{272}
Vane was quite naturally selected at the Restoration as one of the actors in the historical drama who could not be allowed to live any longer. The day after Vane's trial began, Charles II. wrote to Clarendon: "He is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way."[20] His death brought out the loftiest traits of his character, and gave him a touch of beauty and glory of character which for posterity has done much to cover the flaws and defects which were not lacking in him. "In all things," writes Pepys, who saw everything in those days, "he appeared the most resolved man that ever died in that manner."[21]
It is, however, not Vane the statesman, the maker of covenants with Scotch armies, the creator of sinews of war for the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, the organizer of a conquering navy, the man who dared withstand his old friend Cromwell in the day of the great soldier's power, that concerns us in this chapter; it is Vane, the religious Independent, the exponent of inward religion; the man whom Milton calls "religion's eldest son." Even in his early youth he passed through a decisive experience which altered his entire after-life. "About the fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age," he said in his dying speech, "God was pleased to lay the foundation or ground-work of repentance in me, for the bringing me home to Himself, by His wonderful rich and free grace, revealing His Son in me, that by the knowledge of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He hath sent, I might, even whilst here in the body, be made a partaker of eternal life, in the first fruits of it. . . . Since that foundation of repentance was laid in me, through grace I have been kept steadfast, desiring to walk in all good conscience toward God and toward men, according to the best light and understanding God gave me." From this early period on through his life, he always emphasized the importance of first-hand experience, of inward revelation, and of Christ's reign in the kingdom of the {273} human soul. He was still a very young man, when, under the impelling guidance of his conscience, he felt himself called to intermit, as Schwenckfeld and others had done, the practice of the sacraments of the Church. His attitude toward the sacraments at this time, and, apparently ever afterwards, was that of the "Seekers." He had reached the insight that religion is a spiritual relationship with a spiritual God, and on the basis of this position he questioned the divine "commission" of those who administered the external ceremonies of the Church. It is, however, perfectly clear that these views were not "original" with him, but that he had come under the influence of the teachings of the men whom I am calling "spiritual Reformers."
How inward and mystical his type of Christianity really was, may be gathered from a short passage of an Epistle which he wrote in 1661: "The Kingdom of God is within you and is the dominion of God in the conscience and spirit of the mind. . . . This Kingdom of Christ is capable of subsisting and being managed inwardly in the minds of His people, in a hidden state concealed from the world. By the power thereof, the inward senses, or eyes of the mind are opened and awakened to the drawing of them up to a heavenly converse, catching and carrying up the soul to the throne of God and to the knowledge of the life that is hid with Christ in God. Those that are in this Kingdom, and in whom the power of it is, are fitted to fly with the Church into the wilderness, and to continue in such a solitary, dispersed, desolate condition till God call them out of it. They have wells and springs opened to them in this wilderness, whence they draw the waters of salvation, without being in bondage to the life of sense."[22]
He was only twenty-two years of age when, "for conscience' sake" and "in the sweete peace of God," he left England and threw in his lot with the young colony in Massachusetts Bay. At twenty-three he was {274} Governor of the Colony and found himself plunged into a maelstrom of politics, Indian wars, and ecclesiastical quarrels which would have tried even a veteran like John Winthrop. It was here in Massachusetts that the lines of his religious thought first come clearly into view, if any of Vane's religious ideas can ever properly be called "clear." The controversy in the Massachusetts Colony (1636-1638) was initiated and led by Anne Hutchinson, and was, in the phraseology of that period, an issue between "a Covenant of Works" and "a Covenant of Grace," which was a seventeenth-century way of stating the contrast between a religion historically revealed and completely expressed in an infallible Book on the one hand, and, on the other, a religion primarily based on the eternal nature of God and man, and on the fact of immediate revelation and communication between the God of Grace and the needy soul.[23] Governor Vane aligned himself with the Hutchinson party and was in sympathy with this second type of religion, the religion of inward experience, the immediate conscious realization of God, which, in the terminology of the times, was called "the Covenant of Grace."[24] Absorbed as he was for the next fifteen years after his return from America in momentous public affairs, he had no opportunity to give expression to the religious ideas which were forming in his mind. During his "retirement" after his break with Cromwell, he wrote two books which give us the best light we can hope to get on his religious views—The Retired Man's Meditations (1655), and A Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise (1664), written in prison in 1662.
