“Nature and grace have been the same in every age” by John Newton

“Next to the Word of God, I like those books best which give an account of the lives and experiences of His people.

Some of the letters and lives in Fox’s Acts and Monuments, in the third volume, have been very useful to me. But no book of this kind has been more welcome to me than the Life of Mr. Brainerd, of New England, re-published a few years since at Edinburgh, and I believe sold by Dilly, in London.

If you have not seen it, I will venture to recommend it, (though I am not fond of recommending books,) I think it will please you.

I suppose you have read Augustine’s Confessions. In that book I think there is a lively description of the workings of the heart, and of the Lord’s methods in drawing him to himself.

It has given me satisfaction to meet with experiences very much like my own, in a book written so long ago. But nature and grace have been the same in every age.”

–John Newton, The Works of John Newton, Vol. 6, Ed. Richard Cecil (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1988), 6: 211-212.