Faith & Spirit Quote by William Law

Law’s line is a theological gut-punch dressed as pastoral advice: devotion isn’t a private mood you can summon on cue, it’s a practice you either embody or you don’t. The sentence snaps shut like a trap. “Must” removes the option of sentimental religion; “impossible” denies the loophole of respectable hypocrisy. He isn’t arguing that prayer is important. He’s arguing that prayer is diagnostic. If your life and your prayers don’t match, the prayer isn’t a higher self speaking - it’s a mask.

The intent is corrective, almost surgical. Law writes in an Anglican world where religion can become a social language: attend church, say the words, keep the decorum, and let the rest of life run on appetite and ambition. His warning aims at the comfortable believer who treats prayer as a spiritual alibi. “Alter our lives” comes before “alter our hearts” because Law doesn’t trust the modern fantasy of inner transformation without behavioral cost. He assumes the heart is formed by habits, by what you repeatedly do when no one is grading your sincerity.

Subtext: God cannot be managed like a compartment. You can’t bargain with heaven while living as if the moral claims of faith are negotiable. The line also carries an almost psychological realism: the self fractures when speech and action diverge. Law’s point isn’t just moralism; it’s coherence. A prayer that contradicts the life behind it collapses under its own weight, leaving either a changed life or an exposed heart.