Newport Pagnell; Campbell, Conversational Remarks of John Newton). Jay of Bath credited Newton with ‘the drollest fetches of humour.’
During his residence at Olney Newton published a volume of ‘Olney Sermons’ (1767); a ‘Review of Ecclesiastical History,’ which suggested to Joseph and Isaac Milner the idea of their large ‘History’ (1770); and ‘Omicron's Letters’ (1774), which had appeared in the ‘Gospel Magazine’ under that signature. Other letters under the signature of ‘Vigil’ were added to the edition of 1785. Finally, in 1779 was issued the ‘Olney Hymns,’ which had great and lasting popularity. The book contained sixty-eight pieces by Cowper, and 280 by Newton, including ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!’ The contrast between the two writers' contributions is not great, but such hymns as exhibit any real flash of poetic genius may generally be safely assigned to Cowper. Only about twenty of the hymns remain in general use. One of the finest by Newton is ‘Glorious things of Thee are spoken,’ and it is the only really jubilant hymn in the book (see Julian, Dict. of Hymnology). The last years at Olney had their discouragements. The prayer meetings had led to much party spirit, self-conceit, and antinomianism. Newton's zealous attempts to check some dangerous orgies on 5 Nov. so infuriated the rabble that he had to give them money in order to protect his house from violence. Consequently, in January 1780, he accepted the offer made by John Thornton of the benefice of St. Mary Woolnoth with St. Mary Woolchurch, Lombard Street.
When Newton came to London, Romaine was the only other evangelical incumbent there. His church accordingly was soon crowded by strangers, and to the end of his life his congregation was very large. The bulk of his preaching was extempore, and both Venn and Cecil testify to his scant preparation. His utterance was not clear, and his gestures were uncouth. But his marked personality and history, his quaint illustrations, his intense conviction of sin, and his direct address to men's perplexities, temptations, and troubles, sent his words home. His printed sermons have no literary value. In 1781 he published his most considerable work, ‘Cardiphonia,’ a selection from his religious correspondence. The easy and natural style of the book, the sincerity, fervour, and almost womanly tenderness of the writer, and the vivid presentation of evangelical truths, gave it an immediate popularity; and it opened to Newton his most distinctive office in the evangelical revival—that of a writer of spiritual letters. Numbers of these have been published since his death. He said that his letters would fill many folios, and that ‘it was the Lord's will that he should do most by them.’ Among the persons whom at various times he aided by his personal counsel are Thomas Scott, the biblical commentator, whom he converted, after much debate, from socinianism; William Wilberforce at the crisis of his conversion (1785); Richard Cecil [q. v.], his biographer; Claudius Buchanan [q. v.], the eminent Indian chaplain, who was converted by a sermon at St. Mary Woolnoth; young Jay, the eloquent minister at Bath, who has left a graphic account of Newton's breakfast parties; young Charles Simeon, whom he visited at Cambridge; and Hannah More, with whom he stayed at Cowslip Green. In 1786, the Handel celebration, which to his stern mind seemed a profanation of sacred things, drew from him a series of sermons on the texts in the oratorio of the ‘Messiah.’ In 1788 he aided Wilberforce by publishing his own experiences of the slave trade—a temperate, restrained, but ghastly recital of facts. In 1789 he published ‘Apologia,’ a strenuous defence of his adhesion to the church of England, and an effective defence of establishment. It was called forth apparently by charges of inconsistency, grounded on his attendance at dissenting chapels, and on his contempt for all distinctive tenets outside the evangelical creed. On 15 Dec. 1790 he suffered the loss of his wife, whom to the end he loved with what he feared was an idolatrous love. She died of cancer. He had been preparing for the blow for months in prayer, and he had strength to preach three times while she lay dead in the house, and then her funeral sermon. The anniversaries of her death were always seasons for him of solemn meditation, often marked also by very lame but touching memorial verses. Just as in the ‘Narrative’ he had expressed the depths of his unregenerate crimes, and in the ‘Cardiphonia’ his regenerate depravity, so now in his ‘Letters to a Wife’ (2 vols. 1793) he unfolded the innermost recesses of his lifelong love. He had no dread of the world's judgment which leads most men to shrink from uttering their darkest and holiest secrets.
Newton's house was kept henceforward by his niece Eliza, daughter of George Catlett, whom he had adopted as an orphan in 1774. As his sight gradually failed he depended entirely on her devoted care of him. In 1802–3, however, she fell into a deep melancholy, which necessitated her removal to Bedlam. It is said that Newton, old and
