Though God be everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul…

William Law

The Deepest Part of Thy Soul

Topic: Immanence & Transcendence

Though God be everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul.
Thy natural senses cannot possess God or unite thee to Him; nay, thy inward faculties of understanding, will, and memory can only reach after God, but cannot be the place of His habitation in thee.
But there is a root or depth in thee from whence all these faculties come forth, as lines from a center or as branches from the body of a tree.
This depth is called the Center, the Fund or Bottom of the soul.
This depth is the unity, the eternity, I had almost said the infinity of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it any rest but the infinity of God.

William Law

William Law was born in 1686 in King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire, England, the son of a grocer, Thomas Law. He entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1705 as a sizar, studying the classics, Hebrew, philosophy, and mathematics. In 1711, he was elected a fellow of the college and ordained as a priest in the Church of England. His academic career came to an end in 1714, when he refused to swear the oath of allegiance to King George I, remaining loyal to the exiled House of Stuart. This decision cost him his fellowship and marked him as a “non-juror,” part of a group of clergy who prioritized conscience over conformity.

In the years following, William Law served briefly as a curate in London and then became private tutor and spiritual director to the Gibbon family in Putney. He lived for more than a decade in their household, guiding not only the family but also a wider circle of spiritually minded individuals, including John and Charles Wesley, the poet John Byrom, and the physician George Cheyne. During this time, William Law wrote extensively. His 1729 work, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, became one of his most influential texts, offering a vision of disciplined, inward Christian life that deeply affected readers including William Wilberforce and later Evangelical leaders.

By 1740, William Law had returned to his birthplace in King’s Cliffe, where he lived for the rest of his life with Elizabeth Hutcheson and Hester Gibbon. Their household was shaped by devotion, simplicity, and charitable service. Law continued to write, turning increasingly toward a Christian mystical theology that emphasized inner transformation and participation in the divine life. He died on 9 April 1761. His writings—marked by clarity, conviction, and spiritual depth—continue to invite readers to seek the divine not through speculation or belief alone, but through inner surrender and a life shaped by love.

(1686-1761) Christianity
The Spirit of Prayer

Law, William. "The Spirit of Prayer, Part 1." Printed for M. Richardson, London, 1749, p. 28.

William Law

Theme: Everyday Divinity

About This William Law Quotation [Commentary]

William Law writes, “Though God be everywhere present, yet He is only present to thee in the deepest and most central part of thy soul.” This distinction reveals that divine presence is not accessed by external observation or even by our inner faculties of understanding, will, or memory. These can “reach after God,” but they “cannot be the place of His habitation in thee.” Law is pointing to a deeper ground within, beyond thought or effort, where true union with God takes place—not through reason or belief alone, but in direct presence.

This inner depth, Law says, is the source from which the faculties arise, “as lines from a center or as branches from the body of a tree.” He calls it the “Center, the Fund or Bottom of the soul.” It is the soul’s root and unity—its true nature—where God alone can dwell. “This depth is the unity, the eternity,” he writes, and even “the infinity of thy soul; for it is so infinite that nothing can satisfy it or give it any rest but the infinity of God.” The soul, in its essence, longs not for knowledge about God, but for God’s living presence.

Law cautions against relying on ideas about spiritual life in place of actual participation in it. “To reason about life cannot communicate it to the soul,” nor can belief in doctrines restore the divine nature within. The soul’s only rest comes when the spirit of love—a “will to all goodness”—takes root. No outward conviction or theological understanding can substitute for this inward reality. Only in the soul’s “deepest and most central part,” where all faculties return to their source, can we become what we were created to be—united with the goodness of God.

Additional William Law Quotes

“We have no spiritual need except for a restoration of the divine nature in us. And if this be true, then nothing can be our salvation except that which brings us into a right relationship with God, making us partakers of the divine nature in such a manner and degree as we need. But to reason about life cannot communicate it to the soul, nor can a religion of rational notions and opinions logically deduced from Scripture words bring the reality of the gospel into our lives. Do we not see sinners of all sorts, and men under the power of every corrupt passion, equally zealous for such a religion? How is it then that Christian leaders spend so much time reasoning about Scripture doctrines, and yet remain so blind to the obvious fact that filling the head with right notions of Christ can never give to the heart the reality of His Spirit and life? For logical reasoning about Scripture words and doctrines will do no more to remove pride, hypocrisy, envy, or malice from the soul of man, than logical reasoning about geometry. The one leaves man as empty of the life of God in Christ as the other. Yet the church is filled with professing Christians whose faith has never gone beyond a conviction that the words of Scripture are true. They believe in the Christ of the Bible, but do not know Him personally. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is sound doctrine to their minds, but their lives are empty of His manifest power either to overcome the power of sin within, or to convert others to Christ. Though many are zealous to preach the gospel, yet instead of bringing men to Christ, they seek to reason them into a trust in their own learned opinions about Scripture doctrines. In contrast to Paul, their gospel is in word only, without the demonstration and power of the Spirit. Nor can they see their need of the Holy Spirit to fill them with Christ, and then to overflow through them in rivers of living water to others, because reason tells them that they are sound in the letter of doctrine.”

—William Law [The Power of the Spirit (1898), edited by Andrew Murray, further edited by Dave Hunt (1971) Ch. 9: Natural Reason Opposes the Spirit].

“The spirit of love has this original. God, as considered in Himself and His holy Being, before anything is brought forth by Him or out of Him, is only an eternal will to all goodness… Now this is the ground and original of the spirit of love in the creature; it is and must be a will to all goodness, and you have not the spirit of love till you have this will to all goodness at all times and on all occasions… No creature can be a child of God but because the goodness of God is in it; nor can it have any union or communion with the goodness of the Deity till its life is a spirit of love.”

—William Law [The Spirit of Love].

The Deepest Part of Thy Soul

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