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Aetat. 20.]
Johnson grounded in religion.
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to a Holy Life[1],' expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I

    The Rambler, No. 157:—'Though many among my fellow students [at the university] took the opportunity of a more remiss discipline to gratify their passions, yet virtue preserved her natural superiority, and those who ventured to neglect were not suffered to insult her.' Oxford at this date was somewhat wayward in her love for religion Whitefield records:—'I had no sooner received the sacrament publicly on a week-day at St. Mary's, but I was set up as a mark for all the polite students that knew me to shoot at. By this they knew that I was commenced Methodist, for though there is a sacrament at the beginning of every term, at which all, especially the seniors, are by statute obliged to be present, yet so dreadfully has that once faithful city played the harlot, that very few masters, and no undergraduates but the Methodists attended upon it. I daily underwent some contempt at college. Some have thrown dirt at me; others by degrees took away their pay from me.' Tyerman's Whitefield, i. 19. Story, the Quaker, visiting Oxford in 1731, says, ' Of all places wherever I have been the scholars of Oxford were the rudest, most giddy, and unruly rabble, and most mischievous.' Story's Journal, p. 675.

  1. John Wesley, who was also at Oxford, writing of about this same year, says:—'Meeting now with Mr. Law's Christian Perfection and Serious Call the light flowed in so mightily upon my soul that everything appeared in a new view.' Wesley's Journal, i. 94. Whitefield writes:—'Before I went to the University, I met with Mr. Law's Serious Call, but had not then money to purchase it. Soon after my coming up to the University, seeing a small edition of it in a friend's hand I soon procured it. God worked powerfully upon my soul by that and his other excellent treatise upon Christian perfection.' Tyerman's Whitefield, i. 16. Johnson called the Serious Call 'the finest piece of hortatory theology in any language;' post, 1770. A few months before his death he said:—'William Law wrote the best piece of parenetic divinity; but William Law was no reasoner;' Post, June 9, 1784. Law was the tutor of Gibbon's father, and he died in the house of the historian's aunt. In describing the Serious Call Gibbon says:—'His precepts are rigid, but they are founded on the gospel; his satire is sharp, but it is drawn from the knowledge of human life; and many of his portraits are not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyère. If he finds a spark of piety in his reader's mind he will soon kindle it to a flame.' Gibbon's Misc. Works, i. 21.
became