William Law
A STRANGELY NEGLECTED FIGURE of the 18th century is William Law (1686-1761), Anglican divine, writer, and mystic. Strange that he should be neglected, because he is not only a master of English prose, but a deep and original thinker- insofar as the discovery of truth can be called original- and a great saint. Those who know him at all usually know him for his little book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which sets forth in lively language a plan of life so thoroughly Vedantic that one looks for quotations from Hindu scripture- but looks in vain. He found those practical and universal truths not in scripture but in himself.
Serious Call, however, belongs to only one part of Law’s life, and, for the spiritual seeker, not the most interesting part. His life, as orderly and logical as his prose, falls into three stages: a period of controversy when his lucid and witty pen was at the service of all morality; a period of reason and appraisal when he established his ideals and wrote Serious Call; and the mystical period which burst forth at last in divine fire after a lifetime of devotion.
Law was born at King’s Cliffe in Northamptonshire, became a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and an ordained minister of the Church of England. But upon the accession of George I as king and consequently head of the church, his conscience forbade him to take the oath of allegiance. This made him what was known in those days as a non-juror, and caused him to be deprived of his fellowship and of any opportunity for advance ment in the church.
This fact, however, did not by any means cut him off from living the active life of a churchman and theologian, for he had a vigorous and interested mind and threw himself enthusiastically into all kinds of social, moral, and theological controversies. He defend ed the high church which had demoted him, he defended morality, he defended reason against superstition, and he even published a piece called “The Absolute Unlawful ness of Stage Entertainments,” whose very fist-banging title reveals the vigor with which he thought and wrote.
At the age of thirty-seven he became tutor to Edward Gibbon and lived in the Gibbon household for fifteen years. It was in their home he wrote Serious Call. This book was composed for a generation of people whom Law considered irreligious and hypocritical, to point out to them vigorously that the Christian life is more than lip-service, more than morality even, that true Christianity implies a new birth in spirit, a new principle of life, an entire change of disposition. He says that if all those who profess to be Christians, really were, “it would change the whole face of the world.”
From his acquaintances and observations of people, he created synthetic characters to make his points: among the many was Flavian, the orthodox churchwoman who, despite her riches, thinks that charity consists in giving a few pennies to the church; Flatus, restlessly searching for peace in the world and never finding it; Succus, whose greatest happiness is a good meal and who praises the minister who sets the best table; Negotius, the honest businessman who gives to the church hoping for success in his business. And Miranda, the true pattern of piety, who lives a life of renunciation, humility, charity, devotion, and abstinence.
IT is when he describes the ideal Christian life that Law is most pragmatic. He begins with a plea for all Christians to have the sincere intention to please God in all actions. He begs them not to waste time. He points out that worldly business is to be made holy unto the Lord by being done as a service to Him. He urges chanting the name of the Lord, and praying for others. He says, “There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.”
He even plans an ideal day for the devotee. “I take it for granted,” he begins, “that every Christian is up early in the morning.” At daybreak, he says, chant a psalm to the glory of the Lord. At nine o’clock meditate on humility. At noon pray for humanity. At three o’clock surrender to the will of God. At six o’clock make a careful examination of the day and of yourself resolving to correct wrongs and repent of mistakes. At bedtime think of death. Remember, he cautions, that “the greatness of those things which follow death makes all that goes before it sink into nothingness. Then commit yourself to sleep as into the hands of God.”
That he practiced what he preached goes almost without saying. If the fact needs a witness, one is found in the autobiography of his pupil, Edward Gibbon, who draws an appealing picture of Law as “a wit and a scholar, who believed all that he professed and practiced all that he enjoined. The character of non-juror which he maintained to the last is sufficient evidence of his principles in state and church. The sacrifice of interest to conscience will always be respectable.”
A Serious Call which appeared in 1728 made a sensational impact on the public. The book had a profound effect on Samuel Johnson who read it while a student at Oxford. Despite a certain roughness of character and outspokenness, Johnson wrote some of the most inspiring prayers which might never have been written except for the influence of Law’s words. Johnson himself said, “I expected to find it a dull book (as such books generally are) and perhaps to laugh at it, but I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Consequently, he was convinced that it was possible to be a Christian without any loss of intellectual integrity. John Wesley, the Methodist, was impressed enough by the book to seek out Law at the Gibbon home and become his friend. And many churchmen and writers of the day praised the book for its sincerity and its fine style. Even an agnostic, Leslie Stephen, sometime later wrote of it respectfully, “Its power can only be adequately felt by readers who can study it on their knees.”
