John Newton Lives A Life Of Painful Adventure
John Newton, Englishman, 1725 - 1807 A.D. So greatly hated in his early life he was once harpooned by his own shipmates. So greatly loved in later life that his name is remembered even today.
Armchair adventure is wonderful and comfortable, mentally rich, satisfying, and readily available to us all. Real-life adventure by contrast is often exceedingly difficult, fraught with misery and hardship, attended by trials and sorrows often beyond what any sane person might wish upon themselves. The real thing ruins or demoralizes, even kills many who engage in it. But those who survive a truly epic adventure are nearly always genuinely re-shaped by the experience. Those whose whole life seems (to a detached and unaffected observer) a true adventure are almost always going to be an altered, often even an unusual person, having been shaped by forces unexperienced by the average soul. There are quite a few of these type people walking among us, taken altogether, because adventure can take myriad forms and there are many who accidentally encounter or purposely seek adventure.
John Newton of England could hardly be excluded from such a list of adventure survivors. He was put through the grinder, the sand blaster, the crucible and the forge by the time his strange life was over and it seems that God formed him into an inordinately useful man by the end of it all. But it is doubtful that he enjoyed very much of the shaping process that Jesus chose for him at any point along his journey. John Newton, who wrote the famous song Amazing Grace among many dozen others, came to be intimately familiar with hardship, mostly imposed upon himself by himself.... he and torturous trials were very close friends indeed!
In his life's beginning John Newton was almost destined to have something to do with the sea. His father, John Newton Sr. was a Ship's Master (Captain, essentially) on a merchant ship that plied the Mediterranean, and his mother Elizabeth Seatcliffe (also Scatliffe according to some records) was the daughter of an instrument maker. Their son John Jr. was born to them in 1725 A.D. in England, a nation famous for masterfully sailing the roughest of seas.
His dad was often absent due to his maritime occupation, and his deeply Christian mother died from consumption when John was about 7 years old (their word at that time for 'tuberculosis'.) It is a painful thing to be orphaned from the sweet love of your mother at so tender an age, but life deals hard blows to everyone at times. John just began receiving his earlier than most of us.
He grew older as a lonely child at a boarding school for some of the next years after his mother died. Fortunately, his father eventually remarried, and John went to live with the stepmother (and his father at such times as the father was home) in Essex, England. But it was not an ideal family relationship.
When John reached the age of 11, he had the opportunity to go to work with his father, and they eventually made a half dozen sea voyages together. This may have been the best part of his early life despite the hardships of being at sea. One of John's first jobs, however, was on land at a merchant's office, and this job he lost because of 'unsettled behavior and impatience of restraint' as one source put it. These early personal tendencies would apparently grow with time. He transitioned to actually going to sea, an actual sailor in the days of wooden ships and iron men. There was the adventure of it, and he was getting to do 'man stuff' with his dad. But then after some years his aging dad decided to retire, ending this phase of life. He was set up to go to work on a plantation in the Caribbean...an arrangement his dad had engineered for him...but John had other ideas and instead signed onto a merchant ship plying the Mediterranean. He was a young man of 17 who was making his own plans. Perhaps he was a little bull-headed. Without doubt he was a young man with a lot of hurt, rebelliousness, and by his own later reckoning he was a sinner of all sinners. A 'great blasphemer' he said of himself. Perhaps from the pain of losing his mother he was not a follower of Christ, but more of a declared rebel against God.
He sailed the seas and engaged full heartedly in every sort of debauchery that a sailor could engage in, even attempting, by his later admission, to seduce and corrupt his shipmates as much as possible. Sailors were not known for their high moral standards, but he apparently stood out even within such a crowd. He became known as 'the Great Blasphemer'. The Holy Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit that his mother had taught him about in those 7 short years before she died entered his thoughts at times, but didn't reform his behavior.
Sometimes the worst things that happen to you can none the less change your course for the better. Young rebellious Newton was 'press ganged' into service in the British Royal Navy aboard the HMS Harwich in 1744, at the age of about 19, meaning that he was basically kidnapped and forced to serve aboard that government ship. This development sat very poorly with him as one could easily understand, and he protested with a vengeance against the harsh rigid discipline. He deserted, was captured, and was put in irons and flogged, receiving a reported 8 dozen lashes in front of his assembled below sailors. It was a deeply felt humiliation as well as an extremely formidable physical punishment. (He was to receive more such punishments in his life. On one ship that he belonged to he was knocked overboard, or perhaps leaped overboard while being violently disciplined and since he could not swim the captain ordered that he be gigged with a harpoon and brought back aboard. He ultimately survived the harpoon wound in his side, a survival that we can presume mattered little to his superiors, but it left a great scar there for the rest of his life. He would later say that it left a low spot in his healed flesh deep enough to put his fist into.) Unreformed and more resentful than ever he eventually convinced his superiors to allow him to transfer to the crew of the slave ship Pegasus. He was apparently not a charming shipmate, and they did not get along at all with him and left him on the West African shore after a time. He was about 20 at this time.
In Africa Newton made the acquaintance of a slaver named Clow who also owned a lemon orchard on an African island, and Clow was 'married' to the princess of a certain African tribe, the Sherbro people. Newton went to work for Clow but was eventually given as a servant to this African princess, named Peye, who treated both Newton and her other slaves with cruelty and neglect. She kept him dressed in rags and almost starved. He was sometimes forced to eat food from off the floor, he later recalled. He lived in this way for a couple of years until 1748 when he was 'found and rescued' by a ship's captain of a ship called the 'Greyhound' who had been asked by Newton's worried dad to keep an eye out for him when he sailed near the shores of Africa. Through some miracle of circumstance, the man heard word of and located the bedraggled John Newton and obtained his release. He returned towards Europe aboard the Greyhound.
