William Wilberforce Bio

bookslover · #1 (**permalink**) 08-29-2009, 05:23 PM

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has posted a biography of the great English abolitionist. It's up for only the next two days (today and tomorrow).

Here are a couple of excerpts, regarding his religious life:

Wilberforce's Christian commitment remained fundamental to his life. Private prayer and Bible reading were central to his daily routine, and his surviving diaries and journals illustrate the depth of his continual quest for holiness and obedience to the call of God. In the period after his conversion, he regularly sought and received counsel from Isaac Milner and John Newton and, as the years passed, he himself became a valued spiritual counselor, notably to the agriculturist Arthur Young, who had been much stirred by reading the "Practical View."

Wilberforce cultivated a strongly religious tone in family life through holding daily family prayers and anxiously watching over the spiritual development of his children. When in London, he worshipped at the Anglican proprietary Lock Chapel, near Hyde Park Corner, whose minister, from 1785, was the biblical commentator Thomas Scott. At Clapham, he attended the parish church, where John Venn was incumbent. Despite its intensity, Wilberforce's religion was never austere: while reverencing Scott's ministry, he did not imbibe his Calvinism and, while strongly upholding the observance of Sunday as a day of rest, he saw it as a time for recreation with family and friends, as well as for spiritual duties...

..He played an important role [in] the formation, in 1799, of what became the Church Missionary Society, the launch, in 1801, of the magazine "Christian Observer," and the establishment, in 1804, of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

Wilberforce was intensely loyal to the Church of England, seeing it as the essential safeguard of the Christian fabric of the state. Initially, therefore, he opposed the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. One of the key reasons for the success of the "Practical View" was that its call for national spiritual and moral renewal could be read in broad Anglican as well as specific evangelical terms. At the same time, he had a natural affinity with dissenters and Methodists and, in 1800, his influence was important in deflecting Pitt from a measure to restrict the licensing of preachers.

Three of his four sons, by the way, Robert Isaac Wilberforce (1802-1857), Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873), and Henry William Wilberforce (1807-1873), took orders in the Anglican Church - although Robert and Henry, after their father's death, converted to Roman Catholicism.

Robert and Samuel also wrote their father's life: Life of William Wiberforce, 5 volumes (1838).

If you want to read the whole thing, go here: Oxford DNB: Lives of the week. It's on the lower right column.