Daily Inspiration Quote by William Law

Faith, for William Law, is less a belief you hold than a force that holds you. The line refuses the tidy, Enlightenment-friendly idea of religion as “notion” - a set of propositions to be weighed, accepted, or rejected. Instead he casts faith as appetite: “a real strong essential hunger.” That word choice is doing quiet polemical work. Hunger is pre-rational, bodily, embarrassing in its insistence; it can’t be solved by argument, only by satisfaction. Law is relocating Christianity from the courtroom of ideas to the physiology of desire.

The subtext is a critique of nominal Christianity and of a culture treating doctrine as intellectual furniture. By calling faith “magnetic,” he borrows the era’s fascination with invisible forces to dignify inner experience without turning it into mere mood. Magnetism implies inevitability and affinity: what is drawn was already made for what it seeks. That’s why the final clause matters. Faith “proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us” - not self-generated willpower, not moral performance, but an implanted capacity. He smuggles in a demanding comfort: if the seed is real, it will strain toward Christ; if there is no strain, perhaps the “faith” is only social habit.

Contextually, Law writes as an Anglican devotional reformer pushing back against complacency in churchgoing England. His rhetoric makes salvation feel immediate and existential: faith is not assent but union, a life seeking its source. It works because it turns theology into an interior diagnostic - you don’t ask what you think; you ask what you ache for.