In that hour when John Newton ‘first believ’d’, he saw no incongruity between his newly awakened faith and his trade of shipping fellow human beings from West Africa to America. In fact he saw the slave trade as having helped him reshape his life after a chaotic youth, and in his autobiography, written in mid-life, he observed with no condemnation of his former career that he had been ‘upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me’.2
