JOHN NEWTON

I

Evangelical writers-Newton's early life, degradation and conversion-Marriage and ordination-Olney; friendship with Scott, Cowper, and other religious leaders-Incumbent of St. Mary Woolnoth-His personal influence-His hymns-The Cardiphonia, a mirror of the writer's personality-Newton's favourite themes: human depravity and the all-sufficiency of Christ—His certainty of God's overruling Providence-His power of analysis and wise sayings.

THE writings of the Evangelical school in the eighteenth century, with their pious fervour, their simplicity of diction, and their insistence upon personal religion, were as a refreshing stream in a waterless desert to those English men and women who longed for books which made the religion of Jesus the first and supreme interest in life.

In our own days, when the sense of personal religion is more permanently established amongst us, we find some of these books insipid enough, and may wonder what was found in them to call for many editions. But it is there—in their appeal to the sense of the personal need of a Saviour (an appeal already made in a different way by William Law)-that the answer to our wonder is found. Most of the Evangelical writers lived and wrote simply to teach to others what had become so dear to themselves. All other learning, all other books, were worth little or nothing to them. "Were dying sinners," asked William Romaine, "ever converted by

the spots on the moon? Was ever miser reclaimed from avarice by Jupiter's Belt?' William Cowper even had serious doubts as to whether he was right in making his poetry attractive and picturesque; and decided in the affirmative only on the plea that so his verses might the better be made a means of teaching his readers sacred truth.

Venn's Complete Duty of Man, Wilberforce's Practical View, Hannah More's books and tracts, such biographies as the lives of Scott and Venn or Newton's Narrative, Scott's Commentary, Cowper's poems, and the hymns of the Wesleys, Toplady and others, appealed to religious circles in their different ways.

II

Not the least influential amongst these writers was John Newton, author of hymns, letters, sermons and autobiography.

John Newton's conversion is one of the great romances of religion, standing side by side in interest, though not in importance, with such dramatic events in religious history as the conversions of St. Paul, St. Augustine and John Bunyan. If truth is really stranger than fiction, it has rarely been stranger than in the life story of this man, who could truthfully describe himself as a brand plucked from the burning."

In his own vivid biography, the Narrative, he has given us a graphic account of his extraordinary career. Born in London in 1725, of a ship captain and a pious Dissenting mother, he was destined for the ministry; but his mother died when he was young, and her early teaching (though perhaps never quite lost) was

swamped in vicious habits as he grew to manhood. He drifted seawards; but wherever his ship and whatever his rank he was in turn midshipman and common sailor-he sank continually into deeper and deeper degradation, and was ever sworn foe to discipline or goodness.

At twenty years of age he left a ship off the African coast, near Sierra Leone, to join a white slave-trader who was living there. The next two years were of incredible degradation. Ill-treated by his employer, hated and bullied by his master's black mistress, racked with fever, often so starved that he would go into the woods at night to gnaw roots, he was still unmoved by his misery to seek God. In his own words, he "was no farther changed than a tiger tamed by hunger."

Yet through this outwardly hopeless and abandoned life there ran a silver thread of hope and aspiration. At seventeen years of age he had fallen in love with his little Kentish cousin, Mary Catlett; and this pure love was to keep alive in him a tiny spark of spiritual fire when the fear of God had failed him. Through all his degradation he never forgot her, and always longed for her affection. Moreover, the intellectual energy which was one of his characteristics all his life showed itself, even in this African swamp, by his study of a stray volume of Euclid.

In 1747 a trading ship sent by his father to look for him picked him up; and during the rest of the voyage the captain, himself a passionate man, was wont to shudder at Newton's blasphemies, and declared that he had a Jonah on board, who would bring sure trouble upon the crew. However, neither these remonstrances, nor several narrow escapes from death (one

being from drowning during a drinking bout) availed to arouse the young man to any sense of sin.

But gradually under-currents began to surge in his soul. A chance glance at a copy of the Imitatio Christi, and then the danger of an appalling storm which nearly broke up the ship, brought him first into an uneasy feeling, and then upon his knees to pray and to study his Bible, with the result that when the ship reached Londonderry he received the Holy Communion after much private meditation and many resolutions.

During the next six years he received, he says, no personal help from Christian preaching or conversation; nor did he at once give up his trade of slavedealing, which was not as yet accounted a disgraceful calling. But events all tended to keep alive in him his new-born sense of need. In 1750-then twenty-five years of age he married his cousin Mary, with whom he was to spend a happy married life of forty years. He was touched by the death of his father, who had sailed for America on the very day that John had reached England, and so had not seen his returned prodigal; and during subsequent voyages several further narrow escapes from death (seafaring was a more dangerous calling then than now) maintained in him a sense of the divine Providence, and of the mercies which follow the sinner.

Leaving the sea, he settled in a situation at Liverpool, where he assiduously studied the classics in his spare time, learning Horace almost by heart and acquiring also a knowledge of Hebrew.

Little by little the desire for pastoral work grew. His first thought was to join the Dissenters, but finally he decided that Holy Orders in the Church would open out a wider sphere of usefulness. Rejected at first by

the Archbishop of York, he was not ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln until six years later, when he was licensed to serve the parish of Olney.

Here Newton became the friend of most of the bestknown Evangelical leaders, both clergy and laity. Thomas Scott, the commentator, was a close neighbour; the poet Cowper lived at Olney, and looked upon Newton as his spiritual director; whilst John Thornton, the generous banker and friend of Wilberforce, was keenly interested in his work, and allowed him £200 a year.

Opinions differ as to how far Newton's ministry at Olney was a success. Certainly his parishioners did not always appreciate him or his labours; but popularity is hardly a criterion of the highest kind of success. The generally low moral standard of the age prevailed at Olney as elsewhere, and must have made the work of a parish priest exceedingly difficult.

After sixteen years' curacy at Olney under a nonresident vicar, Newton was presented to the incumbency of St. Mary Woolnoth, by Mr. Thornton; and in this London parish he laboured until he died in 1807, nearly thirty years later, at the age of eighty-two.

In this parish Newton found the usual difficulties which beset the incumbent of a wealthy parish. "It grieves me," he said once, "to see so few of my wealthy parishioners come to church. I always consider the rich as under greater obligations to the preaching of the gospel than the poor. For at church, the rich must hear the whole truth as well as others. There they have no mode of escape. once get home, you will be troubled to get at them; and, when you are admitted, you are so fettered with punctilio, so interrupted and damped with the frivolous

But let them