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The railway journey from London to Edinburgh is, by British standards, a long one. Normally lasting about five hours, it can sometimes be drawn out to six or seven if there are problems. On a recent occasion when I was using this service, its start was delayed by half an hour at the London terminus, and almost as soon as the passengers were breathing a sigh of relief that the coaches were actually on their way, the train once more ground to a halt. After a while the intercom seemed to offer the unlikely explanation that there was "a fertility" on the line; and eventually we decoded the accent to mean that there had been a fatality, sadly a suicide, just ahead of us. That took two hours to investigate. There were subsequent engineering works that dictated further postponement of progress. So it turned out to be the longest travel time to Edinburgh I have ever suffered.
The experience, however, was bearable because of a book. Normally I try to read part of a volume on that journey, often turning to a lighter item halfway to Edinburgh. But that day my attention was grasped by a single work for the whole period. It was a study of the English evangelical John Newton by Bruce Hindmarsh, a young Canadian scholar. It is a substantial volume, and it is as thoroughly academic as one would expect of the Clarendon Press. But it is clear, attractively written, and sharply focused on what is important about Newton. It is not a biography but an analysis of what its subject reveals about the broad sweep of evangelical history in the later eighteenth century. It riveted my eye for the full eight or nine hours.
Newton's life has obvious appeal. A profligate sea captain, he commanded several slavers across the middle passage from Africa to America, but then, in a raging storm, received an intimation of the displeasure of God that began a decisive process of conversion. That experience forged the author of the hymn "Amazing Grace." It is not, however, the dramatic adventures of Newton's early life that detain Hindmarsh.
A biography issued in 1960 (by Bernard Martin) leaves fewer than half its pages for Newton's subsequent career as a clergyman of the Church of England. Hindmarsh, on the other hand, allocates three-quarters of his space to themes drawn from the ex-mariner's later life. That policy, interestingly, is a reversion to the relative weighting given in a biography of 1868 (by Josiah Bull). The nineteenth century knew what was of lasting significance about Newton: his extensive shaping influence on the evolution of the evangelical movement. Hindmarsh has restored a just perspective to our view of the man.
Newton took responsibility for the parish of Olney in 1764. Until 1779, when he moved to London, he remained in this market town in the north of Buckinghamshire on its borders with Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. The area was home, as the author finely shows, to the descendants of Protestant refugees from persecution on the Continent, and so there were smoldering embers of ardent religious conviction for Newton to stir up. He did so with a popular preaching style. "I resolve," he wrote in his diary, "to express plain propositions in plain words." This Quaker-like allegiance to an unadorned technique was appreciated in the town and beyond. The church was crowded, a gallery had to be erected, and invitations to preach in the surrounding area multiplied.
What was the theology preached by the Vicar of Olney? Newton was a Calvinist, but one who, following Jonathan Edwards, was careful to guard against any taint of fatalism. So great was his aversion to the suggestion that human beings are automatons that in his last years he actually became wary of Edwards himself, fearing that the American's metaphysics might tend to establish absolute necessity.
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