Life of William Wilberforce

Well, it's a privilege to be with you this morning and to think about an element of church history and the life, particularly of William Wilberforce. And as was mentioned by your pastor, we have a duty as believers to know something of our past, our heritage. We're not the first men and women to know the Lord Jesus Christ. have had the faith handed down to us. And it's important to have some idea as to those who've gone before us, both as an encouragement, but also to know something of the heritage that is ours that we have to pass on to generations that follow us. I can still remember as a teenager going into a church, wouldn't be known to you, Stanley Avenue Baptist Church in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles north of Niagara Falls. And it was a congregation, I found out later, that had existed about a hundred years before I ever entered into that building. And I went there, somebody trying to clean up their life, and found in that building the Lord Jesus Christ. And over the years that followed, as I became a member of that church, was baptized there, was married there, and was discipled there, I began to learn something of the heritage of the men and women who had planted that church. And the names, they're not known to history. They're obviously known to those who were part of that congregation, but they had faithfully handed the gospel on. They had come there initially in the 1870s. There was the city of Hamilton was expanding westward and there was a need for a gospel mission. And it started as a Sunday school mission and there had been faithfulness and then a church had been planted. And over the decades and that amounted eventually to a century before I ever saw that church, there had been faithful men and women who had gone there, given time, energy, prayed that there might be a place where the gospel was preached. I realized as time went on and I was part of that congregation, I owed a significant amount by God's grace to these men and women, most of whom I've never met. Some of them were elderly brothers and sisters in Christ. They were there as I came into that church at the age of 1920. They were in their 80s at the time. And I began to learn something of their faithfulness. And all of us who are in Christ could tell a similar story. And it's important for us to know something of obviously our own personal past, the heritage we own, but also a body of believers, the riches that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ and that great cloud of witnesses of which we read some, they were old covenant saints. But since the New Testament times, there have been 2000 years of adding. to the church and we need as believers to know something of these riches that have come down to us in terms of the lives of men and women who can challenge us, encourage us, inspire us, rebuke us. And today we're going to look actually in the morning to the Sunday School Hour 1 William Wilberforce. This evening Wilberforce's name may not be as familiar to you. It should be but it may not be. This evening one who definitely at least you should know his name from having sung his hymn. We're going to look at John Newton and a little bit of his hymn Amazing Grace. And Newton and Wilberforce's life as we will see intersect. Why pick these two men at this point in time? Well, it was 200 years ago this year that William Wilberforce saw the fruition of what he had been laboring for for 20 years, namely the passage of a bill through the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the British Parliament that brought the slave trade to an end in the British Empire. come in 1787, we'll see this, to the conviction that the slave trade and slavery were an abominable crime, an abomination before God in the British Empire. And he determined under God that he would see them brought to an end if God gave him strength and grace. And after 20 years of political debating and laboring, 12 bills brought before Parliament, all of them shot down except for the last one that passed. He laboured to see the slave trade first ended and then he spent the rest of his life, he died in 1833, the rest of his life to see slavery brought to an end and he heard of the freeing of the slaves by a passage of a bill passed in Parliament three days before he went to glory in 1833. And it was 200 years ago this year that that bill was passed that ended the slave trade in the British Empire. John Newton, it's interesting, who was instrumental in mentoring Wilberforce, it was 200 years ago this year that he died. He died in 1807. And so we'll look at something of John Newton this evening and his hymn, Amazing Grace, which probably in the last 25-30 years has become the most popular hymn in the church, but we'll see something about Newton this evening. But this morning, William Wilberforce. His dates are 1759, born then in the middle of the 18th century and died in 1833, just before the beginning of that period we call the Victorian era. And as was mentioned, there was a movie that came out earlier this year. I think it was February it came out. It was actually in February of 1807 that the bill was passed that brought the slave trade to an end. And this movie, Amazing Grace, produced by Bristol Bay Productions, was an excellent illustration along a number of lines. It shows us something of what Hollywood can do when they put their mind to it and produce a movie that was really very, very solid in many respects. historical bloopers, but by and large, it was a great movie. And it took seriously, in a way that often the media don't, evangelical Christianity. All too frequently, the media, whatever form you've got, be it newspapers, or magazines, or be it