The Millennium

It is a scholarly commonplace that Sir Henry Vane was a millenarian. Little attention, however, has been paid to the specifics and the implications of Vane's millenarian creed. Vane sanctified freedom by giving it an apocalyptic schedule. He cultivated a vigorous rhetoric of authority and righteousness, enlisting freedom as discipline's partner rather than its rival in the business of obeying God. His apocalyptic and theological ideas gave him a voice in midcentury controversies concerning religious toleration and the scope of human power.

Vane looked forward to a time when the saints, with Christ, will rule as “kings and priests” for a thousand years.Footnote 16 Once Antichrist was out of the way the mechanisms of public power would be structured anew in a “church-state,” in the rule of the “general assembly of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven.”Footnote 17 In The Retired Mans Meditations, Vane offered “small glimpses” of the kingdom. He glimpsed generous measures of discipline: judgment and wrath, lawmaking and punishment, “distributive” and “revenging” justice, “Church-Censures” and “the power of the sword.”Footnote 18 He also put into an apocalyptic context the triumph of Christian freedom. Christ liberates in dispensing a restorative grace to the “natural man.” Thus, by virtue of the atonement “all men … shall be actually and entirely restored into their Primitive purity, natural life and glory, upon the same tearmes of mutability, as wherein Adam was first created”; moreover, “they shall be left unto the full and entire scope of their own free will, self-managing and disposal, that they may be as good as they themselves shall desire to be, and have the means at hand to keep them so, if themselves be not at fault.” Additionally, they will be free from Satanic “power or subtilty.”Footnote 19 This multifaceted freedom is designed to draw its beneficiaries out of the unrighteous proclivities of the self and into the ambit of disciplinary authorities. Vane's “right heirs of salvation” deliver the model of apocalyptic discipline:

Vane keeps in his sights the responsibilities of freedom while meditating on the overwhelming compass of millennial discipline. Freedom from Satanic wiles is complemented by freedom from the “bondage of corruption,” but this brings with it an obligation to maintain a covenanted righteousness and a liability to feel the sting, should the obligated turn “rebellious and disobedient,” of God's “fiery vengeance and indignation.”Footnote 21 Unlike the Quakers, in whose circles he moved and whom he both admired and defended,Footnote 22 Vane resisted the temptation to fragment the grand apocalyptic scene into a patchwork of microeschatologies—moral conflicts and, potentially, triumphs of the Spirit or Light in the “mind” or “heart” or “soul” or “conscience” of every person. Vane knew the conversion process to be one of inner conflict giving way to a state of triumphant faith and transformative spirituality,Footnote 23 but his eschatological kingdom was not what it was for Francis Howgil and other Quakers—something revealed to the heart through the Spirit, something “invisible, spiritual and eternal.”Footnote 24 Rather, Vane envisaged the coming of a “government … which shall flow forth from the New JERUSALEM and true MOUNT SION.” This would afford “protection” for those who subsist within its jurisdiction, exercising a “judicial power” capable of being enforced both by ecclesiastical sanction and the power of the sword.Footnote 25 “Qualified with a discerning peculiar to the spiritual seed,” Vane's theocrats will declare “what infallibly is truth, and the mind and will of God, to be observed in heaven or in earth, by all the inhabitants of both.” They will punish the disobedient “by their Church Censures, in a way of Excommunication,” in implementing the most severe of which the “holy and mighty Angels” will be “ready with flames of fire to take vengeance on all that shall not obey the Gospel, and to punish them with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.”Footnote 26

Vane against the Disciplinarians

The furnace of divine vengeance seems to consume Vane's fragile millennial freedom. Vane struggled to fit freedom into a pervasive culture of discipline. William Lamont has explored the disciplinarian impulses that motivated seventeenth-century minds.Footnote 27 Authority was cherished, and discipline was striven for; freedom from each was exiguous and unlovely—an unintended, invidious by-product of the suspended arrival of the New Jerusalem. Lamont shows that “tolerationists” set their minds on weightier and holier things than toleration. More important than that latitude be granted to the preferences of individuals was that the demands of godliness be respected and—at least ultimately—enforced.Footnote 28 Concerned that public powers had not resiled from arrogating to themselves the religious responsibilities that belonged only to Christ, Vane spoke out on behalf of a view of religious liberty.Footnote 29 Lamont's work on discipline encourages us to suspect that the liberty on offer was constrained by particular ends, its value conditioned by the uses to which Vane imagined that it would be put. We need to rethink Vane's language of liberty in the light of his discourse concerning discipline.

Building on Lamont's work, J. C. Davis has explored the ecumenical elasticity of the seventeenth-century concept of freedom.Footnote 30 To be free was to be disposed to submit to God and to obey His commands, to shore up the unity of the godly so sorely hazarded by the fissiparous pressures of religious controversy. In a brief allusion, Davis claimed that Vane is interested not in human freedom but in the freedom of God; his focus is not our autonomy but our susceptibility to divine direction.Footnote 31 Richard Baxter would have none of this. Vane, for Baxter, was a world-inverting libertine, a front-runner in the “Jesuit” drive to undermine Protestant magistracy. His sectarian conspiracies were dedicated to the overturning of authority.Footnote 32 The intensity of Baxter's alarm suggests that Vane was not giving voice to a timid freedom.

It was because of the seriousness with which he treated its applications that Vane gives the impression of having enfeebled his millennial freedom. To be freed from the wiles of the devil, and to have had one's natural resources of mind and will liberated from the corruptions of the Fall, was to be made highly accountable for the righteousness of one's actions. What is special about Vane's millennium is that the “judicial power” available to the saintly government would include legitimate spiritual sanctions: the saints would be capable of directing and punishing a citizenry whose restored freedom must sharpen their responsibility for their own piety and sociability. Such true theocracy, however, belonged to the imagined future. No wonder that Baxter, busy erecting his own “Holy Commonwealth,” was alarmed. Vane would deprive men like Baxter of any sort of confessional apparatus. And a regime, such as Oliver Cromwell's, that is ignorant of the mind of God is in no position legitimately to punish heresy and blasphemy. The freedom that is taken so seriously in an eschatological context comes home, as it were, to roost in a context of ungodly rule in the here and now of mid-seventeenth-century England. If righteousness cannot be guaranteed centrally, if government-sponsored discipline is a sham, if persecution parades as punishment of heretics and blasphemers, then freedom must be secured from false theocracy.