But then, when he was forty-eight, William Law chanced upon the writings of Jacob Boehme. Into his open and prepared soul flooded the radiance of Boehme’s strange teachings, vibrant, altogether over whelming. Ethics immediately broadened away into mysticism. Rationalism was at once set afire with passion. And we have the paradoxical spectacle of the austere, conforming, soberly dressed, Anglican churchman, in a supremely rational century, burning and glowing with the unreasoning, unrestrained fire of God’s love. Even the titles of his writings from now on show the awakening that has taken place: The Way to Divine Knowledge, The Spirit of Prayer, The Spirit of Love, Truths of Revelation. and the like.
WHEN a man becomes a mystic, he breaks with society and walks alone with God. He sets up revelation against orthodoxy and intuition against reason, and cares not for the consequences. Many of Law’s admirers dropped away at this period, among them John Wesley who was too practical-minded to follow this new path. But there were others who recognized Law for what he was, became his true disciples, and followed him to the end. Two of them were women, Miss Hester Gibbon, sister of his former pupil, and a Mrs. Hutcheson, whose husband on his death-bed had urged her to put herself under the spiritual protection of Law. When Law’s patron died and the Gibbon household dispersed, this interesting trio moved to King’s Cliffe, his birthplace, where he had a house and small property, and set up housekeeping. There for the next twenty-one years, they lived the severely simple life set forth in A. Serious Call, a life wholly given to devotion, study, and charity. About devotion Law writes:
Devotion signifies a life given to God. It is neither public nor private prayer. He is the devout man who lives no longer to his own will, or the way and spirit of the world, but to the sole will of God. This is the common devotion which is to be made part of the common life of all Christians. If our common life is not a common course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.
For nine years after moving to King’s Cliffe, William Law’s pen was silent. It must have been a period of deep study and meditation, of extremely active spiritual work, for out of it came his greatest mystical writings. One thing was quite evident, that he made an exhaustive study of the works of Jacob Boehme, who, he announced enthusiastically, was “a guide to the truth of all the mysteries of the kingdom of God.” Law’s rational mind was able to sift out the sugar from the sand. He lovingly set himself the task of interpreting and clarifying the difficult and often fantastic metaphorical writings of the “illumined shoemaker”. But Boehme was not his only study. He was an assiduous reader. In his library at King’s Cliffe today there are more than six hundred volumes by mystical writers, said to be only a fragment of those that he collected.
His life now was a dedicated one, strict and ascetic to the point of austerity. He rose at five every morning for several hours of devotion. Most of his day was spent in his study, which was a room fourteen feet square, furnished with a table, a chair, the Bible, and his mystical books. Here he had his highest moments and put them down on paper for us.
The first writing that came from this period was The Spirit of Prayer, and the very first line of it shows the spirit of the new man. It states unequivocally, “The greatest part of mankind – nay, of Christians – may be said to be asleep, and that particular way of life which takes up each man’s mind, thought, and actions may very well be called his particular dream.”
Law’s treatises are completely ordered, planned to the last paragraph. There could be no greater contrast than between his writing and Boehme’ s. Boehme struggles with obscurities. Law presents his points with the greatest simplicity and clarity. Yet within this frame work of reason, the mystic lifts up his voice and sings. Witness this definition of God, this hymn to God, at the beginning of The Spirit of Prayer:
This is the amiable nature of God. He is the Good, the unchangeable, overflowing fountain of good that sends forth nothing but good to all eternity. He is the Love itself, the unmixed, unmeasurable Love, doing nothing but from love, giving nothing but gifts of love to every thing He has made; requiring nothing of all His creatures but the spirit and fruits of that love which brought them into being. Oh how sweet is this contemplation of the height and depth of the riches of Divine Love!
After defining the object of contemplation, he tells what results can be expected of spiritual exercise:
And for the man who lives in this spirit of love, all his wants are satisfied, all disorders of nature are removed, no life is any longer a burden, every day is a day of peace, everything you meet becomes a help to you because every thing you see or do is all done in the sweet, gentle element of love.
