It is probable that Law, like other writers on the orthodox side, did not sufficiently take into account the service rendered by the Deists in arousing a spirit of inquiry. Free-thinking is right thinking, and 'it was a result of the Deistic controversy, which went far to make up many evils in it, that in the end it widened and enlarged Christian thought.'[64]
The author's next and weakest work, _On the Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments_ (1726), is mentioned elsewhere.[65]
In the same year he published _Christian Perfection_, a profoundly earnest but puritanically narrow work, in which our earthly life is regarded simply as the road to another. 'There is nothing that deserves a serious thought,' he writes, 'but how to get out of the world and make it a right passage to our eternal state.' No man ever practised what he preached with more sincerity and persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so eager to exercise.
Literature _quâ_ literature Law regarded with contempt, and he is said to have looked upon the study even of Milton as waste of time. Yet his biographer states what seems likely enough, considering the fine qualities of Law's own writings, that 'no author was ever a favourite with him, unless he was a man of literary merit.'
In 1727, and probably before that date, Law held the position of tutor to Edward Gibbon, whose famous son, the historian, in his _Autobiography_, gives to him the high praise of having left in the family 'the reputation of a worthy and pious man, who believed all that he professed, and practised all that he enjoined.'
Law accompanied his pupil to Cambridge, and it is conjectured that during this residence at the university he wrote what Gibbon justly called his 'master work,' _A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life_ (1729), the most impressive book of its class produced in the eighteenth century. The historian's father was a man of feeble character. He left Cambridge without a degree, and went on his travels, the tutor meanwhile remaining in the family house at Putney, where he seems to have gathered round him a number of disciples.