Vane defended the wayfarer from predatory magisterial and ministerial powers. He sought to counteract the initiatives of churchmen that seemed, in the 1650s, to be giving strength to “a most sore oppression and insufferable yoke of bondage, most unrighteously kept up over the consciences of the people.”Footnote 33 He spoke out against the persecution of “spirituall Persons” and of the “spiritual seed.”Footnote 34 He lamented that the “corrupt, sensual and malignant Church” had appropriated the “power of humane Laws, and of the civil Sword” and mingled “Interest with worldly Governors.”Footnote 35 He bemoaned the “miserable suppression” of God's prophets, remarking that “in very few states and kingdoms liberty of conscience, in the service & worship of God, is admitted.”Footnote 36 He observed of misdirected discipline that the “Royal law” of doing unto others as we would be done by was rendered inoperable by the eruption of the sort of disorder that it was the avowed purpose of the disciplinary regime to expunge.Footnote 37

Vane's most significant condemnation of the disciplinary regime focused on its theocratic presumption to interpret the divine mind. God revealed the truth concerning Himself. If He chose to reveal truth cumulatively—through episodic dispensations of “new light”—by what privilege could magistrates and clergymen take it on themselves to suppress His advanced installments of truth and to persecute truth's latter-day promulgators? Here was a mighty presumption indeed, made all the more repugnant by Vane's own presumption that magistrates and clergymen were held fast in the grip of Satan.Footnote 38 Accordingly, Vane resolves his political universe into an austere dichotomy of flesh and spirit, light and dark, the empowered vile and the persecuted precious. “The Reformed part of the visible Church” had determined “to hinder the growth of that which is Spiritual, rather than to go forward and become one with it.”Footnote 39 The Reformation, for Vane, had congealed into an insidious conformism, embodying “hatred” for “the heavenly Seed and spiritual part of the Church,” for “those that see clearer and better than themselves, and cannot endure to hear of new lights that go beyond theirs, or that is upon the encreasing more and more unto the perfect day.”Footnote 40 New lights and the perfect day: illuminism and eschatology offer resources for the uprooting of fraudulent theocratic discipline.

The devil of Vane's Meditations worked through Cromwell in order to establish an anti-Christian parody of the kingdom of Christ. Cromwell, the visible saint, manipulated the appurtenances of the sacred: his false godliness was a sophisticated cosmetic designed to deceive the pious unillumined, and he sought to authenticate his brand of discipline by exploiting the words of Scripture. His disposition to “act” in the province of religion was grounded in an arrogant claim to knowledge of the mysterious divine mind. The magistrate's discretionary authority in the province of religion hinders “the breaking in of higher discoveries” from God; Cromwell as “umpire” of religious controversy acts as an agent of Antichrist.Footnote 41

Vane responded theologically to the Cromwellian assault on the conscience. A “covenant theology”—a scheme, spiced with heady shafts of mystery, according to which God dispensed His grace—functioned dramatically to limit the powers of the magistrate. Vane spoke as one who communed mystically with the God of the covenant of grace in order to register the opprobrium of magisterial acts that had sprung, arrogantly and violently, from ignorance of such spiritual consolation. For his critics, Vane's utterances were saturated with inflammatory language, seductive obscurity, combustible applications. His plea was that we “desist from any endeavours to separate our selves from Heretickes, by any publique forme of doctrine or discipline established by a fleshly power.” To indulge such power was to “separate from the more spirituall professors, and entangle our selves in the fleshly interest of a carnall and hypocritical generation.” The “fleshly power” might “secure” the “purest form of doctrine or discipline that can be agreed on by the best Christians,” but this was merely a “counterfeiting” of the truth and would be “refused” by the followers of “the Lambe,” who would incur the “penalty of those lawes, which were intended by weak Christians for the securing of the truth.”Footnote 42

Given Vane's dissent from premillennial disciplinary regimes, his disapprobation of the punitive rule of “weak Christians” and of laws that fortify a “fleshly power,” how would he respond to the challenge of sectarian license? How do Quakers and Ranters—against whose ecclesiastical misdeeds a Cromwellian proclamation was issued in February 1655—fit into his moral and political universe? Vane answered such questions in a language of theology. His organizing scheme was a covenant theology that distinguished the “true saints” from the rest—therein laying the foundation for the genuine theocracy of the millennial future—but that also distributed widely the responsibilities of discipline. The sharp point of this conception was that, in default of genuine theocracy, the pursuit of responsibility could be enabled only by liberty of conscience and toleration of diversity. Christian freedom demanded a politics of dissent on covenantal grounds.

Nuances of Theology: Puritans, Quakers, and Antinomians

Viewed broadly, Vane's doctrine of grace is unremarkable in its studied deference to the idiom of mainstream covenant theology. It is only when we look into the specifics of Vane's doctrine that we begin to hear the alarm bells that rang in the ears of Baxter and others. Vane posited two covenants through which Christ managed the affairs of the conscience and distributed the various species of grace. Puritan theologians knew the covenant of works as an essentially Judaic mechanism of obedience, offering divine mercy on the condition of indefectible observance of divine law, which God had contracted with Adam and which Moses promulgated in the Sinai wilderness.Footnote 43 Vane argued, somewhat peculiarly, that the covenant of works had been renewed universally after the Fall by virtue of the unlimited application of Christ's death. This redemptive provenance, however, did not render the covenant of works an instrument of salvation: Vane concurred with the orthodox that the covenant of works carried the grim freight of the Deuteronomic curse. The covenant of grace was narrower in the scope of its beneficiaries—only the elect communed with Christ in the covenant of grace—and more efficacious in its benefits, for the grace dispensed in this covenant was unconditional as well as irresistible, and guaranteed the passage to salvation.Footnote 44 Vane's emphasis on the unconditionality of the covenant of grace drew fire from the Puritan mainstream. This aspect of his theology could be presented as threatening the divine gifts of faith and repentance that Puritan covenant theologians had managed to conceive both in “absolute” terms, as outworkings of the unconditional decree of election, and in “conditional” terms, as (grace-founded) responses to the “conditions” that enunciate for the elect an “order and way” of salvation.Footnote 45 To remove the conditions, it could be argued, was to sabotage the Puritan experience of godly devotion.