Baxter complained that his Doctrines were "so clowdily formed and expressed that few could understand them,"[25] and the modern reader, however much time and patience he bestows upon Vane's books, is forced to agree with Baxter. Vane acknowledges himself that his {275} thought is "knotty and abstruce." In religious matters his mind was always labouring, without success, to find a clear guiding clue through a maze and confusion of ideas, which fascinated him, and he allowed his mind to get lost in what Sir Thomas Browne calls "wingy mysteries." He had no sound principle of Scripture interpretation, but allowed his untrained and unformed imagination to run wild. Texts in profusion from Genesis to Revelation lie in undigested masses in his books. He had evidently read Jacob Boehme, but, if so, he had only become more "dowdy" by the reading, for he has not seized and appreciated Boehme's constructive thoughts, and, at least in his later period and in his last book, he is floundering under the heavy weight of millenarian ideas, which do not harmonize well with his occasional spiritual insights of an ever-growing revelation to man through the eternal Word who in all ages voices Himself within the soul. He was an extraordinary complex of vague mysticism and astute statesmanship.
In one matter he was throughout his life both consistent and clear, namely, in the advocacy of freedom of conscience in religion. He put himself squarely on a platform of toleration in his early controversy with Winthrop.[26] His friend Roger Williams in later life heard him make "a heavenly speech" in Parliament in which he said: "Why should the labours of any be suppressed, if sober, though never so different? We now profess to seek God, we desire to see light!"[27] Throughout his parliamentary career he stood side by side with Cromwell in the difficult effort, which only partly succeeded, to secure scope for all honest religious opinion. Finally, in The Retired Man's Meditations, he wrote: "We are bound to understand by this terme [the Rule of Magistracy] the proper sphere, bounds and limits of that office which is not to intrude itself into the office and proper concerns of Christ's inward government and rule in the {276} conscience." After defining the magistrate's proper functions in the affairs of the external life, he then adds: "The more illuminated the Magistrate's conscience and judgment is, as to natural justice and right, by the knowledge of God and communications of Light from Christ, the better qualified he is to execute his office."[28]
The central idea of his religious thought—though it never completely penetrated the fringes of his mind—was the reality of the living Word of God, the self-revealing character of God, who is an immediate, inward Teacher, who is His own evidence and demonstration, and who has, Vane testifies, "experimentally obtained a large entrance and reception in my heart as a seed there sown."[29] This living Word is not to be confused with the Scriptures, which are an outward testimony to the inner Word—an external way to the "unveiled and naked beauty of the Word itself," who is Spirit and Life.[30] In the long process of self-revelation through the living Word a temporal universe has been created by emanations in time, a universe double in its nature, first a deeper, invisible universe of light, of angels and exalted spirits, then a visible and material and "animalish" world, a shadow of the invisible world.[31] At the top of the order, man was created, uniting both the visible and the invisible worlds in one being. Man thus in himself is in miniature a double world, a world of light and spirit and a world of shadow. Two seeds, as Boehme had already taught, are always working in man, and his native free-will determines the course of his destiny. In his first test, man fell, though "the tree of life," which was a visible type of Christ, was before his eyes in Paradise, but this event was only the beginning of the long human drama, and the real history of the race is the story of the stages and dispensations of the living Word of God, educating, regenerating, and spiritualizing man, and bringing him to the height of his spiritual possibilities.
{277}
In the first stage of this divine pedagogy, man has the Word of God within himself "as a lampe or light in his mind, manifesting itself to inward senses, assisted by the ministry of angels." This is the period of "conditional covenant," under which man's spiritual life depends on "obedience to the inward operations of this Word," and those that obey are made "Children of the Light," and attain a forward-looking apprehension of the coming Son.[32]