Metaxas' essential tome on the life of William Wilberforce is not an easy read. His categoric description of Wilberforce's life is thick with minute details and a sometimes overwrought narrative that can make it a challenge to wade through its pages. This is not to take away from the skill of Metaxas--my reading tastes just happen to run more Hemingway than Faulkner--and Metaxas falls squarely in the Sound and the Fury school. Regardless I don't know many authors out there today with the researching acumen of Metaxas--one has only to read his untouchable Bonhoeffer to be assured of this. He's also someone that takes morality seriously but does it in a manner that is humorous and approachable. It'd be worthwhile to check out his podcast/radio show as well. He's on twitter too.
The complexity of his writing shouldn't dissuade you from reading Amazing Grace--committing to the marathon is a worthwhile endeavor because of the magnitude of what Wilberforce accomplished. This man's entire life itself was one tireless long-distance race dedicated to a near singular cause--abolishing slavery in England.
To put Wilberforce's life story into perspective, imagine today if a Matt Damon/Conan O'Brien/James Franco/Ben Carson combo of a person was elected as a senator from California and then eventually dropped his hard-partying ways after finding Jesus and then dedicates his next three decades to ending the largest social travesty in existence at the time...something like abortion today. But further imagine that he didn't work tirelessly just to end abortion legislatively but worked just as tirelessly to build a social and financial support and safety net for the hundreds of thousands of mothers (and their babies) faced with an incredibly difficult decision with an unplanned pregnancy--that was his heart and tenacity.
Amazing Grace by Eric Metexas
As one might imagine, Whitefield was despised by the Church of England. But the press and those opposed to religion hated him too. He didn’t mince words on the subjects of sin and hell, and he was increasingly impossible to avoid as his fame grew and grew. Whitefield was forever on the march, like some one-man salvation army. He carried a collapsible pulpit with him and sent handbills and posters ahead to the towns where he would preach; in his lifetime, he preached eighteen thousand sermons, none dull. Read more at location 352
Wit and its employment as a weapon not only in political
combat but in playing with one’s friends was at the core of the Goostree’s
Gang. Their favorite pastime was trading quips and being witty—what they called
“foyning,” or “foining.” The term “to foin”—originally French—means to thrust,
as with a rapier sword. “Foining” swordplay with lighter swords and rapiers had
replaced the earlier kind of swordplay with broadswords, which involved cutting
and slashing. So “to foin” meant to parry deftly and thrust with one’s wits;
the term “rapier wit” is a cousin of “foining.” It was an era in which wit was
greatly valued, and Wilberforce and his friends, all inveterate wits, were
dubbed by Edward Eliot “the Foinsters. Read more at location 662
1782 Gerard Edwards wrote: “I thank God that I live in the
age of Wilberforce and that I know one man at least who is both moral and
entertaining. Read more at location
692
Ideas have far-reaching consequences, and one must be ever
so careful about what one allows to lodge in one’s brain. Read more at location 1069
Wilberforce’s “Great Change” did not happen overnight or in
an instant. St. Paul might have been blinded by the light and changed in a
single moment that could, in effect, be captured in a painting, but
Wilberforce’s transformation was much more gradual. His conversion was much
closer to St. Augustine’s, who came to intellectual clarity about the doctrines
of Christian faith but was frustrated by his inability to conform his behavior
to his beliefs. “I got a clear idea of the doctrines of Religion,” Wilberforce
wrote years later, “perhaps clearer than I have had since, but it was quite in
my head. Read more at location 1100
What he needed desperately was someone to whom he might
unburden himself, someone who would understand and know what to do, someone
with the wisdom to remind him of what he needed to be reminded of just now—of
God’s grace—of the upside of God’s love.