The Greyhound was carrying dry cargo to Europe and off of the island of Ireland it encountered a very great storm. For around a week it fought the huge gale. The hull was damaged by the tempestuous waves such that a leak developed and quickly worsened. Newton awoke at some point with the ship filling with water and cried out to God for help. As if by a miracle the cargo shifted and slid coming up against the damaged inner hull and it partly plugged the hole the sea water was pouring in through. The flow was decreased enough that the pumps could keep up, and the ship eventually made it into a safe port. It seemed like God had listened to his cry. For Newton it was a time of partial conversion to Christianity. Newton began to read the Bible and asked God to take control of his life at this juncture of his life, and for the rest of his life he marked March 10, 1748 as the important day upon which he made this commitment to being a Christian, though he would maintain that his Christianity...his full embracement of all that it meant to be Christian...came only slowly and in stages.
He married a childhood sweetheart, Mary Catlett, during these sea years, when he was 25, and she also began to have a strong influence upon his soul.
He continued forward with the slaving industry, sailing with a couple more ship, and during this time period he tried to bring some Christianity to the slaving industry. More 'Christian' treatment of the African captives, and the sharing of his faith with those he sailed with. But it was essentially comparable to being a more Christian crime syndicate member, or a more Christian pirate. The industry was simply part of a deeply wrong endeavor, and that would always be an insurmountable problem.
Newton suffered a stroke which left him with some physical debilitations and transitioned him to a maritime related shore job as a Tide Surveyor in the Port of Liverpool. A person working in that position was a sort of maritime tax collector. But even there and then he remained associated with slaving, investing in voyages, etc. Yet he did become ever more attached to Jesus and began to yearn to be a Pastor. For over half a decade he applied for a position at an Anglican church somewhere, an assigned flock, but with no luck. Perhaps God wished him to grow more spiritually. He did study ancient Biblical languages during this time, and he worked as a lay minister and gained quite a good reputation for the care he took of people and for his preaching. But for 7 years he received no pastoral assignment.
Finally in 1764 he was introduced to the influential 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, who recommended Newton to be given his living at the Anglican Church at Olney, in Buckinghamshire. He was ordained a priest and move there to begin his time of official religious service. For 16 years he preached there, and he and his wife Mary became both well-known and well liked. The size of the church was much increased as his care for his flock was recognized, and his preaching was especially moving to the people who attended. And one area of great concentration with Newton was the creation of worship music. It is for this that he is perhaps most well-known today. During his time at Olney he jointly produced more than 100 songs of worship, including the still popular 'Amazing Grace'. There are few Christians in the English-speaking world who have not sung 'Amazing Grace' during a church service. Most of us have sung it multiple times, and it is a powerful, movingly worded hymn that has weathered the centuries well, still as applicable to the Christian soul now as it was then.
In 1779 he was invited to become the Rector of a church in London, and he was to continue his work there until he died. He was able to be a key figure in the lives of certain prominent London notables, and one of these was young William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was a politician that had recently come to have his own reckoning with God and was deciding whether to leave politics. Newton convinced him that it was a position where he might have a great effect of some sort, and that he should stay there and see what God had for him to do there. As it turned out, God had a great deal of work for him. Wilberforce is counted as having been a key and central figure in the British movement to abolish slavery. Newton himself took a hand in this with Wilberforce, coming out very strongly against slavery in his later years.... but not until he had been away from slavery for 34 years! He publicly admitted himself greatly deficient for having taken so long to get his thoughts right concerning slavery, and to take a strong public position against it. But once he did take up the challenge of ridding his nation of slavery, he worked at it very strenuously and from a position that had become quite influential with some of London's then contemporary power figures.
John Newton, who came close to death many times in his younger years, ended up living to be about 82 years old. He survived being essentially orphaned, being a young man severely punished by his military superiors, he survived years of debauchery, an unknown number of terrible storms, he experienced being a European slave owned by a sometimes-cruel African princess, and even lived through being harpooned by the crew of a ship he belonged to...an experience that few on Earth could say they suffered. He was a backslider many times in his life he claimed, but the Lord Jesus was patient in his case - for some reason - and kept giving him additional chances...a level of mercy that no one should presume will be allotted to them. But in John Newton's case this mercy led finally to a true devotion to Jesus, and a heartfelt compassion for the condition of his fellow man. The 'Great Blasphemer' is known to history for his stirring praise music. The one-time slaver is known for his contribution to the abolishment of slavery (He lived to see a British law passed in 1807 which abolished the slave trade. In the 1830's slavery itself was abolished in Britain, a couple of decades after Newton's passing.) The one-time whoremonger had, for the book ends of his life, a beautiful and pure relationship with first his Christian mother, and a fruitful older life with his Christian wife Mary, who died in 1790, 17 years before John. In Mary, Newton had found a true and profoundly deep love, a woman who remained committed to him and who played an important part in making him a better man. He referred to his marriage in the most glowing of terms as an old man, as being all that a great romance could ever be.
Who but the Lord Jesus, possessing and reflecting the greatness of our Holy Father and Maker, could have so profound an effect on the tortured soul of a lost sinner? Praises to Jesus, our only given path and a completely worthy Savior of the lost.