Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

‘About the fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age,’ he said of himself on the scaffold, ‘God was pleased to lay the foundation or groundwork of repentance {292} in me … revealing his Son in me, that … I might, even whilst here in the body, be made partaker of eternal life.’

In this temper he was sent to Oxford, where he would not take the oath of supremacy, and was consequently unable to matriculate. He then spent some time at Geneva. On his return, his nonconformity gave such offence to the people about court, that the powers of Laud were applied in a special conference for the purpose, to bring him to a better mind. The final result is best stated in the words of a court clergyman: [1]

‘Mr. Comptroller Vane’s eldest son hath left his father, his mother, his country, and that fortune which his father would have left him here, and is, for conscience’ sake, gone to New England, there to lead the rest of his life, being but twenty years of age. He had abstained two years from taking the sacrament in England, because he could get no one to administer it to him standing. He was bred up at Leyden; and I hear that Sir Nathaniel Rich and Mr. Pym have done him much hurt in their persuasions this way.’

Already on the voyage he found that he had not left bigotry behind him. He had, according to Clarendon, ‘an unusual aspect, which made men think there was somewhat in him of extraordinary.’ He seems to have had long hair, a lustrous countenance, and the expression of a man looking not with, but through, his eyes. ‘His temper was a strong composition of choler and melancholy.’ These ‘circumstances of his person’ and his honourable birth, ‘rendered his fellow-passengers jealous of him, but he that they thought at first sight to have too little of Christ for their company, did soon after appear to have too much for them.’ [2] It appeared notably enough in the matter of Anne Hutchinson, with whom he had to deal as governor of Massachusetts, having been chosen to that office soon after his arrival, while still only twenty-three. This brought him into direct relation to the spirit which the clergy called sectarian, and of which he became the mouthpiece and vindicator under the commonwealth. Let us consider what that spirit was. I have already ventured to describe faith in the higher lutheran sense as the absorption of all merely finite and relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with the infinite God. From this principle, as extravagances, if we like, but necessary {293} extravagances, are derived the fanatic sects of the seventeenth century, antinomians, familists, seekers, quakers. We live perhaps an age too late for understanding them. The ‘set gray life’ of our interested and calculating world shuts us out from the time when the consciousness of spiritual freedom was first awakened and the bible first placed in the people’s hands. Here was promised a union with, a realisation of, God; immediate, conscious, without stint, barrier, or limitation. Here, on the other hand, were spirits thirsting for such intercourse. Who should say them nay? Who could wonder if they drank so deep of the divine fulness offered them, that the fixed bounds of law and morality seemed to be effaced, and the manifestation of God, which absorbs duty in fruition, to be already complete? The dream of the sectary was the counterpart in minds where feeling ruled instead of thought, of the philosophic vision which views the moving world ‘sub quadam specie aeterni.’ It was the anticipation in moments of ecstasy and assurance of that which must be to us the ever-retreating end of God’s work in the world. Its mischief lay in its attempt to construct a religious life, which is nothing without external realisation, on an inward and momentary intuition. It is needless to investigate the history of Mrs. Hutchinson’s antinomian heresy, which bears the normal type. It expressed the consciousness of the communication of God to the individual soul apart from outward act or sign. Its formula was that sanctification, i.e. a holy life, was no evidence of justification; and this again was said to lead to a heresy as to the nature and operation of the Holy Ghost. Practically, perhaps, it was the result of reaction from the rule of outward austerity under which she lived. It must have escaped persecution, had she not employed it (in this, again, anticipating the sectaries of the commonwealth) as a weapon of offence against the puritan ministers. It was the custom in the colony to hold weekly exercises, in which lay people expounded and enforced the sermons heard on Sunday. Mrs. Hutchinson was allowed to hold such an exercise for women, and unhappily soon turned exposition into hostile criticism. This roused the fury of the more rigid professors, who demanded her death as a heretic. Vane protected her, and in consequence, though supported by the Boston people, was superseded by Winthrop in the annual election of governor. This led, soon afterwards, to his return {294} to England; not, however, before Roger Williams had, through Vane’s influence with the Indians, obtained a settlement at Rhode Island, and there, for the first time in Christian history, founded a political society on the basis of perfect freedom of opinion. In Rhode Island Mrs. Hutchinson found shelter, but was pursued by the clergy with hideous stories of her witchcraft and commune with the devil. These Baxter with malignant credulity was not ashamed to accept, and to ascribe her cruel murder by the Indians to the judgment of heaven.

[1] [Strafford’s Letters, i. p. 463.]

[2] [The life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, by George Sikes, p. 8, Ed. 1662.]

