Our exceptionalness is not for us but for others. That is the paradox at the heart of who we are. So what makes us different has nothing to do with jingoism and nationalistic chest beating. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have been good. If we have ever been great, it is only because we have longed to help make others great too. That earnest humility and generosity must be attended to.

When eighteenth-century British society had retreated from the historical Christianity it had earlier embraced, the Christian character of the nation—which had given Britain, among other things, a proud tradition of almshouses to help the poor, dating all the way back to the tenth century—had all but disappeared.

Jesus did not only communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived. And by living with his disciples, he showed them what life was supposed to look like, what God had intended it to look like. It was not merely intellectual or merely spiritual. It was all these things together; it was something more. Bonhoeffer aimed to model the Christian life for his students. This led him to the idea that, to be a Christian, one must live with Christians.

It had been Luther's idea that Christians should confess to one another instead of to a priest. Most Lutherans had thrown that baby out with the bathwater and didn't confess to anyone. Confession of any kind was considered overly Catholic, just as extemporaneous prayer was criticized as too pietistic. But Bonhoeffer successfully instituted the practice of confessing one to another.

To help them was tantamount to shaking one's fist at God. Raising their sights from the vulgar spectacle of things like public hangings could rock the boat of civil society and mustn't be attempted.

I fancy it must be this which, when I am with you, prevents me considering you an object of compassion, tho' Prime Minister of England; for now, when I am out of hearing of your foyning…I cannot help representing you to myself as oppressed with cares and troubles.

He now began to think of the church as called by God to "stand with those who suffer".

It didn't take the abbé long to get to the bottom of things, and once their identities were cleared up, Lageard put himself at their disposal, asking how he might improve their situation.

Perhaps even more significant is that here at the same table were two champions of abolition meeting at a time before either had entered the lists on its behalf, as it were.

The cost of caring for the "incurables" was prohibitive. They must "give their lives" for the greater cause just as everyone else, and just as the parents of soldiers must "make the ultimate sacrifice".

This was evidently the place Wilberforce had come to, a place of such guilt before God, of such misery at his own failings, that nothing short of being publicly pilloried would do. And so now he unburdened himself somewhat by declaring himself to his friends. One can only imagine what, in this overemotional state, he might have written to them, and one can only imagine what they would have thought upon reading his declaration.

What he needed desperately was someone to whom he might unburden himself, someone who would understand and know what to do, someone with the wisdom to remind him of what he needed to be reminded of just now—of God's grace—of the upside of God's love.