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 hop