Faith & Spirit Quote by William Law

The line lands like a spiritual mic drop: the barrier between human and divine isn’t sin as scandal, or fate as misfortune, or God as distant monarch. It’s will. Law tightens the screw with that mid-sentence correction - “or rather” - which doesn’t soften the claim so much as sharpen it. Our will isn’t merely the cause of separation; it is the separation, an active stance of self-possession that crowds out communion.

As an Anglican clergyman writing in an age of Enlightenment confidence and religious factionalism, Law’s target isn’t only private vice. It’s the modern habit of imagining the self as a little sovereign: chooser, manager, architect of meaning. The subtext is almost brutally egalitarian. No one is locked out by lack of education, social rank, or even theological sophistication. The lock is on the inside, and the key is surrender.

That makes the sentence feel both liberating and accusatory. Liberating, because it relocates spiritual distance from external conditions to an interior posture you can actually confront. Accusatory, because it denies the comfort of blaming institutions, circumstances, or even “human nature” as an abstract excuse. Law is also doing quiet theological politics here: he’s shifting Christianity away from mere assent to doctrines and toward the conversion of desire. God isn’t primarily accessed by argument but by the reordering of the will, a move that anticipates later critiques of religion-as-identity and religion-as-tribe. The real line of division runs through the self.