Ah, brothers and sisters, we have no shortage of battles before us in 2026. Society grows ever more twisted without Christ, the church suffers assault from a tide of liberalism and godless philosophy, and the daily glories of family and work continue to present challenges of their own. But how criminal it would be to think on these things and despair!

It seems that every year brings news of an even darker turn in society. It also seems that we have been saying so for a very long time. 

In 1990, Richard Ganz and William Edgar wondered, “Who, back in 1960, would have believed that the press would one day pillory mothers and exalt abortionists?”

Back in 1941, however, Johannes Vos was writing that religious liberalism had already infected most of American Protestantism. The period since the First World War, he explained, had been characterized by “gradual doctrinal decline and disintegration.” (“Retrenchment in Covenanter Foreign Missions—What is the Remedy?” The Covenanter Witness 27, no. 17, p. 313).

The darkness of our present age cannot be divorced from that long trajectory. Nevertheless, the fact that America (and my own country, Canada) has progressively turned its back on Christ should not dampen our hopes for the future in 2026. A little more than two centuries ago, the spiritual state of England was exceedingly low. In 1797, William Wilberforce, an evangelical member of parliament, wrote that “the bulk of professed Christians” in his country were really Christians in name alone. Having adopted a small view of sin, they cared little for Christ and less for the Bible. On the contrary, said Wilberforce, “they advance principles and maintain opinions altogether opposite to the genius and character of Christianity.”

Darkness Defeated

The restoration of real Christianity in England was one of the two great objects to which Wilberforce believed God had called him. He bent much of his prodigious energy toward that end, and the plaque outside his birthplace is a fitting testament to his success: “England owes to him the reformation of manners.”

The second great object to which Wilberforce believed himself called, and the one for which he remains best known, was the abolition of the British slave trade.

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