Justified True Belief

(●) The slave-ship captain who wrote "Amazing Grace," and who lived to help end the trade he had worked. + Most people who can sing "Amazing Grace" from memory could not name the man who wrote it, and would not guess what he had done for a living. John Newton spent nine years in the African slave trade, four of them in command of ships that carried human cargo across the Atlantic. He wrote the hymn nearly twenty years after he left the sea, by which time he was a country curate in a Buckinghamshire market town, a curate being the clergyman who does a parish’s daily rounds on a modest salary. It was written for the New Year’s Day service of a congregation of lacemakers and farm labourers. He matters to Christian readers for two reasons. The first is that his life is the hardest test case there is for the claim that grace reaches anyone. Here was not a man who needed a little polishing, but a man who wrote, in his own last will, that he had been "once an Infidel and Libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa." The second is that when the campaign to abolish the British slave trade needed a witness who had been inside it, Newton was the witness it got. He published what he had seen in 1788. He was examined by the Privy Council, the king’s own standing council of advisers, and afterwards by the House of Commons. And he was the old clergyman a young Member of Parliament named William Wilberforce came to in secret in December 1785 to ask what he should do with his life. One fact worth carrying away. On 25 March 1807 the abolition bill received royal assent, the king’s formal agreement, which is the moment a bill stops being a proposal and becomes the law of the land. Newton died that December, in his eighty-third year. He outlived the trade by not quite nine months.

(●) 1725 AD: Born in Wapping to a sea captain and a Dissenting mother, who died thirteen days before his seventh birthday. + "I was born the 24th of July, 1725," Newton wrote, "and she died the 11th of that month, 1732." The arithmetic is his own and he never softened it. His mother Elizabeth was a Dissenter, meaning an English Protestant who worshipped outside the established Church of England; her congregation in Wapping, by the London docks, was under the Independent minister David Jennings. She was an invalid, she had no other child, and she poured everything she had into this one. She taught him English before he was four, and he could read any ordinary book by then. She filled his memory with chapters of Scripture, catechisms and hymns. She meant him for the ministry. Then she was gone, of consumption, the name that century gave to tuberculosis, and the plan went with her. His father remarried, the boy was sent among rougher company, and at the age of eleven he went to sea aboard his father’s ship. A child who had been learning catechisms in a Wapping parlour was now living among grown seamen. He made five voyages to the Mediterranean with him. His father was a capable man who had been schooled in Spain, and who carried, his son said, "an air of distance and severity" that overawed a child and so had less influence on him than it should have had. What the boy did with his mother’s lessons he described without excuse: he took up religion in fits, kept a diary, thought himself devout, and then let the whole thing go. "Instead of prayer, I learned to curse and blaspheme."

(●) 1744 AD: A press gang put him aboard a warship, and when he deserted the next spring he was flogged at the gangway before the whole crew. + He was pressed, meaning seized by force for the Royal Navy, which in wartime could legally take seamen off the street or out of a merchant ship and keep them there. France was threatening the coast, and his father could not buy him out. So he went aboard HMS Harwich, where his father’s influence with the captain did at least get him quickly rated midshipman: an officer in training, with a place on the quarterdeck, the raised deck at the stern where the ship’s officers stood, and some authority over other men. He was eighteen. He threw it away twice. First he overstayed shore leave over the New Year to see a girl in Kent, which cost him the captain’s favour for good. Then, in April 1745, with the fleet put back into Plymouth and his father reported to be at Torbay on business with the African trade, he walked off the ship while in charge of a boat sent to stop other men deserting. Soldiers picked him up on the Dartmouth road. "I walked through the streets guarded like a felon," he wrote. "My heart was full of indignation, shame and fear." He was two days in the guard-house, kept a while in irons, "then publicly stripped and whipped," broken from his rank, and forbidden to be spoken to by the men who had been his friends the week before. The whipping was done at the gangway, which is the gap in a ship’s side where a man comes aboard, and the crew were mustered to watch it. A maxim of his in those years, he said, was "never to deliberate." That is a young man’s rule, and it is the rule that had just cost him everything, and he went on following it. He got himself exchanged into a ship bound for Africa, which felt at the time like an escape.

