William Wilberforce as a Young Man

William Wilberforce as a Young Man

Properly balancing work, ministry and family responsibilities is not an easy feat to accomplish. Sometimes the pressures of seeking to do so are considerable. And even when we’re giving it our best we don’t always feel like we’re doing a very good job of maintaining a proper balance.

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was a leading Member of Parliament (MP) in the British House of Commons whose enormous efforts helped bring about extensive social and moral reforms in nineteenth century England (see my September 13 & 28, 2016 Perspectives). But Wilberforce also serves as an encouraging example of an individual who did a good (though not always perfect) job of caring for and ministering to his family while at the same time carrying out his heavy vocational responsibilities.

Barbara Spooner Wilberforce

Barbara Spooner Wilberforce

Wilberforce was thirty-seven years old when, on April 15, 1797, he first met Barbara Spooner, the young woman who would become his wife. By that time he had been leading the political fight to end the British slave trade for nine years, and another decade would elapse before that battle would be won. By all reports, Barbara was physically attractive and, like Wilberforce, was an ardent Evangelical Christian. Just eight days after their first meeting Wilberforce proposed marriage by letter, and Barbara accepted that same day, also by letter. They were married five weeks later. Theirs was a happy marriage that lasted till Wilberforce’s death thirty-six years later.

William and Barbara had six children in ten years, four boys and two girls. Wilberforce sometimes had to be away from his family, a circumstance he strongly disliked, while attending to parliamentary duties in London. But when home, Wilberforce was very attentive and involved in the lives of his family members. With them he played games, read, went on walks, observed nature, went to museums, picnicked and celebrated holidays.

Kensington Gore House in London

Kensington Gore House in London

The Wilberforce home was a little eccentric and rather lax. Numerous pets, including a rabbit, were kept in the house. Barbara’s strong suit was not as “domestic engineer,” and the servants were allowed to be somewhat too laid back in their responsibilities. Sometimes the Wilberforces’ guests, who tended to be numerous, had to wait till odd, late hours for meals.

But William Wilberforce was very regular in his personal and family devotions. He habitually dedicated the first hour to hour and a half of the morning to personal Bible reading and prayer. Then, after a late breakfast, he led his family in a briefer time of Scripture reading and prayer, always kneeling for the latter.

One way in which Wilberforce sought to compensate when he needed to be away from his family members was by writing them many letters. His missives were full of warm affection and sound advice. Throughout his life he wrote a total of hundreds or even thousands of letters to his wife and children. One son collected and numbered all 600-plus letters that his father wrote just to him!

Barbara Spooner Wilberforce with child

Barbara Spooner Wilberforce with child

In 1808, after the birth of their last child, Wilberforce moved his family to Kensington Gore House in London so he could be with them more, even when Parliament was in session. Four years later, one of Wilberforce’s small children began to cry when placed on his lap, and the nursemaid commented of the child, “He always is afraid of strangers.” The incident led Wilberforce to resign his position as MP of Yorkshire (England’s most powerful county) and to become MP of a smaller and much less demanding constituency.

Sadly, William and Barbara’s two daughters died as young women, one at age twenty-two of tuberculosis and the other at thirty years of age from complications resulting from a chest infection. Three of the Wilberforces’ sons gained top university honors and entered pastoral ministry. Two of those wrote a comprehensive five-volume biography on the life of their beloved and esteemed father after his death. Unfortunately, the oldest Wilberforce son lost the family’s considerable fortune in the mismanagement of a large dairy operation late in his father’s lifetime.

William Wilberforce was obviously sensitive about and determined in his efforts to strike a proper balance in fulfilling his work and family responsibilities. Though he sometimes struggled to do so as well as he would have liked, he continued to work at it. As a result, he achieved a good degree of success in appropriately discharging both responsibilities. With God’s help and their own conscientious effort, committed Christian parents can do the same today.

