William Wilberforce — Michael Haykin

Began the series, if some of you recall, we did have that little addition, and I felt the laughter that my comments evoked indicated it was true, I felt like a talking head because it was up to about here and that's all that could be seen.

Well tonight we want to conclude our series in terms of looking at the 18th century and what God did in that period through varieties of men and women, and we want to think about the man William Wilberforce tonight and the great struggle against the slave trade.

In the 18th century the church wrestled, as we do in our day, with some very, very vital issues, we've seen them already, issues dealing with revival, issues dealing with the nature of salvation, how do you renew Christian denominations, and such issues.

But also one of the critical issues that the church in the 18th century had to wrestle with can be boiled down to this question, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human? And the reflections that we are going to look at tonight, while they are important in their own right, very important in their own right, also bear upon the church in the early 21st century, because we too have to wrestle with that question, what does it mean to be human?

In the issues that we will see tonight, dealing with the whole area of race and other races, but also in issues that we certainly will not be able to touch on tonight, but also bear on that question, and issues related to things like abortion or genetic engineering, and so on.

These questions really can only be resolved when there has been some attempt made to answer that question, what does it mean to be human? Well, when we come to the 18th century, there is no doubt that the 18th century is a period that is characterized among Christians by the phrase, doing good.

In fact, there is that passage, and this is how I was going to begin tonight, with Galatians 6 verse 10, which in some ways stands over our thoughts this evening. Galatians 6 verse 10, as we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.

But that middle phrase, let us do good unto all men. The topic we think about this evening is a disturbing one, and what is even more disturbing, as we will see, is that those implicated in the institution known as slavery and the slave trade, some of those were evangelicals, and I find it very disturbing, looking back on the 18th century, that some who acknowledged God and his revelation in Christ and knew what it meant to be born again, were unable to see the hideousness and the abomination, to use the language of John Wesley, of this institution.

And so tonight, what we want to think about is disturbing. But on the other hand, it is also a room for great encouragement. It encourages us to realize that individuals can shape the course of history.

History is not, as it were, simply molded and shaped by economic forces or political forces or social forces, as maybe a Marxist would have us believe. But history is, in many respects, shaped by individuals.

And we want to think of, and especially in our second hour, the man whom we call William Wilberforce. The bulk of the first hour is set apart to thinking about how it was that English-speaking people, I'm not going to talk about the Spanish or the Portuguese or the Dutch who also were involved, or the French, also involved in the slave trade, but I'm going to think about the English-speaking people who became the greatest or had the greatest involvement in the slave trade.

And then in the second hour, we want to think about how William Wilberforce was used by God to end slavery and the slave trade in the British Empire. Now, evangelicals in the 18th century were characterized, as I said, by doing good.

Evangelical Philanthropy and Reform in the Eighteenth Century

And they were engaged in all kinds of philanthropic enterprises, establishing orphanages, establishing funds and societies for the help of widows and immigrants and the destitute. Seeking the release of many who were involved in, or had been imprisoned for small deaths.

It's amazing to think of the fact that even as late as the 1820s, let's use one example, in Scotland, three quarters of those imprisoned in Scotland were there because of indebtedness. They had gone bankrupt or they owed significant amounts of money that they could not pay, and they were imprisoned for their being in death.

Or the evangelicals were involved in seeking to bring to an end the barbarous sports like bear baiting, where a bear would be tied or chained to a pole and some of the spectators would bet on which dog would be able to take the bear down eventually.

Or bull baiting, a similar sort of sport, very, very common in England back into the Middle Ages. But in the 1700s, as evangelicals began to be awakened to some of the horrors of these things and mistreatment of animals, they began to lobby in Parliament for the making of such sports illegal.

In fact, Caleb Evans illustrates this very well. He was an English Baptist and he was preaching on one occasion about the Lord's Prayer, and on that praise, thy kingdom come. And he says, when we pray for the advancement of this kingdom, if we are not willing to do all we can to advance this, our prayers cannot be genuine, they are hypocritical.

