The railway journey from London to Edinburgh is, by British standards, a long one. Normally lasting about five hours, it can sometimes be drawn out to six or seven if there are problems. On a recent occasion when I was using this service, its start was delayed by half an hour at the London terminus, and almost as soon as the passengers were breathing a sigh of relief that the coaches were actually on their way, the train once more ground to a halt. After a while the intercom seemed to offer the unlikely explanation that there was "a fertility" on the line; and eventually we decoded the accent to mean that there had been a fatality, sadly a suicide, just ahead of us. That took two hours to investigate. There were subsequent engineering works that dictated further postponement of progress. So it turned out to be the longest travel time to Edinburgh I have ever suffered.

The experience, however, was bearable because of a book. Normally I try to read part of a volume on that journey, often turning to a lighter item halfway to Edinburgh. But that day my attention was grasped by a single work for the whole period. It was a study of the English evangelical John Newton by Bruce Hindmarsh, a young Canadian scholar. It is a substantial volume, and it is as thoroughly academic as one would expect of the Clarendon Press. But it is clear, attractively written, and sharply focused on what is important about Newton. It is not a biography but an analysis of what its subject reveals about the broad sweep of evangelical history in the later eighteenth century. It riveted my eye for the full eight or nine hours.

Newton's life has obvious appeal. A profligate sea captain, he commanded several slavers across the middle passage from Africa to America, but then, in a raging storm, received an intimation of the displeasure of God that began a decisive process of conversion. That experience forged the author of the hymn "Amazing Grace." It is not, however, the dramatic adventures of Newton's early life that detain Hindmarsh.

A biography issued in 1960 (by Bernard Martin) leaves fewer than half its pages for Newton's subsequent career as a clergyman of the Church of England. Hindmarsh, on the other hand, allocates three-quarters of his space to themes drawn from the ex-mariner's later life. That policy, interestingly, is a reversion to the relative weighting given in a biography of 1868 (by Josiah Bull). The nineteenth century knew what was of lasting significance about Newton: his extensive shaping influence on the evolution of the evangelical movement. Hindmarsh has restored a just perspective to our view of the man.

Newton took responsibility for the parish of Olney in 1764. Until 1779, when he moved to London, he remained in this market town in the north of Buckinghamshire on its borders with Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. The area was home, as the author finely shows, to the descendants of Protestant refugees from persecution on the Continent, and so there were smoldering embers of ardent religious conviction for Newton to stir up. He did so with a popular preaching style. "I resolve," he wrote in his diary, "to express plain propositions in plain words." This Quaker-like allegiance to an unadorned technique was appreciated in the town and beyond. The church was crowded, a gallery had to be erected, and invitations to preach in the surrounding area multiplied.

What was the theology preached by the Vicar of Olney? Newton was a Calvinist, but one who, following Jonathan Edwards, was careful to guard against any taint of fatalism. So great was his aversion to the suggestion that human beings are automatons that in his last years he actually became wary of Edwards himself, fearing that the American's metaphysics might tend to establish absolute necessity.

One of the great merits of this book is that it presents perspicuously the distinction between natural and moral inability that Edwards had propounded and that Newton equally upheld. Another merit is that Hindmarsh sets out in tabular form the various strands in the evangelical theology of Newton's day in order to locate his position within the pattern. The table may not be absolutely comprehensive—the governmental theory of the Atonement affected people, including Newton, who would not be identified with the only column where it appears—but it is extraordinarily useful and (so far as I am aware) entirely original. Newton was in substance close to John Owen, one of the most systematic of Puritan divines; in spirit he was nearer to the milder Richard Baxter. The resulting blend has its own appeal:

The love of God, as manifested in Jesus Christ, is what I would wish to be the abiding object of my contemplations; not merely to speculate upon it as a doctrine, but so to feel it, and my own interest in it, as to have my heart filled with its effects.

Newton's Calvinism was as experiential as it was preachable.

To his powerful convictions Newton yoked a literary talent. His friend the poet William Cowper judged his style to be superior to that of the great historian Edward Gibbon. Newton's skills of composition appear in the wealth of correspondence, mostly of a pastoral kind, that he left behind him. Much of it was published in his lifetime, gaining him an audience far wider than his sermons. The tone of unaffected confidentiality ("Your case reminds me of my own") gives force to the profoundly sane advice.

And Newton was a hymnwriter. With William Cowper, he was the author of Olney Hymns (1779), many of them written to be sung after the sermon by his own congregation. Occasionally they reflect the spirit of the age all too closely. His powerful hymn, "One there is above all others," still commonly sung today, contains a stanza which is definitely not used nowadays (nor does Hindmarsh record it):

Men when raised to lofty stations
Often know their friends no more;
Slight and scorn their poor relations
Though they valued them before.
But our Saviour always owns
Those whom he redeemed with groans.

The standard of Newton's verse varies, but, like the poetry of Cowper, its tone accurately reflects the transition from the Augustan to the Romantic. The resulting literary sensibility acts as a suitable vehicle for a deeply devotional spirit.

Newton's Christocentric spirituality, to which Hindmarsh wisely devotes a chapter, bears all the hallmarks of an evangelical. It is founded on the Bible. "I advise everybody," Newton wrote, "to study the Scriptures with prayer … and to examine and try the writing of men by the infallible standard." Next, it stems from the experience of conversion. Hindmarsh perceptively comments that the purpose of Newton's devotional exercises was "to recreate and maintain the emotional landscape of conversion." That in turn was achieved by reflection on the cross of Christ. "But now," runs a record of his meditative prayer, "I may, I must, I do mention the Atonement. I have sinned, but Christ has died." And the piety issued in a dynamo of activity, for Newton never spared himself. On a single Sunday at Olney he once preached for a total of six hours. The combination of emphases on the Bible, conversion, the Cross, and activity was entirely typical of an evangelical of any age.

Newton, however, represents a particular phase in evangelical history, the epoch (as the subtitle of this book puts it) between the conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce. That era was deeply imbued with the attitudes of the Enlightenment.

Although Newton is hostile to the "New light" of advanced Socinian ministers, the liberal preachers of their day, he justifies Calvinism not simply because it is biblical but because it is supported by "Scripture, reason (when enlightened), and experience." The appeal to reason and experience is typical of the approach of the philosopher who is "enlightened," a word Newton actually uses.

He dismisses the technical terms of Puritan theologians because they cause perplexity to plain people; he describes meditation as a fusion of observation and experience; he rejects all that savors of enthusiasm.

Equally, though he remained a contented Anglican, he regarded church order as a matter of little importance, happily ignoring the gulf between members of a state church and those outside its bounds in order to fraternize with Dissenters. This proto-ecumenical stance was again a feature of the tolerant temper of the age. Hindmarsh's conclusion may surprise some readers, but it is undoubtedly valid: Newton was a man "imbued with Enlightenment ideals."

The analysis offered by this study seems incontrovertible. Hindmarsh has deployed an unusual combination of historical, theological, and literary gifts to illuminate John Newton and the English evangelical movement he epitomized. One of the very few minor slips relates not to England but to Scotland, whose Secession church was not as uniformly sympathetic to revival as the author supposes. But in almost every other respect this work is utterly reliable. It rests partly on a number of fresh sources that Hindmarsh has uncovered. Its organization of its own themes is masterly. And it is so readable. It provides what is now certainly the best introduction to the world of eighteenth-century evangelicalism in England. That is why this reader preferred to concentrate on its contents rather than staring through the carriage window on that interminable journey from London to Edinburgh.

David Bebbington is reader in history at the University of Stirling in Scotland. He is the author of Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Baker Book House).

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.