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was beginning to exhibit its strength, though regarded with intense dislike and suspicion by the whole body of the orthodox, and heartily despised by the philosophers and men of the world. Wesleyanism is, in many respects, by far the most important phenomenon of the century. Here I have only to enquire what were the intellectual aspects of the movement, so far as they are reflected in the writings of its most eminent men. Wesley himself appears to have been influenced at the most critical period of his life by three great writers, Thomas à-Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and Law. If the two former were the greatest men, Law had the indefinite advantage of still being alive. The 'Imitation of Christ' has influenced more minds than any book outside the sacred canon; but for that reason we could not discover from its contents what was its special aptitude to Wesley. A similar remark may be made in a degree of Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying.' It was Law who, alone of living writers, materially influenced Wesley's mind; and gave to universal principles that special form which rendered them suitable at the moment. From him and the Moravians came the external impulses which chiefly affected Wesley; and the fact would be enough to give an interest to Law's writings. But he is himself a man of remarkable power and originality, and, indeed, very superior as a thinker to his more active disciple. I have already noticed his controversial eminence. It remains to study the writings by which he exercised his chief influence upon the time.

68. The name of William Law will recall to most readers a passage in Gibbon's Autobiography. The cynical historian is thought to have shown little insight into the loftier motives of the earlier Christians. Yet he spoke with affectionate tenderness of the man who, aimost alone amongst his contemporaries, might stand for a primitive Christian come to revisit a strangely altered world. 'In our family,' says

Gibbon, he left the reputation of a worthy and pious man who believed all he professed, and practised all that he enjoined.' Gibbon's respect for the purity and tenderness of Law's character is mixed with admiration for his intellectual vigour. As a controversialist, according to Gibbon, he showed himself, at least, the equal of the Whig champion, Hoadly;

and in his practical writings, his fervid emotion is seconded by a power of satire displayed in portraits 'not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyère.' Were it not for his mysticism, he 'might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of the times;' and even a philosopher must allow that he exposes with equal sincerity and truth the strange contradiction which exists between the faith and practice of the Christian world.'

69. Gibbon's Autobiography is a very delightful specimen of one of the most generally delightful of all forms of literature. Nobody ever laid bare his own character with more felicity; and there is something curiously dramatic in the contrast between the two men thus brought into momentary contrast. Gibbon is as perfect an incarnation of the worldly thinkers of the eighteenth century, with their placid contempt for all the higher spiritual influences, as Law of the counteracting forces which were gradually stirring beneath the surface of society. The life of the teacher is as characteristic as his writings. The son of a country grocer, he had obtained a fellowship at Emmanuel in 1711, and became an ardent High Churchman. He seems to have been suspended from his degree for a tripos speech, in which he defended, amongst other things, the objectionable doctrine that the sun shone when it was eclipsed.' The eclipsing body, of course, was the parliamentary monarchy, which intercepted the rays of divine right. At any rate, he refused to take the oaths enforced upon the accession of George I., and thus became one of the second generation of nonjurors. After having thus sacrificed all worldly prospects for a crotchet or a creed, he became the tutor of Gibbon's father, and when his pupil was grown up, remained for some years an inmate of the family. There, though apparently respected by all its members, he found types of the great division between the Church and the world. Two of the portraits in the 'Call,' which represent the worldly and the converted woman, are said by Gibbon to stand for his two aunts. Hester Gibbon, the Miranda of the Call,' was to the end of a long life Law's

1 1 If, that is, I am right in identifying him with a 'Mr. Laws,' mentioned in Hearne's Diary, as quoted in Mr. Christopher Wordsworth's interesting book on University Life in the Eighteenth Century' (see pp. 40, 231).

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spiritual support. Catherine, the 'Flavia,' married a man of fortune, and her daughter, afterwards Lady Eliot, grievously offended her pious aunt Hester by an intimacy with the Mallets-Mallet being that 'beggarly Scotchman' who, according to Johnson, fired off Bolingbroke's blunderbuss against religion and morality for half-a-crown. A curious correspondence is preserved between this lady and her aunt :—' If this were the last sentence I should speak,' says the spirited young woman, 'these would be my words, that the aspersion' (that is, Miss Gibbon's aspersion on the Mallets) 'is as false as heaven is true;' and Miss Gibbon replied to her rebellious niece in a letter animated with such holy unction, that Law substituted a more courteous document. Talk not of gratitude to infidel friends,' says this softened version; 'their friendship is of no better a nature than that which kindly gave thirty pieces of silver to Judas, and both you and your unhappy uncle' (the historian's father) 'sooner or later must find that falseness, baseness, and hypocrisy make the whole heart and spirit of every blasphemer of Jesus Christ. It would be less a pain to me, or to your deceased friends, whom I have mentioned, to see you attending a dung-cart for the sake of bread, than riding in a coach of your own crowded with beloved infidels.' It does not exactly appear how the niece received this vigorous bit of plain speaking, or what Miss Gibbon thought in after years of a certain pair of chapters in a celebrated History. Gibbon, at any rate, could write to her affectionately in her old age. She died in 1790 at the age of eighty-six, and two years earlier she received a letter from the historian, touching with tenderness on the old lady's prejudices. Your good wishes and advice,' he says, 'will not, I trust, be thrown away on a barren soil; and, whatever you may have been told of my opinions, I can assure you with truth that I consider religion as the best guide of youth, and the best support of old age, and that I firmly believe

