114 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED
Kempis, and on his way home in 1748, a night spent on a water-logged vessel, with death staring him in the face, deepened the conviction. This he used to call The Great Deliverance. He was then twenty-three. For four years he was master of a slave-ship, then he became tide surveyor at Liverpool, where he came under the influence of Whitefield and Wesley. He studied carefully, and in 1764 was ordained as curate of Olney. Three years later Cowper came to reside here, and for twelve years the two friends were hardly ever twelve hours apart. Newton says, The first six years were spent in admiring and trying to imitate him ; during the second I walked with him in the shadow of death. In 1771 he proposed to Cowper that they should compose a volume of hymns for the promotion of the faith and comfort of sincere Christians. It was to be a memorial of their friendship. Its title-page reads, Olney Hymns, in three books : Book I. On Select Texts of Scripture ; Book II. On Occasional Subjects ; Book III. On the Progress and Changes of the Spiritual Life. It is dated Olney, February 15, 1779.
It is an astonishing fact that the sailor-preacher s work compares so splendidly with that of a great English poet. His hymns embody his experience of the abounding grace and love of the Saviour. A comparison of both, says the Dictionary of Hymnology, will show no great inequality between them. Amid much that is bald, tame, and matter-of-fact, his rich acquaintance with Scripture, knowledge of the heart, directness and force, and a certain sailor imagination, tell strongly. The one splendid hymn of praise, " Glorious things of thee are spoken," in the Olney collection, is his. " One there is above all others " has a depth of realizing love, sustained excellence of expression, and ease of development. "How sweet the name of Jesus sounds" is in Scriptural richness superior, and in structure, cadence, and almost tenderness, equal to Cowper s O for a closer walk with God."
Newton was presented to the rectory of St. Mary Woolnoth, and left Olney at the end of 1779- His last task there was the publication of the Olney Hymns, which first made Cowper known to the world. In his preface Newton says that a few of the hymns had appeared in periodicals and in recent collections. The work had been undertaken not only with a desire to promote the faith and comfort of sincere Christians, but as a monument, to perpetuate the remembrance of an intimate and
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