I continue posting excerpts from Rev. William Law’s book, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Law is our featured Anglican writer this week.

If religion requires s sometimes to fast and to deny our natural appetites, it is to lessen that struggle and war that is in our nature. It is to render our bodies fitter instruments of purity and more obedient to the good motions of divine grace. It is to dry up the springs of our passions that war against the soul, to cool the flame of our blood, and to render the mind more capable of divine meditations.

If religion commands us to live wholly unto God and to do all to his glory, it is because every other way is living wholly against ourselves, and will end in our own shame and confusion of face.

How ignorant, therefore, are they of the nature of religion, of the nature of man, and of the nature of God who think a life of strict piety and devotion to God to be a dull, uncomfortable statewhen it is so plain and certain that there is neither comfort nor joy to be found in anything else!