Funeral Oration, by John Ely
Many an imposing spectacle has, in the course of ages, been exhibited within these venerable walls; but never did they present one more instructive than that of this day. When monarchs have received the royal unction, thousands have crowded together in gratulation; and whilst the ceremonial has been graced by the flower of British chivalry and British beauty, a nation's loyalty has responded from the millions of British subjects. The wail of many a requiem has sounded solemnly and touchingly among these aisles and these arches, when the victor or the statesman has been laid in his "bed of glory," honoured by the tears of prince and people; -- or when some royal scion which British fondness cherished, and on which British hopes were suspended, has been rent away from a stock left branchless and barren, and a nation's passionate grief has all but equalled the cry of Egypt's night of calamity. -- But who are these that gather around that coffin? and who is he whom they attend in solemn procession to the sepulchre? No herald proclaims the style of the dead; no coronet glitters in mockery upon the pall; no banners, rent in battle, and wrested from the vanquished foe, wave over the bier; no passion of grief betokens the demise of some cherished fondling of the people, and no blank stupefaction indicates one of those unlooked-for catastrophes which sometimes smite a whole nation's darling hope. No -- princes, statesmen, legislators have mingled in the funeral train with Britain's selectest citizens, that they may pay the last tribute to one whose virtues and philanthropy were his chief distinctions; that tribute, more honourable to themselves than to him, they pay to the Friend of Humanity and the Liberator of Africa.
It belongs to biography to narrate where Wilberforce was born, and what was the course of his personal history; the offices of this day are due to the eloquence, the energy, the perseverance, and the piety which characterized the negro's advocate, and wrought the negro's liberation. He had already pondered the wrongs of the African race, when, in the year 1787, a stranger presented himself before him, and moved him to become their champion. That stranger had himself foregone literary honours and ecclesiastical preferment, under the strong pressure of a necessity laid upon him by conscientious solicitude to annihilate the horrors of the slave trade; he had dedicated his life to this great object, -- and, in prosecution of it, he travelled thousands of miles, year by year, -- suffered unmeasured fatigue and obloquy, -- moved town after town and province after province, -- and expended every corporeal and mental power upon his voluntary and exhausting undertaking. Though himself but an isolated individual; though the system of enormity to which he opposed himself was supported by the power of the civilized world, while it desolated a whole continent of savages; and though the British slave trade was supposed to be to Britain the nursery of her sailors, the prop of her colonies, and the source of her wealth, -- yet he resolved on nothing less than the annihilation of the criminal and horrible traffic; and he never rested till he saw the accomplishment of his aim. But for Thomas Clarkson, even Wilberforce had not been impelled to the great work which has secured for him this day's honourable tribute.
The impulse was foreign, but it acted on a mind prepared to sympathize in the benevolent design. Wilberforce listened to the appalling representations which were made to him, he carefully investigated the authorities on which they rested, and at length he committed himself to all the responsibilities of the negro's advocacy in the British senate. His eye fixed on the scene of negro oppression, and his heart revolved the enormity of negro wrong, till his spirit melted with pity and burned with indignation. He saw the ships of this nefarious traffic hovering like so many birds of prey upon the Gold Coast, -- while from the shore to the very interior of the continent, tribe was exasperated against tribe, that the captive of savage war might be brought a slave to the fomentors of that barbarous strife; -- while justice was abused in the arraignment and condemnation of miserable victims for crimes which they had never committed, that they might be sold for British gold; and while kidnappers, ascending the rivers, and concealing themselves amid the bushes, assailed at nightfall the unsuspecting inhabitants in their villages, and firing their dwellings, conveyed their persons to the shore to be shipped across the seas and sold into interminable slavery. Then he turned to contemplate the horrors of the middle passage: he saw the wretched captives bound with shackles one to another; crowded into the hold without the power of standing upright, or even lying at their length; breathing a noisome, suffocating atmosphere; and for exercise brought upon deck, and there compelled to dance by the terror of the lash. Particular cases of cruelty were pictured before him, and among the rest that of the mere babe scourged because it would not -- could not eat; its limbs, swollen with the scourge, thrust into water heated so as to scald and excoriate the flesh; the poor infant then tied to a log, and after two or three days scourged again till it expired; when its wretched mother was, by a refinement of brutality, called upon deck, to drop, with averted eyes, its poor lacerated body into the sea. He saw the despairing victims of oppression plunge themselves into the ocean, waving their exulting hands as they escaped from their ruthless oppressors and sunk to rise no more; while still larger numbers perished by disease, and of eighty thousand Africans annually shipped upon the shore, one-eighth portion expired in the passage. Then he turned his eyes to the isles of the western world, and saw the markets where the negro was valued and bought and sold, and witnessed his seasoning to new and laborious occupations, and heard the groan and estimated the degradation of men reduced to perpetual slavery.
