It was not until he was nearly thirty-nine years old that he entered the ministry of the Established Church, being appointed curate of the village of Olney. He had always had an impulse, even during his wildest years, to read and study and to add to his general culture. Hence, in spite of his vagrant life (having spent eighteen years on the sea) and his secular pursuits, he came into the ministry with a rough-hewn education, and a practical and resourceful attitude of mind, that served him well in his aggressive ministry. His spiritual experience was deep and intense. He had been in close touch with Whitefield, the Wesleys, and other leaders in the great evangelistic movement. For his work as a curate in the Established Church, the hymns of Watts lacked the deep personal spirituality for which his own soul sought expression. The Wesleys supplied that element abundantly, but their hymnbooks did not express his Calvinistic attitude, nor fit his local needs. His own urge to write hymns and his intimacy with Cowper, which undoubtedly seemed a providence, encouraged him to produce Olney Hymns, which contained 280 hymns by Newton and 68 by Cowper. Newton sympathized with Watts in his objection to pronouncedly poetic elements in hymns; in his preface he remarks that “the imagery and coloring of poetry, if admitted at all, should be admitted very sparingly.” The book was dedicated to “the use of plain people,” to promote the faith and comfort of sincere Christians. To secure these, “perspicuity, simplicity, and ease” were sought. Yet some of Newton’s best hymns closely approach the best of his friend, the poet Cowper. Genuine feeling gave lyric wings. Of his 280 hymns, the most successful in maintaining a place in our hymnals are: “Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,” “Approach, my soul, the mercy seat,” “Glorious things of thee are spoken,” “Come, my soul, thy suit prepare,” “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds,” “Safely through another week,” “While with ceaseless course the sun,” “One there is, above all others.” What a noble chaplet of pearls for his Lord is this amazing contribution by the former “servant of slaves”! Newton’s famous coworker on the _Olney Hymns_, William Cowper, was the son of one of the chaplains of George II and was born in Hertfordshire in 1731. He was frail and shy, and had a very painful experience among the boys of the Westminster School which he attended for ten years. Doubtless his later mental affliction was due in large part to the bullying of his schoolmates. He studied law, but did not find it to his taste. At the age of thirty-six he moved to Olney, where he met John Newton, who became his close friend and protector as well as his leader in the writing of hymns. He co-operated with Newton’s religious work as lay reader and wrote his hymns for the cottage prayer meetings that were a feature in Newton’s work.