William Law · 10 of 14

The Second Dialogue · Part 3

Choose any life, but the life of God and heaven, and you choose death; for death is nothing else but the loss of the life of God. The creatures of this world have but one life, and that is the life of this world: this is their one life, and one good. Eternal beings have but one life, and one good, and that is the life of God. The spirit of the soul is in itself nothing else but a spirit breathed forth from the life of God, and for this only end, that the life of God, the nature of God, the working of God, the tempers of God, might be manifested in it. God could not create man to have a will of his own, and a life of his own, different from the life and will that is in himself; this is more impossible than for a good tree to bring forth corrupt fruit. God can only delight in his own life, his own goodness, and his own perfections; and therefore cannot love or delight, or dwell, in any creatures, but where his own goodness and perfections are to be found. Like can only unite with like, heaven with heaven, and hell with hell; and therefore the life of God must be the life of the soul, if the soul is to unite with God. Hence it is, that all the religion of fallen man, all the methods of our redemption, have only this one end, to take from us that strange and earthly life we have gotten by the fall, and to kindle again the life of God and heaven in our souls; not to deliver us from that gross and sordid vice called covetousness, which heathens can condemn, but to take the whole spirit of this world entirely from us, and that for this necessary reason, because "All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father," that is, is not that life, or spirit of life, which we had from God by our creation, "but is of this world," {1 John 2:16} is brought into us by our fall from God into the life of this world. And therefore a worldly spirit is not to be considered, as a single sin, or as something that may consist with some real degrees of Christian goodness, but as a state of real death to the kingdom and life of God in our souls. Management, prudence, or an artful trimming betwixt God and mammon, are here all in vain; it is not only the grossness of an outward, visible, worldly behavior, but the spirit, prudence, the subtlety, the wisdom of this world, that is our separation from the life of God.

Hold this therefore, Academicus, as a certain truth, that the heresy of all heresies is a worldly spirit. It is the whole nature and misery of our fall; it keeps up the death of our souls, and, so long as it lasts, makes it impossible for us to be born again from above. It is the greatest blindness and darkness of our nature, and keeps us in the grossest ignorance both of heaven and hell. For though they are both of them within us, yet we feel neither the one, nor the other, so long as the spirit of this world reigns in us. Light and truth, and the gospel, so far as they concern eternity, are all empty sounds to the worldly spirit. His own good, and his own evil, govern all his hopes and fears; and therefore he can have no religion, or be further concerned in it, than so far as it can be made serviceable to the life of this world. Publicans and harlots are all born of the spirit of this world; but its highest birth, are the scribes, and Pharisees, and hypocrites, who turn godliness into gain, and serve God for the sake of mammon; these live, and move, and have their being, in and from the spirit of this world. Of all things therefore, my friend, detest the spirit of this world, or there is no help; you must live and die an utter stranger to all that is divine and heavenly. You will go out of the world in the same poverty and death to the divine life, in which you entered it. For a worldly, earthly spirit can know nothing of God; it can know nothing, feel nothing, taste nothing, delight in nothing, but with earthly senses, and after an earthly manner. "The natural man," saith the apostle, "receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, they are foolishness unto him. He cannot know them, because they are spiritually discerned"; that is, they can only be discerned by that spirit, which he has not. Now the true ground and reason of this, and the absolute impossibility for the natural man to receive and know them, how polite, and learned, and acute soever he be, is this; it is because all real knowledge is life, or a living sensibility of the thing that is known. There is no light in the mind, but what is the light of life; so far as our life reaches, so far we understand, and feel, and know, and no further. All after this, is only the play of our imagination, amusing itself with the dead pictures of its own ideas. Now this is all that the natural man, who has not the life of God in him, can possibly do with the things of God. He can only contemplate them, as things foreign to himself, as so many dead ideas, that he receives from books, or hearsay; and so can learnedly dispute and quarrel about them, and laugh at those as enthusiasts, who have a living sensibility of them. He is only the worse for his hearsay, dead ideas of divine truths; they become a bad nourishment of all his natural tempers: he is proud of his ability to discourse about them, and loses all humility, all love of God and man, through a vain and haughty contention for them. His zeal for religion is envy and wrath; his orthodoxy is pride and obstinacy; his love of the truth is hatred and ill-will to those who dare to dissent from him. This is the constant effect of the religion of the natural man, who is under the dominion of the spirit of this world. He cannot know more of religion, nor make a better use of his knowledge, than this comes to; and all for this plain reason, because he stands at the same distance from a living sensibility of the truth, as the man that is born blind, does from a living sensibility of light. Light must first be the birth of his own life, before he can enter into a real knowledge of it. Yet so ignorant is the natural man with all his learned acuteness, that he does not so much as know, that there is, and must be, this great difference between real knowledge, and dead ideas of things; and that a man cannot know anything, any further than as his own life opens the knowledge of it in himself.

