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Law's Life seen in his Writings.

333 'A Dialogue between a Methodist and a Churchman,' is too slight a performance to require a separate notice; it will be referred to when we treat of the connection between Law and the Methodists. The other, entitled 'An Address to the Clergy,' was written when Law was all but a dying man, and will be best considered in connection with his death.

To some it may appear that too much has already been said about Law's writings in a work which purports to be a life of the man. But the fact is, we see the man in his writings. Law thought very little, and said very little, directly, about himself. Egotism and vanity are the very last faults with which he can be charged. Nevertheless, a man of great force of character, who throws his whole soul into his works, who always writes with intense earnestness of purpose, always with a view to the edification, never to the amusement, hardly ever to the instruction, of his reader, cannot help stamping all that he writes with his own marked individuality. When Miss Gibbon was asked to write a life of Law, she replied,' His life is in his books.' This is so far true, that a biographer would be neglecting to work a mine rich in illustrations of his subject if he did not thoroughly sift these books; and this must be the apology for having dwelt so long upon them.

334

Law as a Correspondent.

CHAPTER XIX.

LAW AS A CORRESPONDENT.

THERE are two species of composition which one expects to find, as a matter of course, largely quoted in every biography - at any rate in every religious biography-belonging to the eighteenth century, viz. the diary and the correspondence. When a man became seriously impressed, his first impulse appears to have been to write a diary. Sometimes he went further still, and wrote a regular autobiography. But Law's biographer could expect to find no such godsends. Happily for him, Law's friend Byrom differed from his master in this respect; but then, Byrom lived a very different life from that of Law; his contact with the outer world at many points afforded him ample material for that amusing journal which has been and will be so largely utilised in the work. But if Law had kept a diary, what could he have put into it? His outer life was a singularly uneventful one; and he was the last man in the world to keep a record of his 'frames and feelings and religious experiences,' all which things he heartily distrusted. The desire of the soul turned to God in humility, gentleness, and resignation '-that was the one frame of the Christian, and it did not admit of any substantial variation. Law was no more likely to have left us any word-painting of

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'Thus, when Charles Wesley became very seriously concerned about spiritual things, he wrote to his brother John, I would willingly write a diary;' and then consults him as to what he should put into it. See Memoirs of the Rev. Charles Wesley, by T. Jackson, p. 7.

The Art of Letter-writing.

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his mental phases, than to have left us any portrait of his bodily features. Knowing the man, it would be unreasonable to look for either the one or the other. But letters Law did leave behind him, and these will form the subject of the present chapter.

In the eighteenth century the art of letter-writing reached its perfection. At no other period of English history have there been so many really good letter-writers. In an earlier age the English style was not sufficiently easy and flexible to admit of excellence in an art which, of all things, requires ease and flexibility. In a later, the penny post, the electric telegraph, and the general rush and hurry of life, have, among them, well-nigh improved letter-writing off the face of the land. Men make known their wants, express their sentiments, and so forth, to their friends in writing, but they no longer write letters. In these degenerate days an average letter hardly contains as many lines as in the last century it contained pages. Then almost every able man left behind him many more or less good specimens of this delightful branch of literature.

Law, however, cannot be ranked among the best letterwriters of the eighteenth century. Neither the bent of his mind nor the circumstances of his life were conducive to his excelling in this kind of composition. A good letter must be the outpouring of one mind to another on perfectly equal terms. But Law's correspondence was not of this character; it was, for the most part, simply the imparting by post of advice to those who could not come and sit at the master's feet and hear the same advice delivered viva voce. Again, a certain degree of 'abandon,' and, in the inoffensive sense of the word, of levity, is, perhaps, essential

This was written before I had seen Mr. Goldwin Smith's Life of Cowper. Similar remarks have been made in that work; and in Mr. W. Bagehot's Literary Studies, On Cowper,' which I had also not read when I wrote the above.

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Law's Published Letters.

to the perfect letter. But this frame of mind was not Law's. He had abundance of wit and humour, and those of the raciest kind. But they were always held in check. His mind rarely unbent itself from its natural gravity. The playfulness of Cowper, that most charming of all letterwriters; the raillery of Horace Walpole; the easiness of Venn; the vigorous, if somewhat elephantine, gambolling of Warburton; which constitute respectively the charms of the correspondence of these eminent men, were all wanting in Law. Or, to compare his letters with those of John Newton, to which they bore, from the circumstances which called them forth, the closest resemblance, there is a softness about the 'Cardiphonia' which Law, as a rule, does not show.

A collection of Law's letters was published with his consent about a year before his death, at the request and through the instrumentality of his friends, Mr. Langcake and Mr. Ward. The first of them is addressed to his old friend Bishop Sherlock, and is interesting as an independent testimony to the merits of that very able man, from one who never flattered, and who could have no interested motive for writing as he did. Against the random aspersions of such men as Horace Walpole and John, Lord Hervey,' may be fairly set Law's opinion that the name of Sherlock was 'justly venerable to much the greatest and most worthy part of the whole English Church,' and that his life had been manifestly serviceable in the most trying times, to the good of this part of the Christian Church.'

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The next letter, addressed to 'Mr. J. L.' (probably John Lindsay), is worth noticing, because it touches slightly upon a subject on which Law, as a rule, was very reticent, viz. the relations between Church and State. The reasons

See Walpole's Letters and Lord Hervey's Memoirs of the Court of George II., both of which give an unfavourable account of Bishop Sherlock.

Law not a 'Church and State' Man. 337

for his reticence are obvious. He had no wish to stir up the troubled waters of ecclesiastical politics. 'Private Christians,' he says, 'have no power or call to govern the world, or set up thrones according to the principles of truth and righteousness; but are by the spirit of the Gospel obliged to submit to, and be contented with, that state of government, good or bad, under which the providence of God has placed them.' At the same time, they are not to call evil good, and good evil, nor 'to imagine that evil loses its evil nature, and may be called right and good, as soon as Providence has suffered it to become successful.' And, therefore, since Law appears to have been called upon by his correspondent to express his views on the influence of the civil power upon the Church, he does not hesitate to declare what he thinks.

It must be remembered that when Law wrote, the blighting effects of Sir R. Walpole's ecclesiastical policy were only too conspicuous; and perhaps Law was a little too ready to draw a general induction from a particular case. At any rate, he asserts roundly that' where the Church and the State are incorporated, and under one and the same power, all the evil passions, corrupt views, and worldly interests, which form and transform, turn and overturn, all outward things, must be expected often to come to pass, as well in the Church as in the State to which it is united;' and much more to the same effect. The whole tenor of the letter, which is a long one, shows that Law was by no means disposed to join in the jubilant strain in which the many optimists of his day spoke of 'our happy establishment in Church and State.' And as he tried every mode of worship by the standard of the Primitive Church, we can hardly be surprised to find that he was not perfectly satisfied with the Church arrangements of the eighteenth century. For the matter of that, the nine

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