ded.'[545] He grieved that 'even the
most worthy and pious among the clergy of the Established Church are
afraid to assert the sufficiency of the Divine Light, because the
Quakers who have broken off from the Church have made this doctrine
their corner-stone.'[546] Of Romanism he remarked that 'the more we
believe or know of the corruptions and hindrances of true piety in the
Church of Rome, the more we should rejoice to hear that in every age so
many eminent spirits, great saints, have appeared in it, whom we should
thankfully behold as so many great lights hung out by God to show the
true way to heaven.'[547]

Nor would he by any means limit the operations of true redeeming grace
to the bounds of Christendom. Ever impressed with the sense that 'there
is in all men, wherever dispersed over the earth, a divine, immortal,
never-ending Spirit,'[548] and that by this Spirit of God in man all are
equally His children, and that as Adam is spoken of as first father of
all, so the second Adam is the regenerator of all,[549] he insisted that
'the glorious extent of the Catholick Church of Christ takes in all the
world. It is God's unlimited, universal mercy to all mankind.'[550]
Understood rightly, Christianity might truly be spoken of as being old
as the Creation; for the Son of God was the eternal life and light of
men, quite independently of the infinitely blessed revelation of Himself
afforded in the Gospel. There is a Gospel Christianity, which is as the
possession compared with the expectation. There is an 'original,
universal Christianity, which began with Adam, was the religion of the
Patriarchs, of Moses and the Prophets, and of every penitent man in
every part of the world that had faith and hope towards God, to be
delivered from the evil of this world.'[551] The real infidel, whether
he be a professed disciple of the Gospel, of Zoroaster, or of Plato, is
he who lives for the world and not for God.[552]

There was probably no one man in the eighteenth century, unless we
except Samuel Coleridge, so competent as William Law to appreciate, from
a thoroughly religious point of view, spiritual excellence in Christian
and heathen, in Anglican, and Roman Catholic, and Methodist, and
Quaker. Much in the same way, although a firm believer in revealed
religion and a vigorous opponent of the Deists, engaged 'for twenty
years in this dust of debate,'[553] he did not yield even to Bishop
Butler in his power of recognising what wa