And he's thinking there not only of sharing the faith and preaching, but he's also thinking of what we call doing good. Evangelicals in the 18th century were do-gooders in a good sense of that term. But probably the most powerful example of the ways in which evangelicals sought to do good was their titanic struggle against the slave trade in the last two decades of the 18th century and the first three decades of the 19th century.

It did not change overnight. The British government and British Empire had invested far too much money and commitment to the slave trade to demolish it overnight. And it took 50 years of political lobbying and of getting petitions from evangelical congregations and of, as we will see most importantly, prayer before Britain gave up first slavery, first the slave trade and then slavery.

The British Expansion of the Slave Trade

Now what I want to do is give some idea of the background because all too frequently I suspect we have very little idea of the horror that dominated Europe and European society in between the period of roughly 1600 to 1800.

And the slave trade was this horror. Britain had gotten involved in the slave trade in the 1600s. There are instances of Britain involvement with transporting Africans from West Coast or West Africa to the New World as far back as the 1560s.

1562 is generally given as the first day in which the English took Africans from Africa to the American continents. And it was done through a man named Sir John Hawkins, one of the Elizabethan naval men, something of a pirate.

Many of the men who sailed under the flag of England during the Elizabethan times, many of them were half pirates, men like Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher. They tread the border between piracy and legitimate defense of the realm.

And Sir John Hawkins got involved in taking 300 Africans from Africa and selling them in what is now the Dominican Republic to the Spanish. Elizabeth, who was Queen at the time, Elizabeth I, was not impressed.

She described his actions as detestable. And well into the 1600s, up until the 1650s, one of the things that the English prided themselves on is that while the Spanish and the Portuguese and the French were involved in the slave trade, they were not.

But that would change. It changes because of British conquests in the West Indies or the Caribbean. Britain engaged in wars with both the French and the Spanish and the Dutch, began to acquire a number of colonies in the West Indies, places like Barbados and Jamaica.

Alongside that, there was also their involvement or their desire to grow sugar in the New World, sugar cane. They initially tried growing sugar cane in Bermuda, but it was far too north. They couldn't do it.

And then they tried it in Virginia, and again the same problem. But it was when they took Barbados in the 1620s and began to grow sugar there, within 30 years they were reaping a huge harvest of sugar cane and realized the possibility of the West Indies being a major source of sugar.

It's interesting to note, and again these are fascinating things and how they shape history, it's interesting to note that up until the advent of Europeans into the New World, they did not have access to sugar cane.

Sugar was not part of their diet. They used other sorts of sweeteners like honey, but not sugar. Sugar is one of the products of the New World that they were able to bring back. So as Britain gets involved in conquering islands in the West Indies or taking them from the Spanish or the Dutch or the French, and as they get involved in growing sugar, they begin to find themselves slipping into the involvement of the slave trade.

Because both the Spanish and the Portuguese had been involved for a number of decades in enslaving Africans and bringing them across the Atlantic to work on plantations in the West Indies. For instance, consider Jamaica.

Jamaica was seized from the Spanish by the English in 1655. By the end of the century, within 45 years, it was home to 45 ,000 Africans who had been enslaved. Within 75 years, by 1775, there were close to a quarter of a million Africans who had been enslaved in Jamaica with the white population being around 18 ,000.

They worked on more than 750 plantations and the revenue, this is the number I'm about to give you, is the revenue from that period. It's not in contemporary pounds. 1 .6 million pounds a year is what the revenue brought of the selling of the sugar cane.

That is in the 1770s. It's over 230 years ago. And to get an equivalent price today, you probably need to multiply that by probably something around the figure of 3 or 400 to give you a contemporary figure of how many pounds.

And then you obviously, if you're doing it in pounds, you get dollars, you need to multiply by 2 .4 or whatever. So you're looking at a vast sum of money. And that's just Jamaica. It's not the other Caribbean islands.

