As has been indicated, there were many strains of influence which in the seventeenth century tended to foster mystical thought in England.  The group of Cambridge Platonists, to which Henry More belonged, gave new expression to the great Neo-platonic ideas, but in addition to this a strong vein of mysticism had been kept alive in Amsterdam, where the exiled Separatists had gone in 1593.  They flourished there and waxed strong, and sent back to England during the next century a continual stream of opinion and literature.  To this source can be traced the ideas which inspired alike the Quakers, the Seekers, the Behmenists, the Familists, and numberless other sects who all embodied a reaction against forms and ceremonies, which, in ceasing to be understood, had become lifeless.  These sects were, up to a certain point, mystical in thought, for they all believed in the “inner light,” in the immediate revelation of God within the soul as the all-important experience.

The persecutions of the Quakers under Charles II. tended to withdraw them from active philanthropy, and to throw them more in the direction of a personal and contemplative religion.  It was then that the writings of Madame Bourignon, Madame Guyon, and Fenelon became popular, and were much read among a certain section of thinkers, while the influence of the teachings of Jacob Boehme, whose works had been translated into English between the years 1644 and 1692, can be traced, in diverse ways.  They impressed themselves on the thought of the founders of the Society of Friends, they produced a distinct “Behmenist” sect, and it would seem that the idea of the three laws of motion first reached Newton through his eager study of Boehme.  But all this has nothing directly to do with literature, and would not concern us here were it not that in the eighteenth century William Law came into touch with many of these mystical thinkers, and that he has embodied in some of the finest prose in our language a portion of the “inspired cobbler’s” vision of the universe.

Law’s character is one of considerable interest.  Typically English, and in intellect typically of the eighteenth century, logical, sane, practical, he is not, at first sight, the man one would expect to find in sympathy with the mystics.  Sincerity is the keynote of his whole nature, sincerity of thought, of belief, of speech, and of life.  Sincerity implies courage, and Law was a brave man, never shirking the logical outcome of his convictions, from the day when he ruined his prospects at Cambridge, to the later years when he suffered his really considerable reputation to be eclipsed by his espousal of an uncomprehended and unpopular mysticism.  He had a keen rather than a profound intellect, and his thought is lightened by brilliant flashes of wit or of grim satire.  We can tell, however, from his letters and his later writings, that underneath a severe and slightly stiff exterior, were hidden emotion, enthusiasm, and great tenderness of feeling.