It used to be a jibe that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer. More positively, we might note that once upon a time the Tory Party used to pray. Lord Shaftesbury, the leading Christian social reformer of the last century (and founder of the Church Pastoral Society), was just such a Tory.
So, of course, was the Tory MP William Wilberforce.
Wilberforce and Shaftesbury
In his account of Wilberforce's forty-year-long struggle to end the evil of the slave trade, Garth Lean, in his book God's Politician,5 reminds us that, with Henry Thornton, Wilberforce established what these days we would call a basecommunity. At the village of Clapham, four miles south of Westminster, the Queen Anne house, Battersea Rise, became the centre of the prayer life which Wilberforce uncompromisingly believed had to be central to parliamentary efforts to outlaw slavery. Many years after Wilberforce died the fellowship was given the misleading name, the Clapham Sect. They were never an insular sect and their appeal was universal. One of the leading critics of William Wilberforce was the radical, William Hazlitt, who criticised him for being preoccupied with evils abroad, saying, 'He preaches untutored Christianity to untutored savages: and tolerates its worst abuses in civilised states.' Those who defended Wilberforce said this was like criticising Christopher Columbus for discovering America but for not going on to discover Australia and New Zealand as well. John Wesley - who in 1780 had published his Thoughts on Slavery - described slavery as 'the execrable sum of all villainy'. Government and the population at large turned their backs on the atrocities and degradation connived at with the full authority of Parliament and British law. The secularists and humanists of the day - still lionised by today's Left - were bitter in their attacks on Wilberforce. The reformer William Cobbett said Wilberforce worked for the 'fat, lazy negroes', while, 'doing nothing' for white wage slaves of England, and that he had 'never done one single act in favour of the labourers of this country'. Though his best-remembered achievement lies in the Bill to abolish the slave trade, the trafficking in human lives was not Wilberforce's sole concern. He and his