And so when evangelicals at the end of the 18th century begin to raise the question, the slave trade is an abomination in the eyes of God, it has to be ended. The powerful vested interests in Britain, those who moved and shook that society then, they were not about to consider it.

The Middle Passage and the Human Cost of Slavery

There was too much at stake for them in terms of financial commitments and so on. Now, I want to sketch a little, and this is very disturbing. I want to sketch a little of how the slave trade, the mechanics as it were of it.

One, if you want to see this graphically portrayed, I think recently it's been very well done in the movie Amistad, which details the revolt on a Spanish slave ship in the 1830s. And the Africans involved were able to take the ship and start to get it back to Africa, but they had no idea of how really where to sail it and ended up off the coast of Massachusetts where they were picked up by the American Navy.

And then there began a massive court case in which the Spanish owners of the ship came and demanded that the Africans be returned. They were going to go to Cuba. And the movie is about that. And it ends very well.

The Africans are released and they go back to Africa. But a number of the things that they indicate about those key figures involved, some of their later lives were unhappy. But there is a portion in the movie which is deeply disturbing where the leading character remembers how he was enslaved.

And it runs for about ten minutes and it's very disturbing. The British would do what they called the triangular passage where ships would sail from three of the major ports in England, London, Bristol and Liverpool.

The great wealth that Liverpool and Bristol had in the 19th century was built on the slave trade. The ships would sail from those ports. They would sail with various types of cheap goods like metal goods and woolens and beads and mirrors, sometimes alcohol, sometimes even gunpowder and firearms.

And they would sail down to what we describe today as West Africa and where they would sell these things to either Arabs who were involved in the slave trade or also Africans. Initially, many of the slaves who had been enslaved through tribal wars or various differing groups in West Africa had conquered another group and they enslaved them and sold them to Westerners as slavers.

As the slave trade developed though, the Westerners themselves would be going in the interior to capture slaves. Many of those who were enslaved would walk miles to the coast and that in itself was a trauma.

And then they would set eyes upon people they had never seen the like of before, namely Europeans, whites. And then they would go through the horror of being split up if they had been captured in families, husbands and wives split up and packed into the holds of slave ships where they would be packed closely together, so close they could hardly move, and chained together through the voyage.

The voyage might take anywhere up to three or four months to cross the Atlantic. It was called the Middle Passage. Those in that environment found themselves, many of them died in that context. And often the dead were shackled to the living.

It was an incredibly unhealthy environment. That's just looking at it from a medical standpoint. Many of the British Royal Navy would say that they could, they knew when they were coming close to a slave ship, they could smell the ship from miles away.

The inhumanity, it's horrendous to think of it, the inhumanity that was done to these men and women. Many of the sailors, historians now as they study this period are realizing many of the sailors on these slave ships also died of the diseases.

And then once they got to the New World, there was another trauma to face. And that trauma was to be sold. And to be handled, and manhandled like animals with no concern for their humanity. And sometimes they'd be sold and resold a number of times before arriving at their final destination.

And again you've got the language barrier. They have no idea of the language because they're speaking a variety of African languages. Upwards again it's estimated upwards of 25 of Africans would die within three years of their arrival in either America or the Caribbean.

The British eventually would be involved, I mean we talk about the Jewish Holocaust and I don't want to misuse that word because sometimes it is misused. But the British would be eventually involved in transporting around 50 ,000 a year by the end of the 18th century.

In total around three million Africans were transported by British slave ships from Africa to the New World. And that's just the British, not the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese. And it's horrific.

It really is horrific to think about. All of this human suffering in many respects escapes the power of the historian to describe. And that's why I do think, I do a section in a church history course that I give on contemporary and 18th century evangelicalism up to the present time.

