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more famous answer. Wesley's letter runs: 'It is in obedience to what I think the call of God that I, who have the sentence of death in my own soul, take upon me to write to you, of whom I have often desired to have the first elements of the gospel of Christ. If you are born of God, you will approve of the design; if not, I shall grieve for you, not for myself. For as I seek not the praise of men, so neither regard I the contempt of you or any other. . For two years I have been preaching after the model of your two practical treatises, and all who heard allowed that the law was great, wonderful, and holy; but when they attempted to fulfil it, they found that it was too high for man, and that by doing the works of the law should no flesh be justified. I then exhorted them to pray earnestly for grace, and use all those other means of obtaining which God hath appointed. Still I and my hearers were more and more convinced that by this law man cannot live; and under this heavy yoke I might have groaned till death, had not a holy man to whom God has lately directed me answered my complaint at once by saying, “Believe, and thou shalt be saved." Now, Sir, suffer me to ask, how will you justify it to our common Lord that you never gave me this advice? Why did I scarcely ever hear you name the name of Christ ?-never so as to ground anything upon faith in His blood? If you say you advised other things as preparatory to this, what is this but laying a foundation below the foundation? Is not Christ the First as well as the Last? If you say you advised this because you knew that I had faith already, you discerned not my spirit at all. Consider deeply and impartially whether the true cause of your never pressing this upon me was this, that you had it not yourself.' Wesley concluded by warning him, on the authority of Peter Böhler, whom he called a man of God, that his state was a very dangerous one; and asked him

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Law's Reply to Wesley.

whether his extreme roughness, and morose and sour behaviour, could possibly be the fruit of a living faith in Christ.

To this letter Law sent the following reply: 'May 19, 1738. Rev. Sir,-Yours I received yesterday. As you have written that letter in obedience to a Divine call, and in conjunction with another extraordinary good young man, whom you know to have the Spirit of God, so I assure you that, considering your letter in that view, I neither desire nor dare to make the smallest defence of myself. . . . But now, upon supposition that you had here only acted by that ordinary light which is common to good and sober minds, I should remark upon your letter as follows: How you may have been two years preaching the doctrine of the two practical discourses, or how you may have tired yourself and your hearers to no purpose, is what I cannot say much to. A holy man, you say, taught you this: "Believe and thou shalt be saved, &c." I am to suppose that till you met with this holy man you had not been taught this doctrine. Did you not above two years ago give a new translation of Thomas à Kempis? Will you call Thomas to account and to answer it to God, as you do me, for not teaching you that doctrine? Or will you say that you took upon you to restore the true sense of that divine writer, and instruct others how they might profit by reading him, before you had so much as a literal knowledge of

It is interesting to find in Law's library at Cliffe three copies of this edition of à Kempis by Wesley, one of them evidently much read. Law had also several other editions of his favourite author; one so curious that it is worth noting. T. à Kempis has doubtless afforded comfort to many troubled spirits, but one may doubt whether the following edition would quite answer the purpose for which it was published: 7. à Kempis-4 Books of the Imitation of Christ; together with his Three Tabernacles of Poverty, Humility, and Patience, by W. Willymott, Vice-Provost of King's, Cambridge. Dedicated to the Unhappy Sufferers by the great National Calamity of the South Sea! (1722).