In a book called Memorials of Mr. Law,' privately printed, which consists, for the most part, of an exposition of the doctrines of Jacob Behmen, drawn chiefly from the MSS. of a disciple, unfortunately preserved in the British Museum for the bewilderment of ordinary intellects. The author, however, fearing, not irrationally, that his readers may weary of the theosophical quagmires through which they are dragged, inserts a gigantic footnote from p. 334 to p. 628, in which are imbedded a few facts about Law's life and a good many letters.

there is less real happiness in the business and pleasures of the world than in the life which you have chosen of devotion and retirement.' Was there some slight expression of pious equivocation in these sentiments, or did Gibbon perhaps reflect that middle age is a tolerably elastic period?

70. The retirement and devotion' to which Miss Gibbon had devoted herself had lasted since 1740, about which time she and a rich widow, a Mrs. Hutcheson, had taken a house in Law's native village of King's Cliffe. There, with Law for their director, they gave themselves up to the course of devotion and charity described in the Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.' Three times a day the family assembled for prayers and religious exercises. Law himself rose at five, and spent many hours in a little study, four feet square, furnished only with a chair, a writing-table, the Bible, the works of Jacob Behmen, and a few other mystic writers; and, according to his biographer, prostrated himself, 'body and soul, in abyssal silence, before the interior central throne of the divine revelation; and, according to his high supersensual science, presented the now passive, desireless, resigned, mirroreye of his purified will and intellect to the free, active, gladsome, supercogitative researches of the Spirit of Wisdom and openings of the Divine life.' When, descending from these celestial regions, he presented himself at his frugal meals, he could talk pleasantly and fluently; he delighted in playing with children, and could never, we are told, see a bird in a cage without trying to release it. As his controversies pretty plainly show, there was a certain choleric element in the good man, which manifested itself in private life when the soup had not been properly made for distribution to the poor. He took care to taste it himself, and, moreover, to try on his own person the shirts which were to accompany it. The charitable energies of such a man are not likely to be directed in accordance with the strict rules of political economy. In fact, it seems that King's Cliffe gained so bad a reputation for attracting the idle and worthless, that some of the richer inhabitants protested. The protest, however, dropped when the little household threatened to withdraw themselves and their money. The united incomes of the two ladies amounted to near 3,000l. a year, of which much the greatest part was given

away. Law himself had founded a school in his native village by means, as was reported, of a hundred pounds presented to him in gratitude by an anonymous reader of the 'Call.' Nineteen poor girls were to be taught reading, knitting, and needlework. They were to learn the catechism, and to go to church regularly, and to curtsey 'to all ancient people, whether rich or poor.' Mrs. Hutcheson added another school and almshouses; and the superintendence of these foundations appears to have been Law's principal external employment. He died in 1761, at the age of seventy-four, almost in the act of singing a hymn.

71. Certainly, this is a curious picture in the middle of that prosaic eighteenth century, which is generally interpreted for us by Fielding, Smollett, and Hogarth; the period of Squire Westerns and Parson Trullibers, and the boisterous humours of ponderous well-fed masses of animated beefsteak. Since the time of the holy Mr. Ferrars, commemorated by Isaak Walton, there had been few parallels in the Church of England. The fine gentlemen, the worldly dignitaries, and the coarse, full-fed squires who were scandalised at the obtrusive preaching of his disciple Wesley, could afford to look with compassion upon the gentle quietist and the pair of old ladies who were saying their prayers at King's Cliffe ; here and there some eccentric persons asked Law's advice in cases of conscience; and a few disciples corresponded with him upon the depths of the divine mysteries. The only one who may deserve a moment's notice is the poet, shorthand writer, and clergyman, John Byrom. Byrom may be still remembered by a few epigrams, and a poem upon the great fight between Figg and Sutton, which is done into prose in Thackeray's 'Virginians.' But these rather incongruous performances were only one manifestation of an almost morbid faculty of rhyming. One of his longest so-called poems is a minute. piece of scriptural exegesis in answer to Conyers Middleton,

1 That, for example, sometimes ascribed to Swift on Handel and Buononcini ; and the well-known lines about the King and the Pretender, ending :

But who Pretender is, or who is King,

God bless us all-that's quite another thing.

Byrom, too, tells the excellent apologue of the Three Black Crows.' His curious Journals have been published by the Chetham Society.

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