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fifty years preceding he had been doing his work at Cam- 
bridge. John Wesley, for six years before his own death, 
had known him, and had hailed him as an earnest fellow- 
labourer. His labours thus occupied the interval between 
John Wesley and the rise of the Oxford High Church party. 
The movement, of which he was the leading organizer, must 
be reckoned as the second wave of religious influence which, 
during the past hundred years, has spread widely through 
the land. 
The third great wave of Christian influence, mingling with 
and reinforcing the second, was that with which the name of 
Wilberforce is identified. Though this movement was closely 
connected with the Evangelical Church of England movement 
of which I have just spoken, it was not altogether limited or 
defined by it. A well-known religious book by an eminent 
Nonconformist divine — Dr. Doddridge’s “ Rise and Progress 
of Religion ” — the companionship of Isaac Milner on two 
continental tours, and, finally and above all, the study of the 
Greek Testament, were the visible links in the chain of 
causes by which William Wilberforce was brought to spiritual 
faith and true conversion. His conversion was no corollary 
of a movement, can be no boast of a section or of a school, — 
it was of God ; and his personality and personal influence 
were not capable of being limited to any particular school, — 
nor indeed to any one Church or denomination. Wilberforce 
was a Catholic Evangelical, and found his friends and allies 
among all those “who loved the Lord Jesus Christ in sin- 
cerity.” He was, in many respects, the forerunner of Lord 
Shaftesbury. He was father of the modern lay Church of 
England, founder of the great English lay brotherhood of 
Christian philanthropy and home mission work. He was 
himself a preacher of no ordinary power. Of his “ Practical 
View ” fifty editions were sold within fifty years after its 
publication. He carried his Christian influence straight and 
full into Parliament, and there confessed Christ as a legislator. 
Thus was another wave of vast scope and mighty influence, 
another wave of Christian life and love, launched on its 
career of blessing. The work of which Wilberforce was 
during his lifetime the soul and centre has been carried 
forward since his death by a host of noble men and devoted 
women — the most distinguished of all these ministers of mercy 
in the influence he has been enabled to exercise having been, 
as I have already intimated, the honoured nobleman who now 
presides over this Institute, and who looks back over forty 
years of philanthropic and Christian enterprise. 
The last movement of life in English Christianity which 
