John Cotton’s Bequest To Sir Henry Vane The Younger

By David Parnham

[David Parnham is an independent scholar who lives in Melbourne, Australia.]

During the cold winter of 1636-1637, when “hot contentions and paroxysms” were swelling and burning “in these poor Churches,” the eldership of New England assembled to articulate its collective mind and to call John Cotton to account.[1] And while errors and heresies orbited around Cotton’s preaching of free grace, the young governor Henry Vane was fully engaged in promoting the cause of the free-grace party.[2] The experience of leadership in controversy, perhaps, would stand the governor in good stead. Parliamentarian, diplomat, administrator, war-party leader, Vane would later maintain friendship and alliance with Oliver Cromwell until the latter’s dissolution of the Rump Parliament in April 1653, whereupon Vane became a voice of the watch, warning his countrymen, in idioms ranging from the stately to the apocalyptic, that hypocrisy and tyranny had not been stamped out in England.[3] Evidently New Englanders witnessed in incipience certain qualities of personality that would mark the later Vane: audacity and ingenuity, a taste for controversy, a capacity to cultivate an affiliation and to prosecute an interest, a willingness to question standards and assumptions—in particular, standards and assumptions concerning religion. Vane would prove himself to be in possession of a subtle theological intellect; but the documentary remains of the free-grace controversy offer scant clues to the workings of that intellect during the two years when Cotton, with whom Vane lodged upon arrival in Boston, must have been on tap to Vane for frequent tutelage in matters of divinity. Indeed, it is not until 1655, with the publication of The Retired Mans Meditations, that the restive glory of Vane’s religious mind presents itself in print.

The Meditations is a significant artifact of Interregnum England. One dimension of its significance lies in its conveyance of an ancestry: it carried into the Interregnum, largely for polemical purposes, a cluster of theological commitments distilled from John Cotton’s New England teachings of the mid-1630s. Some New Englanders—most notoriously, Anne Hutchinson—came, under Cotton’s instruction, to rethink the relative alignments of works and grace, of faith and obligation, of Christ and soul, of God’s conditional and absolute beneficence, of ecclesiastically mediated knowledge and immediate spiritual revelation. Vane offers a rich testament to the durability and adaptability of lessons learned by intelligent lay people when new Boston pursued the possibilities of Cottonian free grace. In the 1650s, Vane had cause to quarrel with English churchmen and with the magisterial power that “backed” their persecutory church, and he conducted his campaign in a theological idiom that Cotton, waging his own battles against ministers and magistrates, had enunciated in strife-torn Massachusetts. We may, then, apportion a further degree of significance to the Meditations in acknowledging its embodiment of a sophisticated applied theology. Vane dealt in accomplished fashion with theological technicalities: the extent of the atonement, the interactions of law and gospel and of works and grace, the curses and blessings discharged by way of divine covenants, the redemptive and regenerative interventions of Christ and Spirit. In the Meditations, such technicalities are forged into tools of combat. Vane had battles to fight against hypocrites and heresy hunters. And he mobilized a distinctive technical arsenal in order to explode the presumptions, and presumptuousness, of his enemies. I would like to argue that he acquired his fighting tools from John Cotton.

It stands to reason that Vane, during his time in New England, would have sympathized with the broad trends and fine details of Cotton’s theology. He expressed his “offense” at the clerical colloquy of December 1636 that committed itself to a question-and-answer teasing out of Cotton’s differences—though it may be that Vane was offended as much by procedural impropriety, since the meeting was held “without his privity,” as by unwarrantable “persecution.” We can but speculate, however, about precisely what Vane assimilated from Boston’s teaching elder during the 1630s. Vane, to be sure, was ruffling theological feathers at that time. John Winthrop remarked upon the distasteful matter of Vane’s commitment to the doctrine of the believer’s “personal union” with the Holy Ghost, and depicted Vane and Cotton in joint denial of the cherished commonplace that sanctification “could be evidence to a man without a concurrent sight of his justification.” Hugh Peter, in 1636, stood toe-to-toe with the governor and reproached him for his confection of novelties—”new notions” that “lift up the mind”—and the Puritan pastor Martin Finch, animadverting upon Vane’s Meditations two decades later, registered a glut of such reproaches.[4] But in lieu of detailed utterances on Vane’s part dating from the period of “new opinions” and “alienations among brethren” in the 1630s,[5] it is left to us to interrogate Vane’s later writings in order to trace the possible shape of Cotton’s bequest to this redoubtable Puritan layman. The word “possible” is used advisedly. Vane does not acknowledge any intellectual debts to Cotton—indeed, very few individuals are referenced by name in Vane’s writings—nor is George Sikes, Vane’s disciple and biographer, forthcoming on relations between the teacher and the governor.[6] Accordingly, it is by means of careful attention to shared nuance and predilection and trajectory that the case for Cotton’s productive counseling of Vane must be assembled.

To this somewhat provisional construal of a legacy an additional—and recalcitrant—layer of possibility might be added, namely, that Vane’s later “Cottonian” views had taken first flight in the 1630s as products of Vane’s own mind upon which Cotton cast a favorable eye and to which he supplied a voice via pulpit and pen. This, however, is a closed path, for of the two theologians only Cotton can be met at close quarters during the unfolding of the free-grace controversy. We can catch Cotton’s mind taxed by ministerial challenge and straining for doctrinal rectitude in 1636-1637; contrariwise, the documentary darkness that engulfs Vane’s mind prevents us from determining whether or not Vane contributed anything of substance to Cotton’s theological formation and from knowing much at all about how Vane comported himself theologically in New England. To say this is to question one element of Michael Winship’s superb recounting of the controversy. In Making Heretics, Winship constructs a daring case for Vane as driver of the engine of theological novelty. However, Winship has little choice but to rely largely upon the Meditations for his understanding of Vane’s theology, thus creating for himself the problem of building an argument upon retrogressive foundations.[7] What entitles us to deploy evidence that dates from the 1650s in order to describe the fruits of a mind operative two decades earlier, especially when the later evidence declines to pass comment on the earlier occurrences or to attempt any self-conscious reflection on its author’s intellectual evolution?

