Amazing Grace

John Newton (1725–1807) lost his mother when he was six and went to sea as a boy with his father, a ship captain. As a young man he was forced into the Royal Navy, and later he worked aboard slave ships — a chapter of his life he would spend his last decades repenting of.

In March 1748, Newton was sailing home to England aboard a merchant ship called the Greyhound when a violent storm began tearing the ship apart in the night. Certain he was about to die, Newton cried out to God for mercy. The ship held together, and Newton marked that date — March 21, 1748 — as his spiritual birthday for the rest of his life.

His change of heart came slowly. Newton stayed at sea for several more years, until illness ended his seagoing career in 1754. Looking back as an old man, he wrote that his heart now 'shuddered' at what he had once done — and that his greatest regret was staying silent about it for so long.

Newton was ordained a minister in the Church of England in 1764 and became the pastor of Olney, a small lace-making village. He often wrote a new hymn to go with his sermons, working alongside his friend, the poet William Cowper.

For his New Year's Day service on January 1, 1773, Newton preached on 1 Chronicles 17:16–17, where King David asks in wonder, 'Who am I, O Lord God... that thou hast brought me hitherto?' The hymn he wrote to match that sermon was his own life story in verse: 'I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.'

It was published in 1779 in the collection Olney Hymns under the title 'Faith's Review and Expectation' — six simple stanzas, printed with no music at all.

In later life Newton wrote openly about the wrongs of his seagoing years, including his work in the slave trade, and urged others to turn from it. Near the end of his life he is reported to have said, 'My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour.'

He died in December 1807 at age 82 — still pointing people to the grace he had once received in a storm at sea.

Newton never heard 'Amazing Grace' the way we sing it. For decades his words were sung to more than twenty different tunes. It wasn't until 1835 — nearly thirty years after his death — that American songbook compiler William Walker paired the text with a folk melody he called NEW BRITAIN, whose original composer is unknown. The match was so perfect it never came apart.

The beloved final verse, 'When we've been there ten thousand years,' wasn't written by Newton either. It was a floating folk verse, in circulation by 1790, that later became widely known through nineteenth-century hymn singing and the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. By the early 1900s it had become a permanent part of the hymn.

From shape-note singing on the American frontier to gospel choirs and concert halls worldwide, 'Amazing Grace' has become one of the most recognizable songs in the world — by one biographer's estimate, it is performed about ten million times every year.

Early Latter-day Saints sang 'Amazing Grace' — it appeared in a hymnbook published by the Church in 1841. But it was left out of the 1985 hymnal, and for a generation many members knew it mostly from outside their own meetinghouses.

That changed on September 12, 2024, when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released it as hymn #1010 in the new Hymns—For Home and Church collection, after a young adult choir introduced it at the April 2024 general conference. After nearly 200 years, one of Christianity's most beloved hymns had come home.