Happiness Quote by William Law

Law’s line lands like a calm syllogism and functions like a spiritual trapdoor. He grants the reader a generous premise - everyone wants happiness - then tightens the logic until there’s nowhere to stand except inside his theology. If you aren’t “full of desire for God,” it’s not because you’re complex, wounded, distracted, or unconvinced; it’s because you’ve already chosen a rival joy. That’s the intent: to eliminate neutrality. Faith becomes less a proposition to weigh than an orientation to reveal.

The subtext is pastoral and accusatory at once. “We can only conclude” performs certainty, borrowing the authority of reason to make a moral diagnosis feel inevitable. Law isn’t arguing for God’s existence; he’s arguing for God’s exclusivity. Desire is the real battleground. Whatever occupies your longing - status, romance, money, pleasure, even respectable things like family pride or intellectual ambition - is quietly rebranded as an alternate “happiness,” a competing devotion. He reframes sin not as rule-breaking but as misdirected appetite.

Context matters. Law writes as an Anglican clergyman in an era shaped by Protestant emphases on inward piety and self-scrutiny, when spiritual life is measured by the temperature of the heart as much as by outward conformity. The line also anticipates modern critiques of consumer culture: we’re always being trained to want, and what we want determines who we become. Law’s move is to insist that desire is never empty. If it’s not God, it’s something else - and that “something else” is already your real religion.