Perhaps a more grounded way of approaching Vane and New England would be to work out what the former may have taken with him from the latter when he returned to England in 1637. What, for example, may we understand of the Vane of the 1650s and 1660s in light of the articulate survivals of the Cotton of the mid-1630s, and how might this “Cottonian” approach to Vane clarify the latter’s notoriously elusive intellectual pursuits at mid-century? Deployments of God’s covenants will suggest answers to such questions. Vane, in interregnal meditation following Cromwell’s closure of the Rump Parliament in 1653, seems to have taken up polemical arms against the “legalist” construal of covenant theology propagated by the likes of Peter Bulkeley of Concord.[8] In what follows, an attempt will be made to identify further shades of the New England complexion of Vane’s post-New England writings by attending to the uses that the former governor of Massachusetts appears to have made of John Cotton’s apologetics and soteriology.

Boston, Cotton tells us, was emitting plentiful measures of light and heat in the 1630s. Or, more precisely—as Cotton would have it—the covenant of works was sending its illuminative gifts into Bostonian hearts and stoking its flames of purification and punishment for the sake of not-yet-regenerated and possibly apostatizing Bostonian congregants. Anne Hutchinson and the “Boston radicals”[9] accused the New England ministry, John Cotton and John Wheelwright excepted, of preaching a covenant of works. Cotton might have been the colony’s foremost proponent of the covenant of grace, the theological wellspring of his pastoral charisma, but he did not ignore the other covenant. Far from it: Cotton made use—deliberate, dramatic, and dangerous—of the covenant of works, and the social consequences of this use were not calculated to be unitive. Winthrop, dismayed at the colony’s descent into a “great alienation of minds,” allowed himself terse but tense commentary on the covenants: “it began to be as common here to distinguish between men, by being under a covenant of grace or a covenant of works, as in other countries between Protestants and Papists.”[10] Covenants, so valued by Puritans as devices serving to clarify and effectuate God’s purposes and to institute and proclaim the gathering of like-minded saints, were being used in Massachusetts to asperse co-religionists, to single out and condemn fellow colonists, to impugn the “legal” proclivity of some pastors and to exalt the “gracious” ministry of others.

By the time of Cotton’s maturity, the two covenants had become established in Puritan divinity as God’s chosen means for bringing to pass the particular destinies of all members of humankind, both elect and reprobate. The covenant of works was the covenant of God’s law, the bearer of his justice. Moses supplied the voice of its commands and curses, and good works served as the vehicle by which its devotees were carried to their “just desert.” An artifact of God’s rigor and ferocity, the covenant of works demanded strict obedience to his commands, this being the capacious condition of justification and therefore of salvation. “A compact of pure justice wherein wages [are] given by debt,” the covenant of works issued the “Do-this-and-live” injunctive but declined to enable the obligated rightly to do their deeds. As William Pemble noted, the prospect of humanity’s claiming the “wages” of “eternall life” foundered on the rock of the “weaknesse of our sinefull flesh,” for which the “condition of obedience” was, simply, an impossibility.[11] The covenant of works, then, articulated the circumstances and consequences of Hebraic “bondage.” One would not wish for such an arrangement to be administered to one’s friends, but, in a pastoral setting, it may help to spur the laggards and purify the unclean. And, if necessity demands, its curses may be unleashed upon the heads of one’s enemies.

The covenant of grace administered a far more agreeable economy. Here, the atmospherics of divine-human relations are brightened and lightened. The saving covenant ameliorates the severity enshrined in a moral code and the morbidity engendered by consciousness of primordial fault and ongoing failure. Pemble informed the fallen Adams of the age that not justice but mercy— “freest and purest mercy”—prevails in the covenant of grace, and that fault and failure cannot extinguish grace that comes “freely,” as a “worke of God,” to justify the “sinner.”[12] Faith rather than obedience is the gracious covenant’s focus and its principal condition, and the operation of mercy ensures that faith is administered as a gift—given unconditionally in order to answer the covenant’s condition of entry. In this covenant “we answer by faith,” Richard Sibbes put it, “that we rely upon God’s mercy in Christ.” It would become a moot point as to whether “there must be something in us before we can make use of what good is in Christ or God.” Sibbes, who had converted Cotton, would have us “search our own hearts for the evidence of our good estate,” but in the same breath he invoked God’s covenantal initiative and so implored us not to “answer by our own strength,” for “we believe of grace, and live holily of grace; every good thought is from grace.”[13]

Cotton became so suspicious of our “own strength” as to deny that “something” of spiritual or evidentiary value can be “in us before” our union with Christ. It was the covenant of works, Cotton held, that cultivated this false opinion of the priority of “qualifications” and “duties.” “Unwholsome and Popish doctrin” was being clothed in “Protestant and wholesome words,” but “if we will speak as Protestants,” Cotton informed his ministerial brethren, “we must not speak of good works as causes or waies of our first Assurance.”[14] This demotion of “conditional promises” to good works was no path to moral obliquity, for all that it sent saintly sights away from the harvest of zeal. Though the law no longer obliges as a covenant it holds its ground as a “Commandment of well-doing”; and Cotton, caught in the critical glare of bemused colleagues, made a point of disowning “antinomian” lawlessness and confirming that the saints are schooled in the classrooms of the law.[15] But, all the same, anti-legal imperatives needed to be sounded, lest an entire spiritual life be built upon a “false and sandy foundation.” “Do not trust upon gifts,” Cotton demanded, “nor upon duties performed by those gifts, to reach the blessings; so look not for your justification from thence at all.”[16] And beware the evidentiary deceptions of the legal covenant: “to seek our first Assurance of our Justification by Christ, or to seek the Assurance of Faith of our Justification in Christ by our works of Sanctification is to make such an use of Works as for which the Lord hath not sanctified them in the Covenant of Grace, but is peculiar to the Covenant of Works.”[17] “You and your Covenant will fail together,” Cotton warned, should you trust “upon conditional Promises” and so “build upon a Covenant made upon a work.”[18]

In New England, Cotton discovered, the law was flexing its self-destructive covenantal muscle. The covenant of works’ game of lights and mirrors so constructed the prospect from the pulpit as to make it plain that Boston’s hypocrites and apostates-in-the-making were conducting themselves according to the canons of a most zealous godliness. Some, from the sea of godly faces that greeted the preacher, would be carried off by the damning tide: the covenant of works confected the godliness that deceives but, as a medium of the law, forswore the grace that saves. Zeal was glittering but deadly—if rested in as a means of assurance. Cotton dramatized the legal covenant’s intervention by having it play the part of stalking horse. He enhanced its danger and duplicity by taking care to notice the likeness between the blessings dispensed—conditionally and transiently—by it and those dispensed to altogether better effect by the covenant of grace.

