right, they might say substantially, do you order us to give up all that makes life beautiful and refined? What is the value of your peremptory denunciations of all that our souls delight in? A messenger from heaven may venture into Vanity Fair, and order its inhabitants to put on sackcloth and ashes, and raise hermitages on the site of its warehouses; but his credentials should be unmistakable. Who are you who come hither to turn the world upside down, and ruin the silversmiths and the priests of the Great Diana of the Ephesians? To such a challenge Law conceived himself to have a decisive answer; but the answer changed at different periods of his life, and the change explains the development of his religious theories.

79. I have noticed in previous chapters Law's attacks upon Hoadly, Mandeville, and Tindal, and I may briefly recall the logical position which they indicated. In answering Hoadly, Law had planted himself upon the ordinary HighChurch theory. A permanent corporation endowed with supernatural attributes was the rock upon which his faith reposed. We do not know by what process of thought this creed became unsatisfactory to Law as the ultimate basis of his religion. Perhaps it was not a very tenable position when the embodiment of the divine element in human affairs was to be identified with the church of the Georges. Perhaps his resistance to Mandeville and Tindal and to the theories which they represented forced him to seek for some more satisfactory standing-point. Mandeville, as I have said, represents the sceptical pessimism of the day, as Tindal represents the deistical optimism. In replying to Mandeville, Law had vindicated human nature from the charges of that shrewdest of cynics, and denied his analysis of all virtue into a superficial disguise of selfishness. In replying to Tindal's theory of the supremacy of human reason, he had stated in vehement language the utter incapacity of human reason to frame a theory of the universe, or to divine without supernatural aid the mysterious purposes of the Creator. But how were these two theories to be reconciled? Mandeville had, in fact, done little more than give a legitimate development to that doctrine of the corruption of human nature which was the central tenet of divines, and of none more decidedly

than Law. If Tindal's attempted construction of a rational theology was to be repudiated on the score of the utter helplessness of the human intellect, what answer could be opposed to Mandeville's scepticism? The corruption of human nature has not only tainted the passions and weakened the will, but obscured the intellect. How then is this corrupt, ignorant and foolish being to escape from the labyrinth of mystery in which he appears to be hopelessly lost? How can he even distinguish between a true and a false revelation? Tindal had argued, in fact, that the legitimate consequence of such a theory would be to force us to rely entirely upon the external evidences; and Law seems to accept the conclusion. We were, that is, to accept Christianity on the strength of the miracles and prophecies. Tindal's argument, he said, would lead to Atheism; for, if we may reject a divine revelation on account of its imperfections, we may on the same grounds reject the divine origin of the world. The difficulty which pressed upon Butler when applying this argument pressed equally upon Law. If anyone refuses to be frightened by Atheism, how is he to be opposed? Is he not simply carrying out your own logic?

80. This central and ever-recurring difficulty was scarcely felt by most contemporary theologians. To a man of Law's spiritual depth, the attitude which they adopted could not be satisfactory. Standing alone against the world, denouncing all its faiths and practices, declaring the utter incapacity of the natural reason and the corruption of the natural passions, Law could appeal to no authority except the historical evidence of certain events which had once happened in Palestine. Against such a position Hume's logic was absolutely unanswerable. How should a story prove the existence of God and be a sufficient support for the whole superstructure of religious faith which, told in any other connection, would simply prove its narrator to be the inventor or the victim of a lie? Law must have felt this difficulty, and he certainly felt that other difficulty which was the ultimate outcome of the Deist controversy. The evidence upon which Christianity was based might possibly satisfy the learned, especially when backed by patronage; but it was not of that kind which could carry vivid conviction into the ordinary soul. Where were

those letters of light, legible alike to the wise and the ignorant, the poor and the rich, which alone could justify the demands of theologians for the implicit faith of all believers? Dodwell, as we have seen, replied ironically that they must be written upon the soul of every man. Law accepted the same answer seriously, and the acceptance determined the remainder of his career. Nature is corrupt, but the primitive, nature is recoverable by the divine grace. Reason is impotent, but we have a faculty of spiritual insight which supersedes reason, and enables us to catch glimpses of divine mysteries through the veil of sense. The connection of ideas is distinctly given in several of his writings.

