This portion of his essay has been revised to emphasize the main theme while ensuring its meaning correlates with the original essay, which may be found as one of my pages in its entirety.
The basic theme of the essay is to place in the minds of readers the sublime uniqueness of the man William Wilberforce, whose notable success in eliminating the slave trade, as well as slavery itself, in the British empire, was brought about, not by mere human craft and endurance, but by a continuous and living faith in Jesus Christ as his Savior, whose promise to bring to fruition the desires of those who love Him and follow Him on the path of the Cross, never fails.
Further, it will be my desire to ask readers of this essay whether or not Wilberforce would have handled the most horrific injustice of our present time, abortion, in any different manner than slavery?
It is my hope that we can find a Wilberforce of our time whose devotion to Christ would be no less and whose companions in faith, within and without politics, would no longer fear the hostility of those who, like the forces arrayed against Wilberforce, try to silence with lies, threats, ridicule and persecution those models of Christ who would courageously prevail until abortion is no more.
Wilberforce, Wesley and the Influence of the Methodist Movement
on England and the English Slave Trade (as edited)
By Ervin Sims
The people of Great Britain were among the first to seek an end to slavery and the slave trade that brought Africans as slaves to the Western hemisphere from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Historians have noted many causes for the rise of opposition to slavery and the slave trade that supported it. Philosophers began to question the logic of rational beings holding one another in bondage, the belief in the virtue or ethic of human benevolence became popular, and the influence of various Christian groups and movements.
Both Quakers and Methodist were vocal in their opposition to slavery. The influence of the Methodist movement had a profound effect on the abolition of slavery in general and the slave trade of Great Britain in particular. When looking at the abolitionism in Great Britain, the lives and careers of two people in particular stand out. They are John Wesley and William Wilberforce.
The Christian beliefs of William Wilberforce had a profound effect on the legislation affecting slavery and the slave trade. John Wesley and the Methodist movement had a profound effect on the beliefs of William Wilberforce. Wesley’s essay entitled “Thoughts Upon Slavery” was a strong statement in opposition to slavery and the slave trade. Wesley makes it clear that Christianity and the institution of slavery are incompatible and that the practitioner of one could not be a practitioner of the other. Wesley calls on the slave trader as well as the slave owner to repent.
On February 18, 1796 Wilberforce
proposed a bill [in the British Parliament ] that would abolish the slave trade [in the entire British Empire]. While efforts to shelf the bill were defeated, the final vote for the bill failed by a vote of 74 to 70.
proposed a bill [in the British Parliament ] that would abolish the slave trade [in the entire British Empire]. While efforts to shelf the bill were defeated, the final vote for the bill failed by a vote of 74 to 70.
While deeply disappointed Wilberforce persevered. Every year after that failure Wilberforce introduce[d] a resolution to end the slave trade until 1807 when he finally met with success. During his [more than two decade] fight for the abolition of the slave trade [he] drew strength from his faith and fellow Christians.
Wesley wrote shortly before he died in 1791 the following letter to Wilberforce.
Dear Sir:
Unless the divine power has raised you us to be as Athanasius contra mundum [Bishop Athanasius against the World - one who fiercely fought the Arian heresy during the 4th century] , I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be fore you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it. Reading this morning a tract wrote by a poor African, I was particularly struck by that circumstance that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress; it being a "law" in our colonies that the oath of a black against a white goes for nothing. What villainy is this?
That he who has guided you from youth up may continue to strengthen you in this and all things, is the prayer of, dear sir,
Your affectionate servant,
John Wesley
In 1797 Wilberforce wrote A Practical View of Christianity - Personal Faith as a Call to Political Responsibility. In this book Wilberforce made a personal statement of faith. No direct statement about the slave trade was made because the issues of moral living were more universal that any one standing political issue. However, from this book one can glean the principles that he used to guide his stand on issues like the slave trade. “In the language of Scripture, Christianity is not a geographical, but a moral term. It is not the being a native of a Christian country: it is a condition, a state; the possession of a peculiar nature [1 Peter 2:9], with the qualities and properties which belong to it.”
Wilberforce was not a Christian because he lived in a country that gave lip service to Christianity. He
was a Christian because he accepted Christ as his Savior and lived in a manner that was pleasing to Him.