And one of the things I do when I deal with this issue is I use that film clip from Amistad. And it's shocking because it cannot be described in words. Here is William Cooper, the great evangelical poet, or some, his name is spelled Calper but he pronounced Cooper, lampooning the defense of the slave trade.

Sugar, Consumer Luxury, and the Defense of Slavery

And those who defended it really defended it on economic reasons but a lot of it came down to the fact that it filled the pockets of British consumers and it produced a number of luxury goods in particular, sugar.

Here is Cooper, his poem was called Pity for Poor Africans and it's a satire on the English attitudes. I pity them greatly but I must be mum, for how could we do without sugar and rum? Especially sugar so needful we see, what give up our desserts, our coffee and tea.

And it's an attack on the British attitude. We often wonder, I was raised in England and one of the things the English have is a sweet tooth. And where did that come from? Well it comes from this period, where they become deeply addicted to sugar.

And one doesn't want to say that the whole of the slave trade amounted simply to sugar, but sugar was a major, major factor in it. When evangelicals begin to raise the cry that there is something deeply wrong in English society, that they would perpetuate the slave trade, that they would tolerate the slave trade, the responses are from our standpoint amazing.

William Young, the personal owner of some 1 ,300 slaves, said commerce in the West Indies, if they stopped the slave trade would be utterly ruined and the entire existence of the British Empire would be jeopardised.

Some said that if we tried to end the slave trade there would be a revolution in England, equivalent to the French Revolution. Wilberforce, as we will see, is critical in ending the slave trade. He said if it took a revolution, it must be stopped even if a revolution came, like the horror of the French Revolution.

Mr. Grosvenor, I'm quoting here, admitted in the House of Commons in 1791, the slave trade was not an amiable trade, this is in his very words, but neither was the trade of the butcher an amiable trade, yet a mutton chop was nevertheless a very good thing.

It's hard for us to think of the reasoning, this is a politician, arguing that in the House of Commons and basically winning the day at that time, that's 1791, the beginning of the slave trade, or the beginning of when the evangelicals were beginning to be concerned about the slave trade.

Evangelical Complicity: Newton and Whitefield

John Newton, who was a slave trader in England, in his early years, in his 20s, in the 1740s, he was a slave trader. And he actually saw both sides of the experience because he ended up for two years a slave in West Africa.

Very interesting if you read his autobiography. But he was converted on a slave ship in the midst of a storm in the Atlantic. One would think he would have immediately given up slave trading. He did not.

He continued to captain a slave ship for about three years or so after his conversion until around the age of 29, he had a stroke, which prevented him from putting to sea. Many years later, he would be disgusted by his involvement.

When he was in his late 50s and 60s, he learned much better. And he could say this, I think I should quit, I would have quit the slave trade sooner had I considered it, as I do now, to be unlawful and wrong.

But I never had a scruple upon this head at the time. Neither was such a thought ever suggested to me by any friends. What I did, I did ignorantly, considering that the line of life which divine providence had allotted me.

And having no concern in point of conscience but to treat the slaves while under my care with as much humanity as a regard for my own safety would admit. Newton, we might say, well, he was unique, but he wasn't unique.

And this is a disturbing thing. We noted earlier in the series something of the greatness of George Whitefield. And I have great admiration for Whitefield. The only blot on his character is in this area, that he tolerated and supported the slave trade.

He was critical in introducing slavery into Georgia. He had started an orphanage in Georgia, a place called Bethesda. The orphanage still exists, actually. And he wanted people to work on the grounds.

He couldn't find people. And he lobbied the governor of Georgia to allow them to introduce slaves and they could work there. Now, some might argue and offset this. Well, he always emphasized the importance of being good to slaves and treating them humanly.

Biblical Arguments Against Slavery

And he criticized slave owners who ill-used their slaves. But still, did he not see that there was something fundamentally wrong with slavery? Now, the one argument that many evangelicals made in this period, and I'm actually going to read a section of the way in which certain evangelicals in this period responded to this whole issue before there is a growing awareness of the wrongness of the slave trade.

