This book has a simple purpose: to show what a conversation with William Law - "England's greatest prose mystic" - can do for contemporary faith. Law composed one of the most startling and vigorous wake-up calls in the Christian tradition. Under the influence of his beloved Jacob Boehme, Law also wrote a series of works that spiral around the subject of Christ, born in believers as the formative power of their lives. His accounts of creation, fall, and redemption are arresting in their expression, and his working of classical topics such as atonement, wrath and judgment, spirit, prayer, and love suggest just how much we need a "mystical" theology. Law composed one of the most startling and vigorous wake-up calls in the Christian tradition. Under the influence of his beloved Jacob Boehme, Law also wrote a series of works that spiral around the subject of Christ, born in believers as the formative power of their lives. His accounts of creation, fall, and redemption are arresting in their expression, and his working of classical topics such as atonement, wrath and judgment, spirit, prayer, and love suggest just how much we need a "mystical" theology.

This book has been written by a scholar who has occupied himself with the subject of religion for over fifty years. But no finality can be claimed. The reason is that religion deals with what is transcendent, in the sense that it deals with what man is going to be. Advaitism terms this futuristic end as becoming Brahman. However, Bergson and other evolutionists would say that religion is a collective and cooperative effort of men to become gods. This simply means the divinising of man what Aurobindo calls super-mind. The terms gods and supermind are vague and impre-cise. They refer to a state beyond human ills, beyond human infatuation and beyond the befogging of human intellect. One thing is clear that fighting with other human beings in the name of religion is sub-human. As religious men we are fellow-travellers in the direction of the realm of spirit. Here the nomenclature of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, etc., ceases to be meaningful. Hence, the religion of man to which we are looking forward is not so much in the past as it is yet to be. Of course, we have to go very far and we have not made any beginning yet. However, at present the advaitic principle of differenceless Brahman can serve the purpose of harmonizing all religions. Here this principle has been adopted and key-concepts of different religions have been shown to mingle into one another.

This book aims to uncover and explore the ideas of notable people in the story of Christian universalism from the time of the Reformation until the end of the nineteenth century. It is a story that is largely unknown in both the church and the academy, and the characters that populate it have for the most part passed into obscurity. With carefully located bore holes drilled to release the long-hidden theologies of key people and texts, the volume seeks to display and historically situate the roots, shapes, and diversity of Christian universalism. Here we discover a diverse and motley crew of mystics and scholars, social prophets and end-time sectarians, evangelicals and liberals, orthodox and heretics, Calvinists and Arminians, Puritans, Pietists, and a host of others. The story crisscrosses Continental Europe, Britain, and America, and its reverberations remain with us to this day.