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John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce. By D. Bruce Hindmarsh. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. xviii + 366 pp. $88.88 cloth.
Although this book preserves the insular tradition of British religious historiography from which scholars ought now to be breaking away, it is a very fine offering, and has given your reviewer more pleasure than anything he has read for a long time. The title appears verbose but states very precisely what is to come; this is not another conventional biography but a series of studies designed above all to "locate" various aspects of John Newton's life and work in the general history of English evangelicalism. Because these studies are acutely done and are based on the whole range of immediate source material, not only do Newton the man, the pastor, and the writer become ultimately clearer than they have ever been before, but so also does the history of the English Calvinist tradition. What happened between the generations of Baxter and Watts at one end and those of Fuller and Simeon at the other has always been obscure. Some of the spiritual descendents of the former move toward Unitarianism, some...