Read more at location 1137
November 29: “Pride is my greatest stumbling block; and
there is danger in it in two ways—lest it should make me desist from a
christian life, through fear of the world, my friends, &c; or if I
persevere, lest it should make me vain of so doing. Read more at location 1155
gives us a strong hint of the contents of Wilberforce’s
letter, as well as an extraordinary picture of Pitt at this time and of the
intimacy of their friendship: My dear Wilberforce, Read more at location 1179
For you confess that the character of religion is not a
gloomy one, and that it is not that of an enthusiast. But why then this
preparation of solitude, which can hardly avoid tincturing the mind either with
melancholy or superstition? If a Christian may act in the several relations of
life, must he seclude himself for all to become so? Surely the principles as
well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation
only but to action. Read more at
location 1194
Newton didn’t tell him what he had expected—that to follow
God he would have to leave politics. On the contrary, Newton encouraged
Wilberforce to stay where he was, saying that God could use him there. Most
others in Newton’s place would likely have insisted that Wilberforce pull away
from the very place where his salt and light were most needed. How good that
Newton did not. Wilberforce writes afterward: “When I came away I found my mind
in a calm, tranquil state, more humbled, and looking more devoutly up to God. Read more at location 1226
Two changes manifested themselves right away: the first was
a new attitude toward money, the second toward time. Before “the Great Change,”
Wilberforce had reckoned his money and time his own, to do with as he pleased,
and had lived accordingly. But suddenly he knew that this could no longer be
the case. The Scriptures were plain and could not be gainsaid on this most
basic point: all that was his—his wealth, his talents, his time—was not really
his. It all belonged to God and had been given to him to use for God’s purposes
and according to God’s will. God had blessed him so that he, in turn, might
bless others, especially those less fortunate than himself. This new attitude
toward Read more at location 1265
As we shall see, in Wilberforce’s day, it was devout
Christians almost exclusively who were concerned with helping the poor,
bringing them education and acting as their advocates, and who labored to end
the slave trade, among other evils. But so successful would Wilberforce and
these other Christians be at bringing a concern for the poor and a social
conscience into the society at large that by the next century, during the
Victorian era, this attitude would become culturally mainstream. Read more at location 1287
God, in his mercy, had allowed Wilberforce to see himself as
he truly was, and it was crushing. But Wilberforce knew God didn’t mean to end
there. On the other side of the worst of who he was, if he dared face that
worst, was a God who would help him overcome his faults and do great things,
the very things for which he had created him. It was not too late. Read more at location 1333
one point he entered into a pact with Milner to “exercise
the invaluable practice of telling each other what each party believes to be
the other’s chief faults and infirmities.
Read more at location 1338
Newton wrote Wilberforce a letter sometime later that seemed
to sum up his view of the situation. “It is hoped and believed,” he famously
wrote, “that the Lord has raised you up for the good of His church and for the
good of the nation.” Pitt, in his letter, had said something similar: “Surely
the principles as well as the Read more
at location 1349
practice of Christianity are simple and lead not to
meditation only, but to action. Read
more at location 1351
Wilberforce’s decision to remain in politics made the
transfer of Christian ideas into the previously “secular” realm of society
possible for generations of Christians to follow. Read more at location 1354
Entirely surprising to most of us, life in
eighteenth-century Britain was particularly brutal, decadent, violent, and
vulgar. Slavery was only the worst of a host of societal evils that included
epidemic alcoholism, child prostitution, child labor, frequent public
executions for petty crimes, public dissections and burnings of executed
criminals, and unspeakable public cruelty to animals. Read more at location 1370
When eighteenth-century British society had retreated from
the historical Christianity it had earlier embraced, the Christian character of
the nation—which had given Britain, among other things, a proud tradition of
almshouses to help the poor, dating all the way back to the tenth century—had
all but disappeared. The almshouses remained, and the outward trappings of
religion remained, but robust Christianity, with its noble impulses to care for
the suffering and less fortunate, was gone.