Copyright 2016 by Vance E. Christie

William Wilberforce as an Older Man

William Wilberforce as an Older Man

On Sunday, October 28, 1787, a year and a half after William Wilberforce’s Christian conversion, he wrote on a blank page in his diary: “God Almighty has placed before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners [morals].” Wilberforce’s decades-long battle to help bring an end to slavery throughout the British Empire is well known. His equally-determined endeavors to promote a broad range of other social reforms and philanthropic causes are little known today so are well worth recalling.

Wilberforce (1759-1833) had a long and influential career as a Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons. In addition to the abolition of slavery, Wilberforce championed some seventy other legislative causes for the welfare of both people and animals. Several of those causes included: small pox inoculation; public relief of poverty; popular education; injustices of the penal code; prison reforms; child labor laws (protecting child factory workers and chimney sweeps); eliminating bear baiting and other forms of cruelty to animals.

William Wilberforce Statue in Hull England

William Wilberforce Statue in Hull England

Besides the anti-slavery issue, another twenty-year political battle that Wilberforce was part of (from 1793 to 1813) was to gain the right for Christian missionaries to minister in India. The powerful British East India Company fiercely opposed missionary activity in its trading domain, claiming (without an evidential basis) such efforts would cause agitation among non-Christian people groups and would adversely affect EIC financial profits. Significantly, Wilberforce himself always declared that gaining the right for missionaries to serve in India was the greatest cause he had lived for, not even excepting the emancipation of the slaves. He doubtless thought that due to the eternal benefits that came to countless people through the passage of the missionary legislation.

Wilberforce generously used much of his personal wealth to help support many individuals and charities. Before marrying, he donated 2,000 pounds per year (fully one-fourth of his annual income) to charity. Wilberforce personally supported nearly every charitable institution in London and Yorkshire (England’s most powerful county and the one he represented in Parliament). He also financially supported numerous young men training for pastoral ministry, as well as many other young people preparing for other careers (including the Bronte sisters who eventually gained literary fame). Wilberforce helped keep many individuals out of debtor’s prison and assisted in funding the erection of a number of churches. He was instrumental in founding the forerunner of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Britain’s National Gallery of Art, London University, and the British and Foreign Bible Society.

William Wilberforce Two Great Objects Quote

Rather ironically in light of his tremendous generosity, and through no fault of his own, Wilberforce lost his fortune near the end of his life. By the time Wilberforce was seventy years old, his oldest son had run the large dairy farm in which Wilberforce had invested much of the family fortune deep into debt. Over 50,000 pounds were owed. Wilberforce decided he needed to lease the estate and mansion where he had been living in retirement years to generate income. The final three years of his life he lived with two of his other sons, both of whom served as ministers.

William Wilberforce Quote 2

A number of beneficial biographies have been written on Wilberforce in recent years: William Wilberforce, A Hero for Humanity, by Kevin Belmonte (Zondervan, 2007); Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, by Eric Metaxas (Harperone, 2008);Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce, by John Piper (Crossway, 2007). Belmonte’s and Metaxas’s works are full-length biographies while Piper’s booklet of sixty-four pages focuses more specifically on Wilberforce’s conversion and Christian convictions that were at the foundation of his remarkable career of public service.

Copyright 2016 by Vance E. Christie

William Wilberforce as a Young Man

William Wilberforce as a Young Man

Sometimes carrying out a particular ministry that the Lord would have us to fulfill requires not just weeks or months of effort. Sometimes it demands many years or even several decades of unrelenting, determined endeavor. But with the renewed encouragement, strength and tenacity that God Himself provides, we can successfully fulfill even the longest-term tasks to which He calls us.

William Wilberforce’s relentless efforts to bring an end to slavery in the British Empire are a sterling and instructive example of that. From the time he was twenty-eight years of age, Wilberforce felt definitely led of the Lord to do what he could to stop the British slave trade. As a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons, Wilberforce initially intended to move for the abolition of the slave trade in February, 1788. But that month he became dangerously ill with ulcerative colitis (an excruciating, stress-induced condition of the digestive tract) and was told he might not live two more weeks.

