WILLIAM

            One evening in 1787 a young English M.P. pored over papers by candlelight in his home beside the Houses of Parliament.  William Wilberforce had been asked to propose the Abolition of the Slave Trade although almost all Englishmen thought the Trade necessary, if nasty, and that economic ruin would follow if it stopped.  Only a very few thought the Slave Trade wrong, evil.

           So opened a fascinating lecture on William Wilberforce given by his biographer John Pollock at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1996.

           Wilberforce’s research pressed him to excruciatingly clear conclusions.  “So enormous, so dreadful,” he told the House of Commons later, “so irremediable did the Trade’s wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition.  Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.”

           “That was a key moment in British and world history,” Pollock told his audience.  “For a few months later, on Sunday, October 28, 1787, he wrote in his Journal the words that have become famous:  ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners’—in modern terms, ‘habits, attitudes, morals.’”

           Amazingly, no great reformer in Western history is so little known as William Wilberforce.  His success in the first of the “two great objects” was described by Pollock as “the greatest moral achievement of the British people” and by historian G.M. Trevelyan as “one of the turning events in the history of the world.”  His success in the second was credited by another historian with saving England from the French Revolution and demonstrating the character that was to be the foundation of the Victorian age.  An Italian diplomat who saw Wilberforce in Parliament in his later years recorded that “everyone contemplates this little old man . . . as the Washington of humanity.”

           Equally amazingly, Wilberforce’s momentous accomplishments were achieved in the face of immense odds.  As regards the man himself, Wilberforce was by all accounts an ugly little man with too long a nose, a relatively weak constitution, and a despised faith— “evangelicalism” or “enthusiasm.”  As regards the task, the practice of slavery was almost universally accepted and the slave trade was as important to the economy of the British Empire as the defense industry is to the United States today.  As regards his opposition, it included powerful mercantile and colonial vested interests, such national heroes as Admiral Lord Nelson, and most of the royal family.  And as regards his perseverance, Wilberforce kept on tirelessly for nearly fifty years before he accomplished his goal.

           Constantly vilified, Wilberforce was twice even waylaid and physically assaulted.  A friend once wrote to him cheerfully: “I shall expect to read of you carbonadoed by West Indian planters, barbecued by African merchants and eaten by Guinea captains, but do not be daunted, for —I Will write your epitaph!”

           Perhaps most amazingly of all, William Wilberforce came within a hair’s breadth of missing his grand calling altogether.  His faith in Jesus Christ animated his lifelong passion for reform.  At one stage he led or actively participated in sixty-nine different initiatives, several of world-shaping significance.  But when Wilberforce came to faith through the “Great change” that was his experience of conversion in 1785 at the age of twenty-five, his first reaction was to throw over politics for the ministry.  He thought, as millions have thought before and since, that “spiritual” affairs are far more important than “secular” affairs.

           Fortunately, a minister— John Newton, the converted slave trader who wrote “Amazing Grace”— persuaded Wilberforce that God wanted him to stay in politics rather than enter the ministry.  “It’s hoped and believed,” Newton wrote, “that the Lord has raised you up for the good of the nation.”  After much prayer and thought, Wilberforce concluded that Newton was right.  God was calling him to champion the liberty of the oppressed— as a Parliamentarian.   “My walk,” he wrote in his journal in 1788, “is a public one.  My business is in the world; and I must mix in the assemblies of men, or quit the post which Providence seems to have assigned me.”

           Sadly, for every follower of Christ who, like William Wilberforce, chooses not to elevate the spiritual at the expense of the secular, countless others fall for the temptation.  Wilberforce’s celebrated “near miss” therefore leads us to the heart of understanding the character of calling.

          Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service.

          First, calling has a simple and straightforward meaning.  In the Old Testament the Hebrew word that has been translated as “call” usually has the same everyday meaning as our English word.  Human beings call to each other, to God, and to animals.  Animals too can call. (The psalmist, for example, wrote that God “provides food for the cattle and for the young ravens when they call.”)  Under the pressure of theology and history, the term call has traveled a long way from this simple beginning, but this straightforward sense and its obvious relational setting should never be lost.  When you “call” on the phone, for example, you catch someone’s ear for a season.

          Second, calling has another important meaning in the Old Testament.  To call means to name, and to name means to call into being or to make.  Thus in the first chapter of Genesis, “God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’.”  “This type of calling is far more than labeling, hanging a nametag on something to identify it.  Such decisive, creative naming is a form of making.  Thus when God called Israel, he named and thereby constituted and created Israel his people.  Calling is not only a matter of being and doing what we are but also of becoming what we are not yet but are called by God to be.  Thus “name-calling”, a very different thing from name-calling, is the fusion of being and becoming.

          Third, calling gains a further characteristic meaning in the New Testament.  It is almost a synonym for salvation.  In this context, calling is overwhelmingly God’s calling people to himself as followers of Christ.  Just as God called Israel to him as his people, so Jesus called his disciples.  The body of Jesus’ followers as a whole is the community of the “called-out ones” (the origin of ecclesia, the Greek word for church).  This decisive calling by God is salvation.  Those who are called by God are first chosen and later justified and glorified.  But calling is the most prominent and accessible of these four initiatives of God.  Not surprisingly it often stands for salvation itself, and the common description of disciples of Jesus is not “Christian” but “followers of the Way.”

