When people are involved in some institutionalisd evil, and come to recognise this, there are two ways of dealing with it. One is to find a way of removing themselves from it, and the other is to try to reduce the damage being done to people, which may mean continued involvement.

It isn't always obvious that the former way is the right way or the best way. Would it really has been best if Oskar Schindler had cut all his connections with the Nazi machine and with the slave factories?

Deciding how to act in that kind of situation must be extraordinarily hard, especially when personal selfish motivations can be entangled with sincere attempts to make things better than they would otherwise be. As was the case with Schindler - and very probably with John Newton.

I don't think we should pride ourselves on the clean hands we have done nothing to clean, and rush to easy judgements about how others have dealt with these things.

And we shouldn't be too confident that people in other times will not look at the things we are involved in in the world today and think that our hands are far from clean.