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