Vane's covenant theology will interest us for three principal reasons, each testifying to controversial engagement with mainstream theological ideas and with prevailing hesitations concerning the value of religious freedom. First, it will reveal that one aspect of Vane's defense of a wide-ranging religious freedom was articulated in a mode of discourse that bespoke a “Pelagian” confidence in the capacity of “natural” resources—the unregenerated mind and will—to preside over a divinely “rewardable” discipline. Second, it will indicate that Vane took a noticeably partial approach in the allocation of his Pelagian confidence: he saw the Quakers as capable of rewardable righteousness but entertained grave doubts at the capacity of mainstream Christian moralists—the bearers of what he termed the “legal conscience” under the covenant of works—to prepare for themselves any other than an infernal destiny. Nor did he consider that zealous magistrates would deflect unhappy legalists onto a heavenly path: human laws and swords in the service of the church have an altogether contrary effect, stimulating hypocrisy rather than piety. Controversially, Vane held that the way to salvation was unburdened by the “conditions” that Puritan theologians standardly identified as constituting the fruits of grace and the foundations of discipline in the covenanted life of the saints. To a compounded unorthodoxy that inflated the natural resources of the Quaker and evacuated from the conditional covenant of the Puritan almost all certainty of salvation, Vane added a further ingredient of doctrinal nuance. He emphasized predestination and regenerative grace to the point at which the conditional covenant of works is superseded by the unconditional covenant of grace. In this refusal to accept the Puritan convention that the covenant of grace put forth conditions that evoked accountable (if ultimately God-given) responses from the godly wayfarer, Vane edged toward “antinomianism.” This is the third point of interest that Vane's covenant theology will bear, and it calls to view an unresolved tension that ripples through his theological scheme.

Vane concurred with the antinomians that the imposition of covenantal conditions entailed the subversion of the Pauline message that salvation followed not on the performance of good works but, rather, on the unconstrained play of divine grace. On this view, works performed in a conditional environment were not fruits of grace; they were contrivances of nature, invidious in their promotion of “legalistic” hypocrisy, doleful in their corruptibility and in their occasioning the damnation of faithless doers of merely “legal” deeds. Neither Vane nor the antinomians denied that grace would stimulate good works; it did not follow from their abandonment of covenantal conditions that they discarded Christian piety. They did, however, insist that the works of grace were uncontaminated by the merely human “power” or “naturall ability” that vitiated the orthodox doctrine of the conditional covenant of grace. “They are not justified by grace,” the antinomian William Eyre solemnly averred, “who are justified upon the performance of conditions … a conditional promise which sends us to our works, promiseth us life no otherwise then if it were placed in our own power.”Footnote 46 Accordingly, to be made subject to the surveillance of conditions was to be forced into reliance on the causal resources of nature. But this was a vacuous causality, and it generated antinomian contempt for orthodox theology, which had recast words of grace and faith into a religion grounded on mere nature and pursuant—with Mosaic zeal—of faithless deeds. The conditioned man, for the antinomian, is simply the “natural man,” for God does not render conditional the salvation of the regenerate. Scripture catches out the proponents of human “power” in its odious role as satisfier of conditions: “That there is no such power, or ability in the Natural man to do that which is good, might be irrefragably demonstrated from sundry Scriptures.”Footnote 47 The deployment of such power was a provocation to God, for its advocates acted on the false pretense of its soteriological value. Vane did not scruple at drawing the retributive corollary. A man is under “the Law,” he admonished, “so long as he is alive to God but upon the condition required in the first Covenant”; in this state of being “a debtour to the whole law” he “trusts” and “engages in the single strength” of his “naturall ability and exercise of free-will.” Such resources prove insufficient in the task of unswerving obedience to the law; consequently, the man “falls and provokes God to wrath.”Footnote 48

Divine wrath at the investment of confidence in mere nature had its part to play in Vane's arguments with theological opponents. In the Meditations, he put such opponents in their (infernal) place by defining faith as a “heavenly power and operation of mind, whereby Christ … works himself into the soul,” and by proceeding to contrast to this felicitous domestication of “heavenly power” an eternally damaging reliance on the unregenerate power of condition-bound nature. Vane situated his opponents at the “natural” pole of the nature-grace dichotomy. He alluded to their obligation to the conditional covenant of works and to their living “but singly in the natural powers and operations of mind.” This was a foreboding move: the opprobrium attaching to mere nature and covenantal condition makes for confronting polemic. Vane consigns his opponents to a Deuteronomic scenario: they would find themselves cursed for their covenantal strivings, courting “danger of miscarrying, before they come to the end of their Race, and so will fall short of the true mark of their high calling.”Footnote 49

The conditional way, for Vane, is oppressively Judaic: it debases the gratuitousness of Pauline grace. Vane ignored the Puritan commonplace that grace facilitates the meeting of conditions. Puritans were adroit at rehearsing this commonplace in order to eschew the imputation of having betrayed St. Paul. Renouncing the antinomian covenant, Baxter, for example, declared that the elect would be caused “infallibly to perform this condition” of faith.Footnote 50 For George Kendall, God's decree of saving the elect on the basis of conditions “carries in it a decree of working these conditions in his Elect, as meanes whereby he will accomplish their salvation as the end.”Footnote 51 “Though Justification and eternall life” are “conditionall” according to the covenant of grace, “yet,” John Ball observed, reconciling divine sovereignty with human responsibility, “may they be called absolute, because God giveth to the man in Covenant every thing necessary to Salvation.”Footnote 52

Like the antinomians, Vane cut the conventional and strenuously held link between “special grace” and the performance of conditions;Footnote 53 like them, he made the easy assumption that those who are circumscribed by conditions are required, independently of regenerative grace, to cultivate deeds of righteousness by enlisting the impoverished resources of nature. Interestingly, it was precisely in the posture of their independence of regenerative grace that Vane depicted the Quakers as rewardably righteous. Vane's God would do for heretics and sectarians what zealous magistrates and clergymen tended not to do: He would grant them the opportunity to prove their righteousness. If Vane's political theology will not resolve the tension that prevails when the Quaker way to salvation is coupled with the antinomian, it will at least alert us to his insistence that the venerable compound of freedom, discipline, and divine favor does not flourish within confessional regimes. Vane was as firm in removing the impostures of the magistrate as he was in abandoning the conditions of the covenant. A moralism contaminated by nature and structured by conditions was bound to desiccate if its principal motivation was conformist—if fear of punishment at the hands of the magistrate was the strongest glue holding it together. As Vane aphorized: “Whenever any spirituall truth is drawn forth into any form of words, and that form made obliging, then the old Adam will soon conforme to it.”Footnote 54 Persecutory regimes manipulate forms of words “made obliging,” and Tim Cooper has recently detailed Baxter's sustained interrogation of antinomian words—a career-long venture designed to expose the divergence of such words from words that Baxter considered ought clearly to oblige.Footnote 55 Vane could honor the Quakers because he saw that they had not become entangled in the hypocrisy of compliance: they would maintain the integrity of their devotion rather than bend to the censures of interrogators.

