In his day Newton was famous for five things — he was an outstanding example of a converted infidel, he was a great hymn-writer, he was a wise spiritual counsellor, he had true charity for all Christians, and his personality had an unconscious godliness about it. All these are worth our study.
It is nearly three hundred years since the birth of John Newton and we do well to pay our little tribute to his worthwhile life.
In his day Newton was famous for five things — he was an outstanding example of a converted infidel, he was a great hymn-writer, he was a wise spiritual counsellor, he had true charity for all Christians, and his personality had an unconscious godliness about it. All these are worth our study.
1. Newton was an Outstanding Example of a Converted Infidel
When only six Newton lost his mother, but she left him two great possessions, the ability to read and a head-knowledge of God. She had taught him to read fluently and he remained bookish all his days, and she had taught him about God and his ways, teaching he never quite forgot. She had herself been a Dissenter attending Dr David Jennings’ Congregational church in London.
When only eleven Newton was taken to sea by his father, who captained a ship trading in the Mediterranean. Unhappily, his father, who had remarried, never gave Newton the impression of really loving him, which would have meant so much to an only, motherless child as quiet as Newton was. With his father Newton made five voyages to the Mediterranean, during which, it seemed, his soul was a spiritual battleground; for on the one hand he learned to curse and to blaspheme, and on the other he three or four times made serious attempts at moral and religious reform, becoming in the course of them a vegetarian and an ascetic.
When seventeen Newton met Mary Catlett, a 13-year-old distant relation, and fell in love with her. The memory of her helped Newton through the next seven years and proved a somewhat restraining influence on his actions. At the age of eighteen Newton was press-ganged into the navy. His father’s influence caused him to be made a midshipman, but a year later he was publicly flogged and demoted for deserting his ship. In disgrace he sailed to Madeira, where he was suddenly allowed to transfer to another ship, which was bound for Sierra Leone. Here Newton decided to work for a white slave trader.
A terrible year followed. The African mistress of his new master treated him with cruelty and contempt, especially when he was struck down with a fever. He had difficulty then in getting even a drink of cold water. Even the African slaves secretly brought him food on occasion. Half starving, Newton used to steal out at night to feed on the raw roots of vegetables. His white master, believing the worst about him, locked Newton to the deck of the ship when he went ashore, and in his ragged clothes Newton bore for hours on end the lashing of torrential rains. His spirit broken, Newton’s only relief in this West African period was to draw mathematical diagrams on the sand.
Finally, a ship’s captain from England, acting on his father’s request, took Newton aboard as his guest. Newton’s lot was now pleasant, yet he was ‘so daring a blasphemer’ that he daily invented new oaths and, though not fond of drink himself, sometimes initiated daring drinking parties among his friends. But on the long voyage home the ship encountered a frightful storm and was badly damaged. In the day of trouble Newton began to think of, if not to call on, the Lord. In between times when he was manning the pump, he remembered the Bible warnings memorised as a child. A little later he began to pray and to examine the New Testament more carefully and ‘to think of that Jesus [he] had so often derided’.
The tide of the battle for Newton’s soul slowly turned with the dawning of gospel light, though for another six years he did not understand or enjoy evangelical preaching or conversation. Finally, the irresistible grace of God (or, as Newton preferred to say, the invincible grace of God) won the day — the crisis of capturing the citadel of Newton’s soul was over and the life-long process of mopping-up operations was begun.
Newton regarded himself as ‘one of the most astonishing instances of the forbearance and mercy of God upon the face of the earth.’ But he was on guard against complacency and forgetfulness. After the publication of his autobiography An Authentic Narrative he wrote, ‘The people stare at me . . . and well they may. I am indeed a wonder to many, a wonder to myself, especially I wonder that I wonder no more.’
2. Newton was a Great Hymn Writer
In all, Newton published nearly a million words. Among all the letters and books were 280 hymns. Though this number was small compared with Charles Wesley’s 6,500 and Isaac Watts’ 600, several of Newton’s hymns have stood the test of two centuries and their changing tastes.
The Dissenters and Methodists in particular were keen on composing spiritual songs in eighteenth-century England. Singing was part of the Evangelical Revival. When thirty Newton attended in Liverpool, where he was the tide surveyor, an early morning meeting taken by Whitefield, with whom he enjoyed an acquaintance. Though the Anglican prayer book was used at the meeting, Newton recalled that there were ‘many little intervals for singing hymns — I believe nearly 20 times in all.’ When thirty-nine and finally, despite his lack of formal education, an Anglican minister himself, Newton encouraged his parishioners to sing and began to compose hymns for them, some of which fitted in with his sermons. This was at Olney, a large village 50 miles north-west of London.
