y
night.'

Between the years 1733-37, owing to his acquaintance with the writings
of the famous mystic, Jacob Boehme, Law became a mystic himself. The
'blessed Jacob' as he calls him exercised an influence which colours all
his later writings and lasted till his death. In 1740 he retired to his
native village and to solitude; but after a while two wealthy and devout
ladies, one of them a widow, the other the historian's aunt, Miss Hester
Gibbon, joined him in his retreat and devoted to charitable objects
their labours and their fortunes. 'Out of a joint income of not less
than three thousand pounds a year, only about three hundred pounds were
spent upon the frugal expenses of the household and the simple personal
wants of the three inhabitants. The whole of the remainder was spent
upon the poor.'[66] Report says, let us hope it may be scandal, that
after the master's death the love of earthly vanities revived in two of
his pupils. His favourite niece had a new dress every month, and Miss
Gibbon 'appeared resplendent in yellow stockings.' This is not the place
to follow Law's self-denying career, neither are we concerned with the
volumes which contain his later views. Admirably written though they be,
these works do not belong to the field of literature. Law lived in
vigour both of mind and body to a good old age, and died in 1761.

[Sidenote: Joseph Butler (1692-1752).]

Joseph Butler, whose _Sermons_ (1726), and _Analogy of Religion Natural
and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature_ (1736), are among
the highest contributions to theology produced in the last century,
called the imagination 'a forward, delusive faculty,' and he could have
boasted that it was a faculty of which no trace is to be found in his
works. Moreover, he is generally regarded as wholly destitute of style,
and in a sense this is true, for Butler is so intent upon what he has to
say that he cares little how he says it. His sense of beauty if he
possessed it, was absorbed in a supreme allegiance to truth, and his
life was that of a Christian philosopher intent upon one object. His
sermons, preached at the Rolls Chapel, which contain the germ of his
philosophy, are too closely packed with argument and too recondite in
thought to fit them for pulpit discourses. The _Analogy_, which occupied
seven years of Butler's life, is better known and more generally
interesting. 'There is,' he says, 'a much more exact correspondence
between the