television, picture evangelicals in one of two ways. Either evangelicals are ignorant fundamentalists who have nothing to contribute to reality. They're out of touch with reality and they're of no earthly good. Or they're dangerous fanatics. And this has been the kind of bent that has come out in a number of books recently that have emphasized that evangelicals are dangerous fanatics who, if they get control of a society, are going to turn it into some sort of version of the Taliban in Afghanistan or Muslim Iran. And both of them are very, very far from the truth, obviously. And it was refreshing to see a media production like Amazing Grace that could depict evangelical Christians as serious-minded individuals who worked for the betterment of society. The truth of the matter is, blessed is that nation that has a sizable number of men and women who love the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and who are seeking heaven. a better country and in doing so taking seriously their calling to be men and women pressing for heaven and for glory that they bring betterment to their society. They are salt and light. And you can look around the world today and you look at various countries and nations and you see the states of them and some of them are in the state they are because of their lack of gospel witness and their immersion in Idolatry and spiritual darkness and that has all kinds of impacts upon a social structure of a country and a nation and what a blessing to be in a nation or country that has had the gospel and The gospel taken seriously by men and women who have been in public life like William Wilberforce What I want to do today In looking at Wilberforce's life. I'm going to sketch his life talk a little bit about the slave trade and and the way in which this was indeed a horror. And how could a nation like the British and the British Empire get involved in it? And I want to spend a little time looking at that. And then I want to look thirdly at Wilberforce's battle against the slave trade. And then fourthly, ask the question, the most important question, which I felt the movie didn't answer as sufficiently as it could have, is what lay behind Wilberforce's battle Politically. Why did he involve himself in a lifetime of struggle against the slave trade? And the answer will be that he was a Christian. And he saw this as something that was bringing great detriment to the British Empire. And it was his duty as a Christian to do good to all. And thus he got involved in the slave trade. So, lying behind his political activity was a life in Christ. Wilberforce, as I said, was born in 1759. He was born into a fairly well-to-do home. His grandfather was a merchant, and the town in which Wilberforce was born in England, the port of Hull, which lies on the North Sea, which is on the east side of the English coast, was a very wealthy port and Wilberforce's grandfather had made sufficient money that when Wilberforce himself inherited it at a fairly young age, he was set for life. He really never needed to work. His early years were spent under the influence of the gospel. He was raised, and we don't have time to go into all the details, he was raised by an aunt and uncle in his very early years, up to about the age of eight or nine, who were evangelicals. They loved the Lord Jesus. They regularly listened to two preachers, George Whitefield, who is probably the most remarkable evangelist of the 18th century. It's said that Whitefield preached across the Atlantic 13 times. in the course of his career, and would eventually die here in America, and preached in probably every town and village along the Atlantic seaboard here in America. When he died in 1770, it was said that every American knew two Georges, George Whitefield, whom they loved, and the other George, George III, the king about whom they had quite different feelings. And there is evidence that young Wilberforce heard Whitefield preach. The other man he heard preach as a youngster was John Newton, who had been converted, and we'll talk about this tonight, crossed in the Atlantic in 1748 on a ship and had been involved in the slave trade himself. And God brought him to faith in Christ in the middle of an Atlantic storm and had gone on to become a gospel preacher. And Whitefield, a young Wilberforce, heard Newton preach on occasion. His mother, though, who took over his education and upbringing when he was around eight or nine, was determined to get rid of these evangelical influences. She did not like the gospel. She felt that anybody who was involved in evangelical activities was simply a fanatic. And so she was determined to drive these influences out of his life. And she seemed to have succeeded to the point that when Wilberforce went up to the Oxford University, sorry, Cambridge University in 1776, he went as a man bent on partying and gambling. And those were not the glory days of Oxford and Cambridge. If you hear those names today, those two universities, you think of places like Harvard and Princeton and Yale. But the 18th century they were not their best years. And those are the years in which you could go to university for four years, never go to one class, never write one essay, never hear a lecture, spend your whole time partying and gambling, and as Wilberforce did, and emerge at the end of it with a BA. And we may have problems with some of the contemporary education, but it hasn't gotten that bad yet. And so it was Wilberforce went there. discovered what he thought would be his calling in life, which was to be a gambler. He had lots of money. And those were days of very high gambling, and there were men who would go through on a weekend 10, 15, sometimes 20,000 pounds. And to get a contemporary