William Wilberforce and the Voice He Mistook for Ambition

In the autumn of 1785, twenty-six-year-old William Wilberforce sat across from John Newton in a small parlor on Charles Square in London. Wilberforce had been a member of Parliament since age twenty-one, brilliant and restless, but something had been stirring in him for months — a persistent inner disturbance he couldn't name. He assumed it was political ambition. He assumed it was guilt over his privileged life.…