Quotes About Wilberforce

Wilberforce wrote some years later that it was as if he'd been all those years in a dream from which at last now he had been awakened.

Wilberforce said that he revered Newton "as a parent when I was a child." The weak-eyed, sickly, extremely nimble-minded boy must have been utterly captivated by the former slaver who at age eleven—William's age when they met—had gone off to sea for a picaresque adventure unimaginable to the wealthy and pampered merchant's son.

When Wilberforce's mother and grandfather sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, they hadn't the slightest idea that they were sending the boy into a glowing hotbed of Methodism.

Wilberforce says that when he was first taken to a play, "it was almost by force." It seems severe and ridiculous to us that what he had imbibed of religion would make him think the theater sinful, but we have to appreciate the circumstances and shibboleths of that era.

But so successful would Wilberforce and these other Christians be at bringing a concern for the poor and a social conscience into the society at large that by the next century, during the Victorian era, this attitude would become culturally mainstream.

William Pitt, who would in a few years become Wilberforce's closest friend, was the same age as Wilberforce but had already been at Cambridge three years when Wilberforce arrived, having entered at the age of fourteen.

Wilberforce's decision to remain in politics made the transfer of Christian ideas into the previously "secular" realm of society possible for generations of Christians to follow.

Of the many societal problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.

Christianity is not the faith of the complacent, the comfortable or of the timid. It demands and creates heroic souls like Wesley, Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, John Paul the Second, and Billy Graham. Each showed, in their own way, the relentless and powerful influence of the message of Jesus Christ.