Pere gave this commentary the headline "Amazing Grace?" with a sense of wry emphasis on the headline. He personally hates the song but he also explores the questions surrounding the grace attached to the song's author, the Rev John Newton – a man credited with helping to end slavery. Are there lessons we might take on board today from the story of John Newton and his conversion to Christianity? Do we suffer from a similar blindness?

Earlier this year, we had the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade within the (then) British-controlled territories.

It was a significant important anniversary. It's a good occasion for reflecting on the evil of viewing others as things to be owned, exploited and consumed, and for acknowledging some of the ways in which we still fall into that sin today.

One aspect of the anniversary was a certain amount of attention paid to the hymn, Amazing Grace, which is often associated with the anti-slavery movement.

Strangling the cat…

I have a confession to make; I hate this hymn. The tune is doleful, the underlying theology depressing and alienating with its emphasis on the inherent wretchedness of the human condition, and the whole thing is incredibly hackneyed. The fact that it seems to have an enduring popularity with bagpipe players doesn't help, to be honest. But maybe that's just me.

What's it got to do with slavery?

Rev John Newton (1725-1807)

The composer, the Rev John Newton, was himself a slaver. The story is told of how he found God in a conversion experience, gave up slave trafficking, became a priest and campaigned for the abolition of the trade that he had once practiced.

The truth, though, is a bit more confused, and not quite so edifying.

A colourful background…

Born in 1725, Newton was a sea-captain's son. He learned his trade sailing with his father, and then served for several years as a midshipman in the Royal Navy. His partiality for both wine and women got him into regular trouble. After one unauthorised absence too many, he was clapped in irons and reduced in rank to common sailor. Reckoning that his naval career did not look promising and that slave trading offered opportunities to make a quick buck, he asked to be exchanged into service on a slave ship. His captain, probably glad to be rid of him, agreed.

But his start in the slave trade was not promising. Having been brought to what is now Sierra Leone, he was beaten, abused and starved. He did not go to sea again under his new master; he was kept as a servant and treated, in his own view, worse than the slaves.

He stuck it out for a time in the hope of better things, but eventually wrote and asked his father for help. His father asked a friend, a Captain Manesty who was just then embarking on a slave-trading voyage to West Africa, to look out for his son and if possible bring him back to England. Which is how, early in 1748, Newton found himself on Manesty's ship, The Greyhound, sailing for Liverpool.

Conversion…

It was on this voyage that Newton had his conversion experience. The Greyhound was nearly lost in a dreadful storm which lasted several days. Newton, who up to this point had lived a fairly dissipated life and had taken little interest in religion, prayed for God's mercy and said the Lord's prayer. When the storm abated he spent the rest of the voyage reading scripture and religious literature. By the time the ship reached Liverpool he had had a profound conversion experience. He assented to the teachings of Christianity, and determined to reform his life.

One change he made was to propose marriage to a Miss Catlett, a woman whom he had up to that point been stringing along in a fairly caddish fashion.

A man intending marriage has responsibilities, and must think of his career. He took a post as mate with Captain Manesty. After one voyage, he was offered, and accepted, the captaincy of another slaver, The Duke of Argyll. On the strength of this appointment, he married Miss Catlett

So Newton's real career as a slave trader actually began after his conversion to Christianity.

The Christian Slave Trader…

We should not doubt the genuineness of Newton's conversion. Apart from his marriage, we know that he changed his life in other ways. He gave up drinking, smoking and swearing, he prayed, he read scripture and theology and he went regularly to church. He kept a spiritual diary in which he recorded his prayers, his reflections, his resolutions and his self-doubt.

Though he had lots of self-doubt, it never extended to his profession as a slave trader. His vocation, as he saw it, was to be a good slave trader.

As an evangelical Christian, he treated his slaves better than most. He did not rape the women; nor did he allow his crew to. (Rape was common, not only because slave women were regarded as mere merchandise, but also because they fetched a better price if pregnant.) He resolved to his slaves "to treat them with humanity while under my power, and not render their confinement unnecessarily grievous." He took such good care of his cargoes that, on his last voyage, there was not one death among the slaves, which was a rare achievement.

