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CHAPTER 1

A SPIRITUAL UPBRINGING

The old saying, "The child is father to the man" has the ring of truth about it in the life of John Newton. He had an uncertain and unhappy childhood. His mother died when he was only six years old. His relationship with his largely absent father was too fearful and formal to allow any intimacy between them. Yet, for all these difficulties, the boy inherited from each of his parents certain strong characteristics, values, and beliefs. Although in the early part of his life he was to wander from that inheritance into other paths, described in his most famous hymn as "through many dangers, toils, and snares," nevertheless the qualities he absorbed from his mother and father were among the strongest influences on John Newton during the eighty-two years that followed his birth in London on July 24, 1725.

Two days after he was born, Newton was baptized at a Dissenting chapel known as the Old Gravel Lane Independent Meeting House in Wapping on the north bank of the River Thames on July 26, 1725. He was given the Christian name John, after his father, a respected sea captain who had been the master of various merchant ships trading in the Mediterranean. John's wife, Elizabeth, was a regular member of the congregation at the Old Gravel Lane Chapel. Its pastor, Dr. David Jennings, lived two doors down the road from the Newtons in Red Lyon Street, Wapping. The fact that the Jenningses and the Newtons were such close neighbors may explain why the chapel came to play such an important part in John's childhood.

Captain John Newton did not play a comparably important role in his son's early upbringing because of his frequent absences at sea. Voyages to the Mediterranean were long nautical commitments in the eighteenth century, and Captain Newton was away for months at a time. When he did come home he was a strict father. He expected his son to keep silent until spoken to, to call him "Sir," and to show him proper deference, obedience, and respect at all times. This was not an unusual pattern of behavior in father-son relationships of that era. If Captain Newton's attitude to young John seemed excessively formal, it may have had more to do with the manners he had acquired during his education in Spain than with the feelings in his heart, for, as later events were to show, the Captain was a consistently loving and forgiving parent whenever John behaved rashly or made mistakes.

Nothing is recorded about the family background and antecedents of John Newton Senior, but the few facts known about his life suggest that he was an aloof, stubborn, and intriguing character. "He always observed an air of distance and severity in his carriage," said his son, "which overawed and discouraged my spirit. I was always in fear before him." This remoteness was attributed to the education he had received from Spanish Jesuits, the renowned religious teaching order of the Catholic Reformation, whose founder, Ignatius of Loyola, is credited with the remark, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." Whether or not the attribution of the remark is correct, the philosophy it expresses has been the cornerstone of Jesuit teaching for many centuries. So it gives an interesting insight into the character of John Newton Senior to note that although he was schooled by the leading Catholic educators of his time and spent several years at a Jesuit college in Seville, he refused to become a Catholic. Throughout his life he was reticent in matters of religion, but he observed his faith as a Protestant of high moral principles and low-church practices.

From this and other glimpses of his personality we can surmise that Captain John Newton was a well-traveled, well-educated man of the world, who knew his own mind and could be stubborn in sticking to it. This may not have made him an easy father to love, particularly as he shielded his inner thoughts and feelings behind a carapace of coldness. Nevertheless, his strength of character and the air of authority he derived from his years of command at sea made it easy for the Captain to be respected by his son, even though that respect was tinged with fear.

John Newton, as a boy, was far closer to his mother Elizabeth. She was a well-educated young woman, the daughter of Simon Scatliff, an East London maker of mathematical instruments. Elizabeth dedicated herself to the Christian upbringing and education of her only son. She spent long hours with him over his books each day, usually with a deep intensity that may have stemmed from the realization that her own life was likely to be short. Elizabeth knew from her coughings and expectorations that she was suffering from consumption — the old name for tuberculosis — a killer disease that was far more feared in that age than cancer is today.

Elizabeth was a good teacher, and she molded young John into an able pupil. He had a keen intelligence and an exceptional memory. "When I was four years old I could read (hard names excepted) as well as I can now," recalled Newton in later life, paying tribute to his mother for storing his mind "with many valuable pieces, chapters and portions of Scripture, catechisms, hymns and poems." His feats of memory included knowing by heart many of the answers to the questions in the Westminster Shorter Catechism of 1647, and also the responses to Dr. Isaac Watts's A Short View of the Whole of Scripture History, which was published in 1732 in catechetical form addressed to "persons of younger years and the common ranks of mankind."

All this hard work of learning by rote may have made John a dull boy. By his own account he was "of a sedentary form, not active and playful." Perhaps he did not have time from his lessons to join the other five-year-old sons of the Newtons' Wapping neighbors in their noisy games with drums, hoops, and sticks along the edge of the River Thames. Memorizing long passages from the Watts and Westminster Catechisms would have been an arduous task for an adult, let alone for a boy under six. The fact that Newton took it in his stride at such a young age suggests either a precocious ability for repetition or a gifted and retentive mind.