The God of providence fits the instruments which he raises up, for the exigencies by which their agency is demanded. From the contemplation of visions like these, a morbid sensibility, though it might offer the tribute of a few tears, would shortly have recoiled; and a heart hardened by the collision of worldly strife would speedily have forgotten the exciting theme. Impotence would have shrunk from the task of interference; indolence would speedily have relaxed exertion; enthusiasm would have consumed itself, after a few disappointments and unavailing efforts. Good intention and persevering zeal would have been ineffective, if unsustained by well-balanced powers of intellect. Eloquence, a manly and persuasive eloquence, was moreover indispensable, that the advocate might depict the scenes of oppression, and argue the questions of justice and policy, and kindle the enthusiasm of the senate and the nation. The champion of such a cause must also himself be of unimpeachable excellence; and none but one possessing the highest style of christian character could have commanded the attention of statesmen, or have endured the keen-eyed vigilance of interested and malignant hostility. Wilberforce possessed the natural and moral attributes required in the discharge of his high and voluntary service. For twenty years he prosecuted his work of christian charity. His clear and comprehensive knowledge of the case, his argumentative and impassioned eloquence, his patience in the details of inquiry, his temper in the hour of provocation, his unwearied perseverance amid difficulty and disappointment, his holy zeal for humanity and justice, -- won for him respectful attention, and secured ultimate success, while they have given to his name a glory as pure as it is brilliant, in the admiration of which partizanship forgets its strifes, and a nation testifies its homage: none but baseness, as unblushing as it is degraded, utters the dissonance of reproach; and the only reproach which even that baseness attempts is a virtual tribute to the philanthropy which it scorns and belies.
This is not the occasion on which to give the details of a conflict which was sustained with equal wisdom and magnanimity through so long a succession of years, and which issued in a triumph as complete as it was glorious. In the progress of that conflict, with what calm dignity did he, who now sleeps in that coffin, meet ridicule and reproach, -- with what perspicacity did he trace the involutions, and with what energy did he unravel the knots of sophistry, -- with what eloquence did he rouse the spirit of the lukewarm to fervour and activity! He met the interested with evidence proving that policy was on the side of justice, whilst he indignantly denounced wrong, as that which no policy could justify; his graphic descriptions and pathetic appeals wakened the indifferent to zeal; he secured on his side the virtue and talent of the senate. It is a splendid eulogy of his moral greatness, to say that Burke, and Fox, and Pitt, and Canning were contented to be his coadjutors in his great enterprise; and that they to whom all others conceded pre-eminence, conceded to him pre-eminence in the sacred cause of oppressed humanity, of abused justice, of insulted religion. At length the conquest was effected; and if on the tombs of victors are inscribed the dates of their victories, a simple date shall constitute the most splendid epitaph of Wilberforce's sepulchre, -- that of the day when he achieved his great triumph: write upon his memorial stone that one simple date,
The 25th of March, 1807,
and all shall comprehend its import, and admire it as expressive and sublime. Yet may other victories be inscribed beneath that first and signal one, -- victories achieved partly by his aid, and partly consequent upon that grand preliminary triumph. When merchandize in the persons of men was denounced as a crime, the purchaser and the holder of slaves were denounced as criminal; and the advocates of the slave-trade argued justly, that its abolition would lead to the emancipation of the slave. It was reserved for the author of the former, to witness the consummation of the latter: his last public act was the vindication of that martyred missionary's character, who had devoted his life to the instruction of the African in West India bondage; the last tidings that fell on his dying ear announced the final triumph of the cause, achieved cheaply, yet nobly, at the cost of twenty millions sterling. Inscribe then the tomb of Wilberforce with this threefold achievement: -- The Slave-Trade Abolished -- The Missionary of Demerara Vindicated -- Slavery Extinguished.
