Time & Perspective Quote by William Law

Time gets demoted here from a scientific fact to a theological concession: a kind of eternity put on a leash. William Law, an Anglican clergyman writing in a world where Newton’s clockwork universe was hardening into common sense, insists that what we call “time” is not ultimate reality but eternity translated into human scale - “finite, measurable and transitory” because we are. The line’s force is in its reversal: instead of eternity being endless time, time becomes chopped-up eternity, a devotional training wheel for minds that can’t bear the infinite directly.

Law’s intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Pastoral, because it reframes anxiety about passing days: the ticking clock isn’t merely loss, it’s eternity made intelligible. Polemical, because it pushes back against the era’s growing confidence in measurement as meaning. “Measurable” is not praise; it’s a clue that time is a reduced format, an interface. If you can count it, you’ve already stepped down from the real.

The subtext is quietly disciplinary. If time is “eternal duration become finite,” then every deadline is a spiritual artifact, not an absolute tyranny. That reframing nudges the reader toward Law’s larger project: inward holiness over outward busyness, contemplation over the new cult of productivity. In an 18th-century Britain bustling with commerce, schedules, and empirical certainty, Law offers a counter-modernity: the most radical thing you can do with time is remember it isn’t the deepest thing there is.