The measure of our life is the measure of our knowledge; and as the spirit of our life works, so the spirit of our understanding conceives. If our will works with God, though our natural capacity be ever so mean and narrow, we get a real knowledge of God, and heavenly truths; for everything must feel that in which it lives.

But if our will works with Satan, and the spirit of this world, let our parts be ever so bright, our imaginations ever so soaring, yet all our living knowledge, or real sensibility, can no higher or deeper, than the mysteries of iniquity, and the lusts of flesh and blood. For where our life is, there, and there only, is our understanding; and that for this plain reason, because as life is the beginning of all sensibility, so it is and must be the bounds of it; and no sensibility can go any further than the life goes, or have any other manner of knowledge, than as the manner of its life is. If you ask what life is, or what is to be understood by it? It is in itself nothing else but a working will; and no life could be either good or evil, but for this reason, because it is a working will: every life, from the highest angel to the lowest animal, consists in a working will; and therefore as the will works, as that is with which it unites, so has every creature its degree, and kind, and manner of life; and consequently as the will of its life works, so it has its degree, and kind, and manner of conceiving and understanding, of liking and disliking. For nothing feels, or tastes, or understands, or likes, or dislikes, but the life that is in us. The spirit that leads our life, is the spirit that forms our understanding. The mind is our eye, and all the faculties of the mind see everything according to the state the mind is in. If selfish pride is the spirit of our life, everything is only seen, and felt, and known, through this glass. Everything is dark, senseless, and absurd to the proud man, but that which brings food to this spirit. He understands nothing, he feels nothing, he tastes nothing, but as his pride is made sensible of it, or capable of being affected with it. His working will, which is the life of the soul, lives and works only in the element of pride; and therefore what suits his pride, is his only good; and what contradicts his pride, is all the evil that he can feel or know. His wit, his parts, his learning, his advancement, his friends, his admirers, his successes, his conquests, all these are the only god and heaven, that he has any living sensibility of. He indeed can talk of a Scripture-God, a Scripture- Christ, and heaven; but these are only the ornamental furniture of his brain, whilst pride is the god of his heart. We are told, that "God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble." This is not to be understood, as if God, by an arbitrary will, only chose to deal thus with the proud and humble man. Oh no. The true ground is this, the resistance is on the part of man. Pride resisteth God, it rejects him, it turns from him; whereas humility leaves all for God, falls down before him, and opens all the doors of the heart for his entrance into it. This is the only sense, in which God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble. And thus it is in the true ground and reason of every good and evil that rises up in us; we have neither good nor evil, but as it is the natural effect of the workings of our own will, either with, or against God; and God only interposes with his threatenings and instructions, to direct us to the right use of our wills, that we may not blindly work ourselves into death, instead of life. But take now another instance like that already mentioned. Look at a man whose working will is under the power of wrath. He sees, and hears, and feels, and understands, and talks wholly from the light and sense of wrath. All his faculties are only so many faculties of wrath; and he knows of no sense or reason, but that which his enlightened wrath discovers to him. I have appealed, Academicus, to these instances, only to illustrate and confirm that great truth, which I before asserted, namely, that the working of our will, or the state of our life, governs the state of our mind, and forms the degree and manner of our understanding and knowledge; and that as the fire of our life burns, so is the light of our life kindled: and all this only to show you the utter impossibility of knowing God, and divine truths, till your life is divine, and wholly dead to the life and spirit of this world; since our light and knowledge can be no better, or higher, than the state of our life and heart is. Tell me now, do you feel the truth of all this? I say feel, because no truth is possessed, till you have a feeling and living sensibility of it.

