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.

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.

Christianity has been successfully attacked and marginalized… because those who professed belief were unable to defend the faith from attack, even though its attackers' arguments were deeply flawed.

It must be conceded by those who admit the authority of Scripture (such only he is addressing) that from the decision of the word of God there can be no appeal.

Only an unwillingness to be open and honest can keep us from the conclusion that both reason and experience tell us that what the Bible says about us is true. We are without excuse if we remain in denial.

Christianity itself has been too often disgraced. It has been turned into an engine of cruelty, and amidst the bitterness of persecution, every trace has disappeared of the mild and beneficent spirit of the religion of Jesus.

No politician has ever used his faith to a greater result for all of humanity, and that is why, in his day, Wilberforce was a moral hero far more than a political one.