dollar figure, you have to multiply, first of all, you have to multiply that by two. That's the exchange rate with the dollar and the British pound today. But then, that's back then. So you're probably going to have to multiply it by another 150 to find out what exactly that is. I've never been good at math. I'll let you do the arithmetic. That's a lot of money. And Wilberforce became an adept gambler, and he did have twinges of conscience. He would remember later, he had twinges of conscience when he would look back and he'd realize that he was ruining a man by his gambling. Sometimes these gambling stints would start Friday night and they'd go all the way through to Monday morning with maybe a few brief hours for sleep. And he would have twinges of conscience when he thought, this man cannot afford to lose this money, but then it would soon pass. 1780 he graduates and basically he says I said he set for life. He really doesn't have to do anything What will he do? Well, he decides to stand for Parliament Those were very different days in the British electoral system those were days in which only wealthy landowners or At least a substantial landowners had a vote Women didn't vote. They don't vote until the late 1800s. They don't get the vote till then and And the average working person who doesn't have significant land holdings, they don't vote either. And in that context, it was very easy to influence voters. And what Wilberforce did, he had lots of money. He threw a huge party that was long remembered, in which they had a number of oxen roasted on spits. Everybody who had to vote in the city of Hull was invited to this grand party. And Wilberforce expected that his grand party would do the trick, and it did. that coming election he was elected. And he would hold the seat of Hull from 1780 to 1825. His first four years were undistinguished. He went up to Parliament. What he discovered there was a lot of the parliamentarians, a lot of the men in the House of Commons, they liked to gamble too. So it seemed like just a continuation of his time at university. And he said he added to his love of pleasure and social world of dancing and balls and gambling, one object which was his own fame and glory. In 1785, at a parliamentary recess, the summer of 1785, he did what many Englishmen of his wealth and status did, was to take what was called the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was where you would take off for three months, maybe four months in the summer, and you'd cross the English Channel and go to France, and you'd go around all of the various capitals of Europe. You'd spend three weeks in Paris, and then you'd go to Rome and spend maybe a month there, and then you'd go to Vienna, and you'd go to Berlin, and you'd do this. You obviously have to have a significant amount of money, first of all, to do the traveling, then the places to stay, and then to be away that long. And so he decided to go on this grand tour. He didn't want to go by himself. He took some family members, but he also took along with him an old friend who had been a schoolmaster, actually, who had taught him. What he didn't know was this old friend, Isaac Milner, had become a Christian. And he was going to spend significant hours trundling along the very poor roads of Europe in a carriage with this man sitting opposite him. Now, Isaac Milner said, why don't we take some material to read while we're going? To enliven the conversation, they would take books and they'd read them back and forth. And Wilberforce said, yes, that's a very good idea. What do you think I should take? And it was suggested, in fact, it appears that Wilberforce chose it. He chose a book that would radically change his life. It was a book by a man named Philip Doddridge. You may know Doddridge's name. Some of his hymns are still sung. He had died in 1751. He was a very well-known in that day gospel preacher. He'd written a large commentary on the entire Bible that many people had in their homes. And the book was The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. And probably no other book Apart from Scripture, it would have such an impact upon Wilberforce. It would lead to a dramatic crisis in his life. Also, in the book, Doddridge laid out, when a person becomes a Christian, how should they live their lives? And it would have a great impact on him, and he would read it assiduously over the years after his conversion. As they're going along then, Isaac Milner is reading from this book. And here are the words of William Wilberforce as he is listening to those words. He said it brought into my life the fear of punishment and a sense of my great sinfulness in having so long neglected the unspeakable mercies of my God and Savior. And such was the effect which this these thoughts produced that for months I was in a state of deep depression from strong convictions of my guilt. Mobile force was confronted with a major problem that every man and woman and child in this world have, which is we are sinners. And we have a holy God. And we have to come before a holy God and give an account of our lives. And apart from refuge in Christ, there is no hiding place. And he realized what he was. He realized how up to that point, still a young man, relatively, Not yet 30, only in his mid-twenties. But how he had wasted his life on gambling, ruining other men, and all the other things that had attended that. And over the period of the next few months, God brought him. He wouldn't be able to actually date his conversion, but God brought him over the next few months to a steady trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, to the point that by The November of 1785, he could write in his diary, Lord, I am a