r 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, th