Blessed Philanthropist! spared to see the consummation of thine own work: avarice, oppression, cruelty foiled! -- the continent of Africa freed from a traffic which rendered barbarism more fiercely savage! -- the West Indian slave put into possession of his rights as a man! -- thy country purged from its foulest blot! -- christian zeal rid of its mightiest and most detested incubus! Surely the rekindling fires of youth shot through that frame, so long bowed down with debility, when the tidings fell on thine ear; and those eyes, dim and glazed in the dying hour, were relumined when it was announced, that "Slavery should be no more." Prophetic visions broke surely in that hour, on thy departing spirit, and the glories of the future passed in cheering symbols before thine enraptured soul! What, think ye, Britons, Philanthropists, Christians, were those prophetic visions? Did he not see Africa, long rent by strife, and exasperated into phrensy, composed to peace and order; her tribes instructed, her governments exercising a paternal sway; the gold of her streams inviting, not cupidity, but commerce; her whole continent, no longer a frightful excrescence, but now a healthy and useful limb of the great body of earth's community? Did he not behold those West Indian islands rendered rich and beautiful by the culture of free men; while, for Sabbath markets, were seen the thronging multitude of christian worshippers; and for the lash and the shriek were heard the songs of the sanctuary; and for the persecuted missionary was found the recognized and venerated pastor? Did he not gaze upon that intermediate sea, and behold it, not darkened with vessels bearing the cargoes of living men to the western slave-market; but covered with sails, wafted by the prayers both of the east and the west, and conveying the produce of the latter in exchange for the gold and ivory of the former? Did he not see Britain, purged of her deep pollution, and forgiven of her God, the herald of mercy to the negro race on either side of the ocean, blessed with augmented prosperity, and rising to loftier rank amid the renovated nations of the world; and, above all, refreshed with reviving piety, and graced with a spiritual glory?
Whatever were the visions of earth, rapturous greetings awaited him when the unutterable glories of the invisible world broke upon his disembodied spirit. With what meek and holy joy did he meet the welcome of them whose names had, in this world, been hallowed in his esteem, by being inscribed on the page of inspiration, and illustrated by the approval of the God of inspiration! Joseph had not forgotten the anguish of his spirit, when, torn from a fond father, he was carried a slave into Egypt; Miriam remembered the day when her timbrel sounded "o'er Egypt's dark sea;" and many a sacred harper recollected the period when the harps of Zion were hung on the willows of the Euphrates: many a shout of gratulation, many a holy paean would celebrate the advent of him whose renovated spirit had felt sympathy with the oppressed slave, and whose benevolence had wrought his freedom. Nor is it a descent unworthy of the occasion, to mention other names more familiar to our own times, -- to speak of Cowper, whose sweet and touching verse appealed in the day of the conflict to the bosom of gentle pity; and Smith, that victim of zeal for the negro's salvation, whose cry, from beneath the altar, has been so speedily heard, and the voice of whose blood pleaded with Britain's population and in Britain's senate with an efficacy surpassing even that of Wilberforce's eloquence: these would welcome him. -- There, too, was the soul of the scourged and murdered babe, whose body an agonizing mother had been compelled to commit to its watery grave; it was "well with the child," and its redeemed spirit would hail the approach of the African's friend, of his mother's liberator. Angels would flock reverently around a man, on whose mortal career their attention had been fixed with benevolent interest, and in whose successes they had triumphed with exultant song, -- glorifying God, whose "exceeding grace" they beheld expanding and ennobling our regenerated humanity. Above all, the Lord of the redeemed and of angels vouchsafed His plaudit to his lowly and abashed, but grateful servant; and received, as done to himself, all those services which that servant had rendered to the meanest of the negro race, -- a race from among whom he claims many a ransomed one.
These, my fellow-countrymen, -- and oh! may I not add, my fellow-Christians? -- these are not vain words; they are not to be regarded as the mere flourish of rhetoric, but as the exhibition of grave and glorious verities. When we speak of Wilberforce as welcomed to the skies, it is not that, in the idolatry of sentiment, we pronounce his apotheosis; nor is it that, in the spirit of superstition, we canonize the saint. Wilberforce was, in the most emphatic sense, a Christian; evangelical in doctrine, holy in character, devout in spirit, zealous for the glory of his God. He deemed it no fanaticism to confess the moral corruption of human nature, and to assert the necessity of its regeneration by the influence of the Holy Ghost. He sought divine forgiveness through that atoning blood which flowed, endued with a divine worth, from the victim of Calvary; and pleaded the merit of his divine Saviour's vicarious obedience, as the ground of his acceptance with God: he "looked for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life." His nature shrunk in holy sensibility from the loathsomeness of sin; and he renounced the dissipations of the world, not in the spirit of a rigid austerity, but in the elevation of a free and lofty mind. He blushed not to be known as a man of tender conscience and devotional habits. The liberator of Africa was also the advocate of Bible distribution and Christian missions; and the eloquence which had thrilled senates, he breathed in assemblies convened for purposes of evangelical zeal. Though a member of one particular church, the Episcopal Church of England, his catholic spirit recognized all who hold the Head; and his expansive charity embraced the whole family of man. He contemplated, with profound prostration of spirit, the glory of God, revealed in Him who is "the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of his person;" and "he was changed into the image of the Lord, from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the living God." It is here, in his religious principles, that we must search for the spring of that benevolence, so hallowed and unwearied, which gave him his preeminent distinction.
