FOR a much richer account of the Life and Opinions of the Reverend William Law, A.M., than can be given here, the student must be referred to the elaborate work of Canon Overton, published by Longmans in 1881.

Canon Overton writes with a fullness of knowledge of English religion in the eighteenth century which is possessed by very few; and Law, more than most men, bears the impress of the time in which his lot on earth was cast. Here it will not be possible to do more than sketch the salient features of his remarkable character and history.

William Law was born in 1686, at King’s Cliffe, a considerable village near Stamford, in Northamptonshire. His father, Thomas Law, was a grocer and chandler — kept, that is to say, the village shop. It is a position, as all country people know, of some importance in the rustic hierarchy, and in those days was more important than it is now. Both the father and the mother — her name was Margaret — were good, religious people. Some have thought that they were the models for Paternus and Eusebia in the Serious Call.

Their son, William — he was the fourth of eight sons, and there were three daughters as well — entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as sizar, or poor scholar, in 1705; took his B.A. degree in 1708; was elected Fellow and ordained in 1711; and graduated as M.A. in 1712. While at Cambridge he drew up a set of “rules for my future conduct.” The first rule was “to fix it deep in my mind that I have one business upon my hands — to seek for eternal happiness by doing the will of God.” “Doing the will of God” sums up the earlier part of Law’s history, as freedom and peace in the Holy Spirit sums up the later. Through the one he rose to the other, like Origen and many other saints. Yet, when Law was a curate in London — the exact date is unknown, he is said to have courted fashionable society, and to have been “a great beau.” It is possible that about 1720 there was a final act of self-renunciation.

In 1713 Law was for a time suspended from his degrees for a Tripos speech. Part of the ceremonies attending the Bachelors’ commencement at Cambridge was a burlesque oration, delivered in the schools on Ash Wednesday, by a bachelor seated on a three-legged stool, and hence known as Tripos. He was expected to be “witty, but modest withal”; but it was difficult for sprightly young men to hit the golden mean. Some of these licensed jesters indulged in gross personalities, some ventured on political satire, and suspensions were not infrequent. Law could not keep the Pretender out of his tirade.

But at the time Law was not Bachelor but Master. If it were safe for an alien to meddle with the arcana of Cambridge life, a suspicion might be expressed that Law was really not Tripos but Prevaricator — a personage who played the same part, as Lord of Misrule or Abbot of Unreason, at the Masters’ commencement. However, we learn here three facts about Law: first, that he was a convinced Jacobite; second, that he was not discreet, or, at any rate, not worldly wise; third, that he was regarded at Cambridge as a man who could and would make an amusing speech.

Indeed, as we can see from his books, Law had a pretty gift of wit, though he was absolutely devoid of humor. The difference is that wit sees the absurdities of others, while humor is conscious of its own.

Shortly afterwards Law testified to the sincerity of his political convictions in a much more serious fashion. On the accession of George I., in 1716, he refused to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, and was accordingly deprived of his Fellowship, and of all prospect of employment in the Church.

The loss to Law was very great. His stiff conscientiousness cost him not only influence but work, and he was condemned henceforth to eat his heart as a looker-on. Further, he was exposed to the full force of that sour trial which besets the martyr who is not wanted. The history of Non-jurism, like that of Jacobitism in general, is not edifying. But affliction tries the righteous man, and very pure reverence is due to those who, like Ken, Nelson, and Law, retained their saintliness in a world which had cast them out, and which they could not understand.

Almost immediately after the resignation of his Fellowship, Law began to make his mark in the world of literature. The Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor appeared in 1717; the Remarks upon the Fable of the Bees in 1723; and the Case of Reason in 1731. Mandeville was a silly, scoffing creature; but Hoadly, the latitudinarian bishop, and Tindal, the philosophical Deist, were formidable antagonists, and Law showed himself a match for both. In 1726 appeared the treatise on The Absolute Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments. Of this, we may notice in passing, that it was suggested by a piece that had been acted “almost every night one whole season,” in which Venus, Pan, Silenus, Bacchus, and a number of other “filthy demons of the heathen world” were brought upon the stage to talk in keeping with their character, or want of character. Law, no doubt, was carried too far; he forgot that he was not living in the age of Tertullian, and on this, as on many other questions, he showed a want of balance. But his disgust at “wanton songs and impure rant” was natural enough in days when the Restoration drama held the stage; and there is much that might be said about the morality of the footlights in any age.