Read more at location 1391
The barbarous custom of hanging has been tried too long, and
with the success which might have been expected from it. The most effectual way
to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller, and by endeavouring to
repress that general spirit of licentiousness, which is the parent of every
species of vice. I know that by regulating the external conduct we do not at
first change the hearts of men, but even they are ultimately to be wrought upon
by these means, and we should at least so far remove the obtrusiveness of the temptation,
that it may not provoke the appetite, which might otherwise be dormant and
inactive. Read more at location
1519
What made this royal proclamation—and the formation of
proclamation societies—so important was that it furthered two parts of
Wilberforce’s plan: his “broken windows” analysis of the condition of the poor,
and his quest to “make goodness fashionable.” It helped the “broken windows”
part of his plan by addressing the fact that the Crown almost never brought
suit against anyone. Read more at
location 1566
By June 1787, Wilberforce had already taken many steps on
the very long journey ahead toward the “reformation of manners.” In fact, it
wasn’t until October 28 that he coined that phrase, when he famously penned in
his diary: “God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression
of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Read more at location 1601
Granville Sharp was one of those Christian fanatics who took
the injunction to love one’s neighbor literally—who loved his neighbors even
when they were inconvenient African neighbors trying to reclaim their freedom.
Of course, word of his literal interpretation traveled quickly, and slaves who
had heard of Sharp and his work sought him out. Granville Sharp was of course
thrilled to be doing the Lord’s work in freeing these poor souls—and each case
provided a fresh opportunity to do the wider good of improving the vexingly weedy
British legal system. Read more at
location 1749
“I well remember,” Wilberforce wrote years later, “after a
conversation in the open air at the root of an old tree at Holwood, just above
the steep descent into the vale of Keston, I resolved to give notice on a fit
occasion in the house of Commons of my intention to bring the subject forward.”
And thus, history: three men, each named William, each twenty-seven years old,
talking at the base of an ancient oak tree on a hill in May: one prime
minister, one prime-minister-to-be, and one who would stand from that moment
forward at the center of something so big and beyond any single man that a tree
whose life had begun several centuries earlier, and would continue for nearly
two more, was the humble creature chosen to bear mute witness to the
conversation. Read more at location
2044
That same year, and perhaps just in time, Henry Thornton had
invited Wilberforce to move with him into Battersea Rise, Thornton’s home in
Clapham. Thornton called it a “chummery”—a place where bachelors lived
together. They would live together for the next four years, sharing the upkeep
of the place. Edward Eliot would live next door, in a house called Broomfield
Lodge, and Charles Grant would live in yet a third house. Thus began the
Clapham Community, which has also been called the Clapham Sect, the Clapham
Circle, the Clapham Saints, the Claphamites, and other things, good and bad. Read more at location 2566
When he was through, Fox rose and flew at Dundas with all of
his considerable oratorical skills, mocking the idea of moderation in such
things as murder and atrocity. “I believe [the slave trade] to be impolitic,”
Fox said. I know it to be inhuman. I am certain it is unjust. I find it so
inhuman and unjust that, if the colonies cannot be cultivated without it, they
ought not to be cultivated at all…. As long as I have a voice to speak, this
question shall never be at rest…. and if I and my friends should die before
they have attained their glorious object, I hope there will never be wanting
men alive to do their duty, who will continue to labour till the evil shall be
wholly done away. It was a powerful peroration from Fox, a crackling bonfire of
truth and clarity, and it was much needed. His words shone a great deal of
light onto the moral cowardice of “regulation” and the lazy wickedness of
“moderation.” But the canny Scotchman was not troubled. Dundas had thrown water
on fires before and knew that one needn’t extinguish the whole fire; sometimes
simply creating enough smoke would do all that was needed. Everyone would
leave, and then the idiot fire could burn and illuminate the blessed
nothingness around it all night long!