Acad. Oh! Sir, you have touched every string of my heart; and I now wish, with the psalmist, that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away, and be at rest; fly away from the spirit of this world, to be at rest in the sweet tranquillity of a life born again of God. You know, sir, that in the morning you told me of a certain first step, that all necessity must be the beginning of a spiritual life; you gave me till tomorrow to speak my mind and resolution about it. But you have now extorted my answer from me, I cannot stay a moment longer: with all the strength that I have, I turn from everything that is not God, and his holy will; with all the desire, delight, and longing of my heart, I give up myself wholly to the life, Light, and Holy Spirit of God; pleased with nothing in this world, but as it gives time, and place, and occasions, of doing and being that, which my heavenly Father would have me to do, and be; seeking for no happiness from this earthly fallen life, but that of overcoming all its spirit and tempers. But I believe, Theophilus, that you had something further to say.

Theoph. Indeed, Academicus, there is hardly any knowing, when one has said enough of the evil effects of a worldly spirit. It is the canker that eats up all the fruits of our other good tempers; it leaves no degree of goodness in them, but transforms all that we are, or do, into its own earthly nature. The philosophers of old, began all their virtue in a total renunciation of the spirit of this world. They saw with the eyes of heaven, that darkness was not more contrary to light, than the wisdom of this world was contrary to the spirit of virtue; therefore they allowed of no progress in virtue, but so far as a man had overcome himself, and the spirit of this world.

This gave a divine solidity to all their instructions, and proved them to be masters of true wisdom. But the doctrine of the cross of Christ, the last, the highest, the most finishing stroke given to the spirit of this world, that speaks more in one word than all the philosophy of voluminous writers, is yet professed by those, who are in more friendship with the world, than was allowed to the disciples of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, or Epictetus.

Nay, if those ancient sages were to start up amongst us with their divine wisdom, they would bid fair to be treated by the sons of the gospel, if not by some fathers of the church, as dreaming enthusiasts.

But, Academicus, this is a standing truth, the world can only love its own, and wisdom can only be justified of her children. The heaven-born Epictetus told one of his scholars, that then he might first look upon himself, as having made some true proficiency in virtue, when the world took him for a fool; an oracle like that, which said, "The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God."

If you were to ask me, What is the apostasy of these last times, or whence is all the degeneracy of the present Christian church? I should place it all in a worldly spirit. If here you see open wickedness, there only forms of godliness; if here superficial holiness, political piety, crafty prudence, there haughty sanctity, partial zeal, envious orthodoxy; if almost everywhere you see a Jewish blindness, and hardness of heart, and the church trading with the gospel, as the old Jews bought and sold beasts in their temple; all these are only so many forms and proper fruits of the worldly spirit. This is the great net, with which the devil becomes a fisher of men; and be assured of this, my friend, that every son of man is in this net, till through and by the Spirit of Christ, he breaks out of it.

