within him, and whose heart is prepared by purity and truth, such light of the eternal life will be granted that, though he be simple and unlearned, heavenly wisdom will be granted to him, and all things will become full of meaning.  He puts no limit to the grand possibilities and capabilities of human nature.  To him the soul of man is indeed ’larger than the sky, deeper than ocean,’[520] but only through union and conformity with that Divine Spirit which ‘searcheth all things—­yea, the deep things of God.’  He would have welcomed as a wholly congenial idea that grand mediaeval notion of an encyclopaedic wisdom in which all forms of philosophy, art, and science build up, as it were, one noble edifice, rising heavenwards, domed in by Divine philosophy, the spiritual and intellectual knowledge of God; he would have agreed with Bonaventura that all human science ’emanates, as from its source, from the Divine Light.’[521] He felt also that in the unity of ’the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as He will,’ would be found something deeper than all diversities in religion, which would reconcile them, and would solve Scripture difficulties and the mysteries which have tormented men.

These and suchlike thoughts, intensely realised, and sometimes expressed with singular vividness and power, possessed great attraction to minds wearied with the religious controversies or spiritual dulness of the time, and which were not repelled by the wilderness of verbiage, the hazy cloudland, in which Behmen’s conceptions were involved.  William Law, the Nonjuror, was thoroughly fascinated by them, and their influence upon him forms an episode of considerable interest in the religious history of the period.

Yet if it had been only as the translator and exponent of ’the Teutonic theosophy’ that William Law had become prominent, and incurred on every side the hackneyed charge of ‘enthusiasm,’ this excellent man might have claimed but a passing notice.  His theological position in the eighteenth century is rendered chiefly remarkable by the power he showed (in his time singularly exceptional) of harmonising the ideas of mediaeval mysticism with some of the most characteristic features of modern religious thought.  A man of deep and somewhat ascetic piety, and gifted with much originality and with a cultured and progressive mind, he had many readers and a few earnest and admiring adherents, yet was never greatly in sympathy with the age in which he lived.  Three or four generations earlier, or three or four generations later, he would have found much more that was congenial to one or another side of his intellectual temperament.  At the accession of George I. in 1716 he declined to take the oaths, and resigned his fellowship at Cambridge, although, like others among the moderate Nonjurors, he remained to the last constant to the communion of the National Church.[522] In 1726 he wrote the ‘Serious Call,’ one of the most remarkable devotional books that have ever been published.