Quaker moralism was not the disingenuous conformism that Vane recognized as one of the corruptions of publicly enforced discipline. Quakers may have been heretics—Pelagian proponents of the efficacy of the light of natureFootnote 56—but they were not hypocrites. Hypocrisy, for Vane, was a far graver sin than heresy, and he nominated Constantine's punishment of heretics as a defining moment in the perduring career of Christian hypocrisy.Footnote 57 Vane's commitment to the rewardability of Quaker deeds sounds a loud discordant note within a soteriology that elsewhere inclines to antinomian exultations of sola gratia. But the England of the 1650s was populated by Puritans—Richard Baxter and Martin Finch, for example—whose espousal of covenantal conditions and support of the magistrates and clerics who guard them, and whose visceral condemnations of unorthodox expression, might in Vane's eyes have damaged sola gratia dogmatics more egregiously than did the harmless naturalism of the Quakers. Thomas Blake conjured an intriguing midcentury hybrid, that of the Pelagio-antinomian. He suggested that people might “improve endeavors as though they were Pelagians” while resting “on grace as though they were Antinomians.”Footnote 58 Vane went beyond Blake's hypothetical hybrid—beyond the pastoral “as though” to a dogmatic adoption of seemingly irreconcilable extremes. In its Quaker guise, Vane accepted the Pelagian possibility of natural, rewardable righteousness while reproving the Mosaic accountabilities of legalists under the covenant of works. And yet his theology was sufficiently fluid to embrace a doctrine of election and regeneration that privileged the conditionless antinomian covenant and its thoroughgoing magnification of grace.

This beckons us to the polemics in which politics mingled with theology, in which freedom and discipline were projected as corroborations of doctrine as well as artifacts of power. In Vane's case the doctrine, as we have suggested, was fluid to the point of discordant, but heresies constructed of dogmatic discordance might be thought to have occasioned Vane far less disquiet than hypocrisies contrived by public zeal. Vane would not permit even the Ranters to be coerced into theological rectitude, for their heresies, while regrettable, were not intrinsically harmful.

Baxter might have concurred with Vane in maintaining both the universal application of Christ's death (universal redemption) and the particularity of election (resulting in limited salvation), but elsewhere there are massive cleavages between the two. One alarm bell that might have sounded in Baxterian ears was Vane's imprudent generosity to the Quakers, whom Baxter identified with Jesuits and Ranters as wreckers of godly order.Footnote 59 Another alarm bell—which rang loudly in the ears of Martin Finch, the Calvinist animadverter of Vane's Meditations—was the doctrine of the unconditionality of the covenant of grace: a doctrine according to which Christ's “performance” of covenantal condition rendered the covenant unconditional for the elect. If Christ, as covenant performer, had believed and repented, was there now need for saintly discipline of such a kind? Too comprehensive an emphasis on the substitutionary dimension of the atonement was bound to grant liberty an unsightly leverage in transactions concerning duty.Footnote 60 This was one of the bedrocks of the antinomianism that Baxter, and other Puritan controversialists, resisted with vociferous urgency in the 1640s and 1650s.Footnote 61 To remove covenantal conditions was to enlist liberty to explode discipline. An unconditional covenant, it could be argued, threatened to obliterate the ordered ways of human sociability. In a context in which antinomians had turned “the Grace of God into wantonness,” it was necessary that the magistrate command a “coactive” and “coercive” power in affairs of religion.Footnote 62 Vane demurred at such magisterial sacerdotalism: there was a “Leprosie of fleshly corruption” in the magistrate's “Priestly office.” Thus Ranters were to be punished not for their grotesque beliefs but for their civil wrongs—their “outward and fleshly defilements.” And it was only by virtue of their maintaining “the Jurisdiction of a forreign power”—not for the sake of their sacramental practices—that Vane's magistrate might legitimately refuse toleration of “Priests and Jesuites.”Footnote 63 An acerbic Henry Stubbe pointed out in reply to Baxter's taunts that Vane had hardly divested “the civill Magistrate of spirituall power to invest the Pope therewith.”Footnote 64

To the extent, then, that religion prompts the intrusions of foreign powers and the misdeeds of domestic sectarians, Vane might concur with Lamont's imperialist disciplinarians on the need for magisterial action in the province of religion. But if God can be thought of as dispensing unconditional grace, He might be presumed to do so without taking into account the religious beliefs and practices of the beneficiaries of such grace. Papists and Ranters, therefore, must not be singled out by zealous magistrates on bare points of doctrine and worship, for God might yet hold them in His mysterious sights for a higher mercy. “There may be,” Vane put it, “a great deal of simplicitie and true desire to know better, in the darkest worshipper, and as much hypocrisie in him that pretends to the purest way of Worship.”Footnote 65

Divine freedom neutralizes earthly paradoxes and cuts through earthly powers. Vane appropriated from Puritan theology the doctrine that an almighty God dispensed “absolute” benefits to the regenerate inhabitants of the covenant of grace. And against Puritan theocrats who presumed to impose a “conditional” way to salvation, he emphasized the absolutist strand of sola gratia, the free giving of grace that was unencumbered by undertakings to reward the performance of covenantal conditions. A wrongful Puritan theocracy could be exposed by that element of Puritan dogmatic that Vane knew to be utterly right: God's freedom to give absolutely, to effect outcomes in the affairs of conscience without regard to human negotiation of conditions. The covenant of works and the covenant of grace are structures of belief and devotion that impinge on the living of human lives, and it is hardly surprising that soteriological discourse bore rhetorical weapons that could be used, as Vane used them, in discussions concerning political duties and the limits of magisterial power.

