Love Quote by William Law

An exhortation that sounds like a benediction and lands like a demand. William Law doesn’t treat love as a mood or a private virtue; he frames it as a location you either inhabit or you don’t. “Dwell” is the operative verb: steady, domestic, daily. This is not the flash of conversion but the slow architecture of a life reordered around charity. By coupling “love and pity and wish well,” Law broadens the emotional range from warmth to mercy to deliberate benevolence. Even when you don’t feel affectionate, you can still choose to “wish well” - a practical spiritual discipline disguised as gentle counsel.

The subtext is quietly radical: every soul, not the deserving, not the doctrinally correct, not your tribe. In an 18th-century Anglican world keyed to hierarchy, confessional boundaries, and social rank, “every soul in the world” presses against the instinct to sort humans into categories of grace. Law’s move is to make universality the proof of sincerity. If your religion sharpens contempt, it’s not merely bad manners; it’s metaphysical error.

Then comes the theological sleight-of-hand that gives the line its force: “and then you dwell in God.” Love isn’t just commanded by God; it’s the medium where God is experienced. Law collapses the distance between ethics and mysticism, suggesting that the most reliable path to the divine is not argument, ecstasy, or ecclesiastical status, but sustained goodwill. It’s both comfort and indictment: if God feels absent, check your address.