William Wilberforce and the Salt That Would Not Lose Its Savor

In 1787, a young British parliamentarian named William Wilberforce sat at his desk in Old Palace Yard, London, and scratched five words into his journal: "God Almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners." He was twenty-seven, wealthy, and well-connected enough to live comfortably without ever raising his voice. Instead, he spent the next forty-six years doing the opposite of comfortable.

Eleven times Wilberforce introduced abolition bills. Eleven times Parliament defeated them. Colleagues mocked him. Slave traders burned him in effigy in port towns across the Caribbean. His health deteriorated until he could barely stand at the dispatch box. Yet he kept standing.

What drove him was not political ambition but a conviction that faith without public witness is faith gone flat — salt poured out on the ground. Wilberforce believed that the Almighty had placed him precisely where his light could not be hidden: in the halls of power, on the record, before watching eyes.

Three days before his death in 1833, Parliament finally passed the Slavery Abolition Act.

Jesus told His followers that salt which loses its savor is "good for nothing." Wilberforce understood this. He knew that a faith kept privately respectable while injustice flourished was no faith at all. He let his light shine before others — not for his own glory, but so that those who watched might glorify his Father in heaven.