wretched, miserable, blind, naked sinner. What infinite love that Christ should die to save me. And how necessary is it that he should save us all together, that we may appear before God with nothing of our own? And what he's talking about there is the great Reformation truth that we are saved by grace alone, by faith alone, not by works, not by anything we have done, but we come before God trusting only in the Lord Jesus Christ, His death and His merits. And please note that while that became the foundation of his life in terms of his thinking, also along with it was that when a person was in Christ, there should flow out of his life good deeds. Good deeds couldn't save him. But a Christian, in the words of the Book of Titus, shall be zealous for good deeds. Problem was, though, he's now converted. Evangelicals were not highly regarded in the set in which he moved among the aristocracy and the wealthy and the upper class. And where was he going to get spiritual direction? What church should he go to in London? He's an Anglican. There are only two evangelical Anglican churches out of the 100, 150 or so Anglican churches in the city of London, only two of them had evangelical ministers, men who preached the gospel. One of them was a man named William Romaine. He had been there from the 1760s. The second was the one in which John Newton was the minister at St. Mary Woolmouth in the heart of London. And he knew of Newton, obviously, from when he was a little boy. He knew that Newton had moved to the city. He'd heard of that. And so he wrote to Newton in December of 1785, asking him, could he come and visit him? But he emphasized to Newton, look, I'm going to come and visit you, but you've got to keep this secret. Nobody can know that William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament, is coming to visit you. Because if they do, it'll be very difficult for me. Now, he would change, obviously, in this regard. He goes there. Newton's thrilled. He tells him the range of time. Wilberforce gets to the date. He goes up to the house. He goes around the block, we're told, at least twice before he summons the courage to go up and knock on the door. One of the things he's scared of is in case somebody sees him going to the door of a well-known evangelical, because evangelicals were regarded as fanatics. But he goes in, and Newton would become his mentor over the next 20 years or so of his life. And Newton would die, well, 22 years later in 1807. And we have a number of the letters back and forth in which Newton encouraged Wilberforce. Initially, Wilberforce thought, God has saved me, I've got to leave politics. Because Christianity, evangelical Christianity and politics don't go together. And the Methodists, who are part of this period of time, men like John Wesley, it's a good thing he didn't go and ask John Wesley for advice, because Wesley would have told him, out and out, leave politics. In fact a lot of Baptists are Baptist forebears in this period of time and the reasons for this would have told him as well This is this is in England not necessarily over here, and you know what will become the United States Many English Baptist would have told Wilberforce as well. Yeah, you're best really politics. It is not a realm for a Christian But we thank God that John Newton said no way He didn't say it exactly that way, but he said yeah, you should stay in politics and And God has raised you up in that context and you're to be a witness for him there. Many about a year or so later, John Newton would write to one of his close friends, a man named William Cowper. That's the way his name is pronounced over here. Cowper always said his name was Cooper. So William Cowper, the hymn writer. There is a fountain filled with blood. Newton could say to Cowper, I hope the Lord will make Wilberforce a blessing both as a Christian and a statesman. How seldom do these characters coincide, but they are not incompatible. And so with the encouragement of Newton and Newton's prayers and regularly helping him to know how he should live as a Christian, Wilberforce stayed as a politician. In 1787, and we are thankful for another area of their lives that we have is that most of these men kept diaries. One of the things I've often thought about is historians, if the Lord tarries, historians looking back at our day, I won't take a poll here on how many people keep a diary, but diary keeping is not what it used to be, and letter writing is not what it used to be. We do do emails, but they're kind of ephemeral. You lose the hard drive and everything's gone. How are historians of the future going to figure out what was going on in most of our heads? We've got the external actions, but what's going on inside the heart? Well, the great thing about this period, if you go to diaries, and Wilberforce kept a diary all his life. And in his diary, he could say the following. In 1787, God Almighty has placed before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade, and the reformation of manners. The latter means bringing morals and morality back into English public life. The first is the abolition of the slave trade. And I want to spend a little time then on going through that very, very quickly. Britain had gotten involved in the slave trade in the 1560s. And they stumbled into it by accident. And when Elizabeth I, the queen at the time, found out that Englishmen had been involved in the slave trade, she was horrified. And it's not really until the middle of the 17th century, the 1660s, that England began to get involved in the slave trade. Up until that point, she prided herself that the Spanish might do it and the Portuguese might do it, the French might do it, but after all, this was England, a land