(●) 1745 AD: On the Guinea coast he became a slave himself, and planted lime trees he was mocked for planting. + Newton attached himself to an English slave trader settled on the Plantane Islands, a cluster of small islands off what is now Sierra Leone, and then fell ill while the man was away. The trader’s African consort, the woman he lived with, ran the household while he was gone, and she decided she had no use for the sick Englishman in it. What followed he set down plainly forty years later, in the pamphlet that helped end the trade: "for about the space of eighteen months, I was in effect, though without the name, a Captive and a Slave myself." The details are small and they stay with you. He pulled up roots in the plantation at night and ate them raw on the spot for fear of being caught, and they made him violently sick, and he went back and did it again. When he could barely walk she made him walk, and set her attendants to mimic him and throw limes at him. The people who fed him, when anyone did, were the enslaved men and women in the chain, who "durst not be seen to do it" and brought him food out of their own rations. He washed his one shirt on the rocks at night and put it on wet so that it would dry on his back while he slept. There is one scene from those months he could never tell without stopping to wonder at it. He was planting lime or lemon saplings, no bigger than a gooseberry bush, and his master strolled past and said: "Who knows, but by the time these trees grow up and bear, you may go home to England, obtain the command of a ship, and return to reap the fruits of your labors?" It was meant as a cruelty. Newton thought it as likely that he would be king of Poland. He came back a few years later as an officer, and picked the first limes off those trees.

(●) 1748 AD: He asked God for mercy on a sinking ship almost without meaning it, and kept the date every year afterwards as the day he turned. + His father got word of him to a Liverpool merchant, who told his captains to look out for the boy, and in February 1747 one of them did. The way home was long. He came home in the Greyhound, a trader carrying beeswax and dyewood, badly out of repair after a long voyage in a hot climate, and more than a year of sailing lay between the day she took him aboard and the night of the storm. The day before that storm he picked up the only book on board worth reading, Stanhope’s English version of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, a medieval handbook of devotion that has been in print ever since. He picked it up the way a bored man picks up anything, and then a thought he had not entertained in years went through him: "What if these things should be true?" He shut the book and went and found someone to talk nonsense with. That night a sea broke over the ship and filled the cabin he was lying in. A man who went up the ladder in his place was washed overboard in front of him. The upper timbers were torn away on one side and the ship began to fill. They worked the pumps and bailed with buckets, eleven or twelve men, and what kept her afloat was the cargo: beeswax and wood are lighter than water. Around nine in the morning, spent with cold, Newton said to the captain what a sailor says without thinking: "If this will not do, the Lord have mercy upon us." Then he heard himself. "This (though spoken with little reflection) was the first desire I had breathed for mercy for the space of many years." He steered the ship till midnight and had nothing to do but think. In the evening, when word came that she was free of water, something in him gave way and he began to pray: "I could not utter the prayer of faith; I could not draw near to a reconciled God, and call him Father. My prayer was like the cry of the ravens, which yet the Lord does not disdain to hear." He kept the anniversary every year for the rest of his life, and he was careful about the date, because Britain changed calendars in 1752, dropping eleven days out of that September to fall into step with the rest of Europe, and he did not want the day fudged. His own dates from before the change therefore come in two forms, the old style and the new, eleven days apart, and he gave both: "The 10th (that is, in the present style, the 21st) of March is a day much to be remembered by me."

