Today I offer three more excerpts from this week’s featured Anglican writer, William Law (see Monday’s post for a brief biography on Law). I hope you have found his writings to be inspiring and challenging to you.

If anyone could show that we need not always act as in the divine presence, that we need not consider and use everything as the gift of God, and that we need not always live by reason–the same arguments would show that we need never act as in the presence of God nor need we make religion and reason the measure of any of our actions. If, therefore, we are to live unto God at any time or in any place, we are to live unto him at all times and in all places. If we are to use anything as the gift of God, we are to use everything as his gift. If we are to do anything by strict rules of reason, we are to do everything in the same manner.

They, therefore, who confine religion to times and places, and who think that it is being too strict and rigid to make religion give laws to all their actions and ways of living–they who think thus mistake the whole nature of religion. They may well be said to mistake the whole nature of wisdom who do not think it desirable to be always wise. He has not learned the nature of piety who thinks it too much to be pious in all his actions.

—A Serious Call

The creature has nothing else in its power but the free use of its will, and its free will hath no other power but that of concurring with, or resisting, the working of God in nature.

—A Serious Call

Prayer is the nearest approach to God and the highest enjoyment of him that we are capable of in this life. It is as much your duty to rise to pray as to pray when you are risen. And if you are late at your prayers you offer to God the prayers of an idle, slothful worshiper who rises to prayers as idle servants rise to their labor.

—A Serious Call