ome proposition, of which we have no certain knowledge, it
will appear that the Deist's faith is much stronger, and has
more of credulity in it, than the Christian's. For instance, the
Christian believes the resurrection of the dead, because he
finds it supported by such evidence and authority as cannot
possibly be higher, supposing the thing was true; and he does no
more violence to his reason in believing it, than in supposing
that God may intend to do some things, which the reason of man
cannot conceive how they will be effected.

'On the contrary, the Deist believes there will be no
resurrection. And how great is his faith, for he pretends to no
evidence or authority to support it; it is a pure naked assent
of his mind to what he does not know to be true, and of which
nobody has, or can give him, any full assurance. So that the
difference between a Christian and a Deist does not consist in
this, that the one assents to things unknown, and the other does
not; but in this, that the Christian assents to things unknown
on account of evidence; the other assents to things unknown
without any evidence at all. Which shows that the Christian is
the rational believer and the Deist the blind bigot.'

It is probable that Law, like other writers on the orthodox side, did
not sufficiently take into account the service rendered by the Deists in
arousing a spirit of inquiry. Free-thinking is right thinking, and 'it
was a result of the Deistic controversy, which went far to make up many
evils in it, that in the end it widened and enlarged Christian
thought.'[64]

The author's next and weakest work, _On the Unlawfulness of Stage
Entertainments_ (1726), is mentioned elsewhere.[65]

In the same year he published _Christian Perfection_, a profoundly
earnest but puritanically narrow work, in which our earthly life is
regarded simply as the road to another. 'There is nothing that deserves
a serious thought,' he writes, 'but how to get out of the world and make
it a right passage to our eternal state.' No man ever practised what he
preached with more sincerity and persistency than William Law, but it
can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the
views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He
forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force
and lucidity of style displayed in his own writin