Some evangelicals argued, well, it's endorsed by the scriptures. And if you go back into the scriptures, you find in the Old Testament, you certainly find provisions made in this whole area for slaves.

If you come into the New Testament, you never find any of the apostles urging those who own slaves to free them. At least you don't find it explicitly. I think there are a number of texts in the New Testament that hint at a Christian, a full Christian understanding is that slavery is wrong.

Passages like 1 Timothy 1, verses 8 -11, where the apostle Paul is enumerating that the law is not given for the righteous, but for the unrighteous. And then he enumerates the list of individuals in 1 Timothy 1, and among them, he mentions in verse 10, that I'm reading, I have a King James, but he says, the law is made for murderers of fathers, murderers of mothers, for man-players, for whoremongers, for them that defile themselves in mankind, for men-stealers.

And the word is kidnappers. And in common Jewish thinking, kidnappers were those who were involved in kidnapping people for slavery. And I think that's a criticism of the slavery in the ancient world, and it's a criticism of slavery in the ancient world.

The book of Philemon, I think if you read it closely, seeks to undermine the whole concept of slavery. Here, Onesimus, a slave of the man Philemon, a Christian, had escaped and made his way to Rome, and Paul had met him in Rome, and Onesimus had been converted to the apostle Paul's ministry in Rome.

But Paul realized that this man legally is the property of Philemon, and so he, although Paul says he'd like to keep him, he needs to go back. But then he tells Philemon in the letter, he said, I'm positive, I'm certain you will receive him back, not merely as a man, as it were, but as a Christian, as a brother.

I would dearly have loved him, kept him with me, he says, but I expect you can do more than I ask. And there is a hint there, I think, that he expects Philemon to free Onesimus, that Onesimus might come back and minister to Paul in Rome.

It's not explicit, I grant you, but I think there is a hint of it there. There is a passage also in 1 Corinthians 7, where Paul is talking about slavery, and he is arguing that in some respects, the context in which we are born is neither here nor there, but then he says in 1 Corinthians 7, verse 21, Art thou called, being a slave, servant of King James?

I care not for it, but if thou mayst be made free, use it rather. In other words, if you get an opportunity to get free, take it. And I think he wouldn't say a thing like that unless he recognized that there was something wrong with the institution of slavery.

Ancient Slavery, Race, and Human Dignity

Now, having said those things, one has to recognize that there is a critical difference between slavery in Bible times and slavery as it has existed in recent memory, recent Western history. And I think it's and the difference is the basis upon which the slavery in the Old Testament is, and the ancient world is constructed, and the slavery in which the Europeans engaged.

In the ancient world, people were enslaved on the basis of their being conquered by another people. And the Romans basically enslaved everybody they conquered. And many of their slaves were Greeks and Egyptians and you name it.

It was not, my point is it was not racially based. And in the Roman Empire, there was a flexibility within the structure that a person could start off their career as a slave, be paid for their services, and actually get enough money to purchase their freedom, and end up working up the social ladder and die a senator.

And that happens where a man has started off his career as a slave, he'd been a Greek slave, he'd got enough money to win his freedom, and ended up being a multi-millionaire in the Roman Empire, and being a very powerful figure.

There are some recent studies, and I'm thinking here by a man named Frank Snowden, who has argued that in fact the modern concept of what we describe as racism, the distinction of men and women on the basis of color, did not exist in the ancient world.

The Romans were, in their concept of slavery, it was not racially based, it was when they thought of others, they divided themselves on the basis of language. If a person didn't speak Latin properly, he was a barbarian.

It didn't matter what he looked like. Slavery in the ancient world that the scriptures speak of is very different from slavery as Westerners have known it, or as being in Western history in recent times.

Because in recent times it has been racially based. It stems from the arguments that were made that the Africans were, in some respects, the argument being that they were inferior to Europeans. And there was no way in the period we're looking at that if an African was able to win their freedom, that they would be able to work their way up the echelons of society.