There were three key figures who exercised a spiritual influence over John Newton's boyhood. The first was his mother Elizabeth. Although frail in her physique, she was formidable in her piety. As a devout member of the congregation at the Old Gravel Lane Dissenting Chapel she knew her Bible and her Reformed theology. She was ambitious for her son to rise above his seafaring background and to become a minister of religion. "I have been told that from my birth she had in her mind devoted me to the ministry," recalled Newton. "Had she lived till I was of a proper age I was to have been sent to St Andrew's in Scotland to be educated." It is interesting to speculate on the course of John Newton's career had this maternal wish been fulfilled. He would probably have become a Scottish Calvinist minister, for that was the school in which St Andrew's trained its eighteenth-century students of divinity. Instead Newton's self-taught theology gave him a more tolerant and transdenominational outlook. In later life this enabled him to appeal to a far wider audience as a preacher, hymn-writer, and best-selling author than he would ever have reached from the narrower spiritual confines of strict Scottish Calvinism.

Mrs. Elizabeth Newton and her son were spiritually mentored by their neighbor, Dr. David Jennings, the pastor at the Old Gravel Lane Chapel. Like most leaders of Independent meetinghouses he preached for at least an hour every Sunday morning with a detailed exposition of "the Word" — a chosen passage of Scripture. Newton was stirred by Jennings's sermons, and the one preached on a Sunday morning in 1730 may have made a particular impact, for with little John Newton sitting in the chapel, Jennings based his message (subsequently published in his book Sermons for Young People) on St. Paul's letter to Philemon, which features a plea by the apostle for an errant slave named Onesimus: "We have in this epistle a memorable instance of the richness and freeness of the grace of God, for the encouragement of the meanest and vilest sinners to fly to him for mercy," declared Jennings. There may be an echo in these words of the opening lines of Newton's great hymn:

Amazing grace! — how sweet the sound — That saved a wretch like me!

Perhaps this sermon on the themes of grace, sin, and slavery planted a first seed in the heart of the boy Newton, even if it took many years to germinate. Whether or not this suggestion is valid, John Newton certainly regarded his childhood pastor, David Jennings, as his first spiritual leader. After his conversion, Newton corresponded extensively with Jennings, often describing him as his "patron."

A third spiritual influence on the young Newton was Dr. Isaac Watts (1674–1748), close to David Jennings as a colleague and fellow minister. Watts was renowned as the leading hymn-writer of his day and also as an outstanding preacher. He sometimes came to deliver sermons in the Old Gravel Lane Chapel where, along with other members of the congregation, Elizabeth Newton and her small son would have listened to him as he illustrated his preaching with his hymns. Given the cooperation and the relationship between Watts and Jennings, it is certain that Newton's earliest spiritual upbringing was influenced by Watts's hymnody. Indeed, nearly fifty years later, when the Reverend John Newton published his best-selling Olney Hymns (1779), it was clear that many of his compositions had been inspired by Isaac Watts.

One of Watts's most popular hymns, likely to have been sung in Wapping's Gravel Lane Chapel at Christmastime in Newton's childhood, was:

Joy to the world! The Lord is come: Let earth receive her King; Let every heart prepare him room And heaven and nature sing.

The tune to this Christmas carol, still popular in the twenty-first century, was written by a rising young composer, George Frederick Handel, who became a naturalized British subject in 1726, the year after Newton was born. When he was at the height of his fame as a London preacher, one of Newton's extraordinary achievements was to draw large crowds to his series of fifty sermons on the words of the recitatives, arias, and choruses of Handel's Messiah, delivered from the pulpit of St Mary Woolnoth in 1785, the centenary year of the composer's birth.

The impact made on John Newton as a small boy by his early experiences of Handel's music, Jennings's sermons, and Watts's hymns is a matter for speculation. His exposure to them was real and perhaps emotionally powerful, particularly when he heard Isaac Watts's most famous hymn on Good Friday. Its opening lines, as Watts originally wrote them, were:

When I survey the wondrous cross Where the young prince of glory died.

The reason why these words might have had a poignant meaning for six-year-old John Newton was that his young mother was surveying her own cross of mortal illness.

By the spring of 1732 Elizabeth Newton was showing all the symptoms of advanced consumption — severe weight loss, a bright-eyed pallor in the face, and racking spasms of coughing up blood. In a desperate attempt to recover from the disease, she went to stay in the family home of her cousin, Elizabeth Catlett, who lived in Chatham on the Kent coast. Deep breathing of sea air was believed to be a cure for tubercular patients, but it was no help to Elizabeth Newton. On July 11, 1732, at the age of twenty-seven, she passed away in the Catletts' house. Her son was not at his mother's bedside because he was thought too young to witness the distressing sights and sounds of her terminal illness. He, therefore, remained in London, boarding with a family who worshiped at Dr. Jennings's chapel. Just two weeks short of his seventh birthday, the news was broken to John Newton that he had lost his mother.

