1. William Law was a Church of England priest who lost his position at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, when his conscience would not allow him to take the required oath of allegiance to the first Hanoverian monarch, King George I Previously, William Law had given his allegiance to the House of Stuart and is sometimes considered a second-generation non-juror.
Thereafter, Law continued as a simple priest, and when that too became impossible without the required oath, Law taught privately and wrote extensively.
William Law was born at King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire, in 1686, the son of Thomas William Law, a grocer.
William Law resided at Cambridge, teaching and taking occasional duty until the 1714 accession of George I, when his conscience forbade him to take the oaths of allegiance to the new government and of abjuration of the Stuarts.
William Law's Jacobitism had already been betrayed in a tripos speech.
William Law retired to King's Cliffe by 1740, where he had inherited from his father a house and a small property.
William Law's writing is anthologised by various denominations, including in the Classics of Western Spirituality series by the Catholic Paulist Press.
William Law never responded to this open letter, though he had been deeply upset, as testified by John Byrom.
William Law worked on a new translation of Bohme's works, for which The Way to Divine Knowledge had been the preparation.
William Law had taught himself the "High Dutch Language" to be able to read the original text of the "blessed Jacob".
William Law owned a quarto edition of 1715, which had been carefully printed from the Johann Georg Gichtel edition of 1682, printed in Amsterdam where Gichtel lived and worked.
William Law had found some illustrations made by the German early Bohme exegetist Dionysius Andreas Freher, which had been included in this edition.
William Law greatly admired both Isaac Newton, whom he called "this great philosopher", and Jakob Bohme, "the illuminated instrument of God".
In part I of The Spirit of Love William Law wrote that in the three properties of desire one can see the "Ground and Reason" of the three great "laws of matter and motion lately discovered [by Sir Isaac Newton]".
William Law added that he "need[ed] no more to be told that the illustrious Sir Isaac [had] ploughed with Behmen's heifer", which had led to the discovery of these laws.
However, William Law wrote, it is in "our Behmen, the illuminated Instrument of God" that:.