In 1726 appeared the first of Law’s devotional works, the Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection. It is significant that Law uses “perfection” here, not, as the old fathers, of love, but of obedience. One result of the book was probably that connection with the Gibbon family which shaped the whole of Law’s after-life. About this time Mr Edward Gibbon, the grandfather of the historian, was seeking a tutor for his only son. Law was selected for this office, attended the younger Gibbon to Cambridge, and in 1730, when his pupil went abroad to make the grand tour, found a home in that “spacious house with gardens and land at Putney,” where his patron resided, “in decent hospitality.” Here he lived, “as the much honored friend and spiritual director of the whole family,” till the establishment was broken up some little time after Mr Gibbon’s death in 1736.

In 1729 the publication of the Serious Call had set the seal on Law’s reputation, and he was visited and consulted at Putney by a little circle of disciples. Chief among them were Dr Cheyne, the two Wesleys, and Byrom. The Wesleys drifted away from him; but the good and flighty John Byrom, squire of Kersall, near Manchester — poet, mystic, Jacobite, physician — remained his faithful friend and worshipper through life. But Law was one of those men who have many admirers and few friends, and whose friends are markedly inferior to themselves. They are men who cannot bear contradiction.

In 1737, according to Mr Moreton, in 1740, according to other authorities, we find Law settled at King’s Cliffe, his birthplace, in a good house known as King John’s Palace, or the Hall Yard. Here, in 1744, he was joined by Miss Hester Gibbon, the daughter of his old patron, and Mrs Elizabeth Hutcheson, the widow of a wealthy country gentleman; and here he died in 1761.

Law’s life at King’s Cliffe was wholly uneventful. The only dates that emerge are those of the writings which he sent to the Press from time to time, down to the very year of his death. It cannot have been a wholesome existence for so able a man to have been thus immured as domestic chaplain with two women of limited understanding and eccentric character.

He seems to have had scarcely any contact with the outside world.

Certainly he suffered through the absence of larger duties and converse with his equals. The little household was strictly ordered. The Bible and books of theology were the only literature admitted; nor was any form of recreation tolerated beyond conversation, a little music, and an occasional drive or ride. The historian Gibbon, who is oddly divided between dislike of Law’s ways and pride in having been, in a sense, the proprietor of so famous a man, speaks of the house at King’s Cliffe as “a hermitage,” and the term is not inappropriate.

The Christian duty most insisted upon by Law was charity. He himself was the soul of munificence. He built and endowed a girls’ school at King’s Cliffe, possibly with the thousand pounds which had been sent to him anonymously by some person who was grateful for spiritual profit received from the Christian Perfection. In 1745 the foundation was increased by Mrs Hutcheson, till it included also a school for boys, almshouses, and a library, which still exist.

Such wise generosity could bear none but good fruits. But the rule of the house was that all surplus income should be given away in alms. As Mrs Hutcheson enjoyed two thousand a year, while Miss Gibbon had inherited half her father’s large property, and Law himself possessed some means, the sums thus disposed of must have been very considerable. The natural result was the demoralization of the whole countryside. King’s Cliffe was crowded with undeserving mendicants, and the evil became so serious that the rector preached against it, and the parish made representations to the magistrates. Here, too, there is a characteristic feature. Law lived just before the iron age of Political Economy set in. Smith’s Wealth of nations appeared in 1776. Perhaps the rector of King’s Cliffe was a magistrate.

But Law’s heart was fixed on the letter of the Gospel, and what he thought to be — though it by no means was — the practice of primitive Christianity. Here also, as in his politics, he stood at the parting of the ways, and failed to see that the old road had come to an end. It was an age of giving. Kings gave pensions; ministers bestowed sinecures; noblemen rained showers of guineas on troops of gaping dependents; and so the ideal country priest, as he is painted in Goldsmith’s Deserted village, gave all he could to all who asked. “Pleased with his guests the good man learned to glow, And quite forgot their vices in their woe.” Law would never suffer his portrait to be taken; but Mr Tighe, who visited King’s Cliffe some time before 1813, and received information from “a kind person” there, tells us that he “was in stature rather over than under the middle size; not corpulent, but stout made, with broad shoulders; his visage was round, his eyes gray, his features well-proportioned and not large; his complexion ruddy, and his countenance open and agreeable. He was naturally more inclined to be merry than sad … He chose to eat his food from a wooden platter, not from an idea of the unnecessary luxury of a plate, but because it appeared to him that a plate spoiled the knives.”