The attraction was the presence of the Rev. John Newton, then curate of Olney.  The vicar was Moses Brown, an Evangelical and a religious writer, who has even deserved a place among the worthies of the revival; but a family of thirteen children, some of whom it appears too closely resembled the sons of Eli, had compelled him to take advantage of the indulgent character of the ecclesiastical polity of those days by becoming a pluralist and a non-resident, so that the curate had Olney to himself.  The patron was the Lord Dartmouth, who, as Cowper says, “wore a coronet and prayed.”  John Newton was one of the shining lights and foremost leaders and preachers of the revival.  His name was great both in the Evangelical churches within the pale of the Establishment, and in the Methodist churches without it.  He was a brand plucked from the very heart of the burning.  We have a memoir of his life, partly written by himself, in the form of letters, and completed under his superintendence.  It is a monument of the age of Smollett and Wesley, not less characteristic than is Cellini’s memoir of the times in which he lived.  His father was master of a vessel, and took him to sea when he was eleven.  His mother was a pious Dissenter, who was at great pains to store his mind with religious thoughts and pieces.  She died when he was young, and his stepmother was not pious.  He began to drag his religious anchor, and at length, having read Shaftesbury, left his theological moorings altogether, and drifted into a wide sea of ungodliness, blasphemy, and recklessness of living.  Such at least is the picture drawn by the sinner saved of his own earlier years.  While still but a stripling he fell desperately in love with a girl of thirteen; his affection for her was as constant as it was romantic; through all his wanderings and sufferings he never ceased to think of her, and after seven years she became his wife.  His father frowned on the engagement, and he became estranged from home.  He was impressed; narrowly escaped shipwreck, deserted, and was arrested and flogged as a deserter.  Released from the navy, he was taken into the service of a slave-dealer on the coast of Africa, at whose hands, and those of the man’s negro mistress, he endured every sort of ill-treatment and contumely, being so starved that he was fain sometimes to devour raw roots to stay his hunger.  His constitution must have been of iron to carry him through all that he endured.  In the meantime his indomitable mind was engaged in attempts at self-culture; he studied a Euclid which he had brought with him, drawing his diagrams on the sand, and he afterwards managed to teach himself Latin by means of a Horace and a Latin Bible, aided by some slight vestiges of the education which he had received at a grammar school.  His conversion was brought about by the continued influences of Thomas a Kempis, of a very narrow escape, after terrible sufferings, from shipwreck, of the impression made by the sights