The Paper analyses the voluntary action of the London-based Committee for Relieving the Distresses in Germany and Other Parts of the Continent, a set of humanitarian relief campaigns in the years 1805-1815, and its connections with the advocacy work of the anti-slavery movement and that of the British and Foreign Bible Society. While advocacy is a well-known dimension of early transnational civil society, early humanitarian relief services across borders are virtually unknown to research. This paper argues that advocacy and service were always interrelated and co-evolved as the two principal dimensions of global civil society already at the turn from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.