A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life: Adapted to the State and Condition of All Orders of Christians

William Law

 Dublin : Printed for W. and H. Whitestone, 1779

Bound in contemporary full sheep.  Red morocco spine label.  Scratch down spine center.  vii, 430 pages ; 18 cm. Pages generally clean and unmarked. "Law's Serious Call is one of the greatest of Englishdevotional works. Law (1686-1761) foreshadowed the rising of Methodism and where he sowed, John Wesley reaped. Dr. Johnson attributed to the Serious Call his first earnest attention to religion.  Wesley wrote 'it will be hardly excelled, if it be equaled, in the English language, either for beauty of expression or for justice and depth of thought." - Printing in the Mind of Man, 187 (Citing the 1st ed.).  Provenance: Early Massachusetts ownership, Quaker. Ownership signatures in a fine hand of Hannah Chase and Micajah Collins, Lynn (Essex County, Massachusetts).  Micajah Collins (1764-1827), the son of Enoch Collins, was a teacher at the Friends' school in Lynn, MA for 25 years.  He married Hannah Chase of Salem.  Collins was a descent of Michael Collins of Bramford, Suffolk, England, who first settled in Gloucester / Salem, MA. Refs: Savage, James. A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England: Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May, 1692, on the Basis of Farmer's Register. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1860-1862)