you so downcast, my soul? He's casting, and then there's a voice of faith, even though it doesn't feel like it. He says, yet I will put my trust. So Psalm 77, Psalm 73, there's so many of these things. And I do agree that there does come a time when the saints are so far gone that they can't bring themselves to say it, but maybe in the early stages, If they see the signs, they're to use these means of grace that God gives them to speak truth, even though their feelings may tell them otherwise, and just to use it to, because again, God's word is true no matter what our understanding or reality or what we may deem to be reality. I know where you're coming from, Mr. Haram. I've read Jay Green as well. Yes, it's a wonderful plan. And we would like to think in a certain way, but what if you're not able to? Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying in the earlier stages, I do recognize it does come in time. Well, this is where we as ministers, as elders, and those who care, to come alongside those who can't, and maybe speak these truths to them, though they themselves cannot express it. I mean, there's a role for us to play here, just to come along and speak this amongst them, even if they can't accept it. Just saying it. and just reminding them of the promises of God. I'm just asking that question. Yeah, there's a place for that. I mean, even the NHS will not use CBT on its own. They combine it with counselling. Yes, yes. But a lot of counselling, remember, is to listen to the person, and they may not be saying much. And the Lord came himself to be a counsellor to Elijah, and he heard Elijah, and he didn't upbraid him and he didn't give him any plans at first. He just made him sleep and to eat. Once they've gone by that stage, a little at a time, but we also have to be careful that we don't, this is the dangerous thing, we don't rush them into something because then they're a failure again. Plus, they may, it does help if you know what we're talking about, of course, as ministers, they may think, oh, well, this person's got the head knowledge, but they'll say, you don't understand where I am or what I'm feeling or that kind of thing, because sometimes they will feel nothing, and that is quite frightening for them as well. You go to Isaiah 50, who is among you that fears the Lord and walks in darkness? Darkness, they feel maybe, They've got nothing, and that Christ is there, but you're not seeing him the same way, you know. And of course, the devil will be around too, remember. The devil will be there saying, ah, you've sent away your salvation. Yeah. Someone, ah, Maria, yes. Yeah, could you elaborate on the practical support that you could give to someone who, you know, a friend, perhaps, who, Right. Caring for them, sometimes not even saying much, just being there. And let them choose when they want you to be there, because their sleep pattern will be strange. And some days they will not want to do anything. You could find some days they won't even get up. And as long as they don't see you writing them off, that's the main thing. Because they're feeling enough of that as it is. And it'll be difficult for them to explain to you, but in a sense, they can't help themselves. They're down to nothing. They've got nothing. And even sometimes their speech pattern will change. They won't be able to string a sentence together sometimes. So there's a lot of things like that, but as I say, you have to be careful about the CBT only. I personally think it's a bit hard. There's a combination, CBT and the drugs, to get them into a sleep pattern. And it's only once they've got over the body thing that the mind will respond. And you can talk to them a little at a time, but it's a long process. You need to be able to stick it out at least two years. And to let them, how shall I put it, let them dictate to you because if they feel that you're trying to tell them this and this and this, you're not feeling what they're feeling. They would like to do all these things, and that's part of their guilt, especially when they compare themselves with the way they were in the past or maybe other people. This is what I'm saying about the church. It needs to be a caring community. And sadly, Presbyterianism in Scotland doesn't have a great reputation for being a caring community. And I think we should address this really somehow. Mr. McLeod. I was very interested that you spoke of this period of a year and a half or two years. No, I didn't touch on that. There's what's called endogenous... Well, there's endogenous depression. They're gonna have it all their lives. And that is quite a severe one. I'm talking more about, well, at the beginning I was talking about reacting to things and triggering things, but we have to accept, and I know it's difficult for some people to accept it, but some people are practically born depressed. They never get away from it. They're gonna have it all their lives. And they have to accept it. And they have to recognize it and be patient with themselves. Spurgeon has a nice comment. He said, some of God's children travel all the way to heaven by night. They don't know what it is to have sunshine or daylight. But they get there in the end. Mr. Fearing and Miss Much Afraid and Mr. Ready to Halt. It's amazing, Bunyan in the second part, the first part of Pilgrim's Progress, is really about the individual. The second part is about the church. By that time, Bunyan was a pastor, and he was seeing all these people in the church. Mr. Fearing, Mr. Ready to Halt, and Miss Much Afraid, and all these people. And remember the man that was robbed. And he lost absolutely everything, but they couldn't get his jewels. Because they were in his heart, you see. Couldn't get the jewels. Bunyan's good. Bunyan's really good. Bunyan, Rutherford, Spurgeon. A nice staple diet for the Christian. Well, so far, all the questions have come from right-wingers. I think so, because there are so many things in common. But the one about white, for example, will point them towards Christ as well. Out of them all, I think it was the most readable and probably the most helpful and the most sympathetic, I would say. William Bridge is very good, but like many of the Puritans, it's Roman numeral one, Arabic numeral two, et cetera. It goes on and on and on. And somebody said to me, I said, John Orne is exhaustive in his treatment. He said, yes, I'm exhausting. But breakdown as well. There are people who are depressed and they will try this and this and this and Stuart Sutherland's book is about he tried it and he went around all these different therapists and he came to his own conclusions and he was one of these people and it does happen in the end he was healed by time. He did try all these different therapies, but after about two years, he suddenly began to get better. Just natural, you might say, without any therapy. And that does happen as well. examples of people who have suffered quite severe repression. Are there stages up to that repression, to that kind of level, and how would we see the stages of dealing with all that, or is it just a hit? Well, this is taking aside the people who have had all their lives, yes. The behaviour pattern will begin to change They will become more reclusive, I would say. They will get away from people more and more. They will take decisions which they will regret. And they're not functioning the same way as they used to, but people can hide it. Many a depressed person will smile at you. And that's why I think John White called his book The Masks of Melancholy, because people are ashamed of it, and they hide it. And it doesn't help when you get people saying, oh, snap out of it. You'll get through it, that kind of thing. And if they don't address it, another thing is, of course, these are things they won't tell you. Are they sleeping properly? Are they eating properly? Because if you don't, you're going to go down. And if the body goes down, it will drag the mind with it. And then, of course, you can get into eating disorders. Your self-esteem will go, and things like this. Depression can spin off into other things. But certainly, like every other misery, an early intervention is good. Does the church really encourage people to tell others, you know, I'm depressed, what can I do, or how can I be helped, or is it not still a stigma in the church? Sorry, I can't be more, you know. Well, maybe I could just ask more of it. How does a person or others know what the difference The length of it. I mean, everybody goes down at some point, but the length of it. If it's beginning to interfere with your sleep, with your eating, with your work, with your relationships, with your relationship with God in some cases. If it goes on, then you need to deal with it. But remember, the psalmist himself didn't know what was wrong with him. And that's why I said, why? He couldn't pinpoint the reason, why am I like this? There doesn't seem to be anything about not repenting in the psalm. And that's why I think Paul says perplexed, but not in despair. To be perplexed means you don't see any way out. And that can drive you into a depression, where you're in a situation, let's say your work, you're in a real bad situation, but there's nothing you can do to get out of it. And you're having to suffer this day by day by day. And it's having an effect on you. You would like to escape, but you can't. And it will have an effect on you. And that's why for some depressions, what they call reactive depressions, you get out. And I've seen in schools where a person was not coping, the doctor, sort of a deputy director actually, very stressful job, deputy director, The doctor just said, right, we've dealt with this long enough, you get out. I'm putting you off for six months. Oh, he said, this is very sudden. Oh, let me go back for my briefcase, I left it in the office. He said, no, you do not go near that place again. And he actually went into the ministry. He's now a reader, is that what they call him, the Episcopal? A reader in the church at Edinburgh. The one at the bottom there, Toll Cross, there's an Episcopal just as you go towards the meadows. He's on the left-hand side. So if you see Bill, tell him I was asking for him. Anybody else? Oh, sorry, John. Yes, OK. Do you want? Many therapies. If it's something to do with God, certainly. If it's something to do with God, but how many ministers, though, are trained in what we're talking about? Maybe it's a good course to have in the seminary sometime. It's not as if we're dealing with perfect people, you know. No, if it's to do with God, yes. But again, it's like I was saying about the NHS, what kind of training have they been given? If it's the Jay Adams book, well, Jay Adams is as hard as nails. nuthetic counseling. You should be doing this. You should not be thinking like that. You should be thinking like this. It reminds me of CBT a wee bit. The psychotherapist's approach is more compassionate. They will try to get not to, and we're not talking about the Freudian. I mean, they're wacky. They're off the wall. But remember, Freud did have a Jewish background. He did accept original sin. So he knew there was something inside. The trouble is he'd come up with all these fantasy theories. But the good thing about some of them is they will go beyond the symptoms. And they will try to find out from you your experience and your thoughts about yourself or others or what is actually triggering this. And it's a great help if you can find what's the trigger. And that's, as I said, I've come to the conclusion it's latent in everybody. A bit like cancer, but there's a trigger, and it's often a social trigger. It can be a physical