William Law was born in 1686 at King's Cliffe in Northamptonshire, and entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a Sizar in 1705. He obtained a Fellowship, and received holy orders in 1711, but having made a speech offensive to the heads of houses, he was degraded. Law believed in the divine right of kings, and on the death of Queen Anne, declared his principles as a non-juror. In 1717 he published his first controversial work, _Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor_; Hoadly, the famous bishop, having, in his opponent's judgment, uttered lax and latitudinarian views with regard to the Church of which he was one of the chief pastors. These _Letters_ have been highly praised for wit as well as for argument, and Dean Hook, writing of the Bangorian Controversy in his _Church Dictionary_, states that 'Law's _Letters_ have never been answered and may, indeed, be regarded as unanswerable.' Law was also the most powerful assailant of Warburton's _Divine Legation_, which he opposed with a burning zeal that was not always wise. But as a controversialist he was an infinitely stronger man than his opponent, and unlike Warburton, he never debased controversy by scurrility, which the bishop generally found a more potent weapon than argument. On the publication, in 1723, of Dr. Mandeville's _Fable of the Bees_, it was vigorously attacked by Law. In this masterly pamphlet, instead of attempting to refute the physician by showing that virtue is more profitable to the State than vice, and that, therefore, private vices are not public benefits, Law takes a higher ground, and asserts that morality is not a question of profit and loss, but of conscience. Mandeville maintains that man is a mere animal governed by his passions; his opponent, on the other hand, argues that man is created in the image of God, that virtue 'is a law to which even the divine nature is subject,' and that human nature is fitted to rise to the angels, while Mandeville would lower it to the brutes. John Sterling, writing to F. D. Maurice of the first section of Law's remarks, says: 'I have never seen in our language the elementary grounds of a rational ideal philosophy, as opposed to empiricism, stated with nearly the same clearness, simplicity, and force,' and it was at Sterling's suggestion that Maurice published a new edition of Law's argument with an introductory essay (1844). The following passage from the _Remarks on the Fable of the Bees_ will illustrate Law's method as a polemic: