Page "Amazing Grace" Paragraph 4

According to the Dictionary of American Hymnology, " Amazing Grace " is John Newton's spiritual autobiography in verse.

In 1725, Newton was born in Wapping, a district in London near the Thames.

His father was a shipping merchant who was brought up as a Catholic but had Protestant sympathies, and his mother was a devout Independent unaffiliated with the Anglican Church.

She had intended Newton to become a clergyman, but she died of tuberculosis when he was six years old.

For the next few years, Newton was raised by his emotionally distant stepmother while his father was at sea, and spent some time at a boarding school where he was mistreated.

At the age of eleven, he joined his father on a ship as an apprentice ; his seagoing career would be marked by headstrong disobedience.