Imatges de pàgina
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conversation of their friends, that, as Archbishop Leighton says, 'it is well if your visit does not prove a blank or a blot.'

It was not as a preacher that Newton won the great influence, which he undoubtedly possessed, so much as by his intercourse with individuals. He was always on the look-out to utter his message, in the delivery of which he would exercise great patience and gentleness and perseverance. And his transparent zeal and sincerity must have opened to his persuasions the hearts of many whose welfare he sought. He had a true love of souls. When I hear a knock at my study door,' he said, “I hear a message from God; it may be a lesson of instruction, perhaps a lesson of patience; but since it is his message, it must be interesting."

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To pass on that message was his purpose to the end. When his friends urged the old man of eighty to rest from his labours (his sight, hearing, and memory were all failing) his answer was: "I cannot stop. Shall the old African blasphemer stop while he can speak?

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Though Newton laboured thus strenuously in the pulpit, his influence for good was probably more widely felt through his writings. He was an assiduous and voluminous writer upon religious subjects. The Olney Hymns, written by him, are in three books, and contain three hundred and forty-eight hymns. These are mostly dull and prosaic enough. Such lines as these are very far from poetry :

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O how I love Thy holy Word,
Thy gracious covenant, O Lord!
It guides me in the peaceful way,
I think upon it all the day.

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Yet among thousands of lines which are no better than these, we find such treasures as : How sweet the name of Jesus sounds," "Come my soul, thy suit prepare," Hark, my soul, it is the Lord," "God moves in a mysterious way," and "There is a fountain filled with blood." One could wish that the writer, instead of reeling off so much that was mere doggerel, had spent his care and thought upon some few hymns only.

Such of Newton's sermons, too, as appear in his works (and in this they agree with most of the printed sermons of the time) are but dull reading to the modern reader.

When we turn, however, to his letters, the tale is very different. As a letter-writer Newton almost equals Cowper, greatest of epistollers. His prose is lucid, vigorous and sane; whilst the religious matter compels the reader's interest, and, in much the same way as Law's Serious Call, carries him unconsciously, yet eagerly, from page to page. The best of these letters were published in Cardiphonia, or the Utterance of the Heart, a collection of letters to the Earl of Dartmouth (patron of the Olney living) and to other friends.

This book is full of interest as the expression of a vigorous and deeply religious mind; and it gives us a picture in a a way which his sermons do not, of the real Newton. It was indeed the utterance of the writer's heart. "I number," the author wrote, "my Christian correspondents among my principal blessings, a few judicious, pious friends, to whom, when I get leisure to write, I send my heart by turns. I can trust them with my inmost sentiments, and can write with no more disguise than I think." The letters

are also a mirror, so to speak, of contemporary Evangelical thought and practice.

There are two ever-recurring subjects upon which Newton in these letters loves to dilate.

The first is, the natural total depravity of the human heart. This, of course, was one of the leading doctrines by which Evangelical preachers were wont to rouse their hearers to a sense of danger and need, and Newton is continually insisting upon it. With him man is hopelessly polluted and lost until he has been born again; and by this new birth he means not regeneration in the sacrament of baptism, but a change of heart.

Closely interwoven with this dogma of total human depravity is the second doctrine in which our author delights the all-sufficiency of Jesus Christ to restore fallen nature. The misery of the unaided human heart can find abundant joy and strength in the free grace and power of the Saviour.

I have gained that which I once would rather have been without, such accumulated proofs of the deceitfulness and desperate wickedness of my heart, as I hope, by the Lord's blessing, have, in some measure, taught me to know what I mean, when I say, Behold, I am vile! And, in connection with this, I have gained such experience of the wisdom, power and compassion of my Redeemer, the need, the worth of His Blood, righteousness, ascension, and intercession, the glory that He displays in pardoning iniquity and sin, and passing by the transgression of the remnant of His heritage, that my soul cannot but cry out, Who is a God like unto Thee ?

Upon this subject Newton's language breaks forth

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