Having problematized the colony’s godliness, Cotton might then stamp his authority upon his charges by displaying the acuity requisite for disentangling the one covenant from the other. This will be recognized, by some colonists at least, as a feat of no mean consequence, given that the children of the covenant of works had taken themselves already to have crossed the threshold of the covenant of grace, and to have found in their works the warrant for such a presumption. An alternative view will deem it presumptuous to presume thus, for it entangled grace and law, to no-one’s benefit. In disentangling the covenants. Cotton crafted a divinity that went to the heart of the difference between presumptuous presumption—or “false confidence”—and spiritual instruction. And Vane, twenty years later, can be found enunciating the same difference in like fashion and by similar means. Which is as much as to say that, for Cotton and for Vane, the hazards of hypocrisy and apostasy needed to be dealt with by identifying and isolating the lesser graces that nourished legalist enemies within the society of saints. Theirs was a polemical world, and a suitably doom-laden agency was needed for the heavy theological hitting that must ensue. Enter the covenant of works, at once the vehicle of the faults to be identified and the chamber into which their perpetrators can be isolated, whether for purification and eventual regeneration or for condemnation and punitive burning. And then, with the regenerate disentangled from the wicked, might the splendor of free grace be permitted its diffusion in the pure economy of its own covenant.

I. Cotton’s Bequest

Courtesy of John Cotton and his ministerial colleagues, the covenant of works found its way to the new world, there to radiate an ambience of terrifying ambiguity. An instrument of doubt, and possibly of despair, descended upon a community whose self-conscious godliness had motivated the crossing of an ocean. Cotton, summoning the covenant of works, required a re-inspection of that godliness. Cotton’s covenant of works was an admonitory measure, designed to benefit those who, by God’s grace, had it in them to heed sermonic warnings. But it was unlikely to please, revealing, as it did, that the godly were investing too many energies in their pious works and that not all such were destined to be rescued, by the stronger hand of the covenant of grace, from their lamentable reliance on their “own strength.” The blemishes that dismayed Cotton were not obvious, for they tended in the direction of overly wrought piety—the deeds that Christians do when godliness, by imperceptible turns, deflects attentions from the grace of Christ and brings them to settle upon the mandates of the law and the qualities of the soul. Here was one of the dangers of the covenant of works: it set concealed traps by encouraging the vile to replicate the deeds of the godly. The more plausible the replication the greater the likelihood that the society of saints will crumble into the sands of its own hypocrisy.

During the decade preceding Cotton’s departure for Massachusetts, Puritan divines were looking anew at the children of the Mosaic law, and were finding, in their midst, marks of the presence of Christ and measures of his discriminating grace. A short stride in this direction came from the Oxford don William Pemble, whose manner was to erect high walls around each of the two covenants—accenting the justice of the one, the reward-for-deed disposition of which was “utterly opposite” to the divine “enabling” administered through the grace of the other. The Sinaitic law, for Pemble, was promulgated as a covenant of works; and though the law might point to Christ and even coincide with a dispensation of grace, Pemble’s governing assumption is the exchange of compensation for compliance, conceived as “absolute” or “perfect” obedience. The covenanted, Pemble made clear, are cursed when their obedience fails.[19]

Others traveled further than Pemble along the road to the Christological marrow of the Mosaic law. Henry Burton, for example, distinguished between the “carnall” and the “believing” Jews: those who “could not discerne the pith of the spirit under the barke of the letter” and those who did penetrate the literal bark to encounter the spiritual Christ within. Enunciated in the setting of London’s antinomian insurgency of the early Caroline period, Burton’s distinction was one way of embedding the entire economy of the law within a structure of grace (the moral law, for Burton, is given “under” the covenant of grace) while yet recognizing that Christ’s evangelical yoke must be set significantly apart from Hebraic legalism.[20] A pronouncement of refined ambivalence was offered in The New Covenant by John Preston, to whose heart God had spoken, years earlier, by means of a “plain” sermon delivered by Cotton in Great St Mary’s, Cambridge. Preston intimated that God had given Jews opportunities for sight of Christ but then plunged them into ceremonial and epistemological darkness. God’s purposes were sufficiently consistent to impress upon Preston’s mind an agreement of “substance” between the Hebraic dispensation and the Christian. Accordingly, Preston noted the covenantal grace that flowed in each dispensation, differently administered. With Pemble, Preston viewed the Mosaic law as a new edition of the Adamic law of the covenant of works, accenting its curse and terror and inclination to kill, while yet, with Burton, spying a Christological “kernel” within the letter’s “shell,” within the “outward barke, and rinde of Ceremonies.” The rites emanated from an environment of works yet served to “cloathe” the covenant of grace and to “set it forth” to Hebraic eyes, while nevertheless rendering those eyes blind to the Christ within, the elusive antitype to the old “types,” “shadows,” and “vailes.”[21]

Touched in some respect by grace, and not wholly set apart from Christ, the Jews and their covenant might have appeared, on the eve of Cotton’s departure for Massachusetts, to have been ripe for the transposing into a more topical condition. Certainly, the demonstrably “pharisaical” among the godly were sparking controversy for the dishonor that their zealous “doings” were doing to grace.[22] When he turned his sights to his Boston flock, Cotton alighted upon visible marks of the Lord’s presence. He beheld, among his auditors, clear signs of the graces that attend redemption: union with Christ, faith, justification, adoption, sanctification.[23] All, however, was not well in Boston. A legal branch had been grafted, in the new world, onto Christ’s body, with consequences that sent Cotton’s mind to the punitive resolution of the covenant of works. That covenant, sporting a bag of tricks, had a way of mirroring the better blessings of the covenant of grace. And Cotton obfuscated the passage beyond redemption to salvation by showing, in graphic terms, how the covenantal parody was a false economy. One might not necessarily establish one’s salvation from the fielding of evidence that one had been redeemed. Redemption itself was available in different editions, mediated via different covenants.

