Antislavery movements -- United States; Slavery -- United States
"To the memory of WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, born in Hull, August 24, 1759,
died in London, July 29, 1833. For nearly half a century a member of
the House of Commons, and for six parliaments during that period, one
of the two representatives for Yorkshire. In an age and country
fertile in great and good men, he was among the foremost of those who
fixed the character of their times; because to high and various
talents, to warm benevolence, and to universal candor, he added the
abiding eloquence of a Christian life. Eminent as he was in every
department of public labor, and a leader in every work of charity,
whether to relieve the temporal or the spiritual wants of his fellow
men, his name will ever be specially identified with those exertions
which, by the blessings of God, removed from England the guilt of the
African slave-trade, and prepared the way for the abolition of
slavery in every colony of the empire. In the prosecution of these
objects, he relied not in vain on God; but, in the progress, he was
called to endure great obloquy and great opposition. He outlived,
however, all enmity, and, in the evening of his days, withdrew from
public life and public observation, to the bosom of his family. Yet he
died not unnoticed or forgotten by his country; the Peers and Commons
of England, with the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker at their head, in
solemn procession from their respective houses, carried him to his
fitting place among the mighty dead around, here to repose, till,
through the merits of Jesus Christ his only Redeemer and Saviour, whom
in his life and in his writings he had desired to glorify, he shall
rise in the resurrection of the just."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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