[3] The senior Edmund Law seems on his marriage to have settled on his wife's property at Buck Crag, about four miles from Staveley.

In 1760, Law was appointed librarian, or rather proto-bibliothecarius, of the university of Cambridge, an office created in 1721, and first filled by Dr. Conyers Middleton, and in 1764 he was made Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy.

His friend and biographer William Paley declares that Law regarded his elevation as a satisfactory proof that decent freedom of inquiry was not discouraged.

His biographer, who knew him well, describes the bishop as "a man of great softnesse of manners, and of the mildest and most tranquil disposition.

In 1734, while still at Christ's College, he prepared, with John Taylor, Thomas Johnson, and Sandys Hutchinson, an edition of Robert Estienne's Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ, and in the same year appeared his Enquiry into the Ideas of Space and Time, an attack upon à priori proofs of the existence of God, in answer to a work by John Jackson entitled The Existence and Unity of God proved from his Nature and Attributes.

In his philosophical opinions he was an ardent disciple of John Locke, in politics he was a whig, and as a priest he represented the most latitudinarian position of the day, but his Christian belief was grounded firmly on the evidence of miracles[11] The Theory of Religion went through many editions, being subsequently enlarged with Reflections on the Life and Character of Christ, and an Appendix concerning the use of the words Soul and Spirit in the Holy Scripture.

Another edition, with Paley's life of the author prefixed, was published by his son, George Henry Law, then bishop of Chester, in 1820.

[12] In 1774, Law, now a bishop, published anonymously an outspoken declaration in favour of religious toleration in a pamphlet entitled Considerations on the Propriety of requiring Subscription to Articles of Faith.

It was suggested by a petition presented to parliament in 1772, by Archdeacon Francis Blackburne and others for the abolition of subscription, and Law argued that it was unreasonable to impose upon a clergyman in any church more than a promise to comply with its liturgy, rites, and offices, without exacting any profession of such minister's present belief, still less any promise of constant belief, in particular doctrines.

The publication was attacked by Thomas Randolph of Oxford, and defended by A Friend of Religious Liberty in a tract attributed by some to Paley, and said to have been his first literary production.