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fairly have claimed my subject as his own, inasmuch as William Law fell mainly to his province in our joint work on the Eighteenth Century, but who, with the courtesy and generosity which he has always shown, at once gave up the subject to me when I told him that I desired to write upon it. I have referred in my foot-notes to the late Mr. Walton's 'Notes and Materials for an adequate Biography of the celebrated Divine, William Law,' whenever I have made use of that most industriously compiled work; but my obligations to the writer are so great that they require a special acknowledgment. I am still more indebted to the Chetham Society, whose useful labours have rendered accessible our best sources of information respecting Mr. Law's personal habits and conversation.

15

LIFE

OF THE

REV. WILLIAM LAW, MA.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

THE name of William Law is so unfamiliar to the present generation that it may be necessary to give some reasons why his life should be written at all. That he was one of the ablest of theological writers in a period remarkably fertile in theological literature; that he lived a pure and conscientious life of Christian self-denial, at a time of great spiritual deadness; that he influenced the generation in which he lived, indirectly but very really, as much or more than any man of his day; that his whole character, moral, intellectual, and social, was a singularly taking one; that he was, in his later years, almost the only notable representative in England of a phase of Christianity which has attracted and helped to form many saintly characters;—these in themselves might be insufficient reasons for introducing an almost forgotten man of genius to a public which is perhaps already bewildered by the multitude of claimants upon its attention.

But the life and writings of William Law are of so striking and suggestive a character that they really ought

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not to be allowed to pass into oblivion. He would have been a remarkable man in any age, but he was doubly remarkable when we think of him as belonging to an age which took its philosophy from Locke, its theology from Tillotson, and its politics from Walpole: an age which had hardly any sympathy with any of the phases of his character. For he stood singularly apart from his contemporaries, though he influenced them so deeply. His Churchmanship differed from that of the typical Churchman of his day as light does from darkness; it was not even like that of his non-juring contemporaries, who were as much concerned with politics as with theology. The life which he recommended in his practical treatises, and lived himself to the very letter, was about as different as one can conceive from the easy-going life of the eighteenth century; while even those who were stirred to the inmost depths of their spiritual nature by the Serious Call,' did not, as a rule, become like-minded with the author. What in him took the form of a benevolent tranquillity, in them took the form of a benevolent activity. His later phase of so-called mysticism aroused, outside a very small coterie, an almost universal feeling of unmitigated disgust. In fact, Law was as one born out of due time; he may be regarded as a relic of the past, or as an anticipation of the future, but of his own present he was an utterly abnormal specimen. To come across such a man in the midst of his surroundings is, to borrow the admirable simile of a writer of our own day,' like coming across an old Gothic cathedral with its air of calm grandeur and mellowed beauty in the midst of the staring red-brick buildings of a brand-new manufacturing town; and, it may be added, the feeling with which he was regarded by many of his contemporaries was something like that with which some nouveau riche might regard such a

1 Miss Julia Wedgwood.

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