In truth, he also was one of those whom any Church might gladly have adopted. He would have been thoroughly happy and at home amongst the best of the Dissenters, he would have been an ideal Methodist, and his _Narrative_ would have given an added glory to the _Lives of Early Methodist Preachers_; but, notwithstanding the difficulties which delayed his taking orders, he was in his right place as a parish clergyman, and had no reason to complain that he was not appreciated in the Establishment. His _Apologia_ shows that when he desired to enter the ministry, Dissenters were quite as much afraid of him as Churchmen, and were as unwilling to ordain him as the archbishop himself.[160] He entered the Church without any special prejudice in its favour, but his conviction that he had taken the right step grew stronger year by year. His defence of the Prayer-book against the criticism of the Dissenter who availed himself of Watts’s _Psalms and Hymns_ is as effective as it is witty, and is enforced by a characteristic anecdote of a preacher who used to compose hymns line by line as he announced them from the pulpit. Crito freely will rehearse Forms of praise and prayer in verse; Why should Crito then suppose Forms are sinful when in prose? Must my form be deemed a crime Merely for the want of rhyme? Newton’s charity went a good deal beyond that of the ordinary evangelical of his own and of many a later day. In the _Apologia_ he expresses with vigour his conviction that ‘the Lord has a people’ among the members of the Roman and Greek Churches. I should hope that they who, having themselves tasted that the Lord is gracious, know the language of a heart under the influence of His Spirit, would, in defiance of Protestant prejudices, be of my mind if they had opportunity of perusing the writings of some Papists. Newton was not one of the great men of his age, but he is remarkable, if not pre-eminent, for the naturalness with which he speaks the common tongue of the children of God. Father Faber, in the preface to his _Hymns_, bears a somewhat reluctant witness to this. Catholics even are said to be sometimes found poring with a devout and unsuspecting delight over the verses of the Olney hymns, which the author (Faber) himself can remember acting like a spell upon him for years, strong enough to be for long a counter influence to very grave convictions, and even now to come back from time to time unbidden into the mind. If Faber deprecated the ‘spell’ of the Olney hymns, it is fair to remember that Newton concludes his defence of devout Catholics by saying, ‘However, I desire to be thankful that I am not a Papist.’ In 1764 the difficulties which beset his entrance to the ministry ended, and he was ordained by the Bishop of Lincoln to the curacy of Olney, which had been secured for him by the Earl of Dartmouth,[161] a devout and liberal Churchman, commemorated in Cowper’s lines—