s most forcible in their
objections. The mystical tendencies of his religion, whatever may have
been the special dangers incidental to them, at all events enabled him
to meet the Deists with advantage on their own chosen ground. How he met
Tindal's 'Christianity as Old as Creation' has been already mentioned.
As Eusebius and St. Augustine and many others had done before him, he
accepted it as to a great extent true, while he declined to accept
Tindal's inferences from it.'[554] So of the Atonement which was always
considered the cardinal point in the controversy with Deists. Law
willingly acknowledged the justice of many of their arguments, but
maintained that the opinions they impugned were simply a mistaken view
of true Christianity. The author of 'Deism fairly stated,' &c.--a work
which excited much attention at its publication in 1746--had said, 'That
a perfectly innocent Being, of the highest order among intelligent
natures, should personate the offender and suffer in his place and
stead, in order to take down the wrath and resentment of the Deity
against the criminal, and dispose God to show mercy to him--the Deist
conceives to be both unnatural and improper, and therefore not to be
ascribed to God without blasphemy.' 'What an arrow,' answers Law, 'is
here: I will not say shot beside the mark, but shot at nothing!... The
innocent Christ did not suffer to quiet an angry Deity, but as
cooperating, assisting, and uniting with that love of God which desired
our salvation. He did not suffer in our place or stead, but only on our
account, which is a quite different matter.'[555] 'Our guilt is
transferred upon Him in no other sense than as He took upon Him the
state and condition of our fallen nature ... to heal, remove, and
overcome all the evils that were brought into our nature by the fall ...
His merit or righteousness is imputed or derived into us in no other
sense than as we receive from Him a birth, a nature, a power to become
the sons of God.'[556] There is nothing here said which would not now
be widely assented to among members of most sections of the Christian
Church. William Law's writings will not be rightly estimated unless it
be remembered that in his time orthodox theology in England scarcely
allowed of any other than those scholastic and forensic notions of the
Atonement which he deprecates. Other views were commonly thought to
savour of rank Deism or rank Quakerism. His theological opponents seemed
somew