Read more at location 2615
And so a motion was passed, 230 to 85, in favor of gradual
abolition. All Wilberforce could do was wonder how it had happened and stare at
the empty plate on the table where the sausage had lain. Three weeks later,
“gradual” was determined to mean by January 1796. Many expressed their hearty
congratulations to Wilberforce that abolition had finally been “approved,” but
for Wilberforce it was confusing. Was this indeed some kind of triumph, after
all, for which to be grateful, or was it an abject and heartbreaking failure to
do what they had tried and tried to do since 1787, Read more at location 2647
Indeed, as far as Wilberforce was concerned, faith in Jesus
Christ was the central and most important thing in life itself, so it can
hardly surprise us that sharing this faith with others was central and
important to Wilberforce too. And so, everywhere he went, and with everyone he
met, he tried, as best he could, to bring the conversation around to the
question of eternity. Wilberforce would prepare lists of his friends’ names and
next to the entries make notes on how he might best encourage them in their
faith, if they had faith, and toward a faith if they still had none. He would
list subjects he could bring up with each friend that might launch them into a
conversation about spiritual issues. He even called these subjects and
questions “launchers” and was always looking for opportunities to introduce
them. Read more at location 2858
Wilberforce wanted to point out the logical disconnect, to
show the vast gulf separating “real Christianity,” as he called it, from the
ersatz “religious system” that prevailed in its place. The book’s long title, A
Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in
the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real
Christianity, made it difficult to miss the point. Read more at location 2899
Wilberforce explained that real Christianity had evaporated
from England principally because it was woven into the social fabric and
therefore was easier to ignore and take for granted. “Christianity especially,”
he wrote, “has always thrived under persecution. For then it has no lukewarm professors.”
Wilberforce was exactly right. Not Read
more at location 2912
For those who believe in random coincidences, it was an
extraordinary coincidence by any account that on the day after registering what
for him was a very rare sense of peace with God that he should meet the woman
for whom he had been waiting and praying so many years. For it was that next
day, Holy Saturday, that Wilberforce met his future wife for the very first
time. They dined in a party, and before all of the courses had been served
Wilberforce had fallen headlong for her, and eight days later they were
engaged, and a month after that married—and within ten years had six children,
four boys and two girls. But we may be getting ahead of ourselves. Read more at location 2995
Jacta est alea. [The die is cast.] I believe indeed she is
admirably suited to me, and there are many circumstances which seem to advise
the step. I trust God will bless me; I go to pray to Him. Read more at location 3021
but inasmuch as love covereth a multitude of sins, it
covereth a smaller number too. Read more
at location 3052
The central feature of Battersea Rise was the oval library.
The oval was a highly fashionable shape at the tail end of the eighteenth
century, the most popular example of which, of course, is the Oval Office in
the White House. The oval shape was used for very special rooms because it
enables a dignitary or honoree to be surrounded by a circle of admirers without
seeming to have a favorite. Read more at
location 3118
The Clapham Circle was involved in a seemingly endless
number of ventures, but at the center, always, was the fight for abolition and
the slaves. One of the projects closest to the heart of the abolition movement
was the establishment, with great effort and difficulty, of a free and
self-governing colony of former slaves in Sierra Leone, a venture whose
beginnings predated Wilberforce’s involvement in the abolitionist cause. On May
10, 1787, two days before the famous conversation under the oak at Holwood, a
ship full of former slaves had dropped anchor off the coast of Sierra Leone.
But of course, this experiment, for such it was, had originated long before
that. Read more at location 3221
Wilberforce was now forty-seven years old, but for someone
who’d been part of a veritable youth movement—a boys’ club that had taken over
Parliament—he was now practically an old man. And he felt it too. His always
frail body, which had been wracked with pain and discomfort ever since he could
remember, was the body of someone much further along in years. The constant
doses of opium pushed on him by his doctors for his ulcerative colitis had
taken their toll on his eyes, and the curvature of his spine and the telltale
slump of his head that would mark him in later years were already discernible.
He’d entered Parliament as a boy of twenty-one, fresh from the bright green
lawns of Cambridge—but how the years and battles had aged him! As if to
underscore things, Pitt, his ally and friend since those carefree days, was
dead, and from complications brought on by gout, an old man’s disease. Read more at location 3449
Everyone caught up in the increasingly charged atmosphere
had been waiting, as it were, for some unconscious cue, something to ground the
electricity—and Wilberforce’s tears were it. Almost simultaneously, every man
in the chamber lost his composure and was carried off by the flood of emotion.
