impediment to the influence of his writings. From
the beginning to the end of his active life he would never swerve an
atom from the high and uncompromising type of holiness which he
constantly set before himself as the bounden goal of all human effort.
His mysticism only intensified this feeling. Assured as of a certain
truth that, corrupt, fallen, and earthly as human nature is, there is
nevertheless in the soul of every man 'the fire and light and love of
God, though lodged in a state of hiddenness, inactivity, and death, ...
overpowered by the workings of flesh and blood,'[531] it seemed to him
the one worthy object of life, by purification and by mortification of
the lower nature, to remove all hindrances to the enlightening efficacy
of the Holy Spirit. So only could the Divine Image, the life of the
triune God within the soul, be restored, and the heaven-born Spirit,
'that angel that died in Paradise,'[532] be born again to life within
us. His words sound like a Christian paraphrase of what Plato had said
in the 'Republic,' where he compares the present appearance of the soul
to an image of the sea-god Glaucus, so battered by waves, so disfigured
by the overgrowth of shells, and seaweed, and all kinds of earthy
substances, that it has almost lost the similitude of the immortal
likeness.[533] No one could have felt more keenly than William Law the
overpowering need of this restorative process, and the fervent longing
of the awakened soul to be delivered from that bondage of corruption
which presses like a burden too heavy to be borne, not upon man only,
but upon all creation, groaning and travailing in sympathetic pain, to
be delivered from the evil and misery and death with which it is
laden.[534] He will allow of no ideal short of the highest pattern of
angelic[535] goodness, nor concede that we are called upon to pray,
'God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven,' without its full
accomplishment being in human power. This height of aspiration gives
great stimulative power to Law's writing, but, as is unfortunately apt
to be the case, it is a source of weakness as well as of power. With
him, as with many mystic writers, all other elements of human nature are
slighted and neglected in the absorbing thirst for holiness. His ideal
is indeed lofty, but it fails in expansiveness. When he speaks of
absorption into the Divine will--of seeking 'deliverance from the misery
and captivity of self by a total continual sel