William Law was a man of far too great intellectual ability to be a mere borrower of ideas.  What he read he thoroughly assimilated; and Behmen’s strange theosophy, after passing through the mind of his English exponent, reappeared in a far more logical and comprehensible form.  It cannot be said that Law was altogether a gainer by his later studies.  To many of his contemporaries the result appeared quite the contrary; and he was constantly reproached with having become a mere mystic or a hopeless enthusiast.  No doubt, he borrowed from his favourite authors some of their faults as well as many of their virtues.  Jacob Behmen’s most glaring faults in style and phraseology are sometimes transferred with little mitigation to his pages.  A person who gathered his ideas of William Law from Wesley’s critique would probably turn with impatience, and something like aversion, from one who could use upon the gravest subjects what might seem a strange jargon compounded out of Gnostic cosmogonies and alchemistic fancies.  We take Jacob Behmen for what he was—­a man in some respects of extraordinary spiritual insight, but perfectly illiterate; living at a time when the fame of Agrippa and Paracelsus was still recent, and accustomed to refer all his conceptions to immediate revelation from heaven.  But we do not expect to find in a cultivated scholar of the eighteenth century such outlandish sayings as ’Nature is in itself a hungry, wrathful fire of life,’ or pages of argument grounded upon the condition and fall of angels before the creation of the world.  Such phraseology and such reasonings, even if culled from Law’s writings less unrelentingly and more fairly than by Wesley and Warburton, are quite sufficient to create a reasonable prejudice against his opinions.  Yet these are blemishes which lie comparatively on the surface.  They are always found in reference to certain views which he had adopted about creation and the fall of man.  Although, therefore, they occur constantly—­for the Fall is always a very essential feature in the whole of Law’s theology—­they do not interfere with the general lucidity of his argument, or the devotional beauty of his thought.

Independently of occasional obscurities of language and visionary notions, Law does not altogether escape those more serious objections to which mystic writers are almost always liable.  When he speaks of heavenly illumination, and of the birth of Christ within the soul, or of the all of God and the nothingness of man, or when he refers over slightingly to ‘human reason’ or ‘human learning,’ or to the outward machinery of religion in contrast to the direct communion of the soul with its Creator, it is impossible not to feel that he sometimes approaches over nearly to the dangerous verge where sound spiritualism loses self-control.