Daily Inspiration Quote by William Law

Law’s sentence is a quiet rebuke to the spiritual meritocracy that always seems to creep into religious life: the idea that God grades on a single curve and the devout are simply the top scorers. He insists on something more unsettling and, in its way, more humane: divine judgment calibrated to the uneven realities of human capacity. “Different abilities and frailties” is doing heavy moral work. It relocates the center of gravity from flashy outcomes to interior struggle, from public performance to private limitation.

The key phrase is “different improvements in virtue.” Law doesn’t deny virtue as a real demand; he denies that it can be measured by one uniform yardstick. Improvement implies trajectory, not perfection - a spiritual fitness regime tailored to the body you actually have. The subtext is pastoral but also disciplinary: you can’t hide behind weakness as an excuse, because God sees the full ledger of what you could do; but you also can’t weaponize your strengths as proof of superior holiness, because God sees how much your gifts helped you.

Context matters. Law writes in an England thick with Christian moral seriousness, anxious about sincerity, reform, and the difference between outward religion and inward change. As an Anglican clergyman with a reputation for rigorous devotion, he’s not selling cheap grace. He’s arguing for a demanding mercy: one that accounts for circumstance without collapsing into relativism. It’s an early, bracing articulation of moral proportionality - not “anything goes,” but “God knows what was possible.”