March (Web-only) 2003

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Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song
Steve Turner
Ecco, 288 pages, $23.95

John Newton, the author of "Amazing Grace" and "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken," was remarkably thickheaded. If Calvinists believe in the "perseverance of the saints," this future Calvinist devoted himself to demonstrating the persistence of the sinner. The first few chapters of Steve Turner's engaging Amazing Grace chronicle Newton's dogged commitment to self-destructive vice to the point that this reader could not help scrawling in the margin of page 37, "This man was thick!"

Like many a seafaring man of the 18th century, Newton repeatedly engaged in physically and spiritually destructive behaviors. He deserted the Royal Navy, then was flogged for desertion and demoted. He made up disrespectful songs about his ship's captain and was demoted again. He frequently drowned himself in drink. He prided himself in creative profanity and sharp attacks on Christian belief. Even though on several occasions he seemed to have been miraculously preserved when he should have lost his life, he persisted in the godless philosophy he learned from the Third Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks (which book Alexander Pope said had "done more harm to Revealed Religion in England than all the works of Infidelity put together"). He hardened his heart against God's advances.

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The story of his conversion during an Atlantic storm is well known, and Turner tells it with exceptional drama. He seizes the moment to offer readers a lesson in what Wesley called experimental religion. "Still at the [ship's] wheel he reasoned that the best way forward was to ask for the power of the Spirit and then to start acting as though the gospel was true. The proof would ...