Cotton’s covenant of works came stocked with an array of graces that so fitted the unregenerate for active integration into godly society as to render them all but indistinguishable from the regenerate occupants of the covenant of grace. Bold enough to make it known that “hypocrites” staffed ranks among the powers that be—among ministers and magistrates[24]—Cotton seems, in the mid-1630s, to have been making a bid to plumb the darkest depths of spiritual machination. Specifically, he was laying before the attentions of his flock the capacity of the covenant of works to interrupt the collective evangelical momentum of a governed and covenanted people. Alarmingly, the interruption was performed in stealth, thus enabling a spiritual malaise to spread unchallenged because unsuspected. Cotton warned his new-world companions that their spiritual lives had become vitiated by the “legal righteousness” that bedevils the morally upright who serve God’s commands with zealous commitment but in a state of estrangement from the power of his saving grace.[25]

Admonition, in such circumstances, shades into polemic. Eyeing “conditionally” graced hypocrites in the covenant of works, Cotton avows that it is “no Arminianism” to maintain that some “may go so far, and yet at length fall away.” “Falling away” is to be accepted as an empirical occurrence, though it is from “common” grace, not regenerative, that the conditionally blessed will fall. Cotton strikes at papists and Arminians by confirming that faith and good works discharge no causal efficacy in the matter of salvation; to say that they do is to “deliver unto us another Gospel.” But the authentic gospel acknowledged the problem of hypocrites who condemn themselves, and fall away, for want of obedience to a covenant’s condition: “if they shall obey [Christ’s] voice.”[26] Cotton saw damnable matter when he looked out upon his congregation.[27] It needed to be a penetrating gaze that could fix upon combustible collateral spread through, and blending into, a society of saints.

The covenant of works imperiled its pious devotees by dispensing transient, conditional benefits: graces that were showy and comforting but brittle and (often enough) short on stamina. This covenant’s bar of piety was adjustable, designed to accommodate the aspirations of different species of professing Christian. Cotton spoke of “washed swine” and high-reaching “goats”—hypocrites whose varying degrees of Christian commitment fitted them for estimable churchly lives. The swine aimed lower on the scale of piety and “wallowed” sooner in ways of recognizable vileness; the goats’ hypocrisy was more exquisite because more polished and more durable.[28] So dangerous, Cotton admonished, was the covenant of works that the goat-like hypocrites who went about their holy business within its bounds might not be detected for the apostates and children of wrath that they were in process of becoming. Cotton picked his quarrel with the colony’s sanctimonious legalists by acknowledging their graces and then deflating their misplaced “confidence.”[29]

The covenant of works embodied the deadly flip-side to the Cottonian currency of free grace with which Hutchinson and her like were so taken. For what the message of free grace revealed, and what the covenant of works illustrated to the point of doom, was that the justified ought not to turn to their sanctification in order to collect principal evidence of the security of their spiritual estate. The goat, a “clean” specimen, was well placed to conduct such self-focused surveillance, but the lesser covenant’s mirroring of the saving covenant’s benefits bore the unsettling corollary that the hypocrite’s holiness will differ scarcely at all from that of the regenerated saint. The goat’s gifts were not “counterfeit”; they were, instead, “real.”[30] But to say this was to underline the danger of the goat’s predicament. Though “real,” the goat’s gifts were non- saving: this ultimate danger looked squarely at the horror of looming infernal destiny.[31] A penultimate danger was societal: a consequence of the “reality” of the goat’s gifts was that even the “Angels in Heaven” would be hard put to distinguish genuine saint from hypocritical fellow traveler. Time will betray the “difference” between hypocrite and regenerate saint. But hypocritical obedience might be manufactured for a lifetime, causing a society to face the dilemma that it was nurturing hypocrites even while it lacked means to discern their “difference.” Discernment might be deferred to an end-of-days revelation, “when the Lord leadeth [hypocrites] forth with workers of iniquity; but many may be led on to their death before they can be discerned.”[32]

Confronted by such unsettling instruction, the society of saints might begin to doubt itself, question its regenerate credentials, discover that its flattering self-appraisal could not be credited. Cotton, here, is reaping the fruits of his own variant of the hypothetical universalism that was finding a receptive godly audience in England during the 1620s.[33] Cotton’s three-pronged innovation—which found a ready audience in Henry Vane—was to enlist the covenant of works as the medium of universal redemptive grace, to articulate that grace as a series of blessings that mimicked the ordo salutis, and to set legalist hearts on edge by insisting that the blessings (including, no less, justification itself) were merely conditional and therefore liable to fail. Blessed and redeemed, the legalist will seem to be saved, and it may take an acute discerner of spirits, such as Cotton, to show otherwise. Viewed thus, hypocrisy looms as an urgent threat to the godly commonwealth precisely by virtue of its anchorage in redemptive grace applied universally, though conditionally, in the covenant of works. “Conditions” attended the legal covenant in order to solicit dutiful “works” or “qualifications” of soul from the conditioned—a state of affairs that prompted Cotton to demonstrate how evangelical graces were being pressured, to perverse effect, by sub-evangelical replicas. Thus, the architecture of faith will be “mistrusted” on account of the “conditions” and “qualifications” that have wrongly served as faith’s foundation, usurping opportunity for reception of Christ’s free grace. Faith, indeed, is but a “temporary” gift to hypocrites, keyed to the justification that is pronounced “conditionally” in their favor. Cotton unearths the layers that structure the “unsafe building” of the hypocrite’s faith: “You may see here the unsafeness of any such building; as when we are convinced of our sins, then we seek for some qualification in our selves, and think that the Holy Ghost applieth some promise made to such a qualification; and so we lay hold upon Jesus Christ.” In this “most unsafe building,” Christ the foundational rock has been displaced in favor of graces that adorn the self. The structuring order must be rightly configured, lest corruption ravage a professedly holy plantation. “We cannot reach any gracious qualification,” Cotton continues, “until we have first received Christ in the Promise; and then we must look up unto him to bring us unto the promises, and to apply them to us. It is not possible that a corrupt tree should bring forth good fruit: but first make the tree good, and good trees we cannot be, till we be ingrafted into Christ.”[34]