of relative freedom. There's no way they would ever get involved in the slave trade. But by the 1660s, England was involved in the slave trade. And the reason was that not only the development of colonies in America, but also, most importantly, the development of colonies in the Caribbean. England had taken a number of very important islands in the Caribbean, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Tobago. And one of the things they found in these islands was sugar cane. And it's hard to imagine a world without sugar. But up until the 1600s, sugar, the sweetest thing Europeans knew, was honey. Sugar wasn't known. And suddenly sugar is discovered, but you need significant numbers of people to work these plantations. Initially, the English, and English, I grew up in England in an Irish family, and know the English attitude to the Irish, and it's not a good one, always. And the English try to convince the Irish, we'll pay your passage over, you work on these plantations, and then we'll give you some free land after you've worked for 25 years. Well, most of the Irish, and I suspect a lot of them were, were like my mother. My mother would burn to a crisp in the sun, red hair, fair skin, no melanin, and the sun is just very brutal to such complexions. It's not surprising the Irish didn't last long. And England finds yourself drawn in the slave trade. And the slave trade, in fact, by the middle of the 18th century, England was the largest in all the nations, European nations involved in slavery. England was far and across the Atlantic the largest number of men and women. Somewhere around 50,000 men and women and children a year. It amounts to around 3 to 4 million in the course of the 18th century. And it's a complex issue. It's complex because the Europeans were not the only ones at fault. The Africans themselves had been involved in enslaving members of different tribes. And in fact, when the Europeans came along, and it's known as the Gold Coast of West Africa, they'd sail along that coastline. They would buy slaves from Africans. African chiefs had enslaved other Africans and they would sell them to the British or the French or whomever. And then a critical part of the slave trade were Arab Muslims. When often the numbers were depleted on the coastal areas, then they had to start to go inland. And often it was Arabs who would kidnap significant numbers and bring these Africans maybe 1,000 miles. Even today, Christianity, I think, does speak against slavery. And that would take us a much further field to go through the New Testament on this issue. But in Islam, Islam is still engaged in the slave trade. You may or may not know that in Sudan and Ethiopia, Arabs are still raiding into African villages, capturing young men and women, selling them into slavery, even as I speak today, in North Africa, places like Tunisia and Morocco. And it's abominable. And so the British then found themselves involved in the slave trade, and ships would leave England, they'd come down to West Africa, sell, trade for various, they'd have various goods they would trade, and they'd pack their ships with slaves in the hold. And then they'd cross the Atlantic, which could be a horrific event because you've got six to eight weeks of these men and women crammed in the hold of a ship. And many of them would die in that context. Sometimes if the ships ran into stormy weather, they would lighten the load by doing what we regard as rightly as murder, tossing these men and women over. And then when they get to the new world, they would be sold like animals. And the reason why the British were able to turn a blind eye to much of this is because they didn't see it. They didn't have movies. They didn't have any of the media we have today that can bring right into the living room of our homes some of the atrocities in the world. They didn't have any of this. All they got, all they had was the product of the slave trade, which was rum and sugar. And when Wilberforce begins to raise the issue, in the 1780s, in the Houses of Parliament, he was opposed by many men. Many of them argued, if we free the slaves, we'll lose the empire. They had already lost, and this will be very familiar to you, Britain had already lost the jewel of their first empire, which were the American colonies. And this is the 1780s. The American War of Independence had only been the previous decade. And they weren't about to, these men were not about to, in their minds, undermine the rest of the empire by freeing, by stopping the slave trade, freeing the slaves. And some of the men who opposed Wilberforce were quite remarkable men. I grew up in England in my first 12 years and was taught history in an interesting way, I suspect very common even over here in those days. Well, you went back and you studied the great men of the British history, or the great men and women, or the great men and women of American history. And so I learned about all the great British heroes, men like the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, or Francis Drake, one of the Elizabethan explorers. Well, one of the great heroes that I really admired was a man named Horatio Nelson, who was the admiral who defeated the French Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar. And what a shock to find out that Horatio Nelson was one of the main men who opposed Wilberforce, on one occasion said that, while I have an arm still to fight, I will defend the right of the slave owners against the hypocritical, these are exact words, the hypocritical doctrine of Wilberforce and his allies. Wilberforce brought 12 bills before Parliament between 1787 and 1807, all defeated except the last one. He was mocked. He was laughed at. He was ridiculed