Happiness Quote by William Law

Law’s line doesn’t flatter prayer as a pious add-on; it sells prayer as a technology of the self. “Learned” is the tell. Prayer here isn’t a spontaneous gush of feeling but a practiced discipline, something you acquire like literacy or music. That framing fits an 18th-century Anglican divine writing against the easy complacency of nominal Christianity: religion as social badge, moral respectability, and little else. If holiness is merely good behavior, Law implies, you can coast. Prayer is the thing that breaks coasting.

Calling it the “greatest secret” is also a strategic bit of marketing. Christianity isn’t supposed to have esoteric insider codes, yet Law borrows the language of hidden wisdom to make an old practice feel urgent, almost countercultural. The subtext: people are hunting for the hack to a stable life; the church already has one, but it requires surrender rather than optimization. “Holy and happy” are paired to refuse the common modern bargain where you choose either moral seriousness or personal wellbeing. Law insists the two are not rivals, but the order matters: happiness is not the goal prayer chases; it’s the consequence of being re-aimed.

There’s an implicit critique of purely rational religion, too. The Enlightenment is rising; polite society is increasingly confident in reason as the instrument for managing life. Law’s counterclaim is that the deepest human problem isn’t ignorance but disordered desire, and prayer is the practice that re-trains attention. The “secret” is not new information; it’s a new orientation.