William Wilberforce, wealthy and eloquent rising star of the British Parliament, paced nervously around a square near John Newton’s home before knocking at the door. The politician had recently become a Christian and was unsure whether he should retire from public life. Wilberforce sent a sealed letter to Newton asking to see him and requested that he not tell anyone of their planned rendezvous. When he finally plucked up the courage in December 1785 to see the pastor/hymn-writer, he did so with “ten thousand doubts,” and with great secrecy and subterfuge.[1]
Wilberforce’s hesitation was understandable. He was born into a wealthy middle-class family. In 1780, after three idle years at Cambridge, the twenty-one year old was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Hull, and was encouraged in his political career by William Pitt, his friend and the future Prime Minister. However, the political and social establishment of late eighteenth-century England had little time for the enthusiastic evangelicalism of men like Newton. Wilberforce was well aware of this attitude: his mother, fearing the Methodist enthusiasm of William’s aunt and uncle (with whom he stayed as a boy following his father’s death), brought him back to Hull to be educated as a “gentleman.”
Yet, God was sovereignly ordering events in Wilberforce’s life. After his election as MP for Yorkshire in 1784, he traveled with an old Cambridge friend, Isaac Milner, unaware of his faith in Christ. Clear thinking and winsome, Milner was a powerful witness for the gospel. Journeying together the following year, they read Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745) and discussed it at length. “Wilberforce had the quicker tongue, Milner had the sharper mind,” and Wilberforce came to acknowledge “wealth’s emptiness, Christianity’s truth, and his own failure to embrace its radical demands.”[2] After a year of growing inner conflict, he became a Christian.
In late November 1785, Wilberforce wrote to tell Pitt of “the great change” in his life. He expressed the fear that their friendship would be lost and mentioned his intention to withdraw from public life to better serve God. Pitt’s reply was gracious, but challenging:
If a Christian may act in the several relations of life, must he seclude himself from all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.[3]
Wilberforce was still undecided, so he went to see Newton, whose preaching he had heard as a boy when staying with his relatives. Newton declared that he had never given up hope about God’s work in Wilberforce since the time he met him as a boy, and counseled him not to withdraw from public life: “The Lord has raised you up for the good of his church and for the good of the nation.”[4] His words were not in vain. Within months, Wilberforce’s thinking was clear: “My walk,” he wrote in his diary, “is a public one; my business is in the world; and I must mix in assemblies of men, or quit the post which Providence seems to have assigned me.”[5] A sense of Christian responsibility took hold: “A man who acts from the principles I profess reflects that he is to give an account of his political conduct at the judgement seat of Christ.”[6]
Ministers may despair of impact, thinking their words scarcely adequate to the firm resistance of the day. They fail to see the great potential and blessed susceptibility of their hearers. Many of these listeners stand at tipping points in their lives, and a simple word of encouragement and admonition can have exponential effect. Milner discussed a book. Pitt counseled action. Newton announced the kairos moment. Small things, but momentous in God’s economy.
[1] Quoted in Wilberforce’s letter to Newton, cited in Kevin Belmonte, Hero for Humanity (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), 85.
[2] Christopher D. Hancock, “The Shrimp Who Stopped Slavery,” Christian History 53, 16:1 (1997): 15.
[3] Belmonte, 88.
[4] Garth Lean, God’s Politician: William Wilberforce’s Struggle (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980), 35.
[5] Belmonte, 96.
[6] Hancock, 15.