Cotton’s exposure of hypocrites in the colony’s heart stimulates a crisis of knowledge. How, if not by obedience to God’s commands, is one to know oneself to be saved? But obedience proceeds upon the basis of gracious qualifications, which, if resorted to for evidentiary purposes, may be more likely to testify to present corruption than to incipient salvation. And yet the pure-seeming corrupt climb high rungs in a Christian society. A pall of “deceit”— the covenant of works’ terrible version of the cloud of unknowing—had descended upon Boston.[35] How was Cotton to scatter the cloud?

One way in which to scatter the cloud was to insinuate hope—to acknowledge the vestigial benefits of the covenant of works. For such a purpose, Cotton repudiated the carceral view of the legal covenant: the legalist was not necessarily and inevitably a subject of wrath’s endless punishment. Cotton refused to accept that “there is no likelihood” that denizens of the covenant of works “should ever come to have fellowship with Christ.” Works-reliant souls ought not to be “censured” or “condemned,” treated “as if there were no hope of salvation.” The “people of God” ought, instead, bear them a “gracious respect.” Notwithstanding that Cotton has only just concluded a disquisition on “washed swine,” “goats,” and “foolish virgins,” he resolves to establish a procedural basis for inter-covenantal civility. God “ordinarily” operates in stages: saving “fellowship” with God in the covenant of grace typically succeeds a prior call to the obligations of the covenant of works. Let it not be forgotten, therefore, that the purgative experiences of terror, humbling, and burning of “false confidence” in the covenant of works may benefit some—as they benefited St Paul.[36] Salvation obeyed a sequence, in which the covenant of works held a “preparatory” office. When it was not preparing apostates for damnation by honing their treachery, Cotton’s covenant of works was preparing saints for regeneration by purifying their souls. As executive agent of divine wrath, the covenant of works controls the destiny of the depraved; as a merciful God’s preparatory instrument, it vouchsafes the discipline that bears the elect beyond their depravity to recognition of their unworthiness and helplessness— whereupon the Spirit dispenses faith and solemnizes union with Christ within the bounds of a better covenant.

In the 1620s, the Puritan controversialist William Twisse had pummeled Cotton for articulating a conditional formulation of the decree of reprobation and for daring to contend that the gift of life belonged to the bounty of the covenant of works.[37] So conceived, the legalist might win redemption as a reward for duty, though disobedience might trigger God to call down reprobative wrath upon unregenerable heads. Piety might count for much, but hypocritical piety would bring doom; in the 1630s, Cotton obliged the pious to confront the doom that loomed within a covenant of justice. Hypocrisy in New England led Cotton directly to the danger and duplicity, and to the evangelical opportunity, that pulsed within the legal covenant.

Cotton’s covenant of works does not straightforwardly showcase the justice meted out to victims of the Sinaitic demand for indefectible compliance with divine law. William Pemble, among others, had pronounced upon the terrible vulnerability of the children of the “compendious” covenant of the law, cursed “in the least point with eternall death.”[38] Cotton takes a softer option. When preaching the covenant of works, he does not cut into his congregants’ hearts with Pemble’s razor-sharp blade. Cotton distinguishes the two covenants, but his work of untangling them requires attention to the threads of resemblance that tied the tangles in the first place. This soft subtlety generated its own stock of troubles. Cotton’s practical divinity was not lacking in horror, for all that its scripting of covenantal differentiation avoided unambiguous rendering of the dreadful black of works as a backcloth to the effulgent white of grace. Cottonian horror lay in the “deceit” of the covenant of works.

Trouble brews, in Cotton’s legal covenant, with the misalignment of presumption and actuality. Thus, to be told that one’s covenantal affiliation might be otherwise than one presumed it to be was to confront the prospect of no longer being able to draw assurance from the deposit of one’s knowledge of self, Christ, grace, and law. The self who wrongly presumes upon its stake in the covenant of grace acquires an interest in concealing its unregeneracy under the cloak of its piety—its fidelity to “conditional promises.” To this effacement of one’s knowledge of self and savior, Cotton appended a further increment of unknowing. The covenant of works, it is evident, occupies for Cotton a point at which the soul turns—or is turned—in one of two predestined directions. But this is a point whose duration can be stretched to meet the requirements of any number of individual predicaments. The child of the covenant of works must live for a time with the anxiety of not knowing whether or not a transition to the covenant of grace will ensue. The covenant of works is a place of preparation for destiny, and knowledge of one’s destiny must be deferred until such time as the work of preparation has been accomplished.

At this fork in the road, the soul might be led through preparatory purification in the legal covenant—by having its works “blasted” and “dashed”[39]— before graduating to the security of the saving covenant. Alternatively, it might be left in its hypocrisy and so proceed to commit the damnable sin of apostasy.[40] Cotton gives warning of these mutually exclusive scenarios, but he leaves it to the mysterious administration of free grace, irradiating chosen hearts, to supply knowledge of salvation.

