AN Humble, Earnest, AND AFFECTIONATE ADDRESS, ΤΟ THE CLERGY. BY WILLIAM LAW, A. M. TO WHICH IS PREFIXED, A SHORT ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE & CHARACTER. PITTSBURGH, PUBLISHED BY CRAMER, SPEAR AND EICHBAUM, FRANKLIN BOOKSTORE, MARKET STREET. Robert Ferguson & Co. print. OF WILLIAM LAW, AUTHOR OF THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS, AND DIVERS HE was born at King's Cliff, a market town in Northamptonshire, (G. B.) in the year 1687-His pa rents were of good repute, and in circumstances which enabled them to give him a liberal education.-He was sent early to the university of Cambridge, and was of Emmanuel College, where his superior genius soon distinguished itself by three letters to (Hoadly) the bishop of Bangor, so greatly, that upon their publication, the celebrat ed bishop Atterbury waited upon him and made him this compliment: "Mr. Law, from your writings, instead of seeing a youth, I should have expected to see grey hairs." The universal applause those three letters met with, instead of filling his mind with pride and vanity, the two pregnant attendants of superior abilities and human applause, only served to make him the more retired from the world, in order the more deeply to look into himself. He lived a single life, and the last twenty years of it in the same town in which he was born; but the reasons or his not continuing in the ministry can only be conjectured: For it is not known that he ever acquainted any one with them. As to his sentiments concerning all churches of the present time, they are sufficiently manifest in his wri tings; and they are, that all of them are in a fallen state, both with respect to doctrine and practice, having wandered very far from the truth, and the spirit of the gospel, placing religion in a regular round of formal, dull duties, or performances, and empty, groundless doctrines, instead of the real love of God and man- -The first fruits which his retirement produced were his two excellent treatises of Christian Perfection and Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. From these instructive writings, by a gradual progress in spirituality and sound |