But when his slaves mutinied, he punished them with thumbscrews and neck-braces, praising "the favour of Divine Providence" for his deliverance. By the standards of the time, the penalties were mild, but it evidently did not occur to Newton that slaves could have a just claim to freedom — or that Divine Providence might be expected to succour them as well as him.

He found slaving unpleasant, but not immoral. "The office of a gaoler, and the restraints under which I was forced to keep my prisoners, were not suitable to my feelings, but I considered it as the line of life which God in his providence had allotted to me, and as a cross which I ought to bear with patience and thankfulness."

The truth is that, despite his conversion, Newton saw nothing wrong with slavery or slave-trading. He believed God had given him his job, and brought him success and miraculous protection in doing it.

When he eventually gave up slaving, it was not because of any growing suspicion that the live of a slaver was not a fitting one for a Christian. He gave it up for the sake of his health. After a stroke in 1755 he was advised not to go to sea again, and so he became a surveyor in the Port of Liverpool.

His later career…

	Portrait of William Wilberforce by K A Hickel, 1794.

His new life on the land allowed him to work as a lay preacher, and he found this so much to his taste that after a number years he became a priest. After more than fifteen years of ministering in country parishes (during which time he wrote Amazing Grace), in 1779 he was appointed as rector of a large church in London, where he was a highly-regarded and influential preacher. Many people sought his counsel and advice, including a young MP called William Wilberforce who, after a personal crisis and his own conversion experience, was considering leaving politics for religious ministry. Newton encouraged him to stay in parliament, and "serve God where he was".

Newton remained close to Wilberforce, and in later years supported his campaign for abolition of slavery. In 1787 he wrote a tract on the subject, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade. This, his first condemnation of slavery, comes more than forty years after his religious conversion, and more than thirty-five years after he left the trade himself.

Newton's later views on slavery…

Newton wrote of the wickedness and devastation of the slave trade, and his own shame at the "misery and mischief to which I have, formerly have been an accessory to." He argued that the trade did enormous damage to Britain, corrupting and brutalizing those involved, and killing large numbers through storm, drink, venereal disease and slave revolts.

It may not seem the most morally compelling case against the slave trade, but it was an effective one. Parliament found arguments from self-interest by far the most persuasive.

It's questionable whether Newton ever really accepted the full horror of slavery. In his epitaph, which he composed himself shortly before he died in 1807, he described himself as "once an infidel and Libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa". He could have said trafficker, gaoler or even torturer of slaves, but in the end he considered himself their "servant". He seems more concerned to emphasise what he had done for slaves than what he had done to them, and his objections to the institution of slavery had as much to do with its deleterious effect on England as they had with its intrinsic injustice.

Amazing grace!

What's amazing about Newton's grace is not the effect it had on him but the effect it didn't have on him. It opened his eyes to Jesus, but not to the presence of Jesus in his neighbour. He knew that the gospel proclaimed liberty to captives, and yet he couldn't see that it referred to the captives that he himself dealt in, and profited from.

To us, it defies credibility that a man could at the same time profess to be a Christian and yet make his living from slavery. This seems like the rankest hypocrisy.

But we should not be too hard on Newton. He was not a hypocrite; he was entirely sincere. And we should acknowledge that, after his initial conversion, he had the humility to remain open to new insight and new understanding, until he eventually arrived at a point where he did repudiate what had once seemed acceptable to him.

The lesson for us is perhaps not the blindness of John Newton, who took forty years to recognise a horror that we can see in an instant. Newton was no different from us; the real lesson is that we, too, can be just as blind.

Christian faith, however strong, does not guarantee either good sense or sound judgment. If a mixture of conventional morality and ordinary self-interest led the devout John Newton into complicity in a shocking crime, then it can lead us there too.

IMAGE SOURCES: The background image used in the headline is taken from a photograph on the Church Times website: www.churchtimes.co.uk. Clicking on the other images will take you to the original source.

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Peregrinus can be contacted at: Peregrinus <peregrinus@catholica.com.au>

©2007 Peregrinus