Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
When we've been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we've first begun.
Public domain hymn text (published 1779). Words by John Newton.
The Story Behind the Hymn
John Newton was born in London in 1725, the son of a merchant ship's captain; his mother, a devout woman who had hoped he might enter the ministry, died when he was only six, and he was largely raised at sea from his early teens onward. His young adulthood was turbulent even by the rough standards of eighteenth-century seafaring: he was forcibly impressed into the Royal Navy, attempted to desert, was publicly flogged for it, and was eventually handed over to a slave trader on the West African coast, where by his own later account he was himself treated as little better than a slave for a period before being rescued by a ship sent by his father.
Newton went on to captain his own vessels in the transatlantic slave trade, and he later wrote candidly about the callousness with which he carried out that work, showing by his own admission little concern for either the danger of his voyages or the suffering of the enslaved people he transported. In March 1748, returning from Africa aboard the ship Greyhound, Newton's vessel was caught in a violent Atlantic storm that came close to sinking it entirely; he later wrote that he had spent part of the previous night reading Thomas a Kempis's 'The Imitation of Christ,' and that amid the storm's worst hours he found himself crying out to God for mercy for the first time in years, half expecting to drown before morning.
Newton always insisted that this night was not a sudden, complete transformation but only the beginning of a slow process; he continued working in the slave trade for several more years afterward, and it was only gradually, through years of self-directed study — he taught himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew during long ocean crossings — that his convictions fully changed. A severe stroke eventually forced him to give up sea travel altogether, after which he took a shore job as a tide surveyor before pursuing ordination in the Church of England, work he had once assumed would be closed to him given his past.
As curate of the small parish of Olney, Newton partnered with the poet William Cowper (author of hymn 42 in this collection) to write new hymns for the parish's weekly prayer meetings, publishing many of them together in 1779 as the 'Olney Hymns.' This hymn, originally titled 'Faith's Review and Expectation,' was one of Newton's contributions, written to accompany a New Year's Day sermon around 1773.
In his later years Newton became an outspoken supporter of abolishing the slave trade he had once worked in, publishing a detailed firsthand account of its horrors and mentoring a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce, who would go on to lead the decades-long parliamentary campaign that finally ended the British slave trade in 1807, the same year Newton died. The hymn's now-famous tune, 'New Britain,' was not written by Newton at all but was paired with his words decades later in America, where it became a staple of the shape-note singing tradition of the rural South before eventually becoming one of the best-known hymns in the English language, sung everywhere from small country churches to state funerals.