Vane, then, made clever use of advanced Puritan theology in order to deligitimate precipitate Puritan theocracy. He recognized that were sola gratia to be genuine to itself there ought, prior to the millennial theocracy, be no keepers of the nation's conscience. False theocrats assign themselves the task of judging the righteousness, and correcting the unrighteousness, of other people. This cannot but diminish the freedom that Christ had purchased for all consciences. Free grace operates mysteriously; it is dispensed by a divine sovereign who need not accommodate Himself to covenantal conditions and who need not favor one group or confession over another. The confessional regime compromises its professed commitment to sola gratia. Vane sees the liberality—and, indeed, the unpredictability—in sola gratia, and so imports a corresponding permissiveness into his political theology. The theological cost is the discordance that has been noted, but perhaps even Pelagianism and antinomianism can somehow be reconciled within a theology that acknowledges the inscrutability of a God who dispenses favor to creatures in His own way and according to His own priorities.

Freedom for Discipline's Sake: From Nature to Grace

The unconditional covenant emerged from respectable origins in the Puritan heartland: the covenant theologians saw that the promissory nature of the covenant of grace bore a significant load of “absolute” divine mercy.Footnote 66 If sufficiently stressed, the removal of conditions could be held to betoken the obsolescence of law; conventional morality would in turn dissolve, giving way to a culture of sinlessness, since sin prospers only where law prevails to accuse and condemn it. The sophisticated utterances of John Eaton, Tobias Crisp, and John Saltmarsh revealed, for imperialist disciplinarians, their most advanced phase of contamination in the abhorrent words and deeds of Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters, and perhaps in the “perfectionism” of the Quakers.Footnote 67 Discipline wrecked by antinomian freedom: this was a midcentury phenomenon to which Vane might be said to have contributed by his indulgence of Quakers and his adoption of the unconditional covenant of grace.

Vane's tactic in defending the Quakers was to acknowledge the error of their theology but to emphasize the rectitude of their behavior. Vane put a case that Baxter could never put, namely, that the Quakers cultivated a discipline, that their actions were directed by their observance of law, and that their piety might be so rewarded by God as to bring them to salvation. Vane was not applying a shiny gloss to antinomianism: Ranters and Familists, in his view, were altogether different from Quakers, and accordingly these discrete groups should not be lumped together in the same pile (as Baxter lumped them).Footnote 68 What Vane shared with the imperialist disciplinarians was an abomination of sin and a strong valuing of “personal righteousness and holiness.”Footnote 69 But he refused to attribute to magistrates and clergymen a positive role in the elevation of moral standards. The Quakers, victims of the Cromwellian abuse of power, constituted for Vane an illustration of how holiness could be promoted in spite of the persecutory drives of the powerful. Vane saw the Quakers as representatives of the “natural conscience” (the unregenerate), whom Christ had not left “without a witness of God, … nor without Judgements, Ordinances and Laws … ordained by God to bring them unto life, and to the knowledge of the truth: accompanied also with suitable and sufficient means, to that end.”Footnote 70 To possessors of the natural conscience God had vouchsafed “the obligation … to yield obedience to that law, which was written out in mans nature at first: the seeds and principles whereof, are renewed freely by gift from Christ, in that enlightning wherewith he enlightens every man that comes into the world.”Footnote 71 The natural conscience was capable of “the fear and aw [sic] of God which such have in them, that keeps them from sinning against him”; of maintaining a “vigilant care and industry to walk faithfully to this light”; of cultivating “an experimental sense of the emptiness and insufficiency of the good works by them done, to justifie and present them faultless before God.” Vane is suggesting that Quaker “vigilance” and “industry” inculcate an incipient appreciation of sola gratia, a dim sense of the “alien” and “imputed” righteousness of Reformed Christology; this insight, however, does not cancel the Pelagian orientation of Vane's doctrine of the rewardability of Quaker righteousness. Its “abilities” having been “rectified and enlightned through the benefit of Christs blood,” the natural conscience might “be taught how to escape the filthiness and gross corruptions of nature, and to arrive at that state wherein he may find the like grace from God, which the Centurion did, that is, to have the means sent to him, whereby he may be saved.”Footnote 72 Christ's blood has sacralized nature; natural “faculties and operations” are heightened

Vane inscribed the Quakers into a discourse of religious freedom that operates on three levels. First, Christ's blood has freed the Quakers from the impurity of the Fall, enabling them to pursue their obligation to the righteousness that expresses the essence of the inner light. Second, the Quakers illustrate the value of freedom from the impediment of the “forms” of religion, which occasion transgression in several ways (by fixing pious attentions on the material dimension of religion rather than on the spiritual, by inviting diabolic manipulation of public ritual, by constituting focal points of coerced uniformity).Footnote 74 Third, in “doing the work of the law, by nature, working righteousness and good therein required,” in putting themselves in a position to “please God, until they be admitted unto such farther manifestation of his counsel, as he yet reserves to communicate unto them,”Footnote 75 the Quakers show that freedom from the law and sword of the magistrate could not but carry forward the discipline encoded in the revelations of an immanent God. Vane domesticates the Quakers by dwelling on their legalism in a way that disarms, by inverting, their reputation for antinomianism. Vane's Quakers embrace the law; they long for the divine reward that crowns their strenuous piety; they dedicate their freedom to unceasing service of God.

Vane uttered a stinging rebuke to the censorious disciplinarians of the protectorate. He put an interesting spin on the capacity of discipline to honor liberty and of liberty to expedite discipline. Vane's rebuke takes as its point of departure the Quaker commitment to discipline, conceived from the perspective of a freedom from disciplinarian maltreatment that, because it has not yet been won, warrants pointed discourse on its behalf. While Baxter is drawn to the magistrate “in a common aim to stamp out Quakerism,”Footnote 76 Vane speaks for Quaker freedom so as to shore up the advance of Quaker discipline. His polemic bolsters the cause of a discipline-promoting freedom. The Quakers are targets of supercilious tongues; they suffer the reproaches of loquacious hypocrites. “Professorial” malevolence throws Quaker morality into high relief. “As for those since Christs coming,” Vane declaims,

Vane's remarks on the “natural conscience,” as represented by the Quakers, indicate that he believed strongly in the human capacity for righteousness, but his remarks on the “legal conscience,” to be considered shortly, bear witness to the depth of his reservations concerning the translation of capacity into practical outcomes. The Quakers almost appear as a pleasant aberration—truly righteous within the limits of their own “dispensation”: naturally good despite not being numbered among the regenerate. Baxter would dismiss the audacious thesis of Quaker righteousness, declaring sardonically that the Quaker “Doctrine of personal sinlesse perfection” had been “bred” by the devil and was shared by Papists, and that “Christs Kingdom is an Hospitall, he hath no Subjects in it but diseased ones.”Footnote 78 But Baxter would not demur at Vane's doubts about outcomes expected of the legal conscience. Nor would he be troubled by the ultimate sanction on which Vane called in order to jolt the legal conscience into righteous action or to condemn it for the hypocrisy of its Mosaic compliance and “rebellion” against spiritual “light.”Footnote 79 The infernal destiny of transgressors can be seen as a disciplinarian ligature connecting Vane and Baxter.

