“What a poor creature I am in myself, incapable of standing a single hour without continual fresh supplies of strength and grace from the fountain-head.” A series of miraculous rescues from death by storm, starvation, mutiny plots, and slave uprisings reinforced his sense of that grace. On the matter of slavery, Newton’s progress was slow. Though he disliked the inconvenience and dangers of the trade, he still accepted it as an honorable profession, as did the rest of “polite” eighteenth-century society.