reproached with having become a mere
mystic or a hopeless enthusiast. No doubt, he borrowed from his
favourite authors some of their faults as well as many of their virtues.
Jacob Behmen's most glaring faults in style and phraseology are
sometimes transferred with little mitigation to his pages. A person who
gathered his ideas of William Law from Wesley's critique would probably
turn with impatience, and something like aversion, from one who could
use upon the gravest subjects what might seem a strange jargon
compounded out of Gnostic cosmogonies and alchemistic fancies. We take
Jacob Behmen for what he was--a man in some respects of extraordinary
spiritual insight, but perfectly illiterate; living at a time when the
fame of Agrippa and Paracelsus was still recent, and accustomed to refer
all his conceptions to immediate revelation from heaven. But we do not
expect to find in a cultivated scholar of the eighteenth century such
outlandish sayings as 'Nature is in itself a hungry, wrathful fire of
life,' or pages of argument grounded upon the condition and fall of
angels before the creation of the world. Such phraseology and such
reasonings, even if culled from Law's writings less unrelentingly and
more fairly than by Wesley and Warburton, are quite sufficient to create
a reasonable prejudice against his opinions. Yet these are blemishes
which lie comparatively on the surface. They are always found in
reference to certain views which he had adopted about creation and the
fall of man. Although, therefore, they occur constantly--for the Fall is
always a very essential feature in the whole of Law's theology--they do
not interfere with the general lucidity of his argument, or the
devotional beauty of his thought.

Independently of occasional obscurities of language and visionary
notions, Law does not altogether escape those more serious objections to
which mystic writers are almost always liable. When he speaks of
heavenly illumination, and of the birth of Christ within the soul, or of
the all of God and the nothingness of man, or when he refers over
slightingly to 'human reason' or 'human learning,' or to the outward
machinery of religion in contrast to the direct communion of the soul
with its Creator, it is impossible not to feel that he sometimes
approaches over nearly to the dangerous verge where sound spiritualism
loses self-control.

The ascetic austerity of Law's life and teaching was at once a
recommendation and an