Perhaps the most important gift which God gave to the Church through
his ministry was his lifelong testimony against the darkness of
Materialism.
2. Second only to his keen sense of the Unseen World was his conviction
of God's love.
Other aspects of the Divine Nature as it is revealed to
us--Almightiness, Justice, Awfulness (though, of course, he recognized
them all)--did not colour his heart and life as they were coloured
by the sense of the Divine Love. That Love seemed to him to explain
all the mysteries of existence, to lift
"the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world";
to make its dark places light, its rough places plain, its hard
things easy, even its saddest things endurable. His Gospel was
this: God, Who made us in His own Image, loves us like a Father;
and therefore, in life and in death, in time and in eternity, all
is, and must be, well.
3. "He prayeth best, who lovest best
All things both great and small.
For the dear God Who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."
Those familiar words of Coleridge perfectly express Wilberforce's
attitude towards his fellow-creatures, and when I say "fellow-creatures,"
I am not thinking only of his brothers and sisters in the human family.
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