There was a deep racism that was deeply rooted in this whole practice. And as I say, it's very disturbing as you look back. In some respects, well, when you look at unbelievers, fine, they're not believers, they don't know the Lord Jesus Christ.

They don't know the great truth that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, Jew or Gentile, male or female, that Christ breaks down racial barriers and cultural barriers. What is disturbing to me is that evangelicals like Whitefield or like Newton could for a period of time be involved in the slave trade and see nothing wrong with it.

Racism, Church Discipline, and Misuse of Scripture

Well, let me illustrate this by a letter written by a group of Baptists in 1711. These Baptists are in South Carolina and in the town of Charleston. And in their church was a number of slave owners. And one of the slave owners did something which shocked others in the church who were not slave owners.

There was a law in the books in South Carolina between 1696 and 1722 that required slave owners, if their slave ran away, male slave, ran away more than three times and was caught, he was to be castrated.

And this slave owner had a slave who did that. And he did, he followed the law. Other Baptists in the church were shocked. And they wrote to a group of Baptists in England in a place called Devon, a little Baptist church called South Moulton.

I'm not sure and I'm not being able to discover why they wrote to those, all those groups all the way across the ocean, but they did. And they asked them, what would these Baptists advise? These people were shocked, they were going to disfellowship the man.

What is shocking is the response of the Baptists in England, which I think indicates, one, the inability to think this thing through in terms of the entirety of the scriptures. Two, the way in which racism, even in the early 1700s, had become deeply part of British thinking.

They emphasized that the action of, these are the Devonshire Baptists, they emphasized the action of the slave owner, and I'm going to be following my notes here closely because I need, I want to quote the exact words.

They said the action of the slave owner would have been, quote, an abomination, savoring of injustice, cruelty, and un-Christian behavior if he had castrated his slave without the law of the magistrate.

But they said, quote, the man who had done this had not sinned because the punishment was regarded as legal in South Carolina. The law was made by the magistrate, and therefore is binding. Yes, they went on to say they knew that man-made laws were not binding in themselves, but they emphasized that if man-made laws were agreeable to God's word, serve the common good, hinder not liberty of conscience, end of quote, they should be obeyed.

And then they went on to say that if this was not done, who knows what could have happened. There could have been a massive revolt of those Africans who were held in slavery in South Carolina. Then they went on to quote biblical texts, and I suspect you probably know from the lectures we've had in this series that I am committed to the scriptures as the authority for the believer's life, and I'm committed to the scriptures as the inerrant word of God.

But it is dangerous to quote verses out of context without looking at the entirety of scripture and the spirit of scripture and the principles of scripture. All kinds of things can be supported if you pull a verse out of context and in isolation, and this is what we see them doing.

They quote a passage from Leviticus 25, which seals this place, and Deuteronomy 15. And in Leviticus 25, 39 to 46, and Deuteronomy 15, 12 to 13, a distinction is made in those two passages, in Leviticus 25, 39 to 46, and Deuteronomy 15, 12 to 13, a distinction is made between Jewish slaves and slaves who belong to other nations.

Jewish slaves could only be held in captivity six years, then released. Slaves from other nations could be held in captivity without that seven year kind of granting of release. Well, the argument that these men then made was, well, look, it's quite clear then that there was a difference made between Jewish slaves and slaves from outside other nations.

They argued, is this not parallel to the situation of the African slaves? Now, as I say, the only way you can make that jump is you have to have already accepted the idea of the more modern form of slavery being based on racism.

And the upshot of the paper was they eventually said, no, the man is not being guilty of sin, he has not done anything wrong, they should have fellowship with him, but he should be advised not to treat his slaves inhumanly.

What is amazing, now it's easy to see this in hindsight, but what is amazing is the burden of the passage is the unity of the church and not the humanity of these men and women who are involved. The concern didn't lie with the slave, but with the peace of the church.