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81. His object is to give a 'short method' on a new pattern, 'yea, the shortest, and, at the same time, surest of all methods,' and the difference between the method of Leslie, at the opening of the controversy, and that of Law, in its decline, is sufficiently characteristic. It is the tacit confession of the most religious mind of the time of the futility of the favourite argument of his contemporaries. The ordinary apologists had endeavoured to meet the difficulty by staking the whole of Christianity upon one point-the proof of Christ's resurrection. Law, in his later writings, says also that deists are to be confuted by reducing Christianity to a single point; that point is the redemption of man from the earthly to the divine; and the proof, lying in each man's consciousness, is altogether independent of external evidence. 'I had frequently a consciousness rising up within me,' says a speaker in one of his dialogues, 'that the debate was equally vain on both sides, doing no more real good to one than to the other; not being able to imagine that a set of scholastic, logical opinions about history, facts, doctrines, and institutions of the Church, or a set of logical objections against them, were of any significancy towards making the soul of man either an eternal angel of heaven or an eternal devil of hell.' Twenty years' experience in this dust of debate had taught him, he says, that the more books were written in defence of the Gospel on the ordinary plan, the more new objections were suggested. The change in Law's mind followed

Law's Works, v. 238.

2 Works, vii., Way to Divine Knowledge,' p. 16.

soon after his attack upon Tindal. Tindal's book was published in 1730, and Law began his studies of Behmen about 1733. All his later writings are more or less expository of Behmen, or applications of his principles to special questions. The impression was natural. Law shows the mystical temperament even in his earlier writings; he is always ready to withdraw from the external world into rapt contemplation of celestial things, when the fighting instinct is not stirred by some external impulse; and Behmen professed to give him the key to the invisible world, just when he most wanted it. Behmen's theosophy is admitted to have anticipated many of the leading principles of Schelling and Hegel; though the relation may be regarded as creditable to Behmen or discreditable to his followers. It is intelligible, therefore, that Behmen should be to Law what the later German speculation was to men like Coleridge in a succeeding generation. It seemed to him that a new spring of truth was gushing up in the wilderness of arid criticist and futile logomachy.

82. This, however, is not the place to touch, even in the briefest manner, upon the theological ontology which Law derived from his master. I shall say nothing of the glassy sea, of that primary struggle and contrariety from which all materiality is derived, or of the seven resultant properties of nature. Law, it is said, gives a clear exposition of his master's principles, and is a useful guide to a labyrinth which few care to penetrate. But a great part even of Law's later writings expounds doctrines which may be disentangled from this mass of technical phraseology; they strikingly anticipate the teaching of the later school of theology, which traces its origin to Coleridge, and has a natural affinity for the mystical element. The chief difference is that in Law their tendency is less obscured by heterogeneous elements. Law starts, it may be said, from a conviction of the utter futility of the external evidences of Christianity, and of the whole theological conception to which they were congenial. Arguments may alter the deist's opinion about facts, but cannot change the state of his soul. We know the fall by our own direct consciousness; and need not go to Moses for it; he does not prove the fact, but only tells us the how and the when. If God's goodness 2 Ib. p. 41.

1 Law, vii. 11, 'Way to Divine Knowledge.'

were no more than equal to human goodness, he would have made man better than he is; therefore we have an 'infallible demonstration' that we are creatures fallen from a better state. The God whose existence was proved by evidence was necessarily an external being; and, as analysed by metaphysicians, instead of pictured by the spontaneous imagination of mankind, he had gradually become the supernatural judge, who administered and was bound by the law of nature. Law pointedly repudiates this theory, so popular with his contemporaries, which took the analogy as a literal truth, and arranged the terms of salvation from the precedent of pardons uttered under the great seal. When the subject derives his life and breath from his prince, says Law, pardon can no longer mean a legal transaction, but an inward effect wrought upon his inmost nature.2 In short, the God who is revealed to us by the heart is an entirely different being to the God who is built up by external demonstration. He is not the judge nor the artificer, but the all-pervading and immanent force, from whom all nature is an emanation. We recognise him by a sensibility of our nature which reveals the spiritual world, as the senses reveal the visible world; and reason is an 'impotent spectator' which only receives its materials from this supreme faculty.3 Reason is thus 'pulled out of its usurped throne, and shown to be a powerless idle boy, when compared to the royal strength of the heart, which is the kingly power, that has all the government of life in its hands.' When the heart thus displaces reason, rightfully or wrongfully, we can tell what God it will recognise. God is love, yea, all love; and is so all love that nothing but love can come from him and the Christian religion is nothing but an open full manifestation of his universal love towards all mankind.' Elsewhere, in language reminding us of another modern formula, we are told that God is only an eternal will to all goodness.' The heart recognises his power as the eye perceives light, or the body feels heat.

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83. Religion, then, with Law, becomes subjective and