The ascetic austerity of Law’s life and teaching was at once a recommendation and an impediment to the influence of his writings.  From the beginning to the end of his active life he would never swerve an atom from the high and uncompromising type of holiness which he constantly set before himself as the bounden goal of all human effort.  His mysticism only intensified this feeling.  Assured as of a certain truth that, corrupt, fallen, and earthly as human nature is, there is nevertheless in the soul of every man ’the fire and light and love of God, though lodged in a state of hiddenness, inactivity, and death, ... overpowered by the workings of flesh and blood,’[531] it seemed to him the one worthy object of life, by purification and by mortification of the lower nature, to remove all hindrances to the enlightening efficacy of the Holy Spirit.  So only could the Divine Image, the life of the triune God within the soul, be restored, and the heaven-born Spirit, ’that angel that died in Paradise,’[532] be born again to life within us.  His words sound like a Christian paraphrase of what Plato had said in the ‘Republic,’ where he compares the present appearance of the soul to an image of the sea-god Glaucus, so battered by waves, so disfigured by the overgrowth of shells, and seaweed, and all kinds of earthy substances, that it has almost lost the similitude of the immortal likeness.[533] No one could have felt more keenly than William Law the overpowering need of this restorative process, and the fervent longing of the awakened soul to be delivered from that bondage of corruption which presses like a burden too heavy to be borne, not upon man only, but upon all creation, groaning and travailing in sympathetic pain, to be delivered from the evil and misery and death with which it is laden.[534] He will allow of no ideal short of the highest pattern of angelic[535] goodness, nor concede that we are called upon to pray, ‘God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven,’ without its full accomplishment being in human power.  This height of aspiration gives great stimulative power to Law’s writing, but, as is unfortunately apt to be the case, it is a source of weakness as well as of power.  With him, as with many mystic writers, all other elements of human nature are slighted and neglected in the absorbing thirst for holiness.  His ideal is indeed lofty, but it fails in expansiveness.  When he speaks of absorption into the Divine will—­of seeking ’deliverance from the misery and captivity of self by a total continual self-denial’[536]—­of converting ’this poison of an earthly life into a state of purification’[537]—­of ’turning from all that is earthly, animal, and temporal, and dying to the will of flesh and blood, because it is darkness, corruption, and separation from God;’[538] when—­sound and thoughtful reasoner as he often is—­he speaks with thorough distrust of ‘the guidance of our own Babylonian reason,’ and of learning as good indeed within its own sphere, but ’as different from Divine