Always in Vane the wayfarer, whether regenerate or unregenerate, stands obligated to the requirement to obey the law of God. To the “several kinds of growth, ages, or statures of human perfection,” Vane counseled, “the word and law of God is a Rule, suiting itself and commanding the same Duties to be performed … accordingly as the heart is principled and qualified for the performance thereof, with a first, second or third measure and degree of light, and power from God, enabling thereunto.”Footnote 80 Although Vane held to the commonplace view that salvation was unachievable under the covenant of works because the covenanted would inevitably fail to satisfy the condition of perfect obedience to a works-promoting law,Footnote 81 he at times spoke as though heaven might yet be stormed by companies of doers (as opposed to believers). The Christian life is intensely performative, for the “word” that reveals the deity is also a “law” that solicits righteousness. As a “rule of their life,” the divine law would “guide” its observants “in the passage out of their mutable state into that which is immutable.”Footnote 82 God's laws “are in themselves possible and rationall to be obeyed.”Footnote 83 Law renders God intelligible, though the movement to obedience and understanding is a graduated one: in accordance with a “gradual discovery and revelation of the mind and will of God in his law, there are several degrees of growth and age, that man is or may be acquainted with, in the conformity and obedience that he is to yeild [sic] to Gods holy law and commandement.”Footnote 84

Vane's legal conscience is obligated to the law of the covenant of works. Salvation, here, is contingent on the satisfaction of the “conditions” of “legal righteousness,” but Vane knew that to be motivated by covenantal condition into self-reliant endeavor is to surrender to the delinquencies of the unregenerate self. Thus, a conscience that is circumscribed by condition, for Vane, is one that is obligated to act on its own resources of “mind” and “free will,” to deploy merely human causality in the interest of securing salvation.Footnote 85 The inhabitants of the covenant of works are “children of bondage” in their thraldom to a law that is dispensed without the gift of “unfailing faith” that motivates an incorruptible holiness, without the “activity and Freedom of another kind” that is available only to the elect under the covenant of grace.Footnote 86 The “natural man” could not be brought “into the true Land of Canaan or heavenly Country” according to the “principles of Moses or of the Law.”Footnote 87 Salvation under the covenant of works was unachievable (for the most part)Footnote 88 because it did not sanctify human causality with regenerative grace; the consolations of the covenant of works were offered on “wavering, unstable and conditional terms.”Footnote 89 Those in thraldom to the law retain a disconcerting freedom to refuse the obligation to obey it. Obedience, here, is a matter of “will and choice.” Vane insists that “the greatest part by far” of the unregenerate, “being wholly left to their owne choice and in the hands of their owne counsel,” would “continue not in their obedience, but perish through a hardnes and impenitency of heart, in which they rebell against the encreasing measure of light with which the holy Ghost would enlighten them.” Disobedience, though ineluctable for “the greatest part,” was “free and voluntary.”Footnote 90

Here we arrive at one of J. C. Davis's crucial insights. God is free; humanity is subject to supernatural direction and to punishment on breaches of divine law. Vane's God is a predestinating God: His decree of election is utterly capricious, unswayed by the empirical faith or deeds of its beneficiaries. The divine “potter hath absolute power over his owne clay”; human destiny, fashioned in a decretive eternity, answers “the holy end and design of the Creatour”; saving grace “was conferred freely on the Elect, without condition, according to Gods purpose, and given them in Christ Jesus before the world began.”Footnote 91 Vane's God is unaccountable in His undertaking to prepare a covenant of grace to facilitate the communion of the elect with Christ's crucified and resurrected body.Footnote 92 But equally, Vane's God is untrammeled in His decision to prepare a furnace for the vile. As the fount of justice, Vane's God is a punitive God, generous in sending Christ to redeem the sins of all, but ultimately brimming with wrath when confronted by those (the nonelect) who spurn His mercy. Spiritual insouciance breeds contempt for the law; contempt for the law, in turn, provokes the God of justice.

Baxter could call on a two-pronged stimulus to discipline: first, a “theocrasie” of magistrates working in concert with ministers; second, the ultimate sanction of hell. Vane, longing for a true theocracy but despising the pretentious theocrats of his own day, used the conditional covenant to draw frequently and forcefully on the horror of the ultimate sanction. The covenant of works “is the Ministry which worketh Wrath, that is to say, contracts a debt of Punishment”; those become “fit subjects for God to destroy” who had miscarried in the “trial” of the covenant of works: the “condition of future obedience and faithful walking with God,” the “condition of repentance and amendment of life.”Footnote 93 The threat of the ultimate sanction hung perpetually over the legal conscience, whose unregeneracy—whose reliance on the unstable resources of “naturall ability and exercise of free-will”—rendered it vulnerable to “wilfull, unexpiable sinning,” to the “default” that makes the covenant “void.”Footnote 94 To repose trust in unregenerate nature, Vane admonished, was to “provoke God to wrath,” for “thy lusting proud flesh and sensuall part of thy mind” will sabotage the drives to righteousness that prevail in a context in which salvation is attainable only by answering a debt “to the whole law.”Footnote 95 It was profound unease at the frustration of discipline that prompted Vane to write, with glowing passion, of the infernal destiny prepared for possessors of the legal conscience: they “become degenerate plants, that bring forth sowr and wild grapes (whose grape is the grape of Sodom, & their wine the wine of Gomorrah) and so are turned out of the house, & cut off from the vine, as branches fit for the fire.”Footnote 96 Vane's God delivered the sinful to “everlasting torments and sorrows, to all eternity”; He condemned them to “the second death, or final ministry” of His “fiery vengeance.”Footnote 97 Unsurprisingly, Vane included among his doctrinal criticisms of the Ranters their denial of the existence of hell.Footnote 98

