A young sailor was being publicly flogged. As the fierce lashes of
the whip bit into his back, intense and angry thoughts of revenge filled
the boy’s mind. John Newton, still only 19 years of age, had betrayed
his captain’s trust by absconding from his ship while it lay at anchor
in Plymouth Harbour. This had been a desperate attempt on Newton’s
part to reach his father, presently visiting nearby Torbay, to persuade
him to purchase his release from the navy. But it had failed.
Recaptured, demoted and publicly disgraced in this way, the only thing
that held Newton back from casting himself into the sea was the brooding
desire to murder the captain first.
When John Newton’s mother died in 1732 shortly before the boy’s
seventh birthday, he lost one whose influence both spiritually and
intellectually had been wholly beneficial and whose death spelled
disaster for the child. His father, a remote and austere figure, was
himself a sea captain and could give little time to his son. Despite
several attempts to reform his ways during his teenage years, John had
gradually drifted first into a careless lifestyle and then into
agnosticism. Idling his time away when he was eighteen, the youth had
been press-ganged into the navy. The Harwich on which Newton was serving
was bound for the East Indies - a long and hazardous voyage. But this
was not the main reason for his anxiety to leave the navy. He had fallen
in love with Mary, a 15 year-old girl from Kent, and the thought of a
prolonged absence from the object of his affections was insufferable.
Accepting the inevitable, Newton watched as the English shoreline
faded into the distance. But when the Harwich docked for a short period
in Spain on its outward journey, through a fortuitous set of
circumstances, John Newton was enabled to leave the ship and board a
merchant vessel bound for West Africa. And glad the captain was to see
him go. Far from being sobered and co-operative after his recent
experiences, however, the young sailor employed his wit and abandoned
conduct to disrupt life on board this new ship. After six months on the
African coast gathering its slave cargo the ship was due to sail on to
the West Indies. Unwilling to sail with it, Newton managed to obtain his
discharge, and planned to remain in Africa until he had made his
fortune. Then he would return to England and take Mary as his bride.
The hardness of the natural heart apart from the grace of God is
demonstrated in the next sorry chapter of John Newton’s life. Through
a variety of circumstances he became little more than a slave, enduring
circumstances of cruelty and privation. Starving and ill, he would creep
out at night and pull up roots in the plantation, eating them raw and
making himself sick in consequence. Commenting on those days, Newton
wrote:My haughty heart was now brought down, not to a wholesome
repentance, nor to the language of the prodigal; this was far from me:
but my spirits were sunk; I lost all resolution and almost all
reflection. I lost the fierceness which fired me on board the Harwich…but
I was no farther changed than a tiger tamed by hunger: remove the
occasion and he will be as wild as ever.
And so it proved. When circumstances began to alter for the better
for the unhappy youth, his old dare-devil spirit returned. But one
thought preserved him from touching the depths: it was Mary, and the
remote possibility that one day he might be able to return to England to
claim her for his own. Meanwhile Newton wrote to his father whenever a
ship was returning to England, urging him to forward the purchase price
for his freedom, and commission a captain of a some vessel to find him
and bring him home.
Although John Newton had no thought for God nor for his eternal
destiny – indeed he was not even convinced that man did not perish
like the animals – God’s time for him was approaching. By an
extraordinary combination of circumstances, the ship commissioned by
John’s father to search for his son happened to pass the spot where
John was standing on some remote beach, far from where the captain had
been asked to make enquiries for him. A smoke signal caused the captain
to send out a small boat to shore and within an hour Newton’s
circumstances had changed from those of partial slavery to ones of
favour.
After a further year of trading the captain set his ship on her
homeward course. One night Newton turned into his bunk as usual, still
with no thought of God, but as he slept disaster struck. A storm,
unequalled in its violence to anything even those experienced sailors
had known, hit the vessel. Struggling against wind and sea, Newton tried
to reach deck, only to see the man ahead of him on the ladder swept
overboard. As the sea tore away the timbers, the water gushed into the
ship. She was sinking fast. Strapping himself to the rigging Newton
attempted to bail the water from the ship. He toiled endlessly although
the endeavour seemed hopeless. After many hours, exhausted and numb, the
young man offered a half-prayer, the first for many years. ‘If this
will not do, the Lord have mercy on us.’ Mercy? How could he expect
mercy? It would be better if he perished in the waves, because if God
existed he would have to send him to hell. But God did have mercy on
John Newton. Battered and leaking, the ship eventually weathered the
storm and limped to harbour. And for Newton himself, now 23 years of
age, these events marked the beginning of his quest for salvation. The
remainder of his story is well-known. He married his Mary, and
eventually, overcoming many obstacles, entered the ministry of the
Church of England - first at Olney then in London. Today he is mostly
known as the writer of some of our best-loved hymns. His experiences,
however, added a dimension of human understanding to his ministry as he
remained amazed at the grace of God to a hardened sinner. Well might he
write:-
‘Saved by blood, I live to tell
What the love of Christ has done;
He redeemed my soul from hell,
Of a rebel made a son.
O! I tremble still to think
How secure I lived in sin;
Sporting on destruction’s brink
Yet preserved from falling in!’
