The second degree of glory—"a more excellent and near approach to the sight of the Son Himself"—is the training stage under the written word, which makes wise unto salvation. This is a dispensation of discipline, reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness, and it culminates in the manifestation of Grace in Jesus Christ, who is the Root of a new race. There are two ways of using the ministry of Grace in Jesus Christ—on the lower level as mere "restoration-work" and on the higher level as "re-creation into new life." Those who apprehend Christ on the lower level, as simply a new law-giver, do not get beyond the spirit of bondage and do not succeed in attaining an immutable and incorruptible nature. Those, however, who are born from within by the immortal and incorruptible Seed of God are "changed from their wavering unstable power" into an inward likeness to God, into a love that binds man's spirit into union with God's Spirit, into "steadfast and unmoveable delight in goodness" and "fixed and unshaken averseness to sin and evil."[33]
The third and final stage of glory, the full dispensation of the Spirit—when "the whole creation will be restored to its primitive purity and to the glorious liberty of sons of God"—will be the thousand years' reign of Christ to which, Vane believed, both the outward and inward Word testify.[34]
It is not easy to see how a man of Vane's mental and moral calibre, who had himself, as he tells us in his scaffold speech, been "brought home to himself by {278} God's wonderful, rich and free Grace, revealing His Son in me that I might be a partaker of eternal life," and who had all his life held that there is an eternal Word and Seed of God working both without and within to bring men to their complete spiritual stature, should be unwilling to trust the operation of this divine Word to finish what He had begun, and should resort to a cataclysmic event of a new order for the final stage. We of this later and more scientific age must, however, speak with some caution of the idealistic dreams and visions and glowing expectations of men, who in their deepest souls believed that God was a living, acting God who, in ways past finding out, intervened in the affairs of men and fulfilled His purposes of good. "God is almighty," Vane said once in a Parliamentary speech. "Will you not trust Him with the consequences? He that has unsettled a monarchy of so many descents, in peaceable times, and brought you to the top of your liberties, though He drive you for a while into the wilderness, He will bring you back. He is a wiser workman than to reject His work."
George Fox, in 1657, was "moved of ye Lord to speake to him of ye true Light," having heard that "Henery Vane has much enquired after mee." Fox told him, in his usual fashion, "howe yt Christ had promised to his disciples to sende ym ye holy ghoast, ye spiritt of truth which shoulde leade ym into all truth which wee [Friends] witnessed and howe yt ye grace of God which brought salvation had appeared unto all men and was ye saintes teacher in ye Apostles days & soe it was nowe." Vane's comment on the Quaker's message was: "None of all this doth reach to my experiens," and Fox, in his plain straightforward manner, said: "Thou hast knowne somethinge formerly; but now there is a mountaine of earth & imaginations uppe in thee & from that rises a smoake which has darkened thy braine: & thou art not ye man as thou wert formerly. . . . I was moved of ye Lord to sett ye Seede Christ Jesus over his heade!"[35]
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Clarendon was more charitable toward Vane than was Fox, who never deals gently with persons who approach his point of view and yet miss it. The former, declaring that Vane's writings lack "his usual clearness and ratiocination," and that "in a crowd of very easy words the sense was too hard to find out," yet concludes to give the furnace-tried statesman the benefit of the doubt: "I was of opinion that the subject was of so delicate a nature that it required another kind of preparation of mind, and perhaps another kind of diet, than men are ordinarily supplied with!"[36]
There can, at any rate, be no doubt of Vane's honesty or of his loyalty to the Light within him. Standing face to face with death, he told his strange audience that he had put everything that he prized in the world to hazard for the sake of obeying the best Light which God had granted him, and he added these impressive words: "I do earnestly persuade all people rather to suffer the highest contradiction from men, than disobey God by contradicting the Light of God in their own conscience."
III
Peter Sterry was born in Surrey, early in the seventeenth century, and entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1629, graduating B.A. in 1633 and M.A. in 1637. Emmanuel College had been founded during Elizabeth's reign (1584) by one of her statesmen, Sir Walter Mildmay, for the especial encouragement of Calvinistic theology, and it was the most important intellectual nursery of the great Puritan movement in England. During Sterry's University period there was a remarkable group of tutors and fellows gathered in Emmanuel College. Foremost among them was Tuckney, who was tutor to Benjamin Whichcote the founder of the school of Cambridge Platonists, or "Latitude-Men," and Whichcote himself was at Emmanuel College {280} throughout Sterry's period, graduating M.A. the same year that Sterry graduated B.A.
Sterry was a thorough-going Platonist in his type of thought and had much in common with Henry More, whose writings were "divinely pleasant" to him and whom he calls "a prophet" of the spiritual unity of the universe, and with Ralph Cudworth, the spiritual philosopher, though he finds "somewhat to regret" in the work of both these contemporary Cambridge Platonists.[37] Sterry is not usually reckoned among the Cambridge Platonists, but there is no reason why he should not be included in that group. He was trained in the University which was the natural home of the movement, he read the authors most approved by the members of this school, and his own message is penetrated with the spirit and ideals of these seventeenth-century Platonists. His writings abound with references to Plato and Plotinus, with occasional references to Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite; and the world-conceptions of this composite school of philosophers, as they were revived by the Renaissance, are fundamental to his thought. He was thoroughly acquainted with the writings of Ficino, and quotes him among his approved masters. He had also profoundly studied the great mystics and was admirably equipped intellectually to be the interpreter of a far different type of Christianity from that of the current theologies.