It wouldn't be entirely clear to him until 1787, but in the meantime, as a first step in the right direction, Wilberforce championed two bills, both of which failed. One was for parliamentary reform and the other was a strange and ghoulish bill combining two macabre issues: putting an end to the burning of women at the stake, and selling the corpses of hanged criminals for dissection.

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.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless.

We pretend we would have spoken out for the Jews in Bonhoeffer's day, or that we would have spoken against the slave trade in Wilberforce's day, but are we speaking out today on the issues that are no less important to God in our time? If not, we are deceiving ourselves.

In one conversation that September in Geneva, Visser 't Hooft asked Bonhoeffer what he prayed for. "If you want to know the truth," Bonhoeffer replied, "I pray for the defeat of my nation. For I believe that is the only way to pay for all the suffering which my country has caused in the world.

Years later, after Niemöller had been imprisoned for eight years in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler, he penned these infamous words: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a Trade Unionist.

What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia.

We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the "will of God.

Bonhoeffer's three conclusions—that the church must question the state, help the state's victims, and work against the state, if necessary—were too much for almost everyone. But for him they were inescapable. In time, he would do all three.

Forgive me for these rather personal ramblings, but they just came to me as I thought about our time together recently. And after all, we do have an interest in each other. I still have a hard time thinking that you really find all these ideas of mine completely mad. Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

The suppression of the Slave Trade and the reformation of manners.

Of the many societal problems Wilberforce might have thought needed his attention, slavery would have been the least visible of all, and by a wide margin.