William Cowper, soon to be the most famous Christian poet of his day in England, deliberately moved to become Newton’s near neighbour. The two men, so different in background, respected and loved each other and for nearly twelve years met almost every day. Newton encouraged Cowper to write hymns for his congregation to sing at their Tuesday evening prayer meetings. The important upshot was the publication in 1779 of the Olney Hymns, a hymnal that sold by the thousand. Of its 348 hymns Newton wrote as many as 280. Cowper’s was a relatively small contribution because for the second time in his life he endured a long period of depression or insanity which at times included suicidal bids.
Some of Newton’s hymns familiar to us are now in a truncated form, among them the lovely Christ-centred hymn:
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear!
Then it was Newton who wrote that noble hymn of praise,
Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our God!
also the much-used hymn, ‘Come, my soul, thy suit prepare’ with its challenging second verse:
Thou art coming to a King,
Large petitions with thee bring;
For his grace and power are such
None can ever ask too much.
Then there is the familiar hymn,
Approach, my soul, the mercy-seat,
Where Jesus answers prayer
which, with many others, was written expressly for the weekly prayer meeting.
Finally, we should mention the hymn that gives our article its title, and that was popularised by the bagpipes of the Royal Scots Guards’ Band
Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound!)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
‘If Watts, Doddridge, the Wesleys, Martin Madan and others introduced the evangelical hymn into the Church’s worship, Newton and Cowper fixed the type of the evangelical hymn.’ The Countess of Huntingdon and Rowland Hill were among the many who used the Olney hymns. Great too was their popularity in nineteenth-century America. Newton may have lacked the high poetic gift and imagination of Isaac Watts, but his hymns are clear and convincing. ‘Simple, direct and Christian. That was John Newton, and that is why his hymns live.’
3. Newton was a Wise Spiritual Counsellor
Newton’s counselling was done through two main channels — letters and private interviews.
Fancy asking your correspondents to return your letters to their writer so that he could publish them! But Newton felt he had a ‘call’ to write letters and published 199 of them as a result. In 1759 Newton could say ‘I number my Christian correspondents among my principal blessings — a few judicious, pious friends, to whom, when I can get leisure to write, I send my heart by turns.’ Five years later he complained that his correspondence was so large that it almost engrossed his time. At one time 60 letters lay on his desk awaiting an answer. At the end of his life Newton could say of all the letters he had written ‘Yes, the Lord saw I should be most useful by them.’
Most of Newton’s letters appeared in the volume entitled Cardiphonia. Marked by a serious concern to impart spiritual teaching and advice, they certainly proved to be popular and were translated into German and Dutch. One young Scot, thinking from the book’s title (translated ‘The Utterance of the Heart’) that it was a novel, bought a copy of Cardiphonia for his circulating library in Jamaica and became a Christian through reading it. This was John Aikman, instrumental in the awakening in North Scotland of 1797 and for 33 years a useful Congregational minister in Edinburgh.
These letters, some of which are almost 5,000 words long, were written to a variety of people. These included Newton’s brother-in-law, Newton’s servant, ministers of different denominations, the aunt of William Wilberforce, Thomas Scott and Lord Dartmouth. Six years younger than Newton, the Earl of Dartmouth was the leading aristocrat converted in the salons of the Countess of Huntingdon. Politically he rose to be the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In 1764 he offered Newton the curacy at Olney and then, as his patron, introduced him to John Thornton, reputedly the country’s richest merchant and the ‘Nuffield of the Evangelical Revival.’
Newton also excelled at personal counselling. In 1774 a young curate was ashamed to learn that two of his dying parishioners had been visited several times by Newton from a neighbouring parish when he himself had not visited them once. Later the curate tried to draw Newton, whom he held in ‘sovereign contempt’ as a Methodist or Evangelical Anglican, into controversy, first in a room full of ministers and then in correspondence. But, as the curate expressed it, Newton ‘prudently declined the discourse; but a day or two after, he sent me a short note, with a little book for my perusal. This was the very thing I wanted; and I gladly embraced the opportunity, which, according to my wishes, seemed now to offer, God knoweth, with no inconsiderable expectations, that my arguments would prove irresistibly convincing, and that I should have the honour of rescuing a well-meaning person from his enthusiastical delusions.’