One can imagine that at this delicate moment in his dual-covenant scheme Cotton’s candid, if not quite limpid, double-mindedness was provocative by design. In setting forth two, diverging, narratives for the one instrumentality Cotton was purposefully setting colonists’ souls on a shifting edge of doubt that, at worst case, might collapse into a gaping pit of despair. The people and their deeds were impure, and Cotton would not rely exclusively upon Christ’s forensic grace to purify them. Bad trees needed to be turned into good trees; souls must be “transformed” into the “image of Christ.”[41] It was a very non-antinomian tactic to adopt, and, on the face of it, administered the sort of anxiety-inducing self-reconnaissance that stirred antinomians to renounce the moral law. But Cotton felt the need to give a lesson in misplaced presumption to those domiciled in a covenant whose obligations engendered prideful piety as a noxious surrogate for saving union with Christ. He needed to admonish colonists not to rely upon their “own strength,” “own sufficiency,” “own righteousness”;[42] to show that grace could not be taken for granted by the needlessly “confident,” that the “comfort” to be extracted from zealous application of effort could not be taken as an entitlement to blessedness. We ought not, with “the Pharisees,” find cause to boast in “our fastings, and humiliations, and alms-deeds, and prayers.”[43] In making a problem out of piety, the covenant of works enabled Cotton to sow seeds of therapeutic doubt. Many would suffer interior agonies, but double-minded Cotton allowed that some would eventually be granted remedy—which entailed, of course, that others would not. Here was the sting in the tail of Cotton’s hypothetical universalism.

In the covenant of works, the “Spirit of bondage” draws the soul away from its sins, and the “Spirit of burning” awaits its opportunity to “melt” the heart’s “iron stone” and to send its formal acts of piety to the flames.[44] Released from its “false confidence” in its works, and no longer seeking “comfort” from the fruits of its zeal, the soul is led to union with Christ through the “Spirit of adoption.”[45] But Cotton’s language bears witness to a persistent crisis of unknowing, itself generated by the ever-present danger that informs the legal covenant’s unpredictable operation. Cotton avers that experience of one phase of the Spirit’s purifying work does not guarantee experience of the next; one might encounter the Spirit of bondage and remain suspended at such a point, not knowing if access will be granted to the next increment of purification. And Cotton is accustomed to propagating other indicators of danger. The very “conditionality” of the legal covenant’s sub-evangelical blessings effectively demands that they be wrapped in intimations of frustration and transience; to be justified or sanctified conditionally for example, was to anticipate acts of divine revocation if stipulated conditions are breached. One might become stalled, therefore, in the merely “common” grace of the covenant of works, left to “taste” the Spirit’s beneficence but not to be nurtured by it, to cultivate a faith that turns out to be “temporary” and to ground a “conditional” justification, to be caught in the “snare” of legal obedience.[46] One thus becomes responsible for confounding the free giving of grace by pursuing the “reward” for works that makes a debtor of God;[47] and to such a soul Cotton will offer the cold comfort that although the covenant of works cannot save its votaries it will nevertheless provide such a schooling of the damned as to leave them without “excuse” for their transgressions.[48]

The elusive structure and fragile blessings of the covenant of works claimed a central place in Cotton’s practical divinity. Hence the (unintended?) irony that laced Hutchinson’s sense of her pastor’s fidelity to the covenant of grace. The New England clergy as Michael McGiffert notes, appreciated that antinomians, “who insisted on a total contrast of the covenants,” would find Cotton’s “conceptual fuzz” more confusing than charming.[49] But Cotton did inform his flock that the covenant of works was a breeding ground for ministers; and with this chicken that came home to roost he coupled a very different covenant, one that succeeded climactically in charming antinomians. Cotton’s covenant of grace distinguished itself—and extinguished antinomian frustration with legalism—by harboring no “antecedent” conditions, diffusing no “qualifications” of soul that preceded the union with Christ;[50] and it was in this region of spiritual “revelation” and of “freely” and “absolutely” dispensed beneficence[51] that Hutchinson and her kind knew themselves to belong.

The Spirit comes, in the covenant of grace, to solemnize union with Christ and distribute the gift of faith, to reveal to the faithful the blessedness of their estate, and to elicit the holy deeds of sanctification. Even this spiritual ministry needed to be distinguished from a pure-seeming but dark-working twin. “There is . . . some kind of presence of the Spirit of God even in hypocrites, that are only fitted to some work of God”—service, perhaps, in “Church, or Commonwealth”—”but not such as doth accompany salvation.” In this sinister economy the Spirit operates “but for a season.” It arrives to “enlighten” minds and “open” mouths, but from hypocritical prophets it “departs,” declining to “bestow any regenerating grace upon them.”[52] The key question then becomes: how do I know that I have received “regenerating grace”? One way of knowing might be to apprehend in one’s being the perpetuity of the Spirit’s operation: if you do not “fall away” you’re probably not a hypocrite. But tenterhooks loom: uncertainty about whether or not the Spirit will at some moment “depart” might so weaken creaturely resolve as to provoke a self-authored fall. Certainly, for all their “glorious” and “dazzling” holiness, legalists’ misplaced “self-confidence” and “comfort” will estrange them from God.[53] Cotton, instead, turned to the mystery of God’s assuring voice in the covenant of grace.

Salvation depended upon covenantal knowledge, and a failure of knowledge risked being ramified into an everlasting fall. The “Christian man” who has “not been clearly taught the distinct difference of the two Covenants, may be misled into dangerous waies, that might tend to the utter undoing of his soul.” Cotton could teach by describing the legalist predilection for deed and reward, for reliance upon evidence extractable from “conditional promises.” But it required a revelation from God to teach an assuring lesson of “regenerating grace.” Cotton the pastoral technician assembles and condemns the appurtenances of legalism. Legalists can be identified by their presumptuous “looking” and “challenging” and “well-doing.” But, sighting the saving covenant, Cotton alters his manner. Deferential and almost inarticulate, he evokes free grace and the mysterious opening of eyes. Having dwelt upon the unknowing of the presumptuous, he can find few words to describe the process of spiritual instruction. Determined to “teach men some kind of discernment of their own spirits, and state,” Cotton proceeds from nefarious presumption to unsayable knowing:

If you look for Justification no longer then you are obedient, and fear eternal condemnation when you are disobedient, if you be afraid of divorce from Christ because of your sins, or if you look for any blessing, and challenge right to any promise, by vertue of any well-doing of your own; in such a case either thou art under a Covenant of works, or at the least thou art gone aside to a Covenant of works; and if ever the Lord open your eyes, and bestow his free grace upon you, you will know your redemption from such dependences as these be.[54]

Elsewhere the soul that arrives at such security has apprehended its own “emptiness” and “nothingness”—a state of utter passivity and self-denial whose idiom may have passed from Sibbes55 to Cotton and thence to Vane. But Cotton and Vane, more so than Sibbes, grew suspicious of sanctification. Cotton found repellent the notion that God becomes indebted to human well-doers by finding himself obliged to reward their repertoire of well-doing, and that deeds, once performed, serve as foundations of the justifying faith that must, perforce, be built upon them. This was to vitiate the dispensation of grace by subverting its freeness.