(●) 1750 AD: He married Mary Catlett, took command of a slave ship, and kept at that trade for four more years. + Mary Catlett of Chatham in Kent was the girl he had overstayed his leave for, the one whose company had cost him a captain’s favour and set the whole run of disasters going. He had loved her since he was seventeen and she fourteen, and had been, by his own account, hopeless at saying so. They married on 1 February 1750 by the old calendar, which is 12 February once those eleven days came out two years later, and they had no children. When she died on 15 December 1790 he wrote on his own epitaph that he had resigned her "to the Lord who gave her." Within months of the wedding he was back on the coast as master, the merchant service’s word for captain, of the Duke of Argyle, and after her the African, twice. That is three voyages as a slave-ship captain, and every one of them came after the night on the Greyhound. He held prayers on deck for his crew. He studied Latin in his cabin. He wrote his wife long, tender letters. Below him, in rooms sometimes five feet high and divided into two tiers, men lay in irons "close to each other, like books upon a shelf," and he later admitted he had known them packed so tight that the shelf would not easily take one more. He did not think there was anything wrong with it, and he said so afterwards without dressing it up: "I never had a scruple upon this head at the time; nor was such a thought once suggested to me, by any friend." In November 1754, fitted out for a fourth voyage and on the point of sailing, he collapsed in a fit "of an apoplectic kind," that century’s phrase for something like a stroke, and it lasted about an hour. The doctors would not let him go. He resigned the command the day before the ship sailed. The man who took his place died on that voyage, along with most of the officers and many of the crew. In 1755 he was made a tide surveyor at Liverpool, a customs officer who boarded incoming ships, and with the unexpected leisure of the post he taught himself Greek, Hebrew and some Syriac, and began to write.

(●) 1764 AD: Ordained at thirty-eight after a refusal, he spent sixteen years at Olney and wrote hymns for a weekly prayer meeting. + The Church of England was not eager for him. In December 1758 he asked the Archbishop of York for ordination, the formal admission to the church’s ministry, without which no man could be given a parish. He was turned down. The archbishop, his secretary explained, "was inflexible in supporting the rules and canons of the Church." A former slave-ship captain with no university degree, keeping company with Methodists, the followers of Wesley and Whitefield whose open-air preaching the bishops disliked, was not what the establishment had in mind. Newton called it "the softest refusal imaginable" and waited six years. Then the Earl of Dartmouth put the curacy of Olney in Buckinghamshire in his way, the curate’s post in that parish, and this time the interview went differently. The Bishop of Lincoln examined him for an hour, chiefly on doctrine. Newton refused to smooth over the points where he disagreed with his lordship, and was ordained deacon at Buckden on 29 April 1764 and priest on 17 June the same year, the two being the successive steps of one ladder, seven weeks apart in his case. Olney was a lacemaking town going quietly poor, and he threw himself at it: cottage visits, a children’s meeting, a midweek gathering for prayer in the great room of a nearby mansion. In 1767 the poet William Cowper moved to Olney, a man of extraordinary gifts and a mind that kept collapsing under him. The two became close, and the hymns grew out of that friendship and out of the Tuesday meeting: a new one written most weeks, plain enough to be sung by people who could not read, and tied to whatever passage had been opened. Cowper’s illness eventually stopped his share of the work, and Newton finished the book alone. When the Olney Hymns appeared in 1779, he said in the preface that besides serving the faith of ordinary Christians it "was likewise intended as a monument, to perpetuate the remembrance of an intimate and endeared friendship."

(●) 1779 AD: From a London pulpit he broke a silence of thirty-four years, testified against the trade he had worked, and lived to see it abolished. + John Thornton, the merchant who had quietly funded Newton’s charity at Olney, presented him to St Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street, in the heart of the City of London. To present a man to a church was to name him its clergyman. That right of naming was itself a piece of property in England then, and this one belonged to Thornton. It made Newton a rector, a parish’s own minister rather than somebody else’s stand-in, and he preached his first sermon there on 19 December 1779. He was fifty-four, a long way from the Plantanes, and for twenty-eight years after that he sat in the middle of London being consulted. Then the abolitionists found him. Thomas Clarkson, gathering evidence for the campaign, sought out men who had been on the African coast and were no longer making money from it, and Newton was among the first he reached. Clarkson passed his name to William Wilberforce, the Member of Parliament who was to lead the campaign in the Commons, and Wilberforce sent for him and took notes. In 1788 Newton published Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade, a short, cold, factual pamphlet from a man who had done the work, and the abolition committee put a copy into the hands of every member of both Houses. He was examined by the committee of the Privy Council and afterwards by the House of Commons, and Clarkson set his name down in the list of witnesses the cause had leaned on. He gave the rest of his life to it without ever claiming credit. When someone told him that an American college had made him a Doctor of Divinity, he answered: "I always resolved I would accept of no diploma, unless it came from the poor blacks." The Slave Trade Act received royal assent on 25 March 1807. Newton, nearly blind and nearly out of memory, died on 21 December that year, and was buried in the vault of his church.

