Select Letters of John Newton

John Newton (1725–1807), sailor, preacher and hymnwriter, was one of the most colourful figures in the great Evangelical Revival of the 18th Century. ‘Once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa,’ he wrote for his own epitaph, ‘by the rich mercy of Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy.’