The Work
A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Adapted to the State and Condition of All Orders of Christians was published in London by William Innys in 1728. At approximately 400 pages, it is organized in twenty-four chapters, moving from the foundational argument that Christianity requires total consecration (chapters 1-7) through an account of the daily ordering of prayer and devotion (chapters 8-19) to an examination of the particular obstacles to holiness in different callings and conditions of life (chapters 20-24). It remains in print and is included among the classic texts of Anglican devotional literature.
The title is both a description and a challenge: 'serious' (not sentimental or merely conventional) and 'call' (not an invitation but a summons). Law's argument is that the majority of professing Christians are not serious in their religion - they have accepted Christianity's claims about heaven and hell, sin and redemption, without allowing those claims to transform the way they live. The book is an indictment of this inconsistency and a detailed program for its remedy.
Biblical Engagement
Romans 12:1 - 'I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service' - is the primary text for Law's demand of total consecration. The 'living sacrifice' of Romans 12:1 is Law's central image: the Christian is not called to occasional religious observances (sacrifice as a periodic act) but to a continuous offering of the whole life to God. The word 'reasonable' (logiken in Greek - 'rational' or 'spiritual') service is key: Law insists that total consecration is not fanaticism but rationality - the only reasonable response to the mercies of God described in Romans 1-11.
Matthew 22:37 - 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind' - is the governing command that makes total consecration necessary. If God demands love with all the heart, soul, and mind, then any division of devotion - any arrangement of life that gives to God the religious part while managing the rest independently - is a direct violation of the Great Commandment. Law's relentless logic proceeds from this premise: if you love God with all your heart, you will pray at fixed hours; if you love God with all your heart, you will use your money as a steward; if you love God with all your heart, you will not spend time on amusements that contribute nothing to his glory.
Luke 10:27 - the double love commandment including 'thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' - grounds Law's extensive treatment of charitable giving. Law argues that the Christian has no right to 'surplus' wealth: anything beyond what is needed for a modest and healthy life is owed to the poor. His treatment of Christian stewardship is direct and demanding: 'If you give what you don't need yourself, you give only to God's poor what you would have wasted or spent needlessly upon yourself.'
Colossians 3:23 - 'And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men' - is the principle that Law applies to every aspect of daily life, including trade, recreation, and conversation. There is no sphere of life that is exempt from the demand to do all 'as to the Lord.' Law uses this principle to critique the conventional separation between religious and secular life: the merchant who practices dishonesty in his trade while maintaining regular church attendance is not a Christian who sins - he is a person whose nominal Christianity has not touched the actual ordering of his life.
Author and Context
William Law (1686-1761) was born in King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was elected a fellow and would have pursued an academic career. He was a Nonjuror - a member of the tradition of Anglican clergy who refused to take oaths of allegiance to William III in 1689, because they had already sworn allegiance to the deposed James II. This conscientious refusal cost Law his fellowship, his prospects of preferment, and effectively his career in the established church. He spent the 1720s as a family tutor in the household of Edward Gibbon (grandfather of the historian) and wrote the major works of his life: A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection (1726), A Serious Call (1728), and later the mystical works influenced by Jacob Boehme.
The intellectual context of A Serious Call was a Church of England whose moral tone Law found deeply inadequate. The Restoration had introduced a culture of worldliness and fashionable irreligion; the early eighteenth century had not significantly improved matters. Law's characters - the vain Flavia, the worldly Mundanus, the pious but inconsistent Miranda - are drawn from life, and their recognizability made the book immediately affecting to readers who saw themselves in Law's gallery.
John Wesley encountered A Serious Call at Oxford in 1727. He wrote later: 'Picking up a small treatise of William Law's, expecting no more than a dull narrative, I found myself convinced, more than ever, of the absolute impossibility of being half a Christian.' George Whitefield also read it at Oxford. Samuel Johnson, encountering it in 1729 at age twenty, said that 'it is the finest piece of hortatory theology in any language.' The book was the immediate catalyst of the Methodist revival.
Structure and Characters
Law's most distinctive literary technique is his use of fictional characters to illustrate abstract principles. Calidus (a frantic businessman), Negotius (a self-satisfied tradesman), Flavia (a vain woman who squanders money on fashion), Miranda (her exemplary sister, a model of modest, charitable, prayerful life), Classicus (a scholar who studies everything but God), Mundanus (a worldly man who is not ungodly but never devout) - these figures are sketched with a satirical precision that makes them memorable and recognizable. The reader encounters the book's argument not as abstract theology but as recognizable human failure.
The chapters on daily prayer (chapters 14-19) are particularly practical: Law proposes a scheme of seven hours of prayer throughout the day (midnight, dawn, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, night), modeled loosely on the monastic Liturgy of the Hours, which he argues (with some exaggeration) was the practice of the early church.
Reception
The book was immediately influential and widely read. It circulated in the same circles as the early Methodist movement and is credited with having a decisive influence on the spiritual formation of both John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Henry Martyn, and Samuel Johnson. It remained standard reading for Anglican and evangelical clergy well into the nineteenth century.
Legacy
A Serious Call permanently shaped English evangelical piety. Its insistence that Christianity is a total, comprehensive way of life - not a Sunday observance plus private morality - established a standard for evangelical seriousness that has never been formally abandoned. Its practical program of daily prayer, charitable giving, and consecrated work influenced the Methodist discipline and, through Methodism, the evangelical tradition broadly.
Law's later mystical works (influenced by Jacob Boehme) moved in a direction that most evangelicals found uncongenial, but A Serious Call remained his most enduring contribution - a work whose demands are as bracing in the twenty-first century as they were in the eighteenth.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Romans 12:1-2 (the living sacrifice), Matthew 22:34-40 (the Great Commandment), Luke 12:13-34 (the parable of the rich fool and the call to treasure in heaven), Luke 16:10-13 (faithful stewardship of worldly wealth), and Colossians 3:17-23 (doing all in the name of the Lord).
Further Reading
- Arthur Keith Walker, William Law: His Life and Thought (1973) - the standard scholarly biography. - Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, Vol. 3: From Watts and Wesley to Martineau (1961) - the essential context for Law's place in English devotional history. - John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766) - the direct theological descendant of A Serious Call, showing its influence on the Methodist doctrine of entire sanctification.