The contribution of evangelical Churchmen, apart from the Wesleys, to
the hymnody of the eighteenth century, is slight, with the important
exception of the remarkable collection of hymns issued by William
Cowper and John Newton, which takes its title from the little
Buckinghamshire town in which Newton was for years curate for an
absentee vicar.
Our little England has been the mother of so many famous sons that it
often happens that some out-of-the-way village or obscure country town
is rich in memories of the great and good, for
Half of her dust has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages.
Such a spot is Olney, the town of Cowper and of Cowper’s Mary, of John
Newton, and for a time of Thomas Scott, of whom Newman speaks as ‘the
writer who made a deeper impression on my mind than any other, and to
whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my soul.’[158] Where William
Carey, after some hesitation on the ground of his slight abilities,
was ‘allowed to go on preaching,’ and finally sent forth to the
ministry by the unanimous vote of the Baptist Church, over which John
Sutcliff presided. Where also Dr. H. J. Gauntlett, when a boy of ten,
was organist at the parish church.[159]
The Olney hymns are at once the ‘monument’ of ‘an intimate and
endeared friendship’ and of a memorable literary partnership. ‘The old
African blasphemer’ must have felt it even more a matter of
thankfulness that he found himself collaborating with William Cowper
than that he should become minister of the nearest church to the
Mansion House. John Newton’s romantic story is too well known to be
repeated here. He is a unique figure in the Christian choir, and the
story of our hymn-writers would be vastly poorer if his life were
omitted.
Influenced, as he gladly recognized, by the mother who died when he
was a boy of seven, his soul lay open to intellectual and spiritual
impressions, even in the midst of his wanderings and sins. Euclid, as
well as Thomas à Kempis, shared in the saving of his soul and kept him
from sinking to the level of his companions and oppressors. His
hair-breadth escapes were so many and so remarkable that he might well
regard them as interpositions of Providence, indicating that he was ‘a
chosen vessel’ whom God had designated to special work when his hour
should come.
Among the many interesting men who occupy secondary places in the
religious life of the eighteenth century, he is one of the most
interesting and attractive. The promise of his childhood blighted by
the death of his mother, his restless, roving, adventurous manhood,
his pursuit of knowledge under difficulties, his seven years’ faithful
love for Mary Catlett, thoughts of whom were never absent from his
mind for an hour amidst all his ‘misery and wretchedness,’ the
unegotistic frankness of his _Authentic Narrative_, his profound and
thankful modesty,
The genuine meek humility,
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
Forms are sinful when in prose?
Must my form be deemed a crime
Merely for the want of rhyme?
Newton’s charity went a good deal beyond that of the ordinary
evangelical of his own and of many a later day. In the _Apologia_ he
expresses with vigour his conviction that ‘the Lord has a people’
among the members of the Roman and Greek Churches.
I should hope that they who, having themselves tasted that the Lord
is gracious, know the language of a heart under the influence of His
Spirit, would, in defiance of Protestant prejudices, be of my mind
if they had opportunity of perusing the writings of some Papists.
Newton was not one of the great men of his age, but he is remarkable,
if not pre-eminent, for the naturalness with which he speaks the
common tongue of the children of God. Father Faber, in the preface to
his _Hymns_, bears a somewhat reluctant witness to this.
Catholics even are said to be sometimes found poring with a devout
and unsuspecting delight over the verses of the Olney hymns, which
the author (Faber) himself can remember acting like a spell upon him
for years, strong enough to be for long a counter influence to very
grave convictions, and even now to come back from time to time
unbidden into the mind.
If Faber deprecated the ‘spell’ of the Olney hymns, it is fair to
remember that Newton concludes his defence of devout Catholics by
saying, ‘However, I desire to be thankful that I am not a Papist.’
In 1764 the difficulties which beset his entrance to the ministry
ended, and he was ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln to the curacy of
Olney, which had been secured for him by the Earl of Dartmouth,[161] a
devout and liberal Churchman, commemorated in Cowper’s lines—
We boast some rich ones whom the gospel sways,
And one who wears a coronet and prays.
Newton was nearly forty when he entered upon his first clerical
employment. A few months after his coming to Olney, Cowper and Mrs.
Unwin stayed with him at the vicarage for about six weeks, and from
that time they were bound together by the ties of a deep affection.
Newton recognized with his usual shrewdness how much he was inferior
to his friend in intellectual capacity, but he was able to give to the
sorely tried poet, in his fits of depression, much comfort and a very
patient friendship. When in 1773 one of Cowper’s worst attacks came
on, he went to the vicarage and remained there for more than twelve
months. It was no light trial to Newton, but he said, ‘I think I can
hardly do or suffer too much for such a friend,’ and ‘upon the whole’
he was not weary of his ‘cross.’ It has sometimes, most ungenerously,
been charged against Newton that his influence tended to produce, or
to aggravate, the religious melancholy of the poet, but Cowper’s
malady had been very pronounced long before Newton met him. Richard
Cecil, and more recently Canon Overton, have defended Newton against
this accusation. Cowper’s morbid depression must have been much more
trying to Newton than Newton’s humble, cheerful faith could have been
to Cowper. Indeed, his playful poems addressed to John Newton and his
wife and to their common friend, ‘the smoke-inhaling Bull’—the
Independent minister of Newport Pagnell, whom Cowper calls ‘a man of
letters and of genius.... but he smokes tobacco—nothing is
perfect’—sufficiently show how genial and even jovial was their
friendship. The fable that Nonconformist ministers and Evangelical
clergymen are either rank hypocrites or intolerable dullards, though
it had, and perhaps still has, the support of many great authorities,
is only believed in circles profoundly ignorant of them.
Yet Newton must have been greatly indebted, especially as a
hymn-writer, to Cowper. His hymns were all written during his
residence at Olney, and he had intended that his share in the volume
should have been much less than Cowper’s. Indeed, when his friend’s
‘long and affecting indisposition’ occurred, he laid the project aside
for some time. In the end the collection appeared with sixty-eight of
Cowper’s and two hundred and eighty of Newton’s. Of Cowper’s hymns,
some few had been written before he went to Olney, e.g. ‘The Happy
Change’ and ‘Retirement.’
Cowper is the one great hymn-writer who ranks with the greater poets.
Montgomery, Heber, Milman, all wrote ‘poems,’ but their enduring
poetic monument is in their hymns. Had Cowper never written a hymn, he
would have had fame sufficient as a poet; had he never written a
‘poem,’ he would still have lived through the ages as the writer of
immortal hymns. Lord Selborne says that Cowper’s contributions to the
Olney collection ‘are, almost without exception, worthy of his name’;
but, as a fact, many of them are prosaic and feeble, apparently
written as task work, perhaps to meet a challenge of Newton’s, or to
follow a particular sermon. Cowper’s choicest hymns are too well known
for quotation—
O for a closer walk with God.
Hark, my soul, it is the Lord.
Sometimes a light surprises.
God moves in a mysterious way.
Jesus, where’er Thy people meet.