What He Taught

(T1) Grace is not a reward for improvement; it reaches the man who has no case to make. + Think of the most exhausting person you know, the one whose apologies you have stopped believing. Now imagine being told that person is not merely forgivable but is the standing proof of how forgiveness works. That is the shape of Newton’s whole ministry, because he was that person and knew it. The hymn that carries this everywhere was written at Olney for the New Year’s Day service of 1773, and printed in 1779 under a title nobody remembers: "Faith’s review and expectation," set against 1 Chronicles 17:16–17, where David sits down in front of God and asks who on earth he is, that God should have brought him this far. Newton never said when he wrote it, so the occasion is an inference, though a strong one: his sermon notebook has him preaching on that text on 1 January 1773, his diary keeps the closing days of 1772 in the same key, and the hymn follows the sermon. The word that has made people uncomfortable ever since is "wretch." It is not a general statement that human beings are worthless. It is one man’s verdict on himself, written by someone who had kept people in irons for a living, and who did not use the hymn to tell his readers that they were as bad as he had been. A man may say of himself what he has no right to say of the stranger in the next pew, and Newton knew the difference. The doctrine underneath it is the one the New Testament states without hedging: "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" (Romans 5:20), and salvation is "the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). Paul calls himself the foremost of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15). Newton read that line as a competitor rather than a reader, and thought he could take it off him.

(Q) "Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) That sav’d a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see." + Source: John Newton, Olney Hymns (1779), Book I, Hymn 41, "Faith’s review and expectation," on 1 Chronicles 17:16–17. Spelling as first printed. Five more stanzas follow, and most of them look forward rather than back. Here is the third of the six, which is about keeping going: "Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home."

(T2) Christians grow the way corn grows, and a young believer should not be judged by a ripe one’s standard. + A gardener who pulls up a seedling to check whether it has rooted kills it. Newton’s most useful contribution to pastoral care is the same observation applied to people, and he took the image straight from Jesus: "The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear" (Mark 4:28). In three letters that circulated for two centuries he sketched three stages and labelled them A, B and C rather than naming names. A is the new believer, full of feeling, sure of Christ’s power and not yet settled about his own acceptance, comforted by God with what Newton calls "cordials," the sweet restorative drinks a doctor of that century gave a patient too weak to take anything stronger, so that he is not swallowed up with sorrow. B is the middle stretch, where the cordials are withdrawn on purpose and the believer learns, slowly and unpleasantly, how much of his confidence had been resting on his own good moods. C is the settled Christian, whose peace no longer rises and falls with his feelings. Newton’s point is not that stage C is holier but that it is later, and that treating an A like a C, or expecting a C to bubble like an A, does real damage. This is where his own history did its work. A man who was three years a Christian and still a slave-ship captain has no illusions about how uneven sanctification is, sanctification being the slow business of actually being made holy after God has already accepted you, and that memory made him patient with people in a way that severer pastors were not. It also left him honest about the cost: what he calls "frames," the warm feelings a believer measures himself by, are the last thing to trust and the first thing God removes.

(Q) "The Lord leads all his people effectually and savingly to the knowledge of the same essential truths, but in such a variety of methods..." + Source: John Newton, Letters on Religious Subjects, Letter X, "Grace in the Blade," on Mark 4:28, as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Newton. It first appeared over the pen name Omicron. He is telling his correspondent why he will not simply write out his own conversion as a template. One road, many ways onto it, and no believer is entitled to make his own route the test of anyone else’s.