Replying in January 1637 to Cotton’s responses to their earlier questions, the New England elders pointed an accusing finger at the Boston teacher, drawing his attention to the “danger” of “straitning the freeness of Gods Spirit.” This was entailed by the Cottonian requirement that assurance “arise from the Spirit in an absolute promise only”56 Cotton, refusing to relinquish the all-embracing priority of union with Christ—that assuring “ground” and shining “sun”— questioned the worth of reliance upon outworkings and “borrowed” lights. For Cotton, the elders were resorting to promises made to conditions and qualifications, and proceeding therefrom to “gather” their justifying faith. What else was this than to interject the squalid self between Christ’s imputed righteousness and the Spirit’s faith-engendering witness to it? It “derogates” from free grace to “gather blessings and comforts to ourselves from the promises made to the good works wrought in us, and by us (though of grace) before we see our union with Christ and right to all promises and comforts and blessings in him.”[57]Christ is given in an absolute promise, at which point faith is wrought in the soul;[58] but this heart of the gospel is bypassed by the worker claiming “reward for his work.”

Piety has become self-consumed when it privileges work over Christ, “thirst” over “fountain.”[59] Cotton rebutted by interdicting the piety and resorting, instead, to the “emptiness” and “nothingness” of genuine self-denial.[60] The Spirit’s revelation of “free justification” is not made to a work. This means that God blinds himself to human endeavor: there is nothing “that God seeth in” the soul and “for which” he reveals justification; it is grace’s glory to “dash all works out of countenance” when God pronounces a sinner to be righteous.[61] And it follows, from the sinner’s side, that there is nothing of human manufacture to which the soul can turn for validation when the saint’s eyes are opened at the Spirit’s arrival. As against the elders, who, in their “Reply,” made much of the visibility of sanctification and the value to be derived from “sight” of its fruits,[62] Cotton slighted the pious discipline of seeing for its own sake, which never, as it turns out, sees past the “concurse” of its creaturely causes.[63] Eyes opened by the Spirit see, as it were, intransitively: they simply see and are assured; they do not see a something, such as a good work, in order to certify the gift of sight. Or they see God’s spiritually revealed “free love” or the “imputed righteousness of Christ,” with whom they are so intimately united as not to need the sight of mere derivatives of grace.[64]

Cotton, then, evacuates the soul of the artifacts of piety. The heart must be broken, the self denied, the soul emptied “of all confidence in its own righteousnesse.”[65] Christ has fulfilled the conditions of salvation,[66] Cotton repeatedly tells his audience, and it remains for the soul to honor this singular beneficence by dissevering itself from its presumptuous practicum. This, too, flowed from divine initiative. Some, though “marvellous eminent,” experience the desiccation of their devotion, discovering that “they cannot pray fervently, nor hear the word with profit, nor receive the seals with comfort.” The Lord’s design is to “disenable” them from their works “because they did build their union and fellowship with Jesus Christ upon them.” The Lord’s “disenabling” operates to “check his servants,” Cotton observes, “when they walk in by-wayes.” The language bears a family resemblance to that of the antinomian Tobias Crisp, who would shortly be warning his London auditors about the legalism that caused souls, trekking the “long way” of Puritan piety, to become lost in “labyrinths” or sunk in “quagmires.” Cotton, preaching the sort of quietist message of free grace that Crisp was to develop to sensational effect, advised the godly not to “trust... in any legal comforts, but wait upon the free grace of God, both to justifie, sanctifie, comfort, and glorifie your souls.” Such was the “way of constant peace.”[67]

II. Cottonian Vane

Cotton said that his divinity was not “antinomian”; the Spirit was sure to sanctify the elect to a suitably evangelical measure of the law’s standard.[68] But the Spirit’s intervention propelled a quietist turn. The salvation of God’s servants “will not lye upon their obedience, nor damnation be procured by their disobedience.”[69] This, taken at its most orthodox and anodyne, might be no more than to say that a predestinating God was the author of destiny; but its practical corollary was—potentially—an endorsement of insouciance, to which Cotton added a relaxing message for the worried psyche: works may not be relied upon for evidentiary purposes, they need not serve as points of devotional self-interrogation, and it is not for them to bear principal witness to the security of the believer’s spiritual estate. For Christ was received into the elect soul by virtue of an “act” that was also a “birth”—leaving the soul purely passive at the moment of faith—and the Spirit would reveal, in an “immediate” voice, that this felicitous union had occurred.[70] In a letter to Cotton written in July 1638, William Fiennes, Lord Saye and Sele, reported that Henry Vane, now back in England, was propagating “dangerous” opinions concerning the evidentiary poverty of works, and that, operating as a pawn of Satan, Vane was professing to “hold nothinge but what you approve of.” Saye and Sele did not refer to Vane as an “antinomian” or a “Familist,” though he did express concern at Vane’s diabolically driven “delusions”—a construction that, during the free-grace controversy, frequently attended an accusation of dire error or heresy. Expressed in the letter is anticipation of Vane’s “recovery” and expectation of Cotton’s assistance in the rescue mission.[71] The fruits from this period of Vane’s “dangerous” mind have not survived, but survivals from the 1650s and 1660s suggest that Vane was confirmed in an antinomian cast of mind, and that quietist Cotton remained a source of inspiration.