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the most plain, open, and repeated doctrine in his book? You cannot but remember what value I always expressed of à Kempis, and how much I recommended it to your meditations. You have had a great many conversations with me, and I dare say you never was with me half an hour without my being large upon that very doctrine which you make me totally silent and ignorant of. How far I may have discovered your spirit and the spirit of others that may have conversed with me may perhaps be more a secret to you than you imagine. But granting you to be right in your account of your own faith, how am I chargeable with it? I am to suppose that you had been meditating upon an author that of all others leads us the most directly to a real, living faith in Jesus Christ; after you had judged yourself such a master of his sentiments and doctrines as to be able to publish them to the world with directions and instructions on such experimental divinity, that after you had done this you had only the faith of a Judas or devil, an empty notion only in your head; and that you were thus through ignorance that there was anything better to be sought after; and that you were thus ignorant because I never directed or called you to this faith. But, sir, à Kempis and I have both of us had your acquaintance and conversation, so pray let the fault be divided betwixt us, and I shall be content to have it said that I left you in as much ignorance of this faith as he did, or that you learnt no more of it by conversing with me than with him. If you had only this faith till some weeks ago, let me advise you not to be hasty in believing that because you change your language and expressions, you have changed your faith. The head can as easily amuse itself with a living and justifying faith in the blood of Jesus as with any other notion; and the heart, which you suppose to be a place of security, as being the seat of

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Law an Overmatch for Wesley.

self-love, is more deceitful than the head. Your last paragraph, concerning my sour, rough behaviour, I leave in its full force; whatever you can say of me of that kind without hurting yourself will be always well received by me.'

Mr. Southey calls this a 'temperate answer,' and so it is, but it is difficult to conceive a more cutting one; and its edge is all the keener on account of its temperateness. Any abuse would not only have been unchristian, but it would have spoilt the force of the answer. It would have been worse than a crime, it would have been a blunder. And none knew this better than William Law. The letter, in fact, shows on a small scale what almost all Law's controversial pieces show--the handiwork of a consummate master of the art of controversy. Law had a marvellous knack, without overstepping the boundaries of Christian courtesy, of making his opponents look particularly foolish. In this case it was a singularly unequal match. For Law had age and experience, as well as incomparably superior argumentative powers, on his side. Wesley was, in more senses than one,

Infelix puer atque impar congressus Achilli,

and no one was more conscious of this than Wesley himself; only, perhaps, instead of comparing himself to Troilus, and Law to Achilles, he would rather have compared himself to David and Law to Goliath. He knew that he had an intellectual giant to deal with, and that he in comparison was but an intellectual stripling; but he knew also that 'the battle is not always to the strong;' he believed that his cause was God's cause, and that by God's help he might with his little sling and stone pierce through the strong man's armour. After he had written his letter, and received his answer, it would, perhaps, have been wiser in Wesley to have let the matter rest. He had delivered his

Wesley's High Estimate of Law.

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own soul by uttering his protest, and he might have seen that there was nothing to be gained by continuing a controversy with Law. But Wesley was a thorough Englishman, and Englishmen proverbially never know when they are beaten. The very day after receiving Law's reply he wrote him another letter, and received from him an answer which, if possible, was more crushing than the first.

But it is neither a pleasing nor a profitable task to descant upon the disputes between two good Christians. It is far pleasanter to record that Wesley's after-conduct was thoroughly characteristic of the noble and generous nature of the man. Though the divergence between him and his late mentor increased rather than diminished with years, yet he constantly referred to Law in his sermons, and always in terms of the warmest admiration and respect. 'In how beautiful a manner,' he exclaims in his sermon on 'Redeeming the Time,' 'does that great man, Mr. Law, treat this important subject!'! 'The ground of this,' he says, in his sermon on Christian Education,' is 'admirably well laid down by Mr. Law!' 2 In another sermon Law is described as 'that strong and elegant writer, Mr. Law.'3 Even when speaking of Law's mysticism, which at the time was the object of his special abhorrence, he asks almost indignantly, 'Will any one dare to affirm that all mystics, such as Mr. Law in particular, are void of all Christian experience?'4 Speaking of the origin of the Methodists, he admits that there was some truth' in Dr. Trapp's assertion that 'Mr. Law was their parent.' For all the Methodists carefully read his books [i.e, the 'Christian

1 Sermon XCIII. vol. iii. p. 79.

2 Sermon XCV. vol. iii. p. 97.

8 Sermon CXVIII. vol. iii. p. 333.

Sermon XX., on the Lord our Righteousness,' preached Nov. 24, 1765, vol. i. p. 269.