(T3) A man can win the argument and lose the temper that makes him fit to hold it. + Somebody Newton knew was about to publish against an opponent, and Newton, who liked him and knew his temper, wrote him a letter before he started. It has outlasted the controversy it was written for, and it is probably the most quoted thing Newton ever wrote after the hymn. The counsel runs in three parts: your opponent, your readers, and yourself. Pray for the man before you write a word about him, every day you are drafting, because it is very hard to be vicious about someone you have just carried to God. If he is a believer, you will be spending eternity with him, so anticipate that now. If he is not, he is an object of pity rather than anger, and you have nothing that you did not receive. As for readers, the uncommitted ones cannot judge your doctrine but can judge your spirit perfectly well, and they know that meekness and love are supposed to be Christian marks. If your zeal is "embittered by expressions of anger, invective, or scorn," which is to say by abuse and sneering wearing the clothes of argument, you have discredited the very thing you set out to defend. The sharpest line is aimed at his own side. Newton was a Calvinist, meaning he held that salvation begins with God’s choice rather than with ours, and he pointed out that this belief in particular ought to make a man gentle, because on his own principles his opponent cannot simply decide to see. Then he turned the knife: "Self-righteousness can feed upon doctrines as well as upon works; and a man may have the heart of a Pharisee, while his head is stored with orthodox notions of the unworthiness of the creature and the riches of free grace." The Pharisees of the Gospels were the scrupulous religious party who kept the rules and looked down on everyone who did not, and Newton is telling his own side that a man can be one of those while believing every syllable of free grace.

(Q) "What will it profit a man if he gains his cause and silences his adversary, if at the same time he loses that humble, tender frame of spirit in which the Lord delights, and to which the promise of his presence is made?" + Source: John Newton, Letters on Religious Subjects, Letter XIX, "On Controversy," as printed in The Works of the Rev. John Newton. The letter is addressed to a friend whose "love of truth is joined with a natural warmth of temper." Newton tells him he is bound to win: "I am not therefore anxious for the event of the battle; but I would have you more than a conqueror, and to triumph, not only over your adversary, but over yourself."

(T4) A nation can be guilty of a trade, and staying quiet about it is itself a sin. + In 1788 an elderly London clergyman published forty pages about a business he had left thirty-four years earlier, and the pages are chilling precisely because they are unexcited. Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade is not a sermon. It is a deposition, the flat sworn statement a witness gives on the record, containing what he saw and nothing he felt about it. Here is what a hundred-ton ship was fitted to carry, and here is the height of the rooms, and here is what a white man was sent below to do with the bodies so that as little space as possible was lost. Here is what the wars on the coast were for. Here is what the trade did to the seamen, which mattered because Parliament could be made to care about English lives when it would not yet care about African ones. Two arguments carry it. The first is that a country cannot wall a profit like this off from the rest of its conscience and call the money clean: "The Slave Trade was always unjustifiable; but inattention and interest prevented, for a time, the evil from being perceived." Newton takes the priests who would not put Judas’ thirty pieces back in the temple treasury, "since it is blood money" (Matthew 27:6), and hands the line to the British Parliament. The Mosaic law had put the matter even more bluntly: "Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death" (Exodus 21:16). The second argument is about silence, and it is the one that applies to people who never owned anybody. Newton did not claim his testimony was needed. He claimed that withholding it would be a crime: "silence, at such a time, and on such an occasion, would, in me, be criminal." The duty is not exotic. "So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin" (James 4:17).

(Q) "I hope it will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was, once, an active instrument, in a business at which my heart now shudders." + Source: John Newton, Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade (1788), opening pages. It comes in the opening paragraph. Before he describes anything he has seen, he puts himself in the dock, and the rest of the argument is made by a man who has already confessed.

(Q) "My memory is nearly gone; but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great Saviour." + Source: William Jay, Autobiography (1855), in his reminiscences of Newton. Jay wrote it down on leaving the house. William Jay, the fellow minister whose Autobiography preserved the line, visited him near the end, when Newton could hardly talk. Almost sixty years of reading, and forty-three of preaching, had gone. What was left was the two facts he had started from on the deck of the Greyhound, and he had them in the right order.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He became the pastor ordinary Christians wrote to, and his letters were read long after his sermons were forgotten. + Newton was not a great preacher and knew it. What he had was an ear, and the willingness to answer letters. He published a volume of them in 1781 under the title Cardiphonia, from two Greek words meaning "the utterance of the heart," with the correspondents anonymous and his own name off the title page, and the book found readers for a century and a half. The letters are about ordinary difficulties: a believer whose feelings have gone flat, a tradesman who cannot see how his shop connects to his faith, a man whose prayer is not answered, a minister worn out by his own congregation. The tone is why they lasted. Newton reached for household pictures instead of technical vocabulary, and he talked the same way he wrote, which is why the friends who took down his conversation kept the pictures. A child asks his father for cherries in spring, and the father says no, not because he begrudges them but because they are not ripe: that is an unanswered prayer. A man carries a candle into a dark room and cannot understand why it gives no light, until he notices that he has left the extinguisher on it: that is what education and prejudice do to a mind. He would not measure a minister by his pulpit alone, either. "I have no idea of the size of a table, if you only tell me how long it is; but, if you also say how wide, I can tell its dimensions. So, when you tell me what a man is in the pulpit, you must also tell me what he is out of it, or I shall not know his size." The one piece of his work everyone still has by heart came from the same instinct. Olney Hymns was written for a congregation of poor lacemakers, in words short enough to be sung by people who could not read them, and its most famous item is a small private testimony that turned out to fit almost anybody (T1).