Then he goes on to practical advice:
Stop, therefore, all self-activity, listen not to the suggestions of thy own reason, run not on in thy own will, but be retired, silent, passive, and humbly attentive to this new risen light within thee. Open thy heart, thy eyes and ears to all its impressions. Let it enlighten, teach, frighten, torment, judge, and condemn thee as it pleases, tum not away from it, hear all it says, seek no relief from it, consult not with flesh and blood, but, with a heart full of faith and resignation to God, pray only this prayer, that God’s Kingdom may come and His will be done in thy soul. Stand faithfully in this state of preparation thus given up to the Spirit of God, and then the work of thy repentance will be wrought in God and thou wilt soon find that He that is in thee is much greater than all that are against thee . . . Through all the whole nature of things nothing can do or be a real good to thy soul but the operation of God upon it.
In his spiritual advice, he shows himself to be an experienced guru. On the practice of mortifications, he cautions, “Their only worth consists in this, that they break down what stands between God and us. But many people mistake the whole nature and worth of them. They practice them for their own sake, as things good in themselves, and so rest in them and look no further, but grow full of self-admiration for their mortifications.”
He has a most beautifully graphic way of making his points:
The evil seek wrong and the good seek right, but they are both seekers, and for the same reason, because their present state has not that which it wants to have. And this must be the state of human life and of every creature that has fallen from its first state or has some thing in it that it should not have.
Purification therefore is the one thing necessary, and nothing will do in the stead of it. It is the purity and perfection of the divine nature that must be brought again into him, because in that purity and perfection he came forth from God. For nothing impure or imperfect in its will and working can have any union with God.
You are to seek your salvation, not in taking up your traveling staff, or crossing the seas to find out a new Luther or a new Calvin to clothe yourself with their opinions. No. The oracle is at home that always and only speaks the truth to you because nothing is your truth but that good and that evil which is yours with in you. What you are in yourself, what is doing in yourself, is all that can be either your salvation or damnation.
Law’s energy and enthusiasm for the work of God did not abate as he grew old, rather grew stronger, until we have at the very end of his life, at age 74, a fiery attack in forceful language upon what was in that day considered Christianity. He gave this work the deceptive title of An Humble, Earnest, and Affectionate Address to the Clergy. True, it is all that, but much more. He rolls up his sleeves and efficiently applies his axe to the forest of deceptions, pretensions, and pride that he sees in the Christian community. Let the chips fall where they may! He had been independent since he left college, all his life careless of clerical standing or social esteem. At 74, just before his death, he was not likely to suppress truth out of any personal consideration. He strides right in and lays his axe at the roots of everything men held dear and important – learning, patriotism, comfort, social refinements, all self deception.
In a way, this treatise is a summing up of all his conclusions of a life of spiritual practice. He begins in his usual straightforward manner by announcing the one thing needful for Christians:
The Spirit of God brought again to His first power of life in us. Everything else, be it what it will, however glorious and divine in outward appearance, everything that angels, men, churches, or reformations can do for us is dead and helpless, but so far as it is the immediate work of the Spirit of God breathing and living in it.
Then he analyzes the problem and makes the simple point that all struggle is between self-pride and humility. On the one side, pride of learning, wealth, and power. On the other, love, goodness, and the perfection of the divine nature. Then someone may ask, is there no place for learning and erudition in the church?
And Law replies, leaving no room for argument, “He in whom the law, the prophets, and the Gospel are fulfilled is the only well-educated man and one of the first-rate scholars of the world.” And he proceeds to thrust this sharp truth at the clergymen of the day:
For until your heart is an altar in which the heavenly fire never goes out, you are dead in yourself and can only be a speaker of dead words about things that never had any life within you.
A fiery man indeed! This is the courage of one who knows he speaks the truth. He concludes his address to the clergy by saying,
All that Christ was, did, suffered, dying in the flesh and ascending into Heaven, was for this sole end, to purchase for all His followers a new birth, a new life, and new light in and by the Spirit of God, restored to them and living in them as their support, comforter, and guide into all truth. And this was His ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’
The paragraph was written a few days before Law died- was written, it is said, on the last occasion when his hand was able to hold a pen.
by Nancy Pope Mayorga
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