he insisted that ’the glorious extent of the Catholick Church of Christ takes in all the world.  It is God’s unlimited, universal mercy to all mankind.’[550] Understood rightly, Christianity might truly be spoken of as being old as the Creation; for the Son of God was the eternal life and light of men, quite independently of the infinitely blessed revelation of Himself afforded in the Gospel.  There is a Gospel Christianity, which is as the possession compared with the expectation.  There is an ’original, universal Christianity, which began with Adam, was the religion of the Patriarchs, of Moses and the Prophets, and of every penitent man in every part of the world that had faith and hope towards God, to be delivered from the evil of this world.’[551] The real infidel, whether he be a professed disciple of the Gospel, of Zoroaster, or of Plato, is he who lives for the world and not for God.[552]

There was probably no one man in the eighteenth century, unless we except Samuel Coleridge, so competent as William Law to appreciate, from a thoroughly religious point of view, spiritual excellence in Christian and heathen, in Anglican, and Roman Catholic, and Methodist, and Quaker.  Much in the same way, although a firm believer in revealed religion and a vigorous opponent of the Deists, engaged ’for twenty years in this dust of debate,’[553] he did not yield even to Bishop Butler in his power of recognising what was most forcible in their objections.  The mystical tendencies of his religion, whatever may have been the special dangers incidental to them, at all events enabled him to meet the Deists with advantage on their own chosen ground.  How he met Tindal’s ‘Christianity as Old as Creation’ has been already mentioned.  As Eusebius and St. Augustine and many others had done before him, he accepted it as to a great extent true, while he declined to accept Tindal’s inferences from it.’[554] So of the Atonement which was always considered the cardinal point in the controversy with Deists.  Law willingly acknowledged the justice of many of their arguments, but maintained that the opinions they impugned were simply a mistaken view of true Christianity.  The author of ‘Deism fairly stated,’ &c.—­a work which excited much attention at its publication in 1746—­had said, ’That a perfectly innocent Being, of the highest order among intelligent natures, should personate the offender and suffer in his place and stead, in order to take down the wrath and resentment of the Deity against the criminal, and dispose God to show mercy to him—­the Deist conceives to be both unnatural and improper, and therefore not to be ascribed to God without blasphemy.’  ‘What an arrow,’ answers Law, ’is here:  I will not say shot beside the mark, but shot at nothing!...  The innocent Christ did not suffer to quiet an angry Deity, but as cooperating, assisting, and uniting with that love of God which desired our salvation.  He did not suffer in our place or stead, but only on our account, which is