(†) Abolition used him as a witness who had been inside the trade and had nothing left to gain by lying. + Every campaign needs a witness the other side cannot dismiss, and Newton was that witness. The trade’s defenders in Parliament could say, with some force, that the abolitionists had never seen a slave ship and were repeating atrocity stories at second hand. They could not say it about a man who had commanded three of the ships. Thomas Clarkson, who did the campaign’s legwork, made a point of finding men who had been on the African coast and were no longer invested in it, and he reached Newton very early. When Wilberforce asked Clarkson whether the assertions in his book could be supported by other evidence, Clarkson gave him Newton’s name. Wilberforce sent for him, took down what he said, and showed the memoranda, his own notes of the interview, to Clarkson. Clarkson later listed Newton among those "examined by the privy council and the house of commons also," with the entry: "Reverend John Newton, five voyages to Africa in a slave-vessel, and resident eighteen months there." The count is of voyages in slave ships, the two he sailed in under other men as well as the three he commanded. The Greyhound, which brought him home in 1748, carried beeswax and dyewood rather than people. The other link is more personal. In late 1785 Wilberforce, twenty-six years old, newly and secretly converted, and half convinced he should leave politics altogether, wrote to Newton asking for a private interview and begging him to tell nobody: "the face of a member of parliament is pretty well known." They met on 7 December. Wilberforce came away, he wrote, "in a calm, tranquil state, more humbled, and looking more devoutly up to God," and with the old man’s advice that he should not hastily form new connexions nor cut himself off from his former friends. He stayed in the House, and the trade he and Newton both hated was abolished in the year they both saw out.

(†) Where his own record convicts him: he was a converted man for six years and a slave-ship captain for four of them. + Newton would not have wanted any of what follows left out, because he wrote most of it himself. The plain facts are these. He dated his turning to God to March 1748. He took command of the Duke of Argyle in 1750 and made three slaving voyages as a captain. He left the sea in 1754 only because his body gave out. He then spent thirty-four years saying nothing in public about the trade, and a good deal of that time as an ordained minister of the gospel. Worse, in the ordinary sense of the word, is what he remembered about those voyages. Writing in 1764 he looked back on his time as a slaver with something close to nostalgia: "I never knew sweeter or more frequent hours of divine communion, than in my two last voyages to Guinea, when I was either almost secluded from society on ship-board, or when on shore amongst the natives." A man is at peace with God on the quarterdeck while, a few feet below him, people are lying in irons in a space five feet high. He offered no explanation for it beyond the one he gave in 1788: "I never had a scruple upon this head at the time; nor was such a thought once suggested to me, by any friend. What I did, I did ignorantly." That is an explanation and not a defence, and Newton never treated it as one. Ignorance of a kind the whole society shared is exactly the kind Scripture refuses to accept as cover, since the law against manstealing, the seizing of a human being for sale, had stood in plain sight since Sinai (Exodus 21:16), and the New Testament lists enslavers among those whose practice is "contrary to sound doctrine" (1 Timothy 1:10). His own reckoning was the harsher one: he called his confession a thing that "comes too late to prevent, or repair, the misery and mischief to which I have, formerly, been accessary." The honest summary is that grace reached John Newton long before it reformed him, that the delay cost other people their lives, and that he spent his last twenty years trying to pay something back on a debt he knew he could not clear.