William Law

William Law 1686-1761, English clergyman, noted for his controversial, devotional, and mystical writings. One of the nonjurors , Law was deprived of his fellowship in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and lost all chances for advancement in the church. Unexcelled among the controversialists of his day, he was also a leading devotional writer. In the former role he wrote Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor (1717-19) in the Bangorian Controversy , and The Case of Reason (1731), in reply to Matthew Tindal, the deist. In the field of devotional writings, few books have been given so high a place as his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). Its influence was acknowledged by John Wesley. In The Spirit of Prayer (1750) and The Spirit of Love (1754) is discernible the influence of Law's study of Jakob Boehme, the mystic. Law's collected works (9 vol., 1753-76) were edited by G. B. Morgan in 1892-93.

Bibliography: See biography by J. H. Overton (1881); W. R. Inge, Studies of English Mystics (1906); S. Hobhouse, William Law and Eighteenth Century Quakerism (1927); J. B. Green, John Wesley and William Law (1945).

Law, William (1686–1761). Christian devotional writer. He was fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, until deprived of his fellowship as a Nonjuror (see DIVINE RIGHT …) at the accession of George I. After a period as tutor to the father of the historian E. Gibbon, he retired in 1740 to his birthplace, Kings Cliffe, Northants., where he gave his remaining years to writing and local social concern, increasingly influenced by Boehme and becoming much more idiosyncratic.

His most famous work, published in 1728, was A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. The simplicity of its teaching and its vigorous style soon established the work as a classic, which has probably had more influence than any other Protestant spiritual book except Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Law, William (1686–1761). Law, one of the most influential religious writers of his age, came from a modest family at King's Cliffe, near Stamford, and was elected to a fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. But in 1714 he refused to take the oaths of loyalty to George I and was deprived of his fellowship. He then became tutor to Gibbon's father. His most famous work, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), preached a quiet and meditative Christianity, restrained, humble, and charitable. Johnson spoke of the great effect it had upon him as a student and Wesley and Whitefield were also much influenced. In 1732 he published The Case of Reason, arguing faith against deistical scepticism. From 1740 he established at King's Cliffe a devout household, including the widow of Archibald Hutcheson, MP, and Gibbon's aunt Hester. Most of their income went on schools, almshouses, and the poor, and their charity attracted so many beggars that there was bad feeling in the village. When Miss Gibbon died in 1790 at the age of 84, her nephew wrote, disrespectfully: ‘aunt Hester is gone to sing Hallelujahs, a glory she did not seem very impatient to possess. I received the news of this dire event with much philosophic composure.’

J. A. Cannon