Vice is beneficial found,
    When it’s by justice lopt and bound;[559]

and that ‘moral virtues’ (unless regarded as dictates of a special revelation) ’are but the political offspring which flattery begot on pride.’[560] The answers even of Berkeley and Hutchinson had been comparatively feeble.  They could not altogether escape from being hampered by those favourite reasonings of the day about the wisdom of morality and the advantages of religion, which after all were much like the very same argument from expedience, clothed in fairer garb.  Law wrote in a different strain.  Addressing himself to Deists who, whatever else might be their doubts, rarely departed from belief in a God, he bade them find their answer in that belief.  ’Once turn your eyes to heaven, and dare but own a just and good God, and then you have owned the true origin of religion and moral virtue.’  ’Suppose that God is of infinite justice, goodness, and truth ... this is the strong and unmoveable foundation of moral virtue, having the same certainty as the attributes of God.’[561] Thence came that original excellence of man’s nature which is essentially his healthy state, his sound and perfect condition, and of which all evil is the corruption and disease.  Examine goodness, analyse it with unsparing strictness; and see ’whether the investigation does not prove that evil is not the substantial part of any act which is acted, or thought which is thought, in this world; but, on the contrary, the destructive element of it, that which makes it unreal and false.’[562]

Closely connected with this unfaltering conviction of the immutable character of right and wrong, that the light of our souls comes direct from the source of light, and that the principles of justice, truth, and mercy cannot be otherwise than identical in God and His reasoning creatures—­came William Law’s speculations about the ultimate destinies of man.  It has been truly observed that ’the first step commonly taken by Protestant mysticism is an endeavour to mitigate the gloom which hangs over the future state.’[563] This is very strongly marked in all the later productions of Law’s mind.  He was very far from taking anything like an optimist view of the world around him.  There is no writer of his age who shows himself more impressed with an abhorrence of sin, and with the sense of its widespread and deeply rooted influences.  He is austere even to excess in his views of what godliness requires.  His whole soul is oppressed with the wilful ruin of spiritual life which he everywhere beholds.  Yet he can conceive of no hope except by the recovery of that spiritual life, no atonement except by the extinguishing of sin,[564] no salvation nor redemption except by regeneration of nature,[565] no forgiveness of sin but by being made free from sin.[566] But paramount above all such thoughts is his ever-ruling conviction of the perfect love of God.  ’Ask what God is?  His name is Love; He is the good, the perfection, the peace, the