And the danger, there's a real danger here of taking verses in isolation to justify things that are biblically wrong, that go against the spirit of the scriptures. Well, I want to stop here at this point, and then in the next hour we want to see how evangelicals begin to recognize there is something flawed with the institution of slavery, deeply flawed, and in particular we want to think about the life of William Wilberforce.

Quaker Abolitionism and Anthony Benezet

At the end of the next hour we'll have some time for questions and comments. So, William Wilberforce, and the way in which evangelicals began to realize that the slave trade was intrinsically wrong, and that they under God and before God were responsible to do something about it.

The first denominational body that begins to criticize the slave trade in the English speaking world are the Quakers. Very different from what they had been in the 17th century, when many of them had been fairly wild in their Christian lives in terms of what they professed, but by the 18th century they had in many respects quietened down.

And by 1760, on both sides of the Atlantic, Quakers condemned slavery, and you could not be a slave owner and be a Quaker. You would be disfellowshipped. It is very important to note this because one of the very important books that is written against the slave trade was written by a Quaker named Anthony Benzet, B-E-N-E-Z-E-T, B-E-N-E-Z-E-T.

He's the son of French Huguenots, refugees. The Huguenots had been driven out of France in the 1680s, many of them anyway, it's estimated probably anywhere up to half a million had been driven out of France in the late 17th century.

And Benzet, if you think of his name, it's obviously French as you look at it, in origin, his parents had come to the United States, to Carolinas, and he had become a Quaker. And he is the first major figure to write a tract against slavery.

Anthony Benzet, B-E-N-E-Z-E-T, died in 1784. What's important about his book is that he emphasized two things. First of all, that Africans were just as much human beings as Europeans. That issue that I mentioned right at the beginning, the question that evangelicals had to deal with in the 18th century is what does it mean to be a human?

And the reason they could justify slavery was to argue on racist grounds, and in some sense they were never able clearly to delineate that Africans were not as human as Europeans. And he challenges that, and argues against that.

He also argues in no uncertain terms that slave traders and slavers who said they were Christians were violating Jesus' commandments to love their neighbor, and to do good to all men. Now that tract is of influence because it's John Wesley who picked it up.

John Wesley's Condemnation of the Slave Trade

Wesley, who died in 1791. In the 1770s, when the book was published, Wesley read it. And by this time, George Whitefield was dead. One would hope you can't deal in what ifs. One would hope that Whitefield would have come out along with his fellow Methodist evangelist, Wesley, and agreed that the slave trade was wrong.

But there is no hint in any of Whitefield's writings before his death in 1770 that he thought so. But after a few years after his death, John Wesley reads this tract of Ben Zay, and it firmly puts him in the anti-slavery camp.

He's probably the first key figure who is an evangelical who argues against slavery. And he describes it as the excrucible sum of all villainies. Excrucible, a word that we hardly use today. But he certainly hammers it.

He writes a book in 1774 called Thoughts Upon Slavery. He uses traditional Western thought, the thought that was going to be used in a few years after this, in the founding of the American Republic, when he argues this way, liberty is the right of every human creature.

And no human law can deprive him of that right which he derives from the law of nature. He argues that there is a solidarity between white Europeans and black Africans. Why? They are all made by one common creator.

They are all human beings. They are not a width inferior to Europeans. Now, what he's arguing here is derived from Ben Zay in many respects. And so that little tract, nobody remembers Ben Zay today, but he influenced greatly John Wesley.

To the end of his life, Wesley fiercely denounced, publicly, the slave trade. In print and from the pulpit. If you recall, when we went through Wesley, one of the centers of Wesleyan Methodism was Bristol.

And he would regularly go to Bristol to preach. He was not afraid, in Bristol, to denounce the way in which that city had made its wealth and its fortune and enriched its businessmen on the blood of Africans and through the slave trade.