The Writings of William Law

by Mary Morrison (Editor)

Overview

Death and life--sleep and waking--hell and heaven--and the process of moving from the one state to the other: these matters were the lifelong concern of William Law, eighteenth-century teacher, writer and mystic.

He was a non-juror--one of those who refused to take the oath of allegiance to George I in 1716--thus forfeiting all chance of a career in either the universities or the Church, then the two great openings for intellectually able men.

From then on the main current of his life ran in his writing and thinking. His outward life moved peacefully in two quiet backwaters, first at Putney, where he was chaplain and tutor in the family of Edward Gibbon's grandparents; then at his own birthplace, King's Cliffe, where he and two companions kept a household dedicated to the kind of devout and holy life that he had already described in his Serious Call.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940161792353
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	08/24/2018
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #120
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	90 KB

About the Author

Mary Morrison first came to Pendle Hill in 1948 to attend Dora Willson’s classes on the Gospels. Since 1957 she has been teaching the course on the Gospels here, using the Records of the Life of Jesus, by Henry B. Sharman, as a text. She teaches a similar course in Trinity Church in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, to which she belongs, and is a contributing editor of The Episcopalian.

Born in New Hampshire and educated at Smith College, Mary Morrison now lives in Swarthmore with her husband and three children.

Mary Morrison first encountered William Law fifteen years ago through Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy and has considered him a valuable spiritual guide ever since. She began to study the complete set of William Law’s writings in the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore and a book by a Quaker, Stephen Hobhouse’s Selected Mystical Writings of William Law, to which Huxley had written an introduction. When she found the later writings difficult, she wrote Aldous Huxley for advice, and found a helpful introduction and interpretation in his recommendation, Characters and Characteristics of William Law, by Alexander Whyte. Both the Whyte and Hobhouse volumes are out of print. Of William Law’s works, only A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life is readily available. A leaflet entitled Wise Words from the Writings of William Law, prepared by Mary Morrison and published by Forward Movement Publications, is now also out of print.

Mary Morrison, an Episcopalian with a great interest in Quaker thought, here introduces the mystical writings of an eighteenth century Anglican who influenced many members of the Society of Friends.