afterwards, was that of the "Seekers." He had reached the insight that religion is a spiritual relationship with a spiritual God, and on the basis of this position he questioned the divine "commission" of those who administered the external ceremonies of the Church. It is, however, perfectly clear that these views were not "original" with him, but that he had come under the influence of the teachings of the men whom I am calling "spiritual Reformers." How inward and mystical his type of Christianity really was, may be gathered from a short passage of an _Epistle_ which he wrote in 1661: "The Kingdom of God is within you and is the dominion of God in the conscience and spirit of the mind. . . . This Kingdom of Christ is 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