e 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 functio