The world honors William
Wilberforce (1759-1833) for his exemplary public service. Becoming God’s
willing worker for humanitarian social reform came as an act of faith for
William Wilberforce rather than as an accident of birth. It followed his
personal encounter with faith after this twenty-five-year-old Member of
Parliament realized the wisdom of abandoning what he called his heretofore
dissolute and wasteful lifestyle.
Biographer William Hague
describes the classic conversion Wilberforce experienced during the autumn of
1785.1 Hague finds it impossible to discern what other subconscious
forces pushed Wilberforce into the agonies of his conversion experience that
November. But he wonders if Wilberforce, after becoming a Member of Parliament
representing the Yorkshire district, found the “excesses of the London club
land he inhabited, with its gambling, womanizing, gluttony and restitution”
revolting and dissatisfying.
Achieving membership in
Parliament, and enjoying all the wealth he needed, failed to produce the
satisfaction for which Wilberforce searched. Hague suggests that by November
1785 the peculiar mixture of influences Wilberforce experienced, namely the
guidance he received from the writings of Doddridge, and the rational force of
his friend Milner’s arguments, compounded by his boyhood receptiveness to
religion “produced … a true conversion crisis.” 2
Wilberforce later described
to his friend his emergence as an Evangelical convert as “like wakening from a
dream and recovering the use of my reason after a delirium.” Although his
wealthy Anglican family discouraged his evangelical and Methodist
non-conformist leanings, walking with Christ became a lifetime journey for
William. Dissatisfied with institutional religion as he knew it, his newly-found
faith led him into the company of other transformed individuals also interested
in giving active public expression to their personal faith.
Initially, he questioned
whether or not he should leave public service. William Pitt, his close friend and
future British Prime Minister, encouraged Wilberforce to allow his Christian
life to produce action rather than mere meditation. William Wilberforce consequently
sought the wisdom of John Newton, the former slaver that young William had idolized
after meeting him when but a boy.
Newton encouraged Wilberforce
to avoid becoming cut off from his friends. “It was Newton,” concludes Hague,
“who not only calmed and soothed him but, from that time and for a good decade
afterwards, fortified him in combining his religious beliefs with a continued
political career” 3
William Wilberforce
consequently became the point-man in a non-conformist platoon sometimes
referred to as the Clapham Sect. These young evangelicals [born-again
believers] came mostly from privileged Anglican families. They married and
neighbored together in the Clapham area south of London. Lampooned as “Clapham
Saints,” they became the nineteenth century social reformers (active c. 1790 –
1830).
Historian Stephen Tomkins
describes them as "a network of friends and families … powerfully bound
together by their shared moral and spiritual values, by their religious mission
and social activism, by their love for each other, and by marriage." 4
His new associations fired
his passion for further independent reform. Before long young Wilberforce, also
being a man of privilege launched his own personal effort to improve working
conditions for British factory workers. As the scion of a wealthy Hull
merchant, he enjoyed the privilege of entering Cambridge at seventeen. At the
university, he met another student named William--William Pitt, the younger.
These two young men became
life-long friends and Pitt, the Younger, eventually became Prime Minister of
Britain. Having no interest in his family business, Wilberforce joined
parliament in 1780. The twenty-one year-old university student represented Hull
while completing his studies. Later, he represented Yorkshire.
Wilberforce’s Clapham Sect
friends added enormous influence into his life as a young Christian, with a
social conscience. Thomas Clarkson was the son of an Anglican clergyman. Granville
Sharp and Josiah Wedgwood were strong abolitionists. They were ably assisted by
other Clapham associates and together this close-knit body of believers campaigned
hard against British slave trade. Forming the “Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” they opposed
allowing British ships to transport captured slaves from Africa to the West
Indies (Official Medallion pictured right).
Slaves, being commercial
property, endured the worst of shipping conditions. They were sold in the West
Indies, and elsewhere, with all the other products of growing
commercialization. Such influences prompted Wilberforce to pursue with quiet
vigor the abolishment of slavery throughout the Empire and today the world
honors him for his significant part in turning this page of human history.
Wilberforce assisted those
of us who follow him by first turning a corner himself, and by then reestablishing
a new direction while devoting his life to public service. Once he agreed to
lobby against the slave trade, he continued to bring consistent anti-slavery
legislation before parliament annually, vigorously supported by his Clapham Sect friends.
With other abolitionists
assisting, he and his Clapham friends raised public awareness by writing pamphlets
and books, signing petitions, and participating in rallies. Wilberforce
remained a faithful and willing worker; petitioning Parliament patiently but
regularly with his anti-slavery legislation for eighteen long years.
By 1807, a sufficient
number in Parliament supported Wilberforce that the British Government mandated
abolishment of the trading of slaves. In 1833, Parliament enacted further
legislation freeing all slaves found under the British flag. By this time,
Wilberforce had become Britain’s retired Elder Statesman, and it was with a
tear-streaked face that the elderly abolitionist listened quietly as friends
read him the exciting news stating that Parliament had finally passed the
anti-slavery legislation.
Wilberforce died shortly
thereafter, after investing his life in causes that he deeply believed renewed
society. In 1802, he helped organize the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
He cooperated with holiness reformer Hannah More in the Association for the
Better Observance of Sunday, also a member of the Clapham Community. He
associated closely with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals. Throughout his long public career, William Wilberforce encouraged
Christian missionaries to serve in India.
His 1825 retirement from
public political life was followed by his death on July 29, 1833, very shortly
after Britain’s House of Commons freed all slaves under the British flag.
William Wilberforce left a
shining example of faith and piety for all to follow. He modeled a role for Christians
of all times, especially those willing to invest time and talents in sharing
God with others. Wilberforce honored others with the same acceptance he sought
for himself, and the world has not forgotten. Tourists still visit
Wilberforce’s burial plot in Westminster Abbey where his remains lay adjacent
to his life-long friend, William Pitt:
... In an age and country fertile in great and good men,
He was among the foremost of those who fixed the
character of their times
Because to high and various talents
To warm benevolence, and to universal candour,
He added the abiding eloquence of a Christian life … 5
_____
1 William Hague, William Wilberforce, The Life of the
Great Anti-Slave Campaigner. (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2007), p. 78.
2 Hague, p. 82.
3 Hague, p. 88.
4 Tomkins, Stephen The Clapham Sect: How Wilberforce’s
circle changed Britain (Oxford: Lion, 2010), p1.
5 Eric Metaxas. Amazing Grace, William Wilberforce and
the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007), p.
278, lines from “To the Memory of William Wilberforce”
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