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365 days with Wilberforce

A collection of daily readings from writings of William Wilberforce—‘the friend of humanity’

DayOne

Today’s Reading

© Day One Publications 2006

Unless otherwise stated, all Scripture quotations are from

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Dedication

For Samuel—our child of promise.

May you come to know the Lord early, love and follow him all the days of your life.

Introduction

In some ways, 365 Days with Wilberforce is quite unlike its predecessors in the series of which it is a part. The great anti-slavery reformer William Wilberforce (1759–1833) never intended to write a work of a purely devotional nature. Nor did he preach sermons for decades, as Charles Haddon Spurgeon did, so that such sermons could have been drawn upon to assemble a collection of daily readings.

Wilberforce did write a book, A Practical View of Christianity (1797) that has been called ‘the manifesto of the Evangelical Movement’ by no less an authority than Sir Leslie Stephen in his celebrated essay in The Dictionary of National Biography. A Practical View was a book with a dual purpose. It was both an apologia for evangelical Christianity and it also set forth a blueprint for the good society—based upon the first principles Wilberforce gleaned from his reading of the Scriptures and other writers who held to a Judeo-Christian worldview. Many passages from this classic work lend themselves to a collection of daily readings, and they are included in the pages that follow.

The other sources that have been drawn upon for this book are letters and diary entries contained in The Life of William Wilberforce (5 vols, 1838). The Correspondence of William Wilberforce (2 vols, 1840) has also been consulted, as has The Private Papers of William Wilberforce (1897). Many passages of an autobiographical nature are contained within John Harford’s Recollections of William Wilberforce (1864). Lastly, Wilberforce published many little-known articles in the Christian Observer, which commenced publication in 1802 and continued beyond Wilberforce’s death in 1833. I have drawn upon some of these articles as well.

It also needs to be said that since Wilberforce never intended to write a purely devotional work, with passages of a uniform length, some of the citations selected for this book are rather concise. But then, these passages are often arresting ...