Everyone rose, and three deafening cheers rang out for Mr. Wilberforce; they
echoed off those historic walls and hallowed them, and all was lost to the tumult. Read more at location 3537
abolition, and the battle would be officially won. But let’s
not run ahead just yet. Let’s behold him here for a little while longer, here
in this Moment of moments, a man allowed that highest and rarest privilege, to
be awake inside his own dream. Seated there, head in his hands, humbled and
exalted in his humility, we have the apotheosis of William Wilberforce. After
this historic victory, Read more at
location 3549
The Irish historian William Lecky gives us his own
oft-quoted verdict: “The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of
England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four
perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.” Read more at location 3581
But as this wider African venture gained traction, it became
painfully clear that the immediate problem would be enforcing abolition. Those
who had been involved in the lucrative slave trade were not about to give it up
without a fight, and much smuggling was going on. British slavers used every
devious stratagem, the first of which was flying the American flag as they
sailed so that Royal Navy patrols wouldn’t bother them. Under the false colors
of the Stars and Stripes, thousands of Africans continued to suffer the Middle
Passage and were sold into West Indian slavery.
Read more at location 3610
The Royal Navy would become the policemen of the high seas
for many decades into the future, and incredible as it may seem, British
patrols were still functioning in this noble capacity into the 1920s. By then
the large-scale trade had disappeared, but enterprising criminals will find
niche markets. Each year into the 1920s ten or twelve boats, each carrying
fifteen to twenty children, mostly for sale into the sex trade, would cross the
Red Sea from Eritrea up into Saudi Arabia.
Read more at location 3622
Wilberforce loved memorizing poetry, Cowper and Milton
especially, and he often recited it as he walked. But he especially enjoyed
reciting Scripture and took seriously the injunction—from Psalm 119 itself—to
“hide God’s word in one’s heart.” Read
more at location 3640
After Perceval’s assassination, another dissolution of
Parliament seemed imminent, and another election. Wilberforce was forced to
think about his position as MP for Yorkshire and the great responsibilities
that it entailed. He was in his twenty-eighth year in his Yorkshire seat,
having entered upon that role in 1784, the year before his “Great Change.” He
had been twenty-four then, and was now fifty-two, with six children. The
exigencies of his political position forced Wilberforce to spend much time away
from his family, far too much time, he thought. Once when Wilberforce picked up
one of his little sons, the child had cried, and the boy’s nursemaid had
helpfully explained, “He always is afraid of strangers.” Read more at location 3677
Both Wilberforce’s habit of twice each day conducting family
prayers—with everyone kneeling against chairs for the ten minutes or so that
they took—and his regard for the Sabbath as a time to be spent with one’s
family went a long way toward establishing these practices as a model for many
in nineteenth-century Britain. Read more
at location 3739
and he denounced the East India Company’s reprehensible
refusal to lift a finger “to enlighten and reform them” while they suffered
“under the grossest, the darkest, and most depraving system of idolatrous
superstition that almost ever existed upon earth.” Wilberforce was speaking
less of Hindu theology than of the barbaric cruelties of East Indian culture at
the time, including the common practices of female infanticide and suttee, in
which a widow was bound and burned alive on her husband’s funeral pyre.
Moreover, the caste system Read more at
location 3770
When Wilberforce entered Parliament, there were three MPs
who would have identified themselves as seriously Christian, but half a century
later there were closer to two hundred.