To Wilberforce the essence of Christianity was that God loved mankind so much, that even though all
men had rebelled against Him and by their deeds were deserving of death and Hell, God took the form
of a man and paid the price that justice demanded for that rebellion. The subsequent salvation gained by
this act was fully and freely available to anyone who would accept it. However, the price of acceptance
was obedience and the desire to please the One who paid the price and offered the salvation. It remains, however, to be here farther remarked, that this grace can no where be cultivated with more advantage than at the foot of the Cross.
Nowhere can our Saviour’s dying injunction to the exercise of this virtue be recollected with more effect: “This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you” [JOHN !3:34]….The view of mankind which is here presented to us, as having been all involved in one common ruin and the offer of deliverance held out to all, by the Son of God’s giving of himself up to pay the price of our reconciliation, produce that sympathy towards our fellow-creatures….
Our hearts become tender while we contemplate this signal act of loving-kindness. We grow desirous for imitating what we cannot but admire. A vigorous principle of enlarged and active charity springs up within us; and we go forth with alacrity, desirous of treading in the steps of our blessed Master, and of manifesting our gratitude for his unmerited goodness, by bearing each other’s burdens, and abounding in the disinterested labours of benevolence.
How can a Christian who has been set free from sin and death enslave another human being? To
Wilberforce the terms Slave Owner and Christian are contradictory terms. To Wilberforce disinterested labours of benevolence most certainly include and require one to work to end the enslavement of fellow humans.
A few years after Wilberforce dies, Marx will say that religion is the opiate of the masses. When one regards the English revival movements, and notes that during the same time France was undergoing a violent and bloody upheaval in the name of social justice, that Christian activists in England were bringing about significant social reform, one might well pause to wonder.
If Atheists are right and there is no God, Marx hit the nail on the head. A believer might say that false religion could be an opiate for the masses. If those who act in the name of religion do no public good then a promise of heavenly reward stands alone and rings hollow.
In the case of Wilberforce, however, one sees more than a hollow promise of heavenly reward. Concrete
acts on behalf of fellow human beings are clearly accomplished.
On the sixth of December, 1833, William Whipper, a free black American delivered a eulogy at the Second African Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia. He started his comments by stating, “To duly awaken and justly impress upon the feelings of an audience, the inestimable worth of an individual whose purity of life and uprightness of character has imperishably enrolled his name in the archives of nations, as one of the greatest earthly benefactors, is a duty of such magnitude, that those who can call to their aid the most powerful of human requisites might well in their appeal ask for indulgence.”
Whipper was speaking of a man who had successfully led the cause of freedom and abolition in the British Empire before many of the great antebellum abolitionists in America were born. He went on to say,
“We have met to pay a tribute of respect to one of the best men that ever graced the earth, or ornamented history.”
That man was William Wilberforce, and Whipper also said that,
“no man ever lived who urged the passage of a law with a more honest zeal, or with such a torrent of awakening eloquence as that which he used in beseeching Parliament to quit her merciless invasions on poor, defenceless Africa.” ...... “My friends, of the millions who sound forth his praises, probably there are only thousands who do him honour ............Those…...who have not adopted for the line of their conduct towards their fellow men, the golden rule, “do unto others as you would they should do unto you” are unfit to utter forth his name.”
On the sixth of December, 1833, William Whipper, a free black American delivered a eulogy at the Second African Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia. He started his comments by stating, “To duly awaken and justly impress upon the feelings of an audience, the inestimable worth of an individual whose purity of life and uprightness of character has imperishably enrolled his name in the archives of nations, as one of the greatest earthly benefactors, is a duty of such magnitude, that those who can call to their aid the most powerful of human requisites might well in their appeal ask for indulgence.”
Whipper was speaking of a man who had successfully led the cause of freedom and abolition in the British Empire before many of the great antebellum abolitionists in America were born. He went on to say,
“We have met to pay a tribute of respect to one of the best men that ever graced the earth, or ornamented history.”
That man was William Wilberforce, and Whipper also said that,
“no man ever lived who urged the passage of a law with a more honest zeal, or with such a torrent of awakening eloquence as that which he used in beseeching Parliament to quit her merciless invasions on poor, defenceless Africa.” ...... “My friends, of the millions who sound forth his praises, probably there are only thousands who do him honour ............Those…...who have not adopted for the line of their conduct towards their fellow men, the golden rule, “do unto others as you would they should do unto you” are unfit to utter forth his name.”
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