The Slave Trader Who Heard the Question

On March 10, 1748, a violent storm battered the merchant ship Greyhound off the coast of Ireland. John Newton, a twenty-two-year-old slave trader who had mocked Christianity and lived in open rebellion, found himself lashed to the ship's wheel through the night, bailing water and certain he would die. In that desperate darkness, words from a Bible he had ridiculed years earlier surfaced unbidden in his mind.…