Hymn History January 2019

“Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound, that Saved a Wretch Like Me!    I Once was lost, but Now am Found, Was Blind, but Now I See”                                                                            by  John Newton                                                               This is the Story of the life of John Newton the writer of “Amazing Grace”. I've shortened it from an article I read. Some of it is from his autobiography. It's amazing, no pun intended, how God can change even the worst of us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Newton was born in 1725 in London to a Puritan mother, who died two weeks before his seventh birthday, and a stern sea-captain father who took him to sea at age 11.  After many voyages and a reckless youth of drinking, Newton was impressed into service with the British Navy on a man-of-war, the H. M. S. Harwich. . After attempting to desert, he received eight dozen lashes and was reduced to the rank of common seaman. Finally at his own request he was exchanged into service on a slave ship.

•     While later serving on the Pegasus, a slave ship, Newton did not get along with the crew who left him in West Africa with Amos Clowe, a slave trader.  Clowe gave Newton to his wife Princess Peye, an African royal who treated him vilely as she did her other slaves.                                                                                                His rescue was undertaken by a sea captain asked by the senior Newton to look for the missing John. During the voyage home, the ship was caught in a horrendous storm off the coast of Ireland and almost sank. Newton prayed to God and the cargo miraculously shifted to fill a hole in the ship’s hull and the vessel drifted to safety. Newton took this as a sign from the Almighty and marked it as his conversion to Christianity. He did not radically change his ways at once, his total reformation was more gradual. "I cannot consider myself to have been a believer in the full sense of the word, until a considerable time afterwards,” he later wrote. He did begin reading the Bible at this point and began to view his captives with a more sympathetic view.                                                                                                                           Newton continued to sell his fellow human beings however, making three voyages as the captain of two different slave vessels, The Duke of Argyle and the African. When he suffered a stroke in 1754, he  retired, but continued to invest in the business. In 1764, he was ordained as an Anglican priest and wrote 280 hymns to accompany his services. He wrote the words for “Amazing Grace” in 1772 (In 1835, William Walker put the words to the popular tune “New Britain”)                                                                                                                It was not until 1788,  34 years after retiring, that he renounced his former slaving profession by publishing a blazing pamphlet called “Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade.” The tract described the horrific conditions on slave ships and Newton apologized for making a public statement so many years after participating in the trade: “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” The pamphlet was so popular it was reprinted several times and sent to every member of Parliament. Under the leadership of MP William Wilberforce, the English civil government outlawed slavery in Great Britain in 1807 and Newton lived to see it, dying in December of that year.                                                                                                                                         “Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade” is still available in print or you can read it on OnLine on the web.