Elizabeth Newton's educational and spiritual legacy to her son was greater than either of them realized during her lifetime. She had brought him up to believe in God's omnipotence, to fear his judgment, and to accept that his Word, as recorded in the Bible, was the source of all truth. In his adolescence and early manhood John Newton often rebelled against these teachings. Yet the spiritual lessons the boy had learned at his mother's knee were never forgotten. They became the foundation for Newton's eventual conversion and Christian commitment.

In addition to her spiritual instruction of her only son, Elizabeth also inculcated the good habits of industry and intellectual curiosity, as well as the enjoyment of expressing oneself in a wide-ranging vocabulary. It is clear that Newton's prolific writings and sermons in later life were, at least in part, the product of his mother's early inspiration. "Almost her whole employment was the care of my education" was Newton's description of her devotion to him.

John Newton's father was away at sea when his wife died. He did not return from his Mediterranean travels until early in 1733. When he came home to discover that he was a widower, Captain Newton spent little time in mourning. He remarried quickly, taking as his second wife the daughter of "a substantial grazier" from Aveley in Essex. Her name was Thomasina, and her background was a relatively wealthy one, for in those days the difference between a farmer and a grazier was at least five hundred acres. Thomasina, who was of Italian descent, bore two sons and a daughter to Captain Newton. The arrival of these children resulted in John's being sidelined into the predictable but unhappy position of a stepson who is excluded from the inner circle of the new family. "My father left me much to run about the streets" was how Newton described his plight. "He kept me at a great distance."

The distance widened when, at the age of eight, Newton was sent away to boarding school in Stratford, Essex. His first teacher there was a sadistic wielder of the cane. "His imprudent severity almost broke my spirit and my relish for books. ... I forgot the first principles and rules of arithmetic which my mother had taught me," recalled Newton. However, his second teacher noticed that the boy had considerable ability. Newton came top of his class in Latin, which in that year's syllabus required studies of Virgil and Tully. However, before John Newton's learning of Latin or any other subject could make deep progress, he was taken away from school. His formal education ended at the age of ten, when Captain Newton decided it was time for his son to go to sea.

FIRST STEPS IN LOVE AND SEAFARING

The sea was in John Newton's blood. He grew up on the banks of the River Thames in Wapping, a nautical hamlet within sight and easy rowing distance of the Pool of London. As a maritime community it had its seamy side of pubs, prostitutes, and pirates, six of whom were hanged on the local gallows in June 1725 the month before John Newton's birth. Most of the residents, however, earned honest livings on or from the ships that anchored in the Pool. Sailors, ships' chandlers, dockers, deckhands, sailmakers, and sea captains — all found the narrow riverside streets of the neighborhood a convenient place to live. In Newton's lifetime, Captain James Cook, the navigator, and William Bligh, captain of the Bounty and its mutinous crew, were Wapping residents. Captain John Newton Senior was not in their respective leagues of fame and notoriety, but he was a respected figure in the London community of what Coverdale's translation of Psalm 107 calls those who "go down to the sea in ships and occupy their business in great waters." With such a background it was natural for the young John Newton to absorb the atmosphere of the maritime world around him. From time to time he would be taken on board whichever of his father's ships was in port, and in 1736, at the age of eleven, he made his first sea voyage on one of them to Spain.

The relationship between the two Newtons does not seem to have been much improved by this sea journey, or indeed by any of the five voyages they made to the Mediterranean together between 1736 and 1742. The Captain remained a stern, unbending, and distant figure whose concept of fatherhood did not extend to emotional intimacy with his son. Nevertheless, under his paternal eye the teenage John Newton received a solid grounding in seamanship and had at least one interesting work experience in another country. When he was fifteen his father found a job for him with a Spanish merchant in Alicante. It was a post with good prospects, but Newton walked out after a few months. "I might have done well if I had behaved well," he wrote later, "but by this time my sinful propensities had gathered strength by habit. I was very wicked and therefore very foolish."

As this description implies, impulsive and rebellious streaks were emerging in John Newton's character. His father, when home from the sea, showed little concern for the unsettled behavior of his eldest son, for he was taking far more interest in his new son by Thomasina, William Newton, born in 1736. Perhaps resenting the partiality shown to his half-brother, John Newton became even more impetuous. He kept bad company, ran wild in the streets, and was often heard swearing or blaspheming. However, he did not entirely desert the religious disciplines he had learned from his mother. As if to balance his impropriety with piety, Newton buried himself in religious books. One that appealed to him was The Christian Oratory by Benjamin Bennett, whose recommendations for prayer and Bible reading he zealously followed. These mood swings of Newton's adolescence that took him temporarily in the direction of religiosity were influenced by two incidents in which he saw the hand of divine providence.

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Excerpted from "John Newton"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan Aitken.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
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