“Amazing Grace” has a long history that helps to add color to
the words, but it is primarily a spiritual song, so the setting
of the hymn is open to interpretation. (In fact, of the six
verses to the hymn, only the last truly mentions any type of
place at all, and even that is more of a spiritual reference to
the earth than a physical one.) When John Newton wrote the words
for the hymn in the early 1770s, he was an experienced Anglican
priest. He had been ordained eight years earlier, and his path
to the priesthood was an unusual one. He had gone to sea at age
eleven, and for the next twenty years he lived a self-admitted
wretched and sinful life as a slave trader. “Amazing Grace” was
a hymn of redemption, a topic that was deeply personal for
Newton, as he himself had been a sinner who was lost but now
found. Having been drawn from personal experience, “Amazing
Grace” contains an almost indescribable feeling of truth and
power. Many fans of the hymn in the early and mid-1800s would
have known that Newton had