Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Amazing Grace (by Eric Metaxas) Kindle Highlights



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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