ough He drive you for a while into the wilderness, He will
bring you back. He is a wiser workman than to reject His work."

George Fox, in 1657, was "moved of ye Lord to speake to him of ye true
Light," having heard that "Henery Vane has much enquired after mee." Fox
told him, in his usual fashion, "howe yt Christ had promised to his
disciples to sende ym ye holy ghoast, ye spiritt of truth which shoulde
leade ym into all truth which wee [Friends] witnessed and howe yt ye
grace of God which brought salvation had appeared unto all men and was ye
saintes teacher in ye Apostles days & soe it was nowe." Vane's comment
on the Quaker's message was: "None of all this doth reach to my
experiens," and Fox, in his plain straightforward manner, said: "Thou
hast knowne somethinge formerly; but now there is a mountaine of earth &
imaginations uppe in thee & from that rises a smoake which has darkened
thy braine: & thou art not ye man as thou wert formerly. . . . I was
moved of ye Lord to sett ye Seede Christ Jesus over his heade!"[35]

{279}

Clarendon was more charitable toward Vane than was Fox, who never deals
gently with persons who approach his point of view and yet miss it. The
former, declaring that Vane's writings lack "his usual clearness and
ratiocination," and that "in a crowd of very easy words the sense was too
hard to find out," yet concludes to give the furnace-tried statesman the
benefit of the doubt: "I was of opinion that the subject 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!"[36]

There can, at any rate, be no doubt of Vane's honesty or of his loyalty
to the Light within him. Standing face to face with death, he told his
strange audience that he had put everything that he prized in the world
to hazard for the sake of obeying the best Light which God had granted
him, and he added these impressive words: "I do earnestly persuade all
people rather to suffer the highest contradiction from men, than disobey
God by contradicting the Light of God in their own conscience."

III

Peter Sterry was born in Surrey, early in the seventeenth century, and
entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1629, graduating B.A. in 1633 and
M.A. in 1637. Emmanuel College had been founded during Elizabeth's reign
(1584) by one of her statesmen, Sir Walter Mildmay, for the especial
encouragement of Calvinistic theolo