He wrote and published this book in the late 1700's, and I have found it's words to be equally as potent and applicable today as they must've been more than 200 years ago. The book that I have quoted below, Wilberforce's A Practical View of Christianity, has challenged my intellect (as Barbara Tuchman's book did), improved my writing (reading his writing is like playing basketball with Lebron...it's rough, but you get better), encouraged my dreams, and shown me that there truly is nothing new under the Sun when it comes to our fallen nature and struggle towards Jesus.
So, I challenge you to muddle your way through this passage as I have his book. Keep a tab in your browser set to www.m-w.com and admit that your vocabulary is a little deficient (as I have found myself forced to). Recognize how material and relevant Wilberforce's words are in 2010 as they were in 1797 - one of my favorite discoveries as I have read the book.
Most of all, I hope that you realize that in the same manner that Wilberforce had a professional calling as a politician but made a tremendous impact on the religious and moral standing of his country through his writing and life - so we can today.
No matter what profession you find yourself called to - engineer, accountant, sales, politics, stay at home mom - I guarantee that you can also have an impact for Christ on the culture around you. Change for our great nation will not emanate from her government, but from normal men and women like us who are willing to follow Christ in a passionate and surrendered manner.
"There are many shades of difference between those who flatly renounce, and those who cordially embrace the doctrine of Redemption by Christ. This class has a sort of general, indeterminate, and ill understood dependence on our blessed Savior. But their hopes so far as they can be distinctly made out (for their views also are very obscure) appear ultimately to bottom on the persuasion that they are now, through Christ, become members of a new dispensation, wherein they will be tried by a more lenient rule than that to which they must have been otherwise subject. 'God will not now be extreme to mark what is done amiss: but will dispense with the rigorous exactions of his law, too strict indeed for such frail creatures as we are to hope that we can fulfill it. Christianity has moderated the requisitions of Divine Justice; and all which is now required of us, is thankfully to trust o the merits of Christ for the pardon of our sins, and the acceptance of our sincere though imperfect obedience. The frailties and infirmities to which our nature is liable, or to which our situation in life exposes us, will not be severely judged: as it is the practice that really determines the character, we may rest satisfied, that if on this whole our lives be tolerably good, we shall escape with little or no punishment, and through Jesus Christ our Lord, shall be finally partakers of heavenly felicity.'
"We cannot dive into the human heart, and therefore should always speak with caution and diffidence, when from external appearances or declarations we are affirming the existence of any internal principles and feelings; especially as we are liable to be misled by the ambiguities of language, or by the inaccuracy with which others may express themselves. But is sometimes not difficult to anyone who is accustomed, if the phase may be allowed, to the anatomy of the human mind, to discern, that generally speaking, the persons who use the above language, rely not so much on the merits of Christ, and on the agency of Divine Grace, as on their own power of fulfilling the moderated requisitions of Divine Justice. He will hence therefore discover in them a disposition rather to extenuate the malignity of their disease, than to magnify the excellence of the proffered remedy. He will find them apt to palliate in themselves what they cannot fully justify, to enhance the merit of what they believe to be their good qualities and commendable actions, to set as it were in an account the good against the bad; and if the result be not very unfavorable, they conceive that they shall be entitled to claim the benefits of our Savior's sufferings as a thing of course.
"They have little ideas, so little, that it might almost be affirmed that they have no idea at all, of the importance or difficulty of the duty of what the Scripture calls "submitting ourselves to the righteousness of God" [Romans 10:3]; or of our proneness rather to justify ourselves in his sight, than in the language of imploring penitents to acknowledge ourselves guilty and helpless sinners They have never summoned themselves to this entire and unqualified renunciation of their own merits and their own strength; and therefore they remain strangers to the natural lostness of the human heart, which such a call would have awakened into action, and roused to resistance. All these, their several errors, naturally result from the mistaken conception entertained of the fundamental principles of Christianity. They consider not that Christianity is a scheme "for justifying the ungodly" [Romans 4:5], by Christ's dying for them "when yet sinners" [Romans 5:6-8], a scheme "for reconciling us to God-when enemies" [Romans 5:10]; and for making the fruits of holiness the effects, not the cause, of our being justified and reconciled; that, in short, it opens freely the door of mercy, to the greatest and vilest of penitent sinners; that obeying the blessed impulse of the grace of God, whereby they had been awakened from the sleep of death, and moved to seek for pardon, they might enter in, and through the regenerating influence of the Holy Spirit might be enabled to bring forth the fruits of Righteousness." (Emphasis the authors)
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