I dwell at some length on this story, because it exhibits in little the forces whose strife, tempered but not governed by the practical genius and stern purpose of Cromwell, formed the tragedy of the commonwealth. Here we find the puritan enthusiasm by a necessary process, when freed from worldly restraints, issuing in the sectarian enthusiasm, and then weaning and casting out the child that it has borne. We see the rent which such schism makes in a society founded not on adjustment of interests but on unity of opinion, and may judge how fatal this breach must be when the society so founded, like the republic in England, is but the sudden creation of a minority, and exists, not in a new country with boundless room where the cast-off child may find shelter, but in the presence of ancient interests, which it ignores but can neither suppress nor withdraw from, and in the midst of an old and haughty people, proud in arms, whom it claims to rule but does not represent. In detachment from both parties stands the clear spirit of Vane, strong in a principle which can give its due to both alike, yet weak from its very refusal to obscure its clearness by compromise with either. This principle, which became the better genius of independence in its conflict with presbyterianism, I will endeavour to state as Vane himself conceived it.

The work of creation in time, he held, which did but reflect the process by which the Father begets the eternal Son, involved two elements, the purely spiritual or angelic, represented by heaven or the light, on the one hand, and the material and animal on the other, represented by the earth. Man, as made of dust in the image of God, includes both, and his history was a gradual progress upward from a state which would be merely that of the animals but for the fatal gift of rational will, to a life of pure spirituality, which he {295} represented as angelic, a life which should consist in ‘the exercise of senses merely spiritual and inward, exceeding high, intuitive and comprehensive.’ This process of spiritual sublimation, treating the spirit under the figure of light or of a ‘consuming fire,’ he described as the consuming and dissolving of all objects of outward sense, and a destruction of the earthly tabernacle, while that which is from heaven is being gradually put on. In the conscience of man, the process had three principal stages, called by Vane the natural, legal, and evangelical conscience. The natural conscience was the light of those who, having not the law, were by nature a law unto themselves. It was the source of ordinary right and obligation. ‘The original impressions of just laws are in man’s nature and very constitution of being.’ These impressions were at once the source and the limit of the authority of the magistrate. The legal conscience was the source of the ordinances and dogmas of the christian. It belongs to the champions of the covenant of grace as much as to their adversaries. It represents the stage in which the christian clings to rule, letter, and privilege. It too had its value, but fell short of the evangelical conscience, of the stage in which the human spirit, perfectly conformed to Christ’s death and resurrection, crucified to outward desire and ordinance, holds intercourse ‘high, intuitive and comprehensive’ with the divine.

Doctrine of this kind is familiar enough to the student of theosophic and cosmogonic speculation. Whether Vane in his foreign travels had fallen in with the writings of Jacob Boehme we cannot say, but the family likeness is strong. The interest of the doctrine for us lies in its application to practical statesmanship by the keenest politician of a time when politicians were keen and strong. That it should have been so applied has been a sore stumbling-block to two classes of men not unfrequently found in alliance, sensational philosophers, and theologians who find the way of salvation in scripture construed as an act of parliament. The man above ordinances, as Vane was called by his contemporaries, [1] was naturally not a favourite with men whom he would have reckoned in bondage to the legal conscience. Baxter’s opinion of him has been already quoted. To the lawyers, calling themselves theologians, of the next century he was even less intelligible. Burnet had ‘sometimes taken pains to see if I could find out his meaning in his words, yet I could never reach it. And since many others {296} have said the same, it may be reasonable to believe that he hid somewhat that was a necessary key to the rest.’ [2] Clarendon had been more modest; when he had read some of his writings and ‘found nothing in them of his usual clearness and ratiocination in his discourse, in which he used much to excel the best of the company he kept’ (the company, we must remember, that called Milton friend), ‘and that in a crowd of very easy words the sense was too hard to find out, I was of opinion that the subject of it 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.’ [3] Hume was superior to such a supposition; ‘This man, so celebrated for his parliamentary talents, and for his capacity in business, has left some writings behind him. They treat all of them of religious subjects and are absolutely unintelligible. No traces of eloquence, even of common sense, appear in them.’ In this language is noticeable a certain resentment common to men of the world and practical philosophers, that a man whom they deem a fool in his philosophy should not be a fool altogether. From his derided theosophy, however, Vane had derived certain practical principles, now of recognised value, which no statesman before him had dreamt of, and which were not less potent when based on religious ideas struggling for articulate utterance, than when stated by the masters of an elegant vocabulary from which God and spirit were excluded.

[1] [Amended from “cotemporary”. Tr.]