William Wilberforce

Wilberforce did more for Pitt than Burke had ever done for Fox. The Prince Regent was a rake, who was drunk at his own wedding, and his personal associates were men of empty and vicious character, but their way of life scandalized the graver part of those who were aware of it. As elsewhere the Revolution produced Chateaubriand and Schleiermacher, so in England it produced an increased seriousness in literature and life. The reform was assisted by changes that came about in the social fabric. In spite of the Conservatism of the Tories, one of the silent effects of the Revolution had been a great diminution of the old privileges. Dress became simpler, wigs and swords were laid aside.

When William Wilberforce was 'converted' in 1785 from the 'mere nominal Christianity' of the great majority of churchmen to the 'vital Reformation Christianity' of Newton's group, it was clear that God had provided one. When he entered in his diary in 1787 'God has set before me as my object the reformation of manners' and in the next year established the first of many Evangelical reforming institutions, the Society to Effect the Enforcement of his Majesty's Proclamation Against Vice and Immorality, an extraordinary campaign for national righteousness had begun.

Wilberforce and many of them gave three hours in the day to prayer. Thornton before he married spent six-sevenths of his income in charity, and afterwards a third. They observed Sunday with strictness, and their hymns gave a new popularity and a new brightness to the service of the Church. They assembled their households for family prayers, they published religious literature which had a wide circulation, and they brought about a great improvement in the language and habits of many whose deeper selves they could not touch. Marriage, which had been cheapened in the previous century, was restored to something like its proper credit.

The greatest of their public works was the Emancipation of the Slave. The Friends began this, but the Evangelicals took it up, and even in 1791 William Wilberforce at thirtytwo was old enough, and already enough identified with the cause by which he will always be remembered, to receive the famous letter from John Wesley, the evangelist's last letter, written a week before he died at eighty-seven. The traffic in slaves carried on by Bristol and Liverpool merchants between Africa and the West Indies, which seemed to many Christian people either a necessary evil or an opportunity of lawful gain, and to Lord Nelson one of the bulwarks of England 's greatness, was to Wilberforce an utter abomination.

In 1862 Wilberforce was far the most prominent of the English Bishops, but Lord Palmerston, who was then Prime Minister, was very much in the hands of his kinsman, Lord Shaftesbury, in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments, and Longley was translated from York . If Gladstone had been in power, Wilberforce would then certainly have been made Archbishop of York, and if Gladstone had succeeded Disraeli a month earlier than he did in 1868, Wilberforce would then have become Primate of all England .

As England was constituted at the end of the eighteenth century a national reform of morals was unthinkable without support from the ruling class and the Established Church. Both were terrified by the French Revolution into hostility to all change. Through twenty of the reform campaign's first thirty years, England was fighting the greatest war of its history. But this movement led by William Wilberforce touched something basic in the nature of large numbers of Englishmen no matter how disturbed the times or how great the spiritual poverty and sophisticated barrenness of the Age of Enlightenment; perhaps an antipathy to moral corruptness, perhaps a desire for a 'religion of the heart' not offered by the Church of England in the eighteenth century.