one, exhaustion, stress, but in most cases, it's a social trigger. Relationships are so important, and that's why to recover, we need to be cared for by other relationships. including God, of course, who came to Elijah. And what did God say to Elijah? Go and get Elisha, get a friend. And here's some work for you to do. And he was given a step-by-step, go to Elisha, go to Hazael, one wee thing at a time. And Elijah, you can see he's back where he was before. And when he's taken up, he's his old self again. and far from discouraging others, where is the Lord God of Elijah? Why art thou cast down, my soul? Answer, still trust in God. Can't trust in yourself, nothing left, but still trust in God. Hope, where there's hope, there's life. Oh, that's difficult. So they will not go for medication then? They will not go for counselling? How's their sleep pattern? No, well it may be in some cases like Stuart Sutherland after a couple of years they'll get better but if it's long term yeah then the more long term it is the more a person is likely to be on the medication. For extreme cases One of the old ones works quite well, which is lithium. It keeps a balance. I'm not aware of any kind of natural remedies, you see. This is where medicine can help us, short term, to get a person sleeping. People don't realise sleep deprivation is so harmful. They think, oh, I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. You keep that up for a week, you'll be in a bad way. You won't be able to function at all. Ministers need to remember this, because they've got a habit of getting up early in the morning. And in Lewis, it's after a late night. So you can imagine there's not much time in between. Only short term. Yeah, that's only treating the symptom. As I said, there's an underlying thing here that's causing the sleep deprivation. Although the person is physically sluggish and that kind of thing, in many cases their mind will be racing. that they're burning up inside, the adrenaline is going like... So a sleeping tablet will not address that. An antidepressant will slow down the adrenaline intake, and the engine will come back to running on a normal level, instead of with all this added fuel going through all the time. There's a physical thing there, you see. But once that's settled, you then have to address the mental thing. And beware of the medical model. which some psychiatrists, in fact most psychiatrists in this country use, you just simply keep giving them medication, medication, medication. Because a lot of them just treat us as bodies, material. They don't accept we have a soul. They may call it a mental state, but in their opinion, all mental states are the product of bodily states. For example, your thought doesn't come from your soul. It is two bits of electricity triggering something, and that's their idea. Feed them with tablets, possibly all their lives, and you're just masking the problem underneath. So you use tablets, you know, like medication, and certain medications bring on depression? Not really, not unless you're taking the wrong one. You could be taking the wrong one. For example, amphetamines, like alcohol, are taken to stimulate you, but after you get to a certain tipping point, they will depress you. For example, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash was taking amphetamines so he could drive during the night from one gig to another. Collapsed on stage, went into serious depression because what goes up must come down. But as I said, it's only a short-term thing to get you sleeping and perhaps calmer. The counseling must come in at some point, and that is where Christians, workers, ministers could benefit. And that's why I plug again the spring conference. Right, folks. We're going to take the advice about sleep deprivation. But Bruce did have his hand up, and one or two came in before him. So Bruce will be the last question. Can you say something about William Cooper, the poet? Cooper, yes. He was in severe depression. He was depressed all his life, endogenous. John Newton did a lot for him. John Newton was right next door, literally right next door, and they were inseparable, you might say. But Cowper, a bit like Bunyan, the devil was convincing him he'd committed the unpardonable sin, and all these thoughts were going through his head. And Cowper did have thoughts of suicide. But it's one thing to have thoughts, and another thing to actually do it. And he didn't actually do it, but he did have thoughts. And he says that somewhere in his letters. But Newton was a great, not just a great preacher, a great counselor. If you have his letters of John Newton, it's a real treasure. He's a very highly experienced man, Newton. The other book that was put out, The Thought of the Evangelical Leaders, I think by Pratt, again gives you an insight to the spirituality of these people. Many people would have said, oh Cowper, not much of an advert for a Christian. Newton loved the man and cared for the man. And it helped the man that he had a housekeeper as well. There was always somebody there. I know that depressed people like to be alone, but it's not the best thing for them. You know, the devil likes to get people when they're alone. And he certainly attacked Cowper. And that's the devil's way. He waits till you're weak and gets you down, and then he goes for you. Very rarely will he attack you when you're feeling strong. But once you're down, well, he'll come for you, just like Elijah, tempting him, perhaps. Just one final thought, and you can discuss this among yourselves, but when I was looking at Nimrod the other day, a mighty hunter, I thought of the devil. A mighty hunter, hunting people down, if not violent, laying snares and traps. Nimrod, a mighty hunter. Peter says, your adversary, the devil, goes about It's just a thought, maybe you can think about Nimrod.