Wilberforce is best known for his role in the abolition of slavery, though he was involved throughout his life in numerous causes to further the gospel of Christ and the betterment of mankind. Among his goals were the improvement of manners and morals in English society and the evangelization of the upper classes, as Wesley had the working classes. He was active in the foundation of the Church Missionary Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Though a very little man, his eloquence in public speaking was legendary. James Boswell records that on hearing him ‘the shrimp grew and grew and became a whale’.
After an education that included boarding schools and Cambridge University, Wilberforce became a Christian at age twenty-five through reading the New Testament with a former instructor, Isaac Milner, while on a tour through Europe. He had entered politics in 1780 at age twenty-one by being elected a member of Parliament for Hull. In 1784 he was elected for Yorkshire, a powerful seat that he held for twenty-three years. He associated himself with the Clapham Sect, and through friendship with John Newton and Thomas Clarkson of that group and the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, he became involved in the campaign to abolish slavery. This was to occupy him for the rest of his life; the complete abolition of slavery did not occur until 1833, the year of his death.
In 1797 Wilberforce published his one great book, Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in this Country Contrasted with Real Christianity. For forty years it was a bestseller. As David Edwards says in Christian England, ‘Real Christianity’ was to Wilberforce a straightforwardly biblical religion, to be accepted as the guide and rule of all human life. God’s love for him was the essence; and the morality he urged was always loving conduct. So this Practical View had an influence both wide and deep in the classes to which it was addressed. Edmund Burke spent the last two days of his life reading it.
Wilberforce and his fellow campaigners were often close to despair, and he himself was always in frail health. But no doubt he carried John Wesley’s words to him in his heart. In the last letter of his life the great evangelist had written, ‘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 for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God?’ In the end, not only did Wilberforce and his companions win a great moral victory, but their achievement opened the opportunity for evangelical missions to penetrate Africa and India.