Read more at location 3882
Czar Alexander was in his mid-thirties and was an
evangelical Christian too, though with leanings toward mysticism and
apocalyptic thinking of which Wilberforce would have been dubious. Read more at location 3967
When his turn came to address the crowd, Wilberforce stood
and before their eyes the frail little man blossomed into the impassioned and
vigorous orator they had always known—and he inspired the jostling assemblage
to a resolution: they would petition Parliament to amend the peace treaty, to
remove the clause allowing the French five more years of the trade. The MPs in
the room were mostly Whigs, and in a grand gesture of political bipartisanship
they determined that they would not present their own petition to Parliament,
which might embarrass their Tory counterparts. Instead, Wilberforce should
present it, and they now hailed him, movingly, as “the father of our great
cause.” Read more at location 3991
strife that when the news reached London, it was very emotional
for Wilberforce. The American inventor Samuel Morse, who gave us the telegraph
and the Morse code, was a friend of Wilberforce’s and was visiting him that
very day for dinner at Kensington Gore. Zachary Macaulay was there, along with
Charles Grant and his two sons. When Morse arrived, he had just walked through
Hyde Park and had seen crowds gathering. The rumors were that Napoleon had been
captured and the war was over. But Wilberforce, cautious as ever, couldn’t
believe it. “It is too good to be true,” he said. “It cannot be true.” Read more at location 4040
As for abolition, there was even better news. The Bourbon
government, once again restored, did not rescind Napoleon’s decree abolishing
the French trade. For his glorious victory on the muddy field at Waterloo,
Wellington’s stature had grown greatly in Europe’s eyes. This, among other
things, had turned the tide. Castlereagh had reapplied pressure for abolition
with Talleyrand, and in the end the French king felt compelled to confirm
abolition once and for all. On July 31, 1815, Castlereagh wrote to Wilberforce,
“I have the gratification of acquainting you that the long desired object is
accomplished and that the present messenger carries to Lord Liverpool the unqualified
and total Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout the dominions of France.”
This Read more at location 4052
“This is not our friend. This is but the earthly garment
which he has thrown off. The man himself, the vital spirit has already begun to
be clothed with immortality.” Read more
at location 4086
Like many struggles, the battle for abolition was fought in
people’s minds as much as in the halls of Parliament. Wilberforce knew most
people would not believe blacks could be free citizens entrusted to the
formidable task of governing themselves, but if these skeptics saw it, they
wouldn’t have any choice. This was why Sierra Leone was a symbol of supreme
importance, and worth all of the endless trouble it caused. But in 1811 the
island state of Haiti—formerly Saint-Domingue—presented the cause of abolition
with a second signal opportunity to show the world that African blacks could be
their own masters, and in the slave owners’ backyard too. It was in that year
that Henri Christophe, a former slave who had risen in the ranks of the
revolutionary army, suddenly found himself at the head of the country. Read more at location 4102
Christophe everything from virus vaccines, with instructions
on how to vaccinate, to special New Testaments they had prepared with
side-by-side French and English translations. They sent a copy of the British
Encyclopedia, and Wilberforce continued to send letters offering advice on
everything that related to the great project—including a plea to Christophe to
do something many might have found scandalous: he persuaded him to educate the
women of Haiti Read more at location
4124
But now, in 1818, it could be seen that this hope had been
naive. So once again the course was clear: immediate emancipation by political
means. Read more at location 4193
So Wilberforce stepped into the breach. He put forward a motion
in the House, wrote another MP, “upon pure motives of charity to spare the
public the horrid and disgusting details of the King’s green bag and of the
green bag which the Queen might bring against the King.” A trial would open a
Pandora’s box of venereal furies. But the king and queen hardly seemed to give
a fig for how their actions might harm the nation. Read more at location 4268
The king’s final offer was a large sum of cash, in return
for which he expected the queen to go away forever. She could use the title of
“Queen” wherever she roamed and would have a royal yacht at her disposal, a
frigate, etc. But there was one thing the king would not give her, one
concession he would not make: he emphatically refused to allow her name to be
read Read more at location 4271
Later that summer, Wilberforce came face-to-face with