in the press. And on two occasions, he actually was physically attacked. And on one occasion, in the House of Parliament, one man challenged him to a duel. And what kept him going? What kept him going were two things. Number one is he realized that there was no way he was going to bring down the slave trade without the help of others. He was the man who publicly debated it, but there were many others who helped, men like If William Wilberforce's name is obscure today, these men's names are even more obscure. But these men are remembered in heaven. Men like Henry Thornton, who was one of the leading owners of the Bank of England, very wealthy philanthropist, who poured in enormous amounts of money into the battle against the slave trade. Or John Venn and Charles Simeon, both of these were evangelical clergymen. who began to recognize that there needed to be, on occasion, sermons against this moral evil. Or a woman named Hannah Moore. Hannah Moore was a very wealthy, very well-known author, popular kind of, you know, when you go into a supermarket and you go to the checkout counter, you sometimes got these paperback racks of these various authors, very well-known selling authors. The only one I can think of right now is John Grisham. But those sort of author, well Hannah Moore was that kind of author in this day. And then she was converted and began to use her pen for the Christian literature. And she was involved in this kind of circle of men and women. They would be known as the Clapham sect because they all lived, at least most of them lived in an area just south of London called Clapham. And that's one thing Wilberforce realized, and there's a great truth in this, that whenever God does something in the history of his church, he does it through not just one individual, but through a group of individuals. And often we remember only one, but it's men and women who band together and who labor to see a great end accomplished. And so it was in 1807 that a bill was passed and it passed by around 263 to 18, the debate had gone on all night. And you wonder, given the large numbers who voted for him, what had taken so long? But it passed. And we're told that when it passed, Wilberforce sat in his chair as everybody had erupted in cheering and just wept as he realized what God had done over those 20 years. The other reason was his own walk with God. And he could say early on in would that those who are thinking about going into politics would remember this today, the best preparation for being a good politician is to be a truly Christian man. And in the midst of a very busy political life, he sought to maintain a walk with God and committed himself. And we have his diary in which he, at the beginning of each year, he'd commit himself to so many hours a day of prayer and usually amounted to at least an hour a day of reading scripture, praying and meditating on what he had read and trying to turn that into prayer. And there were days in which his time was greatly shortened and then he would try to make up for it on a Sunday. He sought to keep, and this is one of the great lessons of his life, he sought to keep the Lord's Day free from political activity. There were days he couldn't avoid it. But most of the time, he tried to keep that one day completely free. He was a great family man. He had six children. He marries in the 1790s a woman named Barbara Spooner. And often people would come visit him on a Sunday, Sunday afternoon after church, and they'd find him on the floor playing with his boys. He had four boys playing whatever games that they would be playing at the time. And Sunday was a day in which he sought to keep for his family and for spiritual rest and refreshment. As I said, there were sometimes times in which that couldn't be avoided, the attitude of politics. But if you look at his life, the keys are maintaining this life of prayer. Secondly, keeping the Lord's Day as a day devoted to the Lord and to his family. That's a great challenge, I think, in our day. I'm not sure what it's like here in Virginia, but I know in Ontario in the last 25, 30 years of the various passages of various acts that open up the entire shopping realm on Sundays. I don't think it's produced a healthier society. I think it's produced just a society that's more fretful and more busy when we need to be stepping back and reflecting upon life and upon why we're involved and what we're involved in. And then the third area was that he, again, when he had opportunity, especially during recesses of parliament in summers, he would go into the countryside. And he could say on one occasion, Through nature, I look up to nature's God and could tell as one of his sons, Samuel, I think a solitary walk or a ride now and then would be an excellent opportunity for cultivating spirituality of mind, the grand characteristic of a thriving Christian. In other words, he took opportunities to go into the world of nature around us and use that as a means of meditating upon God. If you go to Clapham today, and I'm thinking here of actually Charles Colson, I suppose most of you know who Colson was, converted in the 70s after a fairly interesting career in the Nixon government, and wrote a book, Born Again, which is a bestseller, and then devoted himself, has devoted himself in the succeeding years to being involved in a prison ministry. Charles Colson's hero is William Wilberforce, and understandably the common link being the political In 1978, Colson went to Clapham to kind of see what influence is there left of William Wilberforce there. And he went to the church where Wilberforce worshipped. And in that church, there was a little plaque on the pulpit that said that William Wilberforce preached on this pulpit once. And then there was a little table at the back of the church. This was the communion table when William Wilberforce was here. And on the table, there was a little pile of booklets. 