The Philosopher
William Law
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- English
- Schools:
- High Church Anglicanism, Nonjuror
- Branchs:
- mysticism, Theology, Christian Devotional Literature
- Period:
- 18th-century
The synopsis
The works
Remarks upon a Late Book, Entituled, The Fable of the Bees
A Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection
The Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage Entertainment
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
The Case of Reason
A Demonstration of the Gross and Fundamental Errors of a late Book called a Plain Account, etc., of the Lord's Supper
The Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Regeneration
An Earnest and Serious Answer to Dr Trapp's Sermon on being Righteous Overmuch
An Appeal to All that Doubt
The Spirit of Prayer
The Way to Divine Knowledge
The Spirit of Love
A Short but Sufficient Confutation of Dr Warburton's Projected Defence (as he calls it) of Christianity in his Divine Legation of Moses
A Collection of Letters on the Most Interesting and Important Subjects, and on Several Occasions
Of Justification by Faith and Works, A Dialogue between a Methodist and a Churchman
An Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy
The quotes
If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.
Death is not more certainly a separation of our souls from our bodies than the Christian life is a separation of our souls from worldly tempers, vain indulgences, and unnecessary cares.
Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.
God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.
Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; dwell in love, and then you dwell in God.
Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.
All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.
What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?
Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.
Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.
We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.
Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.
He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves.
No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress.
Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.
Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like.
Perfection does not consist in any singular state or condition of life, or in any particular set of duties, but in holy and religious conduct of ourselves in every state of Life.