In 1832 he suffered another devastating blow: his dearest Lizzie died, at the age of thirty-one. The loss hit Wilberforce hard, but Lizzie’s own daughter, just an infant, gave her grandfather some consolation and prompted this rumination on God and suffering:
“I was much impressed yesterday,” he wrote,
“with the similarity in some respects of my own situation to that of [Lizzie’s] dear little innocent, who was undergoing the operation of vaccination. The infant gave up its little arm to the operator without suspicion or fear. But when it felt the puncture, which must have been sharp, no words can express the astonishment and grief that followed. I could not have thought the mouth could have been distended so widely as it continued, till the nurse’s soothing restored her usual calmness. What an illustration is this of the impatient feelings we are often apt to experience, and sometimes even to express, when suffering from the dispensations of a Being, whose wisdom we profess to believe to be unerring, whose kindness we know to be unfailing, whose truth also is sure, and who has declared to us, that all things shall work together for good to them that love Him, and that the object of His inflictions is to make us partakers of His holiness.”
William Wilberforce