Sunday’s Reflection: Commemoration of William Wilberforce. 

William Wilberforce was an English politician whose commitment to Jesus Christ made him lead a forty-year campaign for the emancipation of all slaves throughout the British empire.

Wilberforce entered the House of Commons in 1780 as a very wealthy young man with little purpose to his life beyond the conventional duties and privileges of his class. Four years later he experienced a revolution in his attitude to Christian doctrine, when his intellect accepted its claims upon his life; and this was followed by an even greater “conversion of the heart,” when he embraced Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour. he threw himself into projects for the moral conversion of English society; and it was at this time that he agreed to bring before Parliament a bill to end all traffic in slaves. 

Anxious to preserve their way of life, the West Indian landowners subsidized Members of Parliament to resist Wilberforce’s bill. The fight lasted twenty years. The night it passed its second reading, the entire House stood and gave Wilberforce the tribute of an ovation.

Eight years later after he retired in 1825, as he lay on his deathbed, he had the joy of hearing that Parliament was finally about to pass his bill. He died on July twenty-ninth, 1833, just as the liberation of slaves became the law of Great Britain and its empire.

Prayer: O God, the Source of life and liberty, let your bountiful mercy continually renew in your Church the never-failing gift of love, that following your servant William Wilberforce, we may have grace to redeem the needy from oppression and power to maintain the cause of those who have no helper; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.