Summary and Review of the first 84 pages of John Newton

 From Disgrace to Amazing Grace by Jonathan Aitken

       It is remarkable that Jonathan Aitken’s biography of John Newton begins, in part with a note about the spiritual teachings that the latter’s mother Elizabeth laboured to instill into her son at an early age. She ensured that by the time young Newton was four years old, he could at least read. A pious woman, she introduced the word of God to her son ensuring he stored in his mind many “valuable pieces, chapters and portions of scripture, catechisms, hymns and poems.” Indeed and even though she died while Newton was only a little child, Elizabeth’s early teachings of the word of God to her son were to later have a great influence on the outcome of his life when it is considered that his father, Captain John Newton was an absentee father, a sea farer whose “frequent absences at sea” is much talked about in the book. It is noted, for example that when Elizabeth Newton died in 1732, her husband was away at sea and only returned home “in early 1733”, yet the scripture lessons young Newton learned at his mother’s knee were not  completely forgotten and these would become the foundation for his eventual conversion and subsequent Christian commitment.

       Captain Newton introduced his son to seafaring in the latter’s teenage, but the captain being of the view that his son was not suitable for a career at sea, found him employment with a family friend, one Joseph Manesty in one of the latter’s plantations in Jamaica but Newton never took up the job, he having gone for a visit at his mother’s cousin Elizabeth Catlett’s house where he met his cousin Polly Catlett with whom he fell deeply in love and decided to overstay the visit. It was during a second visit to the Catlett’s in Chatham that he was press-ganged (forcefully recruited) into the Royal Navy and placed abound HMS Harwich. He soon lost his captain’s favour after prolonging a day’s leave he had been granted to over ten days on account of Polly Catlett but things came to a head when he attempted to desert the navy, was caught flogged and degraded. Eventually he was discharged from the Navy through an exchange programme then allowable and onto a merchant ship, the Pegasus, a slave trading ship that would take him to Africa and into the slave trade, with its appalling brutality. By this time Newton was an ardent blasphemer and even though he survived several near death mishaps which he would later attribute to divine providence, he became increasingly steeped into sin.

       Starting his life in Africa as a land-based slave trader, Newton soon disagreed with his employer, Amos Clow and he soon found himself under severe punishment first after disagreeing with Mr. Clow’s African mistress, one PI and even more so after it was falsely alleged by one of Mr. Clow’s friends that Newton had stolen his employer’s property. When he contracted some tropical diseases in the absence of his employer who had then travelled inland from their base at the West coast of Africa, Newton was extensively mistreated by the his employer’s mistress who not only denied him medication and food, but also taunted him with unending abuses and insults. When his employer came back he believed PI’s side of the story against Newton’s and so the punishments were increased, for Newton, in this state of severe illness, was put in chains on the upper deck of a slave ship where he stayed through the cold of rain and the heat of the African sun, was starved, beaten, mocked some more and denied proper medication such that even his fellow African slaves pitied him. It is at this point that he wrote and smuggled out letters to his father, describing the horror of his plight in Africa. Newton felt hopeless, helpless and humiliated, with no end of his captivity in sight. By this time, Newton was about twenty one years of age.

       By God’s providence, Newton was subsequently offered employment by another slave trader who even gave him a share in the said trader’s “factory” so that he, Newton, also now owned and sold some slaves for personal profit besides his pay for the work he did for this new employer. Living as he pleased, with increased income and an unbridled lust for African slave women who he often raped, Newton began dabbling in witchcraft and blasphemed God even the more. Back home, however, his father had received the letters his son had written and managed to smuggle out while in captivity and so Captain Newton organized for a rescue mission of his son to be carried out by a captain of one of Joseph Manesty’s trading ships, the Greyhound. By the time the rescuers reached the younger Newton, he was so comfortable in this sinful lifestyle that it took persuasion and indeed a litany of concocted tales and lies to get him on board. Once on the ship, he took to heavy drinking and unending blasphemy and even later when he read a Christian classic that he found aboard the ship “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas Kempis, he was largely indifferent to it. Soon enough however, the Greyhound was hit by a huge and devastating storm that smashed a large section of its upper bow to smithereens and the crew laboured hard to keep her afloat with increasing desperation even as it was all too apparent that the all the ship’s food stores and supplies had been lost, not to mention that some of the crewmen got swept overboard to their deaths in the cold Atlantic. It was then and only then and after all hope seemed lost that Newton remarked “If this will not do, the Lord have mercy on us”

       This appears to have been the beginning of Newton’s conversion to faith for even his fellow crew members, convinced that his God-mocking profanities had brought down divine wrath upon the Greyhound increasingly started toying with the idea of throwing him overboard in a manner akin to the story of Jonah of the Bible. This beginning part of the book sets the stage, so that through the diverse and severe sufferings that Newton encountered, for his eventual conversion, we are taught that in our stubbornness, God may allow us to suffer that we may then look to Him for salvation. Indeed at the end of chapter ten of Jonathan Aitken’s book, and as the Greyhound to their amazement, eventually landed in Ireland, with a limp and quite miraculously, it was difficult for John Newton not to see the providences of God in his life. Yet in all this, I have seen that the grace of God which is mightier than human thought can comprehend or fathom never left Newton and this has encouraged me greatly and to the extent that I would recommend this book to all serious Christians who would want to look again at the grace of God in its exemplary work in the life of John Newton. I have, as well, learnt anew from this book the truism in Proverbs 22:6 that if we “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” This God that his mother had long taught him about, and whose teachings had somehow remained at the back of Newton’s mind, is the one who rescued the Greyhound and her crew when all else appeared unhelpful.  It is at this point that John Newton stated “About this time I began to know that there is a God who hears and answers prayer”. It was the time of John Newton’s conversion. And his song ‘Amazing Grace how sweet the sound ‘ testifies to his conversion.

Review by Kennedy Owiti of Grace Baptist Church-Kisumu