Characters and Characteristics of William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic. Selected
and arranged, with an Introduction, by Alexander Whyte, D.D. (Hodder and Stoughton.)—William Law was born about twenty years after the death of Jeremy Taylor, and like Taylor, he devoted all his energies as an author to the discussion of religious and controversial questions. If the "Holy Living and Holy Dying" was the most influential work on the practical duties of the Christian life published in the seventeenth century, Law's "Serious " probably exercised an equal power in the eighteenth. Happily, the book was written before the author, to quote Dr. Whyte's words, "had been taken possession of by Jacob Behmen," the German shoemaker, whose mysticism made a deep impression on Law's powerful intellect in his later years. How strong that intellect was, has been admitted by Mr. Leslie Stephen, who, in his comments on "The Case of Reason," which is a reply to Tindars attack on Christianity, expresses his surprise that "such a master of English and of reasoning should have sunk into such oblivion." Controversies, however forcible, have seldom any permanent vitality, but Law's practical works ought not to be forgotten, and it may be hoped that Dr. Whyte's admirable selection from his copious writings will bo at least the means of drawing renewed attention to the volume
which was once, and ought still to be, the most popular. "Mr
Law's masterpiece," Gibbon wrote, "is a powerful book Many of his portraits are not unworthy the pen of La Bruy ire ;" and Dr. Johnson relates how, when a young man at Oxford, he took up "The Serious Call," expecting to find it a dull book, 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." Law's influence on John Wesley in his early days was also profound, and his writings, as Southey observes, "coin- plated what Jeremy Taylor and the treatise De Imitatione Christi had begun." Mr. Gesso, by-the-way, in his "History of Eighteenth Century Literature," has fallen into two or three errors about Law. Upon one page he styles him a High-Churchman and on another a Dissenter, whereas, as Mr. Stephen truly says, "he was a High-Churchman to the end of his life ;" and he observes that he wrote his "remarkable Evangelical treatise" for the use of certain pious ladies clustered round him in King's Cliff. "The Serious Call," however, was published in 1729, when Law was living at Putney in the Gibbon family ae tutor to the historian's father, and it was not until 1736 that he returned to his birth- place. The "pious ladies" mentioned by Mr, Gesso did not form a part of his household until 1744. Moreover, what founda- tion is there for the statement that William Law's name "was first rescued from obscurity by the pious care of Gibbon " ? "The Serious Call" was published years prior to Gibbon's birth, and before the youth was seventeen years old, six editions of the book had appeared. Moreover, the "-Memoirs," in which Gibbon praises the book, appeared in 1799, five years after the historian's death, and in the seventy years which divided the two works, Law's famous volume had become widely popular.
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