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Its Excellences as a Composition.

light, it must be admitted that it has been wonderfully effective. The 'Call' reached the ears of thousands, and appealed to them not in vain.

As a composition, it is difficult to speak too highly of it. The epithets which Wesley applied to its writer, 'strong' and 'elegant,' express exactly two out of its many excellences. As one reads it, one feels under the guidance of a singularly strong man. There is no weak, mawkish sentimentality, no feeble declamation, no illogical argument. It is like a strong man driving a weighty hammer with well-directed blows. Every stroke tells, and you cannot evade its force. And both in style and matter it is a singularly elegant composition. There are no offences against good taste, no slipshod sentences, no attempts at fine writing in it. Its illustrations (though, perhaps a little too frequent) are always apposite, and often very beautiful.

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But besides being 'strong' and 'elegant,' it has also another characteristic, which Wesley would have thought wrong to mention in a sermon, and which Law would probably have disclaimed. The Serious Call' is full of humour, and sparkles with wit in every page. It never forfeits its title to be a serious call, but wit and humour, so far from being inconsistent with seriousness, often shine the brighter from their contrast with their surroundings. If one could conceive-as one cannot-Law taking part in such light productions, what admirable papers he could have contributed to the 'Spectator'! Steele and Addison at their very best do not rise higher as humourists than Law did.

But, after all, it is not the beauties of composition-many and great as these undoubtedly are-which attract us most in the 'Serious Call.' It is the intense earnestness, the obvious reality and thoroughness of the man, the

Intense Earnestness of the Writer.

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knowledge that his 'Call' to others was only to do what he meant to do and did himself. The book is (to use the language of an able writer of our own day, who cordially admires and appreciates Law, though he differs very widely from his views) 'a book which throughout palpitates with the deepest emotions of its author. Law, whose sensitiveness to logic is as marked as his sensitiveness to conscience, is incapable of compromise. He not only believes what he professes, but he believes it in the most downright sense, and he is not content until it is thoroughly worked into his whole system of thought,' and, it may be added, 'of action.'

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In short, if Law had written nothing whatever except the Serious Call,' he would have written quite enough to deserve a prominent and honoured place in English literature; and, what is better still, he would have written quite enough to earn the gratitude of all who value true piety.

' Mr. Leslie Stephen's English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. pp. 395, 396.

I 20

Law against Tindal, the Deist.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE 'CASE OF REASON,' ETC., AGAINST TINDAL.

'WHETHER,' writes a correspondent to the 'Gentleman's Magazine' in October 1800, 'the "Serious Call" be Mr. Law's masterpiece, I have some doubt; I should give the palm to his "Case of Reason," stated in answer to "Christianity as old as the Creation." It is difficult to compare works of so different a scope and character; each is good of its kind, but it may safely be asserted that Law did not diminish the reputation he had justly won by his ' Serious Call' by his next work, published probably about three years later, in 1732.

Law always selected foemen worthy of his steel to do battle with. As he had formerly pitted himself against the ablest champion of the Low, or, as we should now call it, the Broad, Church party, so now he pitted himself against the ablest champion of Deism; and the unprejudiced reader will admit that he at least holds his own as successfully in the one case as he does in the other. Tindal was an old enemy, or perhaps we should rather say friend, of Law's; for Law had found his book, written thirty years earlier, the Rights of a Christian Church,' a useful ally in his controversy with Hoadly, as tending to show what was the real conclusion of the bishop's argument- a conclusion to which the bishop would naturally have objected, since it gave him no locus standi as a bishop at all. It will

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'Christianity as old as the Creation.'

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be remembered that Law was constantly twitting Hoadly for not recognising the author of the Rights of a Christian Church' as his ally. Tindal's 'Christianity as old as the Creation' was a more able and important work than its predecessor. No book on the Deist's side created so great a sensation; and justly so, for it marks the climax of Deism. Oddly enough, the title of the book contained a truth which Law, especially in his mystic days, not only held, but actually made the cardinal point of his whole system. As we shall see presently, Law insisted as strongly as Tindal did that Christianity was as old as the Creation, in one sense; only that sense was certainly not Tindal's sense. It is worth remarking, however, that in the work now before us Law never finds fault with the title of Tindal's book ; but the contents of the book were not necessarily indicated by the title. The way that Tindal proved that Christianity was as old as the Creation was by magnifying Reason at the expense of Revelation, and on this point Law joined issue with him. He will by no means admit what Tindal had laid down as an almost self-evident axiom, viz. that man is obliged to abide by the sole light of his own reason. He contends à priori that this may be a mere groundless pretension. If humility be a duty, then this lofty claim for reason may be nothing better than spiritual pride. This being in Law's view the true point of the controversy, he discusses it at some length, and it need scarcely be said with what result.

The earlier part of the 'Case of Reason' is concerned with a question which belongs to the province of Ethics as much or more than to that of Theology. Whether morality depended upon the will of God, or upon the eternal and immutable fitness of things, had long been a bone of contention between moral philosophers. Tindal took the latter view, but turned it to a purpose which its

122 Man, no fit Fudge of Goa's Actions.

Christian advocates (among whom Law himself may to a certain extent 1 be reckoned) never intended. The way in which Law deals with his adversary on this point affords a good specimen of that adroitness which he always showed as a controversialist. 'You argue,' he says in effect, ‘that the relation of things and persons, and the fitness resulting from thence, is the sole rule of God's actions. I grant it most readily; but I contend that instead of proving

what you suppose, it proves the exact opposite. I appeal

to this one common and confessed principle as a sufficient proof that man cannot walk by the sole light of his own reason without contradicting the nature and reason of things and denying this to be the sole rule of God's actions. For, God's nature being divinely perfect, the fitness of things implies that He must necessarily act by a rule above all human comprehension.' This idea is powerfully worked out by a reference to Creation, Providence, the miseries of life, the nature and origin of the soul, the origin of evilin fact, to all the topics of natural religion. 'What,' he asks, can we know of such matters by such means as our own poor reason can grope out of the nature and fitness of things?' 'We have the utmost certainty that we are vastly incompetent judges of the fitness or unfitness of any methods that God uses in the government of so small a part of the universe as mankind are.'

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Law shows how the line of argument which Tindal was using must end in 'horrid Atheism.' 'For,' he says, 'it is just as wise and reasonable to allow of no mysteries in revelation as to allow of no mysteries or secrets in Creation and Providence. And, whenever this writer or any other shall think it a proper time to attack natural religion with as

I say 'to a certain extent,' because Law rather held that the 'eternal and immutable fitness of things' and the 'will of God' were only different modes of expressing one and the same thing.

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