From:   {Notes and Materials}*   

The Subjects of the "First Part" of The Spirit of Love, In a Letter to a Friend.  

The nature and perfection of the Spirit of Love.  •   No man can participate in this Spirit until he lives freely, willingly, and universally according to it.  •   Its indispensable necessity as the means of union between God and man.   •   The state of nature and of man as deprived of the Spirit of Love, by reason of the fall.   •   The process of its recovery by purification.   •    The fundamental reason of this process opened out in a description of nature and its seven properties.   •   The similitude of these properties in the nature and being of man.   •   All evil — the consequence of nature working in self, or in a state of separation from God.   •   All good — the power and presence of the super-natural Deity, dwelling and working in the properties of nature.   •   How his presence and the birth of the Spirit of Love, are the same thing.   •   Being a Spirit of Life, it can rise in one only way and from one only cause.   •   Its birth, by the kindling of eternal fire, and consequent transmutation of the life.   •   Hence the truth and necessity of the Christian redemption, and the doctrine of the Cross.

 

The "First Part" of The Spirit of Love, In a Letter to a Friend, was published in 1752 within a few months of the publishing of The Way to Divine Knowledge.  This "First Part" of The Spirit of Love was also identified as "an Appendix to the "The Spirit of Prayer" when it first appeared as a Tract.

From:   {Notes and Materials}*   

The Subjects of the "Second Part" of The Spirit of Love.

First Dialogue. — The Deity - an infinite ocean of pure overflowing love and joy.   •   All nature and creature brought forth to manifest and rejoice in this love and happiness.   •   Nothing can be in God which is not infinite and eternal.   •   What wrath is in itself.   •   It can be nowhere but in nature, and that in a state of disorder.   •   The origin of wrath and evil,  the same.   •   In man at the disunion of his twofold life, of God and nature.   •   All man's salvation and good from the manifestation of the life of God in the soul.   •   Perpetual inspiration essential to a life of goodness.   •   The ground of salvation, the inspoken word or seed of the divine nature.   •   This, the subject of all revealed dispensations.   •   The earthly self to be resisted and renounced.   •   Wrath ascribed to God, because the creature has changed its state in nature, therefore must experience God as manifest in nature.   •    How wrath originates in nature though this a manifestation of the Deity.    •   God and nature distinguished.    •    Wrath kindled by the will of the creature, when it breaks or loses the union of the seven heavenly properties.     •   The Deity a governing love and wisdom always seeking the restoration of lapsed nature and creature.   •   The texts of Scripture confine the working of wrath to the powers of nature.   •     Vengeance not allowed to man because that a working with fallen nature.    •    Only to God who is supernatural; that is to the love of God, (to overcome it.)

Second Dialogue. — The atonement of the Divine wrath or justice, and the extinguishing of sin in the creature, only different expressions for one and the same thing.   •    The analogy of Scripture teaches this.    •   The atonement, the one work of regeneration, rightly understood.    •    The suffering and death of Christ, the gracious effects of divine love and goodness.    •   In what sense the justice or righteousness of God is satisfied thereby.   •   Man's original righteousness, his law.   •    No peace, till this be perfectly restored.   •    God's being all love does not abate the force of the Scripture pronouncements of eternal torments and punishments to those who live and die in sin.   •   The popular doctrine of the vicarious suffering of Christ, erroneous; opening a door to superstition or to infidelity.    •    Christ's suffering and dying, nothing else but Christ conquering and overcoming all the false good and hellish evil of the fallen state of man.    •    His resurrection and ascension into heaven, though great in themselves, and necessary parts of our deliverance, were but the consequences and effects of his suffering death—his entering into possession of what he had obtained by them.   •   No wrath in God, no fictitious atonement, no folly of debtor and creditor, no suffering for sufferings' sake; but a Christ suffering and dying, as the same victory over death and hell, as when he rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven.   •   The necessity and efficacy of the sufferings and death of Christ, as that which gave him power to become a common father of life to all that died in Adam.   •    Only acceptable to the love of God on that account.   •   How we, by virtue of Christ's complete process in us, have victory over all the evils of our fallen state and shall rise to the glory of Christ—the heirs of God.     •    The Bible to be studied in this simple, adorable light.  

Third Dialogue. — The practical ground of the Spirit of Love.   •   The good and amiable of this natural life easily mistaken (by mere reasoners and transcendentalists) for the spirit of divine love in the soul.   •   The danger of this delusion.   •   The doctrine, and the Spirit of Love itself, two very different things.    •   How we are to acquire the Spirit of Love.   •   The Scripture doctrine of election and reprobation, in its ground.   •   The figures under which it is represented.   •   Nothing elected but the seed of the New Man, or heavenly birth within us; all else reprobated to death.    •    Two ways of induction into virtue and goodness.   •   One by rules and precepts, the other by the Spirit itself, born in the soul; the former must precede the latter.   •   What Divine love is, and its effects within us.   •   All that we are and have from Adam as fallen, must be given up, if the birth of divine love is to be brought forth in us.    •   All our natural contrariety to divine love must be lost and swallowed up in it, as darkness in the light.   •   This, the state of the first man, previous to the fall.   •   Concerning darkness and light.   •   The priority and glory of light; in itself invisible, and only known by possessing darkness or substantiality.   •   Light immaterial; though materiality always with visible light.   •   All nature and creature as such, darkness, and therefore can only work according to the powers of darkness.    •    Nothing evil or tormenting but that which nature or self does.   •   Self or nature, the three properties of desire thrown into a fourth of wrath, through the loss of their only (supernatural) good.     •    No possible deliverance from self, but by the new birth of God in the soul.    •   Desire, the ground of life, and all sensibility of life.   •   How this manifests in outward nature, by attraction with its essential properties.   •   The relations of the visible world and all its productions to the invisible, and hellish world.    •    The way of abolishing all evil, or the art of dying to self.   •   God must be and do all; the state of heart that this perfect conviction of truth induces.    •    The results of a true practical conformity to this conviction, or the Spirit of Prayer.     •   The 'marriage of the Lamb' or birth of the Spirit of Love.   •   The one simple way to attain it, as here shown, the one infallible way, because the will is the leader of the creaturely life.   •   Christ having obtained an infinite power over the human nature, must sooner or later see all enemies under his feet—all subdued to LOVE.

These subjects are not only treated in the strictly argumentative manner and captivating diction peculiar to the author's gift, but they are all along elucidated from Scripture, so as to demonstrate the exact conformity of their philosophical development with the genuine gospel, and with the simple experimental matter of fact as regards personal regeneration, and conversion of the soul to God.  The range and scope of these subjects is of course much more extensive than that of adulterated evangelical truth as commonly taught and expressed, and their presentation is worthy of that universal procedure which must have been the true origin of things; and which, indeed, have been collaterally demonstrated by their applications in the Newtonian philosophy, and, as the basis of all modern enlightened sciences as well as medicine.

The "Second Part" of The Spirit of Love, In Dialogues, was published in 1754.

* Much of the above text was gleaned from the preserved work of Christopher Walton, author of:
Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of The Celebrated Divine and Theosopher, William Law.
Published in London -1854 {otherwise referred to on this page as Notes and Materials}.