another happy “alleviation,” much like the moss-rose, though he in no wise
could have appreciated the larger significance of it at the time. Just before
departing with his family for Weymouth, Wilberforce was invited to call on the
Duchess of Kent. “She received me,” he writes, “with her fine animated child on
the floor by her with its playthings, of which I soon became one.” How like
Wilberforce to stoop to the floor at sixty and engage an infant, but had he
known whom he entertained there on the floor, he might have sung the Nunc
Dimittis and departed in peace for Weymouth. For the rosy-faced,
German-speaking Read more at location
4337
fourteen-month-old was none other than the future Queen
Victoria, whose cherubic countenance was as unlike Queen Caroline’s countenance
as that glorious moss-rose. And so here, on the miniature plain of the carpet,
in a prophetically fitting tableau of domestic happiness, the child who would
lend the future era her name met the man who would lend it his character. Read more at location 4341
Though it would have surprised Wilberforce, two of his sons,
Henry and Robert, would be involved in the Oxford Movement and later in life be
received into the Catholic Church. But it was the battle for Read more at location 4370
Throughout his life Wilberforce resisted the cheap
temptation to point the finger at others while posturing as their moral
superior. He succeeded in defusing the anger of some and drew them in to hear
what he was saying. Cobbett, however, was never one of them; he called Read more at location 4376
Wilberforce knew he was not the man to lead the final
parliamentary push toward emancipation. It would be wiser to appoint—and in his
case, perhaps anoint—a successor. The oil would be drizzled upon the head of
Thomas Fowell Buxton, a devout evangelical MP who was politically independent,
like Wilberforce, but who, unlike him, was young, vigorous, and healthy, having
been born in 1786. Read more at location
4388
Nor did his concern for the well-being of others end with
his own species. Wilberforce’s home was a menagerie of animals that included
rabbits, turtles, and even a fox. In 1824—along with his successor in the
abolition struggle, Thomas Fowell Buxton—he was one of the founding members of
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Read more at location 4404
has been so heavy as to compel me to descend from my present
level and greatly to diminish my establishment. But I am bound to recognise in
this dispensation the gracious mitigation of the severity of the stroke. Mrs.
Wilberforce and I are supplied with a delightful asylum under the roofs of two
of our own children. And what better could we desire? A kind Providence has
enabled me with truth to adopt the declaration of David, that goodness and
mercy have followed me all my days. And now, when the cup presented to me has
some bitter ingredients, yet surely no draught can be deemed distasteful which
comes from such a hand, and contains such grateful infusions as those of social
intercourse and the sweet endearments of filial gratitude and affection. Read more at location 4447
But others aren’t obliged to be so modest about him. In the
estimation of Sir Reginald Coupland, who was Beit Professor of Colonial History
at Oxford, “more than any man, he had founded in the conscience of the British
people a tradition of humanity and of responsibility towards the weak and
backward…whose fate lay in their hands. And that tradition has never died.” As
well versed as we are today in the manifold failings of colonial rule, the
comparison to things before Wilberforce gives us another picture. Before
Wilberforce, a world power like Great Britain could do what it liked with the
people of Asia and Africa, and for two centuries and more did, treating human
beings as they treated dumb beasts or insensate resources like timber, hemp,
and ore; but after Wilberforce, all that changed. What “Wilberforce and his
friends achieved…” Coupland tells us, “was nothing less, indeed, than a moral
revolution.” Read more at location
4523
and go down to the grave amid the benedictions of the poor. Read more at location 4577
One year later Wilberforce would have his greatest memorial,
and the one for which, unashamedly, he had labored. Sir Reginald Coupland
describes it in the last words of his 1923 biography: “A year later, at
midnight on July 31, 1834, eight hundred thousand slaves became free. It was
more than a great event in African or in British history. It was one of the
greatest events in the history of mankind.”
Read more at location 4578
And yet these are all but shadows of the things that once
were. To all of us wandering together here now, looking for William
Wilberforce, I repeat the words Wilberforce repeated to himself that day when
standing near the lifeless body of his own departed friend, Henry Thornton:
“Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen.” Read more at location 4674
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