Humility is the life and soul of piety, the foundation and support of every virtue and good work, the best guard and security of all holy affections. I recommend that you make humility a constant subject of your daily devotions, earnestly desiring you to think no day safe or likely to end well, in which you have not early humbled yourself before God and called upon Him to carry you through the day in the exercise of a meek and lowly spirit…
Humility does not consist in having a worse opinion of ourselves than we deserve, or in abasing ourselves lower than we really are, but as all virtue is founded in truth, so humility is founded in a true and just sense of our weakness, misery and sin. He who rightly feels and lives in this sense of his condition, lives in humility…
You must practice humility like a young beginner that has all of it to learn, that can learn but little at a time, and with great difficulty. You must consider that you have not only humility to learn, but that you must be content to proceed as a learner in it all your time, endeavoring after greater degrees of it, and practicing every day acts of humility as you every day practice acts of devotion….
In order to begin and set out well in the practice of humility, you must take it for granted that you are proud, that you have all your life been more or less infected with pride. You should believe also, that it is your greatest weakness, that your heart is most subject to it, that it is so constantly stealing upon you that you have reason to watch and suspect its approaches in all your actions.
There is no one vice that is more deeply rooted in our nature or that receives such constant nourishment from almost everything that we think or do, than pride. There is hardly anything in the world that we want or use, or any action or duty of life, but pride finds some means or other to take hold of it. At what time so ever we begin to offer ourselves to God, we can hardly be surer of any thing, than that we have a great deal of pride to repent of.
If you find it disagreeable to your mind to entertain this opinion of yourself, and cannot put yourself amongst those who from heaven had told you, that you have not only much, but all your humility to seek. You can have no greater sign of a confirmed pride, than when you think that you are humble enough. He who thinks he loves God enough shows himself to be an entire stranger to that holy passion. So he who thinks he has humility enough shows that he is not so much as a beginner in the practice of true humility.
Be the first to react on this!
William Law was an English cleric and theological writer. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and was elected a fellow in 1711, the year of his ordination. He declined to take the oath of loyalty to King George I, in 1714, and was deprived of his fellowship. He became the tutor of Edward Gibbon, father of the famous historian. Later he returned to his birthplace of King's Cliffe where he lived the rest of his life, though he was known throughout England for his speaking and writing.
His writing of A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), together with its predecessor, A Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection (1726), deeply influenced the chief actors in the great Evangelical revival.
John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Henry Venn, Thomas Scott, and Thomas Adam all express their deep obligation to the author. The Serious Call also affected others deeply.
William Law, born inKing's Cliffe, England, in 1686, became a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1711, but in 1714, at the death of Queen Anne, he became a non-Juror: that is to say, he found himself unable to take the required oath of allegiance to the Hanoverian dynasty (who had replaced the Stuart dynasty) as the lawful rulers of the United Kingdom, and was accordingly ineligible to serve as a university teacher or parish minister.
He became for ten years a private tutor in the family of the historian, Edward Gibbon (who, despite his generally cynical attitude toward all things Christian, invariably wrote of Law with respect and admiration), and then retired to his native King's Cliffe. Forbidden the use of the pulpit and the lecture-hall, he preached through his books. These include - Christian Perfection, the Grounds and Reasons of Christian Regeneration, Spirit of Prayer, the Way to Divine Knowledge, Spirit of Love, and, best-known of all, A Serious Call To a Devout and Holy Life, published in 1728.
Law's most influential work is A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, written in 1728. In this book, he extols the virtue of living a life totally devoted to the glory of God. Although he is considered a high-churchman, his writing influenced many evangelicals, including George Whitefield, John and Charles Wesley, Henry Venn, Thomas Scott, Henry Martyn, and others such as Samuel Johnson. In addition to his writing, Law spent the final years of his life founding schools and almshouses, and in other practical ministries.
William Law died in 1761 just a few days after his last book, An Affectionate Address to the Clergy, went to the printers.