Prime Minister William Pitt

Prime Minister William Pitt

However, Prime Minister William Pitt, Wilberforce’s close friend and powerful political ally, got the ball rolling for Wilberforce during his illness. Pitt was able to pass legislation to conduct a formal government investigation of conditions in the slave trade.

Debate on Wilberforce’s bill for abolishing the trade did not start for three more years, until April, 1791, and it was defeated. When Wilberforce again moved for the slave trade’s abolition in 1792, the House of Commons voted to gradually eliminate the trade over the next four years. But the following year, 1793, the House refused to confirm that decision because France had just declared war on Britain, and many concluded it was not the right time to address the deeply divisive issue of slavery.

Those were extremely difficult years for Wilberforce. He was accused of undermining the British economy and received death threats on his life. He was challenged to a duel (which he refused on Christian principles) by anti-abolitionists who still strongly supported the slave trade.

In 1796 Wilberforce’s renewed motion that the slave trade be abolished was narrowly defeated by a vote of 74 to 70. Twelve supporters of his bill carelessly missed the session when that vote was taken, instead being at a new opera with free tickets supplied by anti-abolitionists! Wilberforce was bitterly disappointed at that tragic development and shortly thereafter suffered a serious relapse of intestinal problems.

William Wilberforce as an Older Man

William Wilberforce as an Older Man

The struggle to abolish the slave trade dragged on eleven more years. Every year from 1797 to 1803 the abolition cause suffered setbacks. Finally on February 23, 1807, the House of Commons voted to abolish the trade by an overwhelming majority of 283 to 16. Slave trading and the shipping of slaves to or from British territories were outlawed. Nearly twenty years had passed since Wilberforce had first agreed to lead the legislative effort to end slavery.

In the 1810s Wilberforce campaigned to emancipate slaves and completely abolish slavery throughout the British Empire. In 1821, due to failing health, he turned over the leadership of that legislative responsibility to Thomas Buxton, a young Quaker MP whose efforts at prison reform Wilberforce greatly admired. Wilberforce officially retired, for health reasons, four years later, at age sixty-five.

On July 26, 1833, Wilberforce received news that a bill for the complete abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire was now assured of becoming law. England was willing to give twenty million pounds to purchase the freedom of the 800,000 slaves in Britain’s colonies.

Just three days later, William Wilberforce died at age seventy-three. Forty-six years had elapsed since he was first led of God to take up the cause of ending slavery.

A number of beneficial biographies have been written on Wilberforce in recent years: William Wilberforce, A Hero for Humanity, by Kevin Belmonte (Zondervan, 2007); Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, by Eric Metaxas (Harperone, 2008); Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce, by John Piper (Crossway, 2007). Belmonte’s and Metaxas’s works are full-length biographies while Piper’s booklet of sixty-four pages focuses more specifically on Wilberforce’s conversion and Christian convictions that were at the foundation of his remarkable career of public service.

Copyright 2016 by Vance E. Christie

Wlliam WilberforceWilliam Wilberforce (1759-1833) is best known as the extraordinary Member of Parliament whose tenacious efforts played a prominent role in bringing an end to the British slave trade. Wilberforce testified that his slavery abolition endeavors and his many other philanthropic works never would have come about without what he always called his “Great Change” – his Christian conversion.

Wilberforce was born in Hull, on the east coast of England, on August 24, 1759. The Wilberforces were a well-to-do merchant family, extravagant socialites who enjoyed lots of balls, lavish dinner parties, the theatre and card parties.

When William was just eight years old, his father Robert died at age forty. A short while later William’s sister Elizabeth died at fourteen years of age while at boarding school in London. Through that double shock William’s mother, also named Elizabeth, became gravely ill and only gradually recovered.