It is not always that we can speak in such tones of confidence and exultation, of the dead for whom the nation justly claims an honoured grave, and over whom the nation mourns with unaffected regrets. There are cases in which, willingly as we pay the tribute of honour, and sincerely as we drop the tear of regret, we dare not glance a thought at the state of the separate spirit. Loyalty, patriotism, genius, eloquence, heroic courage, will not compensate for the want of "repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ." We may admire the virtues which graced the mortal life, but we must not suffer our spirits to be seduced by sentimentalism; there were loftier destinies, and more solemn relationships. We may acknowledge the halo that surrounded the names of the great and glorious of earth, but we must not suffer our spirits to be dazzled by the glare; there is a brightness before which that halo will fade, or beneath the searching illumination of which it will be found a mere fallacy. Oh! it is a melancholy thing, when, pronouncing the eulogy on a man who occupied his place in society with honourable distinction, we are compelled to admit that he utterly forgot the relations in which he stood to the highest and best of Beings! Oh! sad it is, when, as we commit, with many an honour, to the grave, the mortal remains, we dare not think of the immortal part! Oh! that dirge can never be sufficiently doleful which we perform, when lamenting the demise of one of whom, though he shed on others the splendours of great powers, we are constrained to admit that, having neglected his own salvation, "it had been better for himself that he had never been born." How refreshing, how cheering the reflection, that we stand by a grave to-day, to which the archangel's trumpet will be a welcome sound; and do honour to one on earth, whom celestial intelligences are at this moment honouring, and on whose brow the Lord of all has placed the amaranthine wreath!
Though surrounded by an audience demanding his profoundest respect, the speaker must, nevertheless, be permitted to combine with the eulogy of the dead his appeal to the living. Princes, Statesmen, Britons, ye have this day paid a noble tribute to virtue and goodness. When these eyes behold the train graced by the presence of them in whose veins flows the blood of Hanover's royal house, this heart beats with a fuller and warmer throb of loyalty than ever; and when I see so many of Britain's legislators gathered around that grave, my patriotic hopes spring into exulting confidence. It is an auspicious augur for our country. Return, venerated and beloved by your countrymen, to the venerable assemblies in which ye sit, in your legislatorial capacity; go, ye statesmen, to the council-chamber, where ye wield the powers of government; and act upon those great and inalienable principles; -- that policy can never stand opposed to truth and righteousness, and that if it could, it ought to be unhesitatingly sacrificed for the maintenance of truth and righteousness, -- and that the true safety of the state must be found in the virtue and piety of the people. Hearken to the words of your own Wilberforce, they were spoken at a period when the weal of Britain seemed to decline: -- "It would be an instance in myself of that very false shame which I have condemned in others, if I were not boldly to avow my firm persuasion, that to the decline of religion and morality our national difficulties must both directly and indirectly be chiefly ascribed; and that my only solid hopes for the well-being of any country depend not so much on her fleets and armies, not so much on the wisdom of her rulers, or the spirit of her people, as on the persuasion that she still contains many, who, in a degenerate age, love and obey the gospel of Christ; on the humble trust that the intercession of these may still be prevalent, that for the sake of these, Heaven may still look upon us with an eye of favour." Yes, sainted philanthropist, thy trust has been verified, and more than verified; and thy funereal solemnities attest this day, that thy country is arousing from her degeneracy, that she is aroused; the pitying Spirit of our God is surely returning, the slumbers of voluptuous ease are broken, the alarms of a distracted state are hushed, and Britain is endued with a giant strength, and invested with the hallowed character of a champion for the religion of Christ and the church of God.
Above all, let me beseech you, ye who are honoured with your country's confidence, and all who hear me this day; above all, I say, let me beseech you, that ye go hence to track those footsteps of believing and holy obedience which Wilberforce traced. Go, and bow the knee before his God, trust his Saviour, implore a double portion of that Spirit which rested on him. The day approaches when the royal purple, and the judge's ermine, and the knightly badge must be laid aside; and then, mortals like your fellow-men, you will need the supports and hopes of the gospel as much as the lowliest of your race. Then, when the world's honours fade from your view, may you be invested with immortal glory, and endued with immortal life. Then while your countrymen shall weep as sincerely at your grave, as we do at that of Wilberforce; they will cherish a hope as animating and glorious. Then, when all state shall be laid aside, and you shall stand arraigned at the tribunal of the Judge eternal, his hand shall reach forth a crown of life, and so "an entrance shall be ministered unto you into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ."
John Ely.
Leeds.