William Law, born in 1686, became a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1711, but in 1714, at the death of Queen Anne, he became a Non-Juror: that is to say, he found himself unable to take the required oath of allegiance to the Hanoverian dynasty (who had replaced the Stuart dynasty) as the lawful rulers of Great Britain, and was accordingly ineligible to serve as a university teacher or parish minister. He became for ten years a private tutor in the family of the historian Edward Gibbon (who, despite his generally cynical attitude toward all things Christian, invariably wrote of Law with respect and admiration), and then retired to his native King’s Cliffe. Forbidden the use of the pulpit and the lecture-hall, he preached through his books. These include Christian Perfection, The Spirit of Love, The Spirit of Prayer, and best-known of all, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, published in 1728. The thesis of this last book is that God does not merely forgive our disobedience, he calls us to obedience, and to a life completely centered in him. Law writes, “If you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but because you never thoroughly intended it.”
The immediate influence of the book was considerable. Dr. Samuel Johnson said (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, chapter 1), “I became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not think much against it; and this lasted until I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up Law’s Serious Call, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion after I became capable of rational inquiry.” Gibbon, Law’s sometime employer, said that “If Mr. Law finds a spark of piety in a reader’s mind, he will soon kindle it into a flame.” John Wesley calls it one of three books which accounted for his first “explicit resolve to be all devoted to God.” Later, when denying, in response to a question, that Methodism was founded on Law’s writings, he added that “Methodists carefully read these books and were greatly profitted by them.” In 1744 he published extracts from the Serious Call, thereby introducing it to a wider audience than it already had. About eighteen months before his death, he called it “a treatise which will hardly be excelled, if it be equalled, either for beauty of expression or for depth of thought.”
Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Henry Venn, William Wilberforce, and Thomas Scott each described reading the book as a major turning-point in his life. All in all, there were few leaders of the English Evangelical movement on whom it did not have a profound influence.
Some Christians have considered Law’s work inadequate, as insufficiently concerned with justification by faith and thereby promoting works-righteousness, to which objection Law would reply that he did not offer the book as a complete presentation of the Gospel but only as a reminder of the words, “Go and sin no more,” which are surely a part of the Gospel.
adapted from James Kiefer’s biographical sketch (edited)
The Collect
Almighty God, whose servant William Law taught us to hear and follow your call to a devout and holy life: Grant that we, loving you above all things and in all things, may seek your purpose and shape our actions to your will, that we may grow in all virtue and be diligent in prayer all the days of our lives, through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Ghost be all honor and glory now and forever. Amen.
For All the Saints 