50 pence apiece or about a dollar apiece on the life of Wilberforce. And there was a stained glass window, which because of the age of the church was covered in soot from the coal fires of the 19th century on the outside, which was dedicated to Wilberforce, nothing else. And Colson said, after all those men accomplished, I felt cheated. Surely more could have been done to honor their memory. And then Wilberforce said, as he began to reflect on this, he realized that Wilberforce, or rather as Colson began to reflect on this, he said he realized Wilberforce and those who fought with him against the slave trade did have a memorial. And that memorial was all of the spiritual blessing that came to the British Empire in the 19th century. One of the things, the 20th century, and we're still close enough to the 20th century to talk in these terms, has been one long century, especially since 1914, in reaction against the Victorians. And everything from fashion, to religion, to politics, and you name it. And we tend to think of the Victorians through the eyes, if you've ever read Charles Dickens' novels or seen some of his movies or any of the novelists of the 19th century, and we tend to see the Victorians as hypocrites, and especially Christians in the Victorian era. And that's partly because all of the so-called great novelists of the late Victorian era hated evangelicalism. Dickens did, Trollope did, George Eliot did, Thomas Hardy did, and they didn't like Christianity at all. The truth of the matter is that God used the British Empire in the 19th century to take the gospel to the four corners of the earth in remarkable ways. That's not happening today, but that's because of various things in the 20th century. And the British were remarkably used by God, and there were great tithes of spiritual blessing that came into Britain. And they came because of men like William Wilberforce, who were determined to rid their society of this moral evil. In 1803, I'm going to close with this, and I'm not sure if we have time for questions. It's, yeah, okay. 1803, in the middle of a great war that England was fighting with France, and Napoleon Bonaparte, the Adolf Hitler of the 18th century, was about to invade England. And many Englishmen were quite convinced that England was the only nation in Europe still fighting against Napoleon, and all was over. And Wilberforce said this, and what he said here is very applicable to us in our day. My only solid hopes for the well-being of my country depend not so much on our fleets and armies. And in that day, Britain had the best fleet in all the worlds and one of the greatest armies. Not so much on the wisdom of her rulers or on the spirit of her people, but on the persuasion that Great Britain still contains many who in this degenerate age love and obey the gospel of Christ, and on the humble trust that the prayers of these may still prevail, and that for the sake of these, heaven may still look upon us with an eye of favor." Those are words that I think are very applicable to our day. In the midst of a degenerate age, our great hope is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that in this part of the world, there are still many who love the Lord Jesus. And that God will look upon this nation with favor for the sake of these men and women and for their love of Christ. Well, let me stop here. That's a very rapid overview. We could spend a lot more time looking at Wilberforce. Two very quick things. If you're interested in his life, there are two books I'd recommend. They're both ends of the spectrum. John Piper, Amazing Grace and the Life of William Wilberforce is about 100 pages maximum. Takes you right through a very quick overview of his life and then the key principles of why he was the man he was. The other one, and this is the sort of biography I love, I love a big biography. five, six hundred pages. It's only when you get to page 100 that you actually get to the birth of the person the biography is about. You learn all about their great-grandparents, their grandparents, their parents, and everything else. And that's a book written, it's simply called William Wilberforce. It's written by William Hague. H-A-G-U-E. He was the leader of the opposition in the British Parliament up until very recently, and he knows the political scene very well. And he could say in his book that it was Wilberforce's Christian conversion that led him on the course of life that he took. Otherwise, it's very unlikely he would have ever done what he did. Very quickly, if there are questions about Wilberforce that we could field in a minute or two. It is, yeah, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul by Philip Doddridge. And that book is still in print. I know some people have drawn a parallel between the fight against slavery and what Wilberforce did in abortion. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think our great moral evil, and you have it here as well as we in Canada, is abortion. And we are living in a context in which thousands are being slain. And the similarity turns on the fact, what is a human being? The reason why the British were able to justify the slave trade was they did not believe the Africans were fully human the way they were. And the reason why men and women can think what they're doing to infants in the womb is not murder of a horrific degree is because these children are not human beings. And against all of the evidence of science, against obviously scripture, they argue that. There is a parallel. There is a real parallel.