Wesley Mentor Pleads Against Man’s Own Light
Book: An Humble, Earnest, and Affectionate Address to the Clergy.
By: William Law, A.M.
William Law (1686-1761) English devotional writer. “He was a fearless nonjuror, and, in consequence of his refusal to take the oaths of allegiance and abjuration on the accession of George I, forfeited his fellowship, and all prospects of advancements in the Church… Law was one of the most eminent English writers on practical divinity in the eighteenth century. He was a genuine Mystic, although he lived in a worldly and rationalistic age… At one time, Law was a kind of oracle with Wesley, and his influence upon early Methodism was of an almost formative character. In his later years he became an enthusiastic student of Jakob Boehme, but his strong churchly feeling and his sound English sense kept him from the wild errors and extravagances into which some of Boehme’s disciples fell.”–New Schaff-Hertzog Enc. Relg. Knowl., 6:431-32.
The Address tot he Clergy was first published posthumously the year of Law’s death, 1761. Wesley republished extracts from it in 1768. “Law seems from the first to have recognized varying ‘degrees of goodness,’ and in his latest writings stressed the supreme ‘necessity of a continual inspiration of the Spirit of God, both to begin the first, and continue every step of a divine life in man’. Continue reading
John Brown is without a doubt one of the most fascinating characters of the pre-Civil War era… and one of the most polarizing. So we pose this question: was John Brown a madman or a martyr (or something in between)?
It has been the singular ill fortune of Oliver Cromwell, and of his family, that his character hath been left exclusively in the hands of his enemies. The short interval between his death and the Restoration, and the unsettled state of the nation in the intermediate time, left no opportunity for a faithful and impartial history of that extraordinary man. From that time to the present, his memory hath been abused and vilified without any allowance for the peculiar circumstances in which he was placed : his name alone is to this day deemed by many a sufficient description of every thing that is ambitious, hypocritical, and tyrannical. He has been held forth as a composition of every bad quality, without one virtue to counterbalance them. 
from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man. The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent morality, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects (The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurection and visibkle accession, his coproreal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity, original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of the hierarchy, etc.) is a most desirable object.”