           Fourth, calling has a vital, extended meaning in the New Testament that flowers more fully in the later history of the church.  God calls people to himself, but this call is no casual suggestion.  He is so awe inspiring and his summons so commanding that only one response is appropriate—a response as total and universal as the authority of the Caller.  Thus in the New Testament, as Jesus calls his followers to himself, he also calls them to other things and tasks: to peace, to fellowship, to eternal life, to suffering, and to service.  But deeper even than these particular things, discipleship, which implies “everyone, everywhere, and in everything,” is the natural and rightful response to the lordship of Christ.  As Paul wrote the followers of Christ in the little town of Colosse, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.”

           In short, calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.  To limit the word, as some insist, to a few texts and to a particular stage in salvation is to miss the forest for the trees.  To be a disciple of Jesus is to be a “called one” and so to become “a follower of the Way.”

Charles Péan

Charles Péan, a young French Salvation Army Officer, couldn't believe what he was seeing.  Men were dying of fever, leprosy was rampant, good food unknown, hearings commonplace.

The place was Devil's Island, a colony of prison camps in French Guiana established in 1852 as a so-called "white experiment'.  French convicts were sent to Guiana to perform work once done by African slaves.  The experiment was an easy way to get rid of dangerous criminals and provide free labor for Guiana.

Reports of maltreatment of the convicts had been filtering back to France for decades when, in 1928, Charles Péan was asked to visit the prison camps by the head of the Salvation Army in France.  Péan spent a month in the South American colony, visiting many sites that made up the complex known as Devil's Island.  He was appalled at what he found, and vowed to seek reformation.

Men were compelled to work long hours in the steaming jungles with no protection against the heat, poisonous snakes or insects such as mosquitoes and ants.  Day after day they were forced to fell and cut up iron hard trees or break rocks, trying to reclaim the overgrown sugar plantations that once had been cleared by African slaves.  Animals the men worked alongside were treated more humanely than the prisoners.

"Devil's Island" was the name given to several prison camps on the mainland of French Guiana and on three small islands off the coast: Devil's, Royal and St. Joseph.  Escape from the camps was virtually impossible, for prisoners on the run not only had to get away from the brutal guards but outwit snakes, sharks or head hunters.  Border patrols in Dutch Guiana to the west and Brazil to the east had orders to either shoot or capture escapees.

In addition to serving their time---which many convicts did not survive---prisoners had, in effect, a double sentence.  Once their sentence was completed, they were expected to get a job in the colony and settle there.  To make them stay, the French government doubled their time.  A convict imprisoned for seven years or less also had to spend an equal amount of time in the colony after his release.  Those sentenced to eight or more years were forced to remain for life.

These ex-convicts were called libérés, and n some respects were more pitiful than the convicts in the prison camps.  For the few jobs available pay was poor, not allowing the men to earn enough for passage home when "doublage" was completed.  To survive they had to beg, scrounge and steal, often having rags for clothes and no place to live.

Charles Péan found nearly 2,000 libérés in the colony.  They were uppermost in his mind on his journey home as he pondered the report he would write for his superiors in the Salvation Army and the French government.  He knew doublage must be abolished and that men without hope should be given hope.  Ultimately, he wanted to see the Devil's Island complex closed for he considered the prison nothing more than a colony of white slavery.  So he wrote in his report.

Among Péan's recommendations were the building of hostels for the libérés and workshops where they could earn the 2,000 francs needed for passage home.  Salvation Army volunteers also were needed to meet with the men and their families when they returned to France, and a labor exchange had to be established so they could find work.

Charles Péan's recommendations were quickly accepted by the Salvation Army, but the French government was slow to act.  In fact, it took five more years of Péan's time talking to people and collecting money before he returned to Guiana with a group of Salvation Army officers to put his plan into action.

Within a month of Péan's return to Guiana, "Le Maison France," a hostel, was opened at Cayenne, welcoming men who had all but given up hope.  A restaurant and a workshop helped the libérés begin earning money to pay for their keep and put aside for passage.  Eight miles west of Cayenne the Army established a farm, where libérés built huts, cleared the land and planted crops.  They also made money selling exotic insects to dealers in Europe.

By 1934, Charles Péan knew that the effort to get the libérés home had to be increased.  He established a system where the men who wanted to return to France could work and have free food and lodging, and at the end of each month be given a coupon worth forty francs.  When a libéré had collected 20 coupons, the Army would give him a ticket for passage home.

Péan himself went back to France to make arrangements for the first group of convicts to leave Guiana.  Thirty-six libérés were on a mail boat that docked at St. Nazaire, France, in February 1936, and they were met by Salvation Army members who were to help them over the difficult times ahead.  None had seen family and friends for years; one man had spent 35 years in the prison colony, but still felt he could start life over at home.  In two years, more than 800 men had returned to France.

But to Charles Péan, this effort was not enough.  He traveled throughout France speaking out against sending prisoners to Devil's Island, urging that the prison colony be closed.  Even though some minor reforms were established at the camps, men still died by the hundreds and suffered in despair.

The French government finally decided in 1938 that the 'white experiment' had been a failure and Devil's Island should be closed.  Even so, it was another 14 years before the last of the libérés returned home and the jungle began to reclaim the dreaded camps.

Thanks to Charles Péan, one who believed, some 2,000 libérés made it back to their native land as free men, leaving behind the remains of 70,000 who slaved and died in the colony.