As we turn to the covenant of grace, and with it the “evangelical conscience,” we notice that hell evaporates from Vane's discourse. Martin Finch, Vane's principal theological critic, was disturbed by the evaporation of covenantal condition.Footnote 99 We shall see that the evaporation of the one was not unrelated to the evaporation of the other. In neither case, however, was Vane sacrificing discipline at the altar of liberty. The unconditional covenant was a hot topic in the 1640s and 1650s. The antinomians had extended the logic of free grace, of the gratuitousness and promissory nature of divine mercy, to the point of dissolving the conditions (such as “faith, and repentance, and obedience”) of the Puritan covenant of grace.Footnote 100 Their opponents offered outraged rebuttals: prior divine causality was not inconsistent with the secondary operation of natural causality; to remove the latter was to open the floodgates to complacency and, ultimately, to anarchy; to refuse faith's conventional standing as a condition of salvation was to obviate the need for an object of faith, namely, Christ.Footnote 101

It was the elect of Vane's covenant of grace—those whose election and regeneration had carried them beyond the uncertainties of the covenant of works—who acquired the divine gift of “the liberty of the sons of God.” This “true freedom” or “truest liberty” is regulated and performative: the beneficiaries of such liberty “act more fully then ever, in harmony with, and subserviency unto the workings and life of faith.”Footnote 102 In this covenant there is no “possibility of sinning unto death, or any danger of final falling away.”Footnote 103 The covenant of grace brought freedom from the Deuteronomic curse; it ensured obedience to divine law, as an outcome of grace, but did not render it vulnerable to corruption by proposing it as a “condition” of salvation; it delivered the elect wayfarer from the ceaseless obligation to works of righteousness on which salvation was contingent under the covenant of works; it conveyed a faith in Christ that constituted an “absolute justification” in the sight of God. Vane sketches the obsolescence of the “do this and live” religion of the sanctimonious “professors” and Puritan apostates who have Christ on their lips and Moses in their hearts. The freedom of regenerative grace has supervened on the burden of Hebraic commitment to divine law and liability to divine vengeance.Footnote 104

Hell could safely be removed from this scenario. Why? Vane adduced the terror of infernal punishment as a spur to those, including the “orthodox” of his own day,Footnote 105 whose destiny could be presented as conditional on their own doings, and whose liability to divine vengeance was an entailment of doings that failed to coincide with covenantal condition. What changes under the covenant of grace is that the good works of the elect constitute a righteousness inspired by faith—an “unfailing” and “saving” benefit of regenerative grace and therefore untainted by the weaknesses of nature.Footnote 106 If Vane links hell with covenantal condition, his massive confidence in the grace of the unconditional covenant liberates him from the need to advert to hell as a potential destiny for the evangelical conscience. Vane and Baxter used hell as a disciplinary mechanism, but Vane did not renounce discipline once he had eliminated the need to draw the mind to the horrors of hell. For just as the covenant of grace brought true freedom, for Vane, so too did it inculcate true discipline. Elect souls were inclined, “infallibly” though voluntarily, to cultivate the fruits of righteousness; they did not need to be terrorized into compliance with divine law, even though (unlike the possessors of the legal conscience) they did not need to work their way to salvation, which was secured by faith, not works. The “freedom” of the covenant of grace was a voluntary (yet grace-founded) submission to God that could not be vitiated by the corruptions of nature. Divine law remained a charter of righteousness under Vane's covenant of grace, even though it no longer played the role of the condition laced with the curse that it had played under the covenant of works.Footnote 107

If, then, the new freedom of Vane's covenant of grace brings relief from “condition,” it does not do away with God's “requirement” of righteous undertakings.Footnote 108 The erasure of condition does not entail the needlessness of performance. By living outside a conditional world—in an environment of absolute mercy, of uncompromised and uncompromising promise—the holy obedience of Vane's elect is guaranteed with the arrival of “unfailing faith.”

Vane, now, strides the gap between a unilateral scenario of utter grace and the bilateralism that proposes a contractual relationship of exchange of divine reward for human effort. The spontaneous efflorescence of righteousness under the covenant of grace was so much a function of supernatural intervention that Vane cannot present it as the honoring of a contract. And yet the consciousness that the unconditional covenant “requires” good works retains the focus on a duty-bound moral athleticism. Vane wants to retain the divine initiative of the unilateral model (God's free gift of faith to the elect) without fully doing away with the dimension of mutual response that characterizes the bilateral (in its strongest sense, the delivery of grace as a reward for the satisfaction of condition). Striking Pauline notes, he wants grace, but he also wants works, and such works must please God and be required by His law but must emerge from the freedom of the graced rather than from the thrall of the conditioned. Vane insisted with St. Paul that “every true beleever is created in Christ Jesus unto good works, that are before prepared and ordeined of God, that they should walk in them.”Footnote 109 The transactions played out—in the covenant of grace—by faith, good works, and divine law are not assembled around the notion of “condition,” which Vane regarded as having compromised the gratuitousness of grace by rendering it contingent on the response of nature.

In this scenario of God's unilateral initiative, Vane specifies the “higher divine birth” of faith as that which “produceth in the heart ground which brings forth the good seed in abundant friutfulness, without any danger of miscarrying.”Footnote 110 But the unilateral dispensation that stimulates such productivity extinguishes neither the voluntary consent of regenerate souls nor the (inferior) causality of the resources that they muster in faith's service. And this is where human freedom and discipline finally coincide. Vane depicts the freedom of the covenant of grace as a state of consensual servitude to a merciful God. The servitude of the evangelical conscience is entered into voluntarily, and it issues in fruitful devotion to a law that functions, mercifully, as a charter (without discharging the sting of the curse). The regenerate “will” participates in the requirement of righteousness; the freedom of its participation is grounded in the divine will's determination to guarantee that the participation is willingly pursued. Divine grace holds the initiative, and yet it sanctifies the freedom of human participative agency. A “continuing rootedness in the ontological and moral orders of creation,” as William Stoever terms it,Footnote 111 is not undermined by regeneration; the “free will” of unregenerate nature, always at liberty to spurn its obligations, is replaced (as its “end”) by the gift of “true freedom” that fixes the mind and will on the imperative to serve God. For Vane, the concurrent gifts of freedom and faith will motivate the regenerate to consent to, and to pursue, the “requirements” of the covenant of grace.

