The Great Change of William Wilberforce

In the autumn of 1785, William Wilberforce was a twenty-five-year-old member of Parliament — wealthy, witty, and restless. He had everything London's high society could offer: dinner parties, gambling tables, political influence. Yet something gnawed at him. During a journey across the French countryside with his former schoolmaster Isaac Milner, Wilberforce began reading Philip Doddridge's The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. The words cracked something open.

For months, Wilberforce wrestled with what he called "the great change." He wept. He could not sleep. His mind, so long fixed on ambition and pleasure, was being reoriented by the Spirit of God. He seriously considered leaving politics altogether to enter ministry.

But the transformation the Spirit worked in Wilberforce was not escape from the world — it was resurrection within it. Where his mind had once been set on the flesh — on status, comfort, and self-advancement — the Spirit planted something altogether different: a burning conviction that every enslaved person bore the image of God. That conviction sustained him through twenty years of parliamentary defeat before the slave trade was finally abolished in 1807.

Paul tells the Romans that the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace. Wilberforce discovered exactly that. The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead took a restless young politician and filled his mortal body with a purpose that outlasted every setback. The flesh offered Wilberforce a comfortable career. The Spirit gave him a calling — and with it, life.