the mysteries of existence, to lift

"the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world";

to make its dark places light, its rough places plain, its hard
things easy, even its saddest things endurable. His Gospel was
this: God, Who made us in His own Image, loves us like a Father;
and therefore, in life and in death, in time and in eternity, all
is, and must be, well.

3. "He prayeth best, who lovest best
All things both great and small.
For the dear God Who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

Those familiar words of Coleridge perfectly express Wilberforce's
attitude towards his fellow-creatures, and when I say "fellow-creatures,"
I am not thinking only of his brothers and sisters in the human family.

He was filled with a God-like love of all that God has made. Hatred
and wrath and severity were not "dreamt of" in his "philosophy."
Towards the most degraded and abandoned of the race he felt as
tenderly as St. Francis felt towards the leper on the roadside
at Assisi, when he kissed the scarred hand, and then found that,
all unwittingly, he had ministered to the Lord, disguised in that
loathsome form. This was the motive which impelled Wilberforce
to devote himself, uncalculatingly and unhesitatingly, to the
reclamation of lives that had been devastated by drunkenness, and
which stimulated his zeal for all social and moral reforms.

But his love extended far beyond the bounds of the human family;
and (in this again resembling St. Francis) he loved the birds and
beasts which God has provided as our companions in this life, and
perhaps--for aught we know--in the next. In a word, he loved all
God's creatures for God's sake.

4. No one had a keener sense of the workings of the Holy Spirit
in regions beyond the precincts of all organized religion; and
yet, in his own personal heart and life, Wilberforce belonged
essentially to the Church of England. It is difficult to imagine
him happy and content in any communion except our own. Nowhere else
could he have found that unbroken chain which links us to Catholic
antiquity and guarantees the validity of our sacraments, combined
with that freedom of religious speculation and that elasticity
of devotional forms which were to him as necessary as vital air.
Various elements of his teaching, various aspects of his practice
will occur to different minds; but (just because it is sometimes
overlooked) I feel bound to remind you of his testi