It was by virtue of an “attracting, prevailing power in and over the will” that man is “brought to give up the absolute Rule and power of keeping himself, into the will of [God].” Freedom emerges out of a voluntary sacrifice: regenerative grace “makes ready the will to deny itself, take up the crosse, and become absolutely resigned up to the will of … the Lord, as the sure guardian and keeper of the will in its truest and best freedom.” The believer is “a free and willing co-worker with God,”Footnote 112 but the sovereignty of the latter orientates in a particular way the freedom of the former. In no sense is this a self-disposing freedom; Vane resolves the freedom of the believer into a “seeming bondage” to the divine will (revealed by faith). In this “subserviency” and “captivity” Vane identified “truest liberty.” “Subjection” replaces “self-sufficiency.”Footnote 113 “Bondage” to the divine will, Vane put it, “is the truest, greatest and most absolute freedome, being that which falls to mans share as he comes to be actually united with Christ in the band of the choicest and most excellent marriage union.”Footnote 114 The “better state of freedom … is for ever exclusive of sin, or of any possibility to chang [sic] and return to the service of sin againe.” The “free indeed” have “saving faith … created by Christ unto good works.” Divine love “carries the regenerate soule captive to the obedience of faith.”Footnote 115 Freedom, Vane wrote, expanding on the theme of the consensual bondage of those “under grace,”

The will's consent to “sacrifice” itself to the divine will has become fixed, even bound in “chains and fetters.”Footnote 117 The will, then, undertakes to observe the directives of faith, the gift of God's unilateral intervention—in registering the causality of which Vane rehearses descriptors of the operation of sovereign freedom: “absolute,” “unresistible,” “transforming,” “prevailing,” “effectual,” and “infallible.”Footnote 118 But divine efficacy does not eliminate human freedom; the evangelical conscience responds to divine “requirement” in a willing blaze of moral energy. God, in His sovereignty, is free to determine ends and means. But He respects the subordinate freedom of the elect in consenting to adopt the means—self-sacrifice, captivation, submission to faith—that effectuate the disciplinary ends.

Conclusion

Freedom, for Vane, began and ended with a God who directed the affairs of humanity. But human lives lived in transit to ends established by God participated in streams of freedom that Vane clearly valued. He valued freedom from covenantal condition, and he valued liberty of conscience, in a way that more conventional disciplinarians never could. But godly discipline was the very rationale of Vane's vaunted freedoms. The “liberty of the sons of God” is “a freedom to good only, a liberty to do all things for the Truth”; in experiencing such freedom, in which elect wills consent to their own “sacrifice,” the regenerate are “kept and subjected under the Rule that God would send.”Footnote 119 Thus, graced freedom uniquely accommodates the gospel's disciplinary refinements. Only in the unconditional covenant did the “seeming bondage” that articulated the responsibilities of discipline constitute, for Vane, the “truest, greatest and most absolute freedome.” For all that the Spirit might “witnesse,” in an “immediate” and “infallible” revelation, to the “adoption” that constitutes an essential stage in the morphology of regeneration, and for all that “ye supernaturall eye” might acquire a divinely sourced knowledge “wch flesh and blood has not revealed,” Vane did not seize on the opportunity provided by the doctrine of spiritual assurance of salvation to collapse the covenant of grace into an utterly numinous, postlegal economy of the Spirit. To the contrary, Vane uttered a legalist language when he spoke of the obligations that pressed on the regenerate. The discipline of divine law—the “dying to sinne and a living unto righteousness, in the full extent of both”—followed surely on from the Spirit's witness.Footnote 120

It was for disciplinarian reasons that Vane defended Quakers from persecution, and in relation to “legal” Christians he favored the furnace of hell, not the discretion of the magistrate, as an estimable mechanism of discipline. Officious and clamorous, Vane's false theocrats enjoyed a predilection for self-serving rectitude, “none being more ready then these, to lay Heresie, Blasphemy, and high Notions at the wrong door of others, in hopes to make themselves appear the sound and good Physitians.”Footnote 121 Such jurisdictional rectitude, as Vane conceived it, had been the “cause” of “our late troubles.” It was in the application of “outward Force” in relation to matters of religion, deriving from the doctrine that the magistrate was keeper and judge of both Mosaic tables, that the contamination of Christian discipline by antichristian hypocrisy and persecution was most clearly to be seen. Doctrine was “profitable” to an individual only insofar as the latter inwardly “experienced” the substance of which the doctrine spoke; Vane exploited the pluralist possibilities latent within the Puritan category of “experience” in order to challenge the cultivation of monolithic doctrinal structures engendered by the Puritan urge to instruct and to discipline. What alarmed Vane was not “the growth of severall Opinions” in religious matters, but rather the stifling of “truth it self” occasioned by the conviction that “one way” could be selected from the plurality of ways available and then be established, in a menacing parody of Christ's kingdom, by means of law and sword.Footnote 122 Thus did Vane, provocatively, turn the tables on the empowered disciplinarians of the age. Little wonder that he despised the magistrates who acted on the prescriptions of churchmen, and that he viewed “Church forms” not as holy instruments of discipline and devotion but, rather, as “Nurseries of hypocrisie, apostasie, and other Spiritual uncleanesses and defilements.”Footnote 123

But Vane did not surrender hope in a latter-day arrival of disciplinary governance. The true saints will assume power in the “church-state” of the millennium, when rulers will at last honor the freedom that Christ had purchased for all consciences. Vane defended religious liberty against the assaults of Cromwell for the sake of applied theology. His was a politics of dissent with the theology left in. Vane lived on the margins of the disciplinary culture described by Lamont and Davis. He can be placed in a religious continuum that esteemed profoundly the value of law, obligation, self-renunciation, effortful piety, productive faith, divine sovereignty. Vane was of the mind that Cromwell—“umpire” of religious controversy, persecutor of heretics and blasphemers, aspirant to the “Throne in spirituals as well as Temporalls”—exploited discipline in order to extinguish liberty.Footnote 124 The liberty at issue was of such kind as enabled consciences to commune with a God who dispensed “measures” and “degrees” of grace and light in order to bestow faith and to nurture righteousness. Liberty of this stamp was to take precedence over Cromwell's heavily compromised authority.

Freedom and discipline, for Vane, were not mutually exclusive options; rather, they would intersect—optimally in the covenant of grace—and flow together in a common stream. The interventions of magistrates and ministers tended to impede the flow. Vane's defense of the integrity of the flow vivified the anti-imperialism and anticlericalism that the likes of Baxter found particularly obnoxious. Vane spoke out on behalf of liberty and in defense of sectarians; he called on Cromwell in 1658 to “let the oppressed go free.”Footnote 125 But freedom did not entail self-disposal; it was a disciplinarian vision, grounded in theology, that motivated Vane's dissent.