The Spirit of Love and The Spirit of Prayer

by William Law

William Law was a priest at the Church of England in the 18th century. In the Spirit of Love, Law discusses the nature of God's love for mankind. The devotional also examines how God is Love even though there are so many examples of His wrath in the Scripture. In The Spirit of Prayer, Law provides a series of prayers and dialogues that focus on the love of God.

Genres: Theology

194 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2000

About the author

William Law (1686 – 9 April 1761) was a Church of England priest who lost his position at Emmanuel College, Cambridge when his conscience would not allow him to take the required oath of allegiance to the first Hanoverian monarch, George I. Previously William Law had given his allegiance to the House of Stuart and is sometimes considered a second-generation non-juror (an earlier generation of non-jurors included Thomas Ken). Thereafter, Law first continued as a simple priest (curate) and when that too became impossible without the required oath, Law taught privately, as well as wrote extensively. His personal integrity, as well as mystic and theological writing greatly influenced the evangelical movement of his day as well as Enlightenment thinkers such as the writer Dr Samuel Johnson and the historian Edward Gibbon. Law's spiritual writings remain in print today.

Reviews

[Zachary Mays · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have started and stopped with these books several times. As prose I find William Law's style very pleasant to read. And his general picture in these latter works of a God who is all love, and not wrath, while yet giving an interpretive framework for the images in Scripture of God's "wrath" is quite in line with several patristic thinkers.

There are many beautiful passages here, though I had to skim through the many repetitive parts. One weakness of these works to me is their reliance upon familiarity with Jakob Boehme's mystical and esoteric works. I don't agree with Boehme about everything, and neither does Law, but nonetheless he sort of presumes familiarity with him. As such the works lack a universal appeal.

Law denigrates the material world and its animal and plant life to an extreme degree at times, and yet his general picture of a fallen material reality and not merely a "moral" or "subjective" fall that I hear about in contemporary theology is spot on as far as my sympathies go. The world, from the Big Bang onwards is a damaged reality to nod to David Bentley Hart, and Law is I believe picking up on major thematic strands of the New Testament when he posits the ultimate destiny of the cosmos as having an altogether more “refined” and “spiritual” nature.

Law is a mixture of Miltonian speculation about angels and a cosmic fall, quietist and Quaker devotional passages, and a lot of boring repetition. I recommend skipping the full works unless you are seriously and academically interested in Law's ideas, and reading them as passages in a reprint of Hobhouse's Selected Mystical Writings of William Law instead. If you want to read A Serious Call it is widely available as well.

Still I can't say I didn't enjoy some of the digressions, even if they prevented my reading these books cover to cover.

[Dfbaker2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book from deep thinker William Law.