![]() ![]() For almost every week's service, he wrote a hymn to be sung to a familiar tune. In 1769, Newton began a Thursday evening prayer service. Cowper, a skilled poet who experienced bouts of depression, became a lay helper in the small congregation. Three years after Newton arrived, poet William Cowper moved to Olney. He quit, was ordained into the Anglican ministry, and in 1764 took a parish in Olney in Buckinghamshire. Influenced by both the Wesleys and George Whitefield, he adopted mild Calvinist views and became increasingly disgusted with the slave trade and his role in it. Newton then served as a mate and then as captain of a number of slave ships, hoping as a Christian to restrain the worst excesses of the slave trade, "promoting the life of God in the soul" of both his crew and his African cargo.Īfter leaving the sea for an office job in 1755, Newton held Bible studies in his Liverpool home. Newton had been reading Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, and was struck by a line about the "uncertain continuance of life." He also recalled the passage in Proverbs, "Because I have called and ye have refused, … I also will laugh at your calamity." He converted during the storm, though he admitted later, "I cannot consider myself to have been a believer, in the full sense of the word." The sluggish sailor was transferred to the service of the captain of the Greyhound, a Liverpool ship, in 1747, and on its homeward journey, the ship was overtaken by an enormous storm. Isaac Watts publishes Hymns and Spiritual SongsĪlexander Campbell begins Restoration Movement John Bunyan writes The Pilgrim's Progress But he was treated cruelly by Clow and the slaver's African mistress soon Newton's clothes turned to rags, and Newton was forced to beg for food to allay his hunger. He took up employment with a slave-trader named Clow, who owned a plantation of lemon trees on an island off of west Africa. Espousing freethinking principles, he remained arrogant and insubordinate, and he lived with moral abandon: "I sinned with a high hand," he later wrote, "and I made it my study to tempt and seduce others." He eventually convinced his superiors to discharge him to a slaver ship. He was caught, put in irons, and flogged. Newton rebelled against the discipline of the Royal Navy and deserted. He spent his later teen years at sea before he was press-ganged aboard the H.M.S. ![]() Newton lost his first job, in a merchant's office, because of "unsettled behavior and impatience of restraint"-a pattern that would persist for years. At age 11, Newton went on his first of six sea-voyages with the merchant navy captain. Newton was nurtured by a Christian mother who taught him the Bible at an early age, but he was raised in his father's image after she died of tuberculosis when Newton was 7. ![]() Though some today wonder if the word wretch is hyperbole or a bit of dramatic license, John Newton, the song's author, clearly did not. It is probably the most famous hymn in history: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me." ![]()
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