William WilberforceFor two years during his mother’s recovery, while William was between the ages of 10 and 12, he was placed under the guardianship of his uncle and aunt, William and Hannah Wilberforce. William and Hannah were committed evangelical Christians and good friends of John and Polly Newton, whom they often visited in Olney, where Newton pastored an Anglican Church. Newton took an interest in young William Wilberforce, and a fond friendship developed between the pastor and the boy during that time.

Elizabeth Wilberforce, like the Newtons, belonged to the Church of England. But she strongly disapproved of Dissenters, Methodists and other evangelists with whom William and Hannah Wilberforce and the Newtons associated. So when Elizabeth regained her health, she brought her son, at age twelve, back home to live with her in Hull. There she worked hard to stifle the religious convictions he had gained from his guardians, viewing them as unhealthy and extreme. Instead she sought to help him acquire a taste for the world and its diversions. At first this seemed distasteful to William but gradually he came to relish it.

William Wilberforce: A Hero for Humanity by Kevin BelmonteAt age seventeen William Wilberforce entered St. John’s College, Cambridge. He loved to socialize with his fellow students and was the life of the party with his lively spirit, quick wit, entertaining conversation and wealth. He had a gift for classical languages and literature but partied so much that he largely squandered his college years.

Wilberforce desired to enter politics. Just days before his twenty-first birthday, he was elected as MP (Member of Parliament in the House of Commons), representing his hometown of Hull, one of England’s most important port cities. During his early years in parliament his primary concern was gaining the approval of others and prominence. He quickly became known as an eloquent speaker and powerful debater. He was not above bribing voters (buying votes was a common practice in that day) and bitterly attacking and humiliating political opponents with sarcasm.

Wilberforce belonged to five clubs made up of well-born young men with similar political convictions. Drinking and heavy gambling were part of those clubs. Wilberforce was pained to see some young men lose far more than they could afford through gambling.

In March of 1784, at age twenty-four, Wilberforce pulled off an unlikely political victory by being elected as the MP representing Yorkshire County, where he had few contacts. Yorkshire was the most powerful county and one of the most coveted political seats in all of England.

Wilberforce’s “Great Change,” his gradual process of coming to embrace Christian beliefs, began that same autumn and continued for a year and a half, through the spring of 1786. During that period of time Wilberforce became convinced of and personally embraced the truths of Christianity, including the Deity of Jesus Christ, His atoning death on the cross for sin and the Bible as God’s authoritative Word.

Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric MetaxaxIn December 1785, Wilberforce made a secret visit to John Newton who, at age sixty, was then pastoring in London. Newton affirmed Wilberforce’s newfound Christian convictions and encouraged him to serve God by remaining in Parliament. They had other visits, which were enormously reassuring to Wilberforce, that winter and the following spring.

There were several noticeable, positive results of Wilberforce’s conversion: (1) He became kind and forbearing rather than being irritable and employing biting sarcasm with family members and political opponents. (2) He dropped out of all five of the worldly clubs he had been a member in and gave up gambling. (3) He took greater care to be present for every debate in the House of Commons in an age when legislators were commonly absent, and did the thankless work of serving on countless committees. (4) For the next seven to eight years he devoted much of his free time to making up for the educational opportunities he had squandered in college. Ever after he was a diligent lifelong reader and student, with his coat pockets often being full of books. (5) Instead of using politics to further his own prominence, he used it to diligently serve God and his fellow human beings. (I plan to devote a future blog to the significant ways in which he did that.)

Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce by John PiperA number of beneficial biographies have been written on Wilberforce in recent years: William Wilberforce, A Hero for Humanity, by Kevin Belmonte (Zondervan, 2007); Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, by Eric Metaxas (Harperone, 2008); Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce, by John Piper (Crossway, 2007). Belmonte’s and Metaxas’s works are full-length biographies while Piper’s booklet of sixty-four pages focuses more specifically on Wilberforce’s conversion and Christian convictions that were at the foundation of his remarkable career of public service.

Copyright 2016 by Vance E. Christie