Cotton’s denial that his discourse was antinomian wears the embattled visage of a rejoinder from a man in the hot seat. In his Meditations, Vane, too, can be seen medicating a raw nerve. Perhaps, in Vane’s case, twenty years’ worth of co-existing with antinomians brought discriminatory caution. Perfectionists, Vane announced, were at large, “asserting themselves to be God; or at least, to be as much the Sonnes of God in all respects, as Christ himself, in his own person, who is God blessed for ever.” Ranters, moreover, operated “under pretence of spirit and power” to introduce “again the filthiness of the flesh, whereby to destroy the righteousness and holiness of the natural man”; and Familists went so far as to “annihilate the creature-being, and assert perfection to consist in a swallowing up thereof into the pure being of God.”[72] Vane felt the need to make exculpatory distinctions. Winthrop had reasoned that Vane’s doctrine of “personal union” with the Spirit turned soul into deity, but if Vane ever held such a view he set it aside, almost ostentatiously, in the Meditations. It was “in a weaker, inferior state of glory” that Vane’s true saints are “Heirs of God, and co-heirs with Christ”—they subsist in “subordination and inferiority” to Christ, and so “are neither Godded with God, nor Christed with Christ, but are still in the proper capacity of creatures.”[73] Vane continued to honor Cotton’s spiritist bequest while putting himself at arm’s length from those who blasphemed it. Puritan ministers might become impatient of such seemingly disingenuous discrimination. Richard Baxter, for one, enjoyed fulminating in full throat at Vane’s expense and for the sake of exposing Vane’s “hidden” antinomian agenda.[74]

The wilder of the Interregnum antinomians could be put in their place with relative ease; a more absorbing problem, for Vane, was posed by the legalists of the age. Hypocrisy loomed large for Vane in the 1650s, as it had earlier for Cotton. And, with Cotton, Vane cast the covenant of works in a starring role as grand deceiver. The subtitle to Vane’s Meditations makes plain that deception-hunting gave the work a particular praxis. Vane anchored his book in the mystical art of the discerning of spirits. Itself an expression of the disabusing virtue of grace, the subtitle places Vane in Cotton’s world, where things are other than they seem: The Mysterie and Power of Godlines Shining Forth in the Living Word, to the Unmasking the Mysterie of Iniquity in the Most Refined and Purest Forms. Iniquity took flight from within the self-serving soul; thanks to devilish spirits, it found itself a “throne” and, with it, means of directing civil and ecclesiastical affairs.

Vane was adopting and modifying Cottonian terms and lines of argument in setting forth the dangers faced by the Interregnum and Restoration godly This is not to say, of course, that he was deaf to the luxuriant English ideological world of the mid-seventeenth century, but the pattern and language of Vane’s theology are suggestive of a persistent New England-Cottonian persuasion. Particularly noticeable in this regard is the manner in which Vane embeds the “confident” and “legally” righteous hypocrites of his day in the redemptive blood of Christ and proceeds to grant them a series of “conditional” sub-evangelical blessings administered, to sinister effect, via the covenant of works. And to this economy of “deceit” he contrasts, with Cotton, the “absolute” beneficence of the saving covenant—the medium of free grace, of secure union with Christ, of unfailing faith and Spirit-borne assurance, of the state of “emptiness” and “nothingness” within that allows the deity to irradiate the soul. With such matters we shall concern ourselves henceforth.

Vane’s Meditations is awash in anti-legalist militancy. The preface embodies a memorable act of self-positioning in highly conflicted material and spiritual worlds. Vigorously and eloquently Vane presents himself in a posture of “right combate” against “beasts,” taking the part of light-bearer in elemental struggle with black-hearted “hypocrites,” speaking for Christ and faith against “legal spirits”—janglers and strife-mongers, “very keen and sharp in barking, biting and devouring (wherein, if they find they cannot do hurt enough themselves, they will be calling out to others for assistance).” As Cotton, in the 1630s, had spied hypocrites in high places, so Vane, situating himself in the tribulations of an imminent apocalypse, fixed upon a “selfish spirit” prophesied to come “eminently into view in the last dayes” and, as Mark’s abomination, to stand “where it ought not, even in the very Temple of God, clothed with a visibility of Saintship.” This was the “foundation of all that hypocrisie and apostacy” in which the end times would be “filled.”

The threat delivered herein encouraged the faithful to stand in vigilance “against it,” armed, as “heavenly” besiegers of a “throne of iniquity,” with the “whole armour of God.” The selfish spirit builds a material empire for itself “its last strong hold and chief place of defence,” when it creeps “into the purest Forms of Religion, in conjunction with worldly Government to back it.” When addressing Cromwell, Vane candidly advised that the tyrannical and antichristian analogues of magisterial self-interest were uppermost in his mind as he reflected upon the withdrawal of divine blessings during the protectorate.[75]

A garrulous eschatologist, Vane made far more than Cotton had of the vicious deceptions and persecutions of Antichrist, but both men launched into discourse from the same anti-legalist base. The first paragraph of Vane’s preface sounds a sharp warning against the “own sufficiency” and “own strength” that Cotton had shown would be deadly to legalists if relied upon for the winning of salvation. Nothing, Vane declares, “lies more cross to the busie and boundless Spirit of Man, than that which takes him off the wing of his Natural desire, and is a bar unto that activity in him, which if permitted to run its course, makes his feet swift to his own destruction.” Elaborating upon which, Vane strikes his opening Cottonian note:

For when such a power is assumed and delighted in by man, to direct his own steps; the more he is gratified by God with a scope and freedom herein, the more is he left alone and singled out in a self-sufficiency of wisdom and strength, to be at his own dispose, and reap the fruit of his many inventions.

Such is the situation of “self-interest”—aspirant dethroner of God and “great Idol” to the “natural man,” and “influence” by which “the whole world seems to be governed, as well in Religion as Civil policy.” Whence arises, to add a further layer of material-spiritual complication, “that gain and advantage . . . which as a