Thornton advised Wilberforce not to make haste, and to accept that such a change took time. Through December and into the new year Wilberforce’s many doubts about his own worthiness and ability to uphold his new beliefs did indeed continue. His diary is peppered with such statements as: ‘I am colder and more insensible than I was – I ramble – oh God, protect me from myself’; ‘colder than ever – very unhappy – called at Newton’s and bitterly moved; he comforted me’; and ‘was strengthened in prayer, and first I shall be able to live more to God, which determined to do – much affected by Doddridge’s directions for spending time, and hoped to conform to them in some degree: it must be by force at first, for I find I perpetually wander from serious thoughts when I am off my guard’.78 Steadily, as the weeks went by, his willpower and new convictions prevailed. He resigned from the clubs at which he had passed so many happy evenings, spent many hours each day studying the Bible, and took new lodgings in London ‘at one of the Adelphi hotels’,79 which gave him easier access to Evangelical preaching. He wrote earnestly to his sister about his beliefs, and reassuringly to his mother about his continuance in public life: he would not ‘fly from the post where Providence has placed me’.80 He continued to visit Downing Street and attend the House of Commons, his mind more at peace as he realised he could live up to the standards he had set himself without forsaking the world he had always known.
One study of religious conversion contends that once conversion is complete ‘there is the sensation of liberation and victory, which the convert displays by a powerful and integral joy of the spirit’. The convert also has a ‘sense more or less like the sense of vision or touch of nearness to God’, and of ‘an answering touch which thrills and recreates him’.81 By Easter 1786 Wilberforce was writing to his sister from Stock in Essex on a beautiful day: ‘the day has been delightful. I was out before six … I think my own devotions become more fervent when offered in this way amidst the general chorus with which all nature seems to be swelling the song of praise and thanksgiving; and accept the time which has been spent at church and at dinner … and neither in the sanctuary nor at table I trust, had I a heart unwarmed with gratitude to the giver of all good things.’82 William Wilberforce had found his faith.
Wilberforce would later describe his emergence as an Evangelical convert as being akin to wakening from a dream and recovering ‘the use of my reason after a delirium’.83 His governing motives had been ‘emulation, and a desire of distinction … ardent after the applause of my fellow creatures, I quite forgot that I was an accountable being; that I was hereafter to appear at the bar of God’.84 Now he believed ‘that if Christianity were not a fable, it was infinitely important to study its precepts, and when known to obey them’,85 and resolved to regulate his political conduct according to a new golden rule, ‘to do as I would be done by’.86 He was clear that he would stay in politics, but from now on his political activity would be directed and armed by the philosophy of Christian evangelicalism, of which he was now an adherent and would eventually become a leader.
Most people found it hard to distinguish between the Evangelicals and Methodists. As Sydney Smith wrote in 1808: ‘Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists and the Evangelical clergymen of the Church of England … We shall use the general term of Methodism to designate those three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but treating them all as in one general conspiracy against common sense and rational orthodox Christianity.’87 Another observer had written in 1772: ‘As soon as a person begins to show any symptoms of seriousness and strictness more than the fashion of the age allows he is called a Methodist, though he may happen to have no sort of connection with them; and when once this stigma is fixed upon him, he becomes like a deer whom the sportsmen have marked out for a chase.’88 Evangelicals such as Newton also blurred matters by insisting that religious experience was more important than ‘nice distinctions’ between different categories of Christians. Methodism and evangelicalism were indeed part of the same religious movement. They both had their intellectual origins in German Pietism and English Puritanism, which had stressed ‘a reformation or purification in worship as well in life’. They both contended that every person was lost in sin and could only be rescued and achieve personal salvation through faith in Christ. They had both moved on from the seventeenth-century Puritans of Civil War times by determinedly staying within the Church of England (although the Methodists broke away in 1795), and giving complete loyalty to the Crown. The general themes of Methodists and Evangelicals were indistinguishable, and Methodists would generally have regarded themselves as Evangelicals: it was not sufficient merely to observe the forms of being a Christian; eternal damnation could only be avoided by allowing Christian beliefs to guide all the habits and actions of daily life. Their theology was no different from that of the established Church, but the seriousness with which they practised it most certainly was.
Any doctrinal differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were blurred by the cross-currents of beliefs within each grouping: some Evangelicals, such as Newton, held to the Calvinistic concept of predestination favoured by some Methodists; others were in accord with Wesley himself in believing in unlimited atonement and the free will of human beings. The crucial differences between Methodists and Evangelicals were therefore largely of nuance and organisation, but these led to important differences in the type of person likely to join each group. Methodists were organised around their own Societies and Conferences, with a national and eventually international network and hierarchy, while Evangelicals were entirely outside such machinery. Evangelicals tended to be more in tune with prevailing English culture, less likely to separate themselves from society, less austere in their attitudes to simple sports and leisure, more likely to encourage a broad education, and readier to involve themselves in public life. Such differences of view partly stemmed from, and in turn strengthened, the general tendency for leading Evangelicals to be drawn from the more highly educated and business-orientated classes, while the tens of thousands of converts to Methodism were drawn heavily from lower income groups. Wilberforce was therefore a natural Evangelical, and would in due course find no shortage of people with a similar background to his own who could share his habits and thinking.
If Evangelicalism was more an attitude towards Christianity than a separate branch of the faith, what were its defining attributes, as now adopted by Wilberforce? One was certainly a belief in the all-encompassing role of Providence: God’s hand could be detected in events great and small. It was Providence, he believed, that had enabled him to win his seat in Parliament by methods he would later have found unacceptable, thus launching him on a political life when an earlier conversion would have kept him away from it. If he escaped without injury from an accident, as he did when the linchpin on his coach fell out, he saw Providence at work; when Napoleon dominated Europe, Wilberforce considered him ‘manifestly an instrument in the hands of Providence’, and ‘When God has done with him he will probably show how easily he can get rid of him.’89 That anything would happen entirely accidentally was now alien to Wilberforce’s thinking: ‘How I abhor that word, fortunate; as if things happen by chance!’90
A second fundamental aspect of Evangelical beliefs was that Christian principles should be applied to all areas of life. They should guide every aspect of human life, not merely be added on to other beliefs or conflicting activities. As a result, drunkenness, gambling, duelling, the unfairness of the penal system, every form of immorality and the lack of observation of the Sabbath were all targets of Evangelical attack. Evangelicals considered themselves as ambassadors of God on earth, and to be at all times, an example of his godliness, holiness and compassion. Such activities as card-playing, public dancing and horse-racing were a distraction from devotion to God. Worldly indulgence was to be avoided, and leisure was seen as an opportunity for renewal rather than an end in itself. By contrast, prayer and devotion were essential: ‘There is nothing more fatal to the life and power of religion; nothing which makes God more certainly withdraw his grace’,