The change in his sentiments was to gather pace when he and Milner resumed their travels once Parliament had risen at the end of June. Heading first for Genoa for a reunion with the ladies, they then travelled to Switzerland, where Wilberforce was overcome by the beauty of the mountains: ‘I have never since ceased to recur with peculiar delight to its enchanting scenery, especially to that of Interlaken, which is a vast garden of the loveliest fertility and beauty stretched out at the base of the giant Alps.’37 He wrote to Muncaster on 14 August that ‘I have never been in any other part of the world, for which I could quit a residence in England with so little regret,’ but while retaining his normal good humour – ‘If you read on thus far, I am sure your patience will hold out no longer, and my letter goes into the fire, which in your cold part of the world you will certainly be sitting over when my packet arrives’ – he said he was in despair at ‘the universal corruption and profligacy of the times’, which had now ‘extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people. When the mass of blood is corrupt, there is no remedy but amputation.’38 While in Geneva he happily entertained the many contacts and friends, such as de Lageard, Wyvill and Earl Spencer, who turned up there; but others were evidently noticing a distinct change in his behaviour. When they reached Spa in the Austrian Netherlands (present-day Belgium), he noted: ‘Mrs Crewe cannot believe that I think it wrong to go to the play. – Surprised at hearing that halting on the Sunday was my wish and not my mother’s.’39 When he wrote to congratulate Eliot on his marriage to Pitt’s sister Harriot, he expressed his growing contempt for the pursuit of money, saying that if a man had enough, then ‘to torment himself for fresh acquisitions as delusive in this enjoyment and uncertain in their possession as these are, seems to me a perfect madness’.40
Closeted in his carriage with Milner and the Greek version of the New Testament, to the point that the ladies complained of him paying them insufficient attention, Wilberforce was becoming gradually convinced of the Evangelical Christian case. He always liked to examine a question before pronouncing his view on it; now Milner’s arguments left him intellectually convinced by, but not yet emotionally committed to, the need for a new approach to life. Much later he would recall: ‘I got a clear idea of the doctrines of Religion, perhaps clearer than I have had since, but it was quite in my head. Well, I now fully believed the Gospel and was persuaded that if I died at any time I should perish everlastingly. And yet, such is man, I went on cheerful and gay.’41 Very soon, however, he was to be overwhelmed by the force of what he now believed to be true. ‘What madness is all this,’ he began to think, ‘to continue easy in a state in which a sudden call out of the world would consign me to everlasting misery, and that, when eternal happiness is within my grasp!!’ By the time he was preparing to return to England in late October 1785, ‘the deep guilt and black ingratitude of my past life forced itself upon me in the strongest colours, and I condemned myself for having wasted my precious time, and opportunities, and talents’.42 The ‘great change’ was upon him.
In the autumn of 1785 Wilberforce experienced a classic conversion to Christian evangelicalism, a mental and spiritual experience of enormous power. When it came, the climax of his conversion was neither as dramatic nor as seemingly supernatural as in many other documented cases of the eighteenth century. Charles Wesley had experienced his conversion in 1738 when his sleep was interrupted by someone entering his room and saying, ‘In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise, and believe …’, the speaker turning out to be a friend’s sister who had dreamt that Christ had knocked at her door and told her to do this.43 The celebrated Colonel James Gardiner, who was killed in battle with the Jacobites in 1745 but immortalised in a biography written by Doddridge, experienced his conversion when a ‘blaze of light’44 fell upon a book he was reading and he lifted up his eyes to see a vision of Christ on the Cross, causing him ‘unutterable astonishment and agony of heart’,45 with the result that ‘the whole frame and disposition of his soul was new-modelled and changed; so that he became, and continued to the last day of his exemplary and truly Christian life, the very reverse of what he had been before’.46
Many other famous conversions can be pinpointed to a single day. John Wesley could trace his own such moment to 8.45 p.m. on 14 May 1738, when ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that he had taken my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’47 John Newton’s conversion followed a near shipwreck in which he ‘dreaded death now, and my heart foreboded the worst, if the Scriptures which I had long since opposed, were indeed true’.48 His survival and recovery from a subsequent fever led him ‘from that time’ to be ‘delivered from the power and dominion of sin … I now began to wait upon the Lord.’49 William Huntington, whose conversion led to him building his own chapel in London after a dissolute youth, also had a sudden conversion – one day, he became intensely conscious of sin: ‘I leapt up, with my eyes ready to start out of my head, my hair standing erect, and my countenance stained with all the horrible gloom and dismay of the damned. I cried out to my wife, and said, “Molly, I am undone for ever; I am lost and gone; there is no hope or mercy for me; you know not what a sinner I am; you know not where I am, nor what I feel!”’ He later saw a vision of the Holy Ghost and ‘heard a voice from Heaven, saying unto me in plain words, “Lay by your forms of prayers, and go pray to Jesus Christ; do you not see how pitifully he speaks to Sinners.”’50
It is not possible to pinpoint Wilberforce’s own conversion to a single day, nor did he report the intervention of an other-worldly vision or voice. Yet the time which elapsed between him going about his normal business in the late spring of 1785 and the adoption of an entirely new and rigorous approach to life that December was unusually short. Many such conversions followed years of intellectual doubt and agonising. Gardiner had kept his religious side subordinate for eleven years before his conversion burst through; the ‘awakening’ of the Wesleys also took place over many years; Newton endured periods of internal conflict spread over twelve years; and the great George Whitefield experienced his conversion crisis six years after being deeply affected by listening to a sermon. In another documented case, that of William Grimshaw, the son of a poor farmer from Lancashire who became second only to the Wesleys in Methodist authority, his final conversion took place eight years after he had first been ‘powerfully awakened and alarmed’.51 Wilberforce was clear in later life that true religious conviction could only emerge after a period of self-examination, doubt, and often agony. Writing of his son Samuel’s expectation of his own ‘great change’, he said: ‘I come again and again to look to see if it really be begun, just as a gardener walks up again and again to his fruit trees to see if his peaches are set; if they are swelling and becoming larger, finally they are becoming ripe and rosy.’52 Away from the daily cares of Westminster that summer, and with a companion in Milner who had ‘doctrines of religion in his head though not then I think in his heart’,53 Wilberforce found that his own period of doubt and awakening was relatively short.
A role model of the kind Isaac Milner provided for Wilberforce could be crucial in providing reassurance that conversion was both attainable and desirable. Wilberforce had always been struck by Milner’s intellect, coherence and equanimity; he had a quiet strength to which it is not surprising that the sometimes erratic and overheated young Member of Parliament aspired. There are clear parallels with the cases of others: the conversion of the great Scottish preacher Ebenezer Erskine followed on from ‘his realisation that others have found an experience which he lacked’,54 and that of Lady Huntingdon, founder of a radical Calvinistic movement within Methodism, apparently came about because ‘the happiness of her sister-in-law induced a longing for the same condition’.55 Wilberforce had this factor and many others in common with those who underwent a similar religious experience. For instance, many of them had been exposed to strong religious influences in childhood. Gardiner, Whitefield, the Wesleys and Newton all had mothers with strong personalities who managed to give their children a religious inclination even if it did not become apparent until much later in life. Wilberforce’s