I say the Spirit of Christ, for nothing else can deliver him from it. Trust now to any kind, or form of religious observances, to any number of the more plausible virtues, to any kinds of learning, or efforts of human prudence, and then I will tell you what your case will be; you will overcome one temper of the world, only and merely by cleaving to another. For nothing leaves the world, nothing renounces it, nothing can possibly overcome it, but singly and solely the Spirit of Christ. Hence it is, that many learned men, with all the rich furniture of their brain, live and die slaves to the spirit of this world; and can only differ from gross worldlings, as the scribes and Pharisees differ from publicans and sinners: it is because the Spirit of Christ, is not the one only thing that is the desire of their hearts; and therefore their learning only works in, and with the spirit of this world, and becomes itself, no small part of the vanity of vanities. Would you further know, Academicus, the evil nature and effects of a worldly spirit, you need only look at the blessed power and effects of the spirit of prayer; for the one goes downwards with the same strength, as the other goes upwards; the one betroths and weds you to an earthly nature, with the same certainty, as the other espouses, and unites you to Christ, and God, and heaven. The spirit of prayer, is a pressing forth of the soul out of this earthly life; it is a stretching with all its desire after the life of God; it is a leaving, as far as it can, all its own spirit, to receive a Spirit from above, to be one life, one love, one Spirit with Christ in God. This prayer, which is an emptying itself of all its own lusts, and natural tempers, and an opening itself for the Light and love of God to enter into it, is the prayer in the Name of Christ, to which nothing is denied. For the love which God bears to the soul, his eternal, never-ceasing desire to enter into it, stays no longer, than till the door of the heart opens for him. For nothing does, or can keep God out of the soul, or hinder his holy union with it, but the desire of the heart turned from him. And the reason of it is this; it is because the life of the soul is in itself nothing else but a working will; and therefore wherever the will works or goes, there, and there only, the soul lives, whether it be in God, or in the creature.

Whatever it desires, that is the fuel of its fire; and as its fuel is, so is the flame of its life. A will, given up to earthly goods, is at grass with Nebuchadnezzar, and has one life with the beasts of the field: for earthly desires keep up the same life in a man and an ox. For the one only reason, why the animals of this world have no sense or knowledge of God, is this; it is because they cannot form any other than earthly desires, and so can only have an earthly life. When therefore a man wholly turns his working will to earthly desires, he dies to the excellence of his natural state, and may be said only to live, and move, and have his being, in the life of this world, as the beasts have. Earthly food, &c., only desired and used for the support of the earthly body, is suitable to man's present condition, and the order of nature: but when the desire, the delight, and longing of the soul is set upon earthly things, then the humanity is degraded, is fallen from God; and the life of the soul is made as earthly and bestial, as the life of the body: for the creature can be neither higher nor lower, neither better nor worse, than as the will worketh: for you are to observe, that the will has a divine and magic power; what it desires, that it takes, and of that it eateth and liveth. Wherever, and in whatever, the working will chooses to dwell and delight, that becomes the soul's food, its condition, its body, its clothing, and habitation: for all these are the true and certain effects and powers of the working will.

Nothing does, or can go with a man into heaven, nothing follows him into hell, but that in which the will dwelt, with which it was fed, nourished, and clothed, in this life. And this is to be noted well, that death can make no alteration of this state of the will; it only takes off the outward, worldly covering of flesh and blood, and forces the soul to see, and feel, and know, what a life, what a state, food, body, and habitation, its own working will has brought forth for it. Oh Academicus, stop a while, and let your hearing be turned into feeling. Tell me, is there anything in life that deserves a thought, but how to keep this working of our will in a right state, and to get that purity of heart, which alone can see, and know, and find, and possess God? Is there anything so frightful as this worldly spirit, which turns the soul from God, makes it an house of darkness, and feeds it with the food of time, at the expense of all the riches of eternity?

On the other hand, what can be so desirable a good as the spirit of prayer, which empties the soul of all its own evil, separates death and darkness from it, leaves self, time, and the world, and becomes one life, one light, one love, one Spirit with Christ, and God, and heaven?

Think, my friends, of these things, with something more than thoughts; let your hungry souls eat of the nourishment of them as a bread of heaven; and desire only to live, that with all the working of your wills, and the whole spirit of your minds, you may live and die united to God: and thus let this conversation end, till God gives us another meeting.