The Olney Autobiographers: English Conversion Narrative in the Mid-Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Consider the central religious crisis in the life of each of three individuals. First, on 21 March 1748, in the belly of a ship in the dead of night, awakened by a raging North Atlantic storm which threatened to sweep all on board to a watery death, John Newton cries out to God for mercy. Second, at an insane asylum on 26 July 1764, William Cowper emerges from nearly a year of psychological derangement and repeated attempts at self-destruction, and, flinging himself into a window-seat in the parlour, he opens a Bible, reads, and falls into a spiritual reverie as a kind of divine light floods into his soul. And then third, after months of anxiety over his ineffectual pastoral ministry, and remorse over the levity with which he entered holy orders, Thomas Scott shuts himself up in his study with his Bible, the works of Richard Hooker and other Anglican divines, and by Christmas 1777 argues himself into evangelical conviction.