TRINITY · 30 JULY & TRINITY · 13 AUGUST
William Wilberforce & Florence Nightingale
Parliamentarian & Nurse · The Reformers of Public Life · d. 1833 & 1910
Wilberforce — WIL-ber-fors · Clapham Sect — KLAP-am · Nightingale — NY-ting-gayl · Scutari — SKOO-tah-ree · Crimea — kry-MEE-ah · John Newton — NYOO-ton
O God, who didst call thy servants William and Florence to fight for the dignity of thy children in the parliament and the hospital ward; Grant us their courage to speak when silence is convenient and to serve when service is costly, knowing that every act of justice and every act of mercy is an act of worship; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Gospel has social consequences, or it is not the Gospel. William Wilberforce (WIL-ber-fors) and Florence Nightingale (NY-ting-gayl) are the two Anglican laypeople who most completely embody the conviction that the faith received at Baptism is not a private consolation but a public obligation — that the God who made every human being in his image requires those who claim his name to defend that image wherever it is violated, whether in the slave ships of the Atlantic trade or the cholera-ridden wards of Scutari (SKOO-tah-ree). Both came from privileged families. Both were told that their vocation was unsuitable for their sex or station. Both pressed on anyway, in the conviction that God had specifically called them to the specific work they were doing. Both transformed the world they inhabited more completely than almost any ordained minister of their generation. Both are in the cloud of witnesses as the fullest expression of what the Anglican tradition means when it says that every baptised Christian has a vocation and that the vocation of the layperson is exercised in the world.
William Wilberforce came to serious Christian faith in 1785 through the influence of his friend the Younger Pitt, a meeting with John Newton (NYOO-ton) — the former slave-trade captain who had become an Evangelical clergyman and the author of Amazing Grace — and the reading of Philip Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. He pursued the abolition of the slave trade for twenty years in Parliament, introducing his first abolition bill in 1789 and seeing it defeated, reintroducing it session after session through ridicule, opposition, and the devastating personal attacks of those whose commercial interests it threatened, until the Slave Trade Act passed in 1807. He continued to advocate for the abolition of slavery itself until three days before his death in 1833, when he learned that the Slavery Abolition Act had passed its second reading. He died on 29 July; the Act received Royal Assent on 28 August. The Clapham Sect (KLAP-am) he had helped to found — a group of wealthy Anglican Evangelicals who combined prayer meetings with political action, personal piety with institutional reform — was the model for every subsequent movement of Christian social engagement in the English-speaking world.
Florence Nightingale was born into a wealthy family in 1820, educated by her father in Greek, Latin, and mathematics, and from the age of seventeen heard — she described it precisely and repeatedly — the voice of God calling her to a specific service. Against furious family opposition she trained as a nurse, led a team of thirty-eight nurses to the military hospital at Scutari during the Crimean (kry-MEE-ah) War in 1854, and reduced the mortality rate in that hospital from forty-two per cent to two per cent in six months by the radical application of statistical analysis, basic hygiene, and systematic nursing care. She invented the modern hospital, established nursing as a respected profession, and spent the last fifty years of her life reforming military and civilian healthcare systems across the British Empire. She also wrote Suggestions for Thought, a remarkable work of private theology in which she described her experience of God as a direct voice calling her to specific work, and wrestled with theodicy, mysticism, and the nature of the divine will with a depth that would have marked her as a significant theologian had she been a man and had the work been published in her lifetime.
Wilberforce and Nightingale together hold the full range of the Anglican social tradition: the parliamentary arena and the hospital ward, the legislative campaign and the bedside care, the public argument that changes the law and the private service that changes individual lives. Their feasts fall within two weeks of each other in mid-Trinity, in the long green season of ordinary faithful labour — which is where they belong, these two exhausting, brilliant, utterly determined servants of God who spent their lives doing what they had been called to do without ceasing and without complaint. They are the embodiment of the Anglican conviction that the Gospel is addressed to society and not only to the individual, that the justice which flows from Sinai and the mercy which flows from Calvary must be expressed in parliaments and hospitals as fully as in churches and chapels, and that the layman and the laywoman, equipped with their particular gifts and fired by their particular calling, are fully capable of carrying the Gospel into the places the ordained can rarely reach.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant William didst show that the faith which cannot change the law of the land is a faith not yet fully believed, and by thy servant Florence didst show that the mercy which cannot enter the hospital ward is a mercy not yet fully practised; Grant that we may carry the Gospel into every arena of our lives, knowing that the whole of the world belongs to thee and that thy Kingdom demands our obedience in every corner of it; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.