The wonder why such love to me,
his genius for friendship, his good-humoured perplexity as to his proper theological and ecclesiastical affinities, his ready wit and manly tenderness, unite to make John Newton’s a name over which one may well linger.
He was a Calvinist for the same reason that the Wesleys were Arminians. They were convinced that only a love divine which included every soul of man could have stooped to them. Newton believed that only God’s determinate counsel could have set such wandering feet as his upon the rock and established his goings. To such elect souls the divers ways of contradictory theologies blend in the one path which leads the sinner to the Saviour. ‘The views,’ he says, ‘I have received of the doctrines of grace, are essential to my peace, and I could not live a day or an hour without them.’ He found them ‘friendly to holiness,’ and it was not in him to be ‘ashamed of them.’ One of his favourite stories was of an old woman near Olney, whose views on predestination suited him exactly. ‘Ah! I have long settled that point; for if God had not chosen me before I was born, I am sure He would have seen nothing in me to have chosen me for afterwards.’ But we can well believe that he was not a satisfactory Calvinist from the ‘highest’ point of view. ‘There were two sorts of Calvinists at Olney,’ he said, ‘and they always reminded me of the two baskets of Jeremiah’s figs.’
His Churchmanship was like his Calvinism, convinced but liberal, almost easy-going. He writes to his friend, William Bull—
I know not how it is. I think my sentiments and experience are as orthodox and Calvinistical as need be; and yet I am a sort of speckled bird among my Calvinist brethren. I am a mighty good Churchman, but pass amongst such as a Dissenter in prunello. On the other hand, the Dissenters (many of them, I mean) think me defective, either in understanding or in conscience, for staying where I am. Well, there is a middle party called Methodists, but neither do my dimensions exactly fit with them.... But there are a few among all parties who bear with me and love me, and with this I must be content at present.... Party walls, though stronger than the walls of Babylon, must come down in the general ruin when the earth and all its works shall be burned up, if not sooner.
In truth, he also was one of those whom any Church might gladly have adopted. He would have been thoroughly happy and at home amongst the best of the Dissenters, he would have been an ideal Methodist, and his Narrative would have given an added glory to the Lives of Early Methodist Preachers; but, notwithstanding the difficulties which delayed his taking orders, he was in his right place as a parish clergyman, and had no reason to complain that he was not appreciated in the Establishment. His Apologia shows that when he desired to enter the ministry, Dissenters were quite as much afraid of him as Churchmen, and were as unwilling to ordain him as the archbishop himself.[160]
He entered the Church without any special prejudice in its favour, but his conviction that he had taken the right step grew stronger year by year. His defence of the Prayer-book against the criticism of the Dissenter who availed himself of Watts’s Psalms and Hymns is as effective as it is witty, and is enforced by a characteristic anecdote of a preacher who used to compose hymns line by line as he announced them from the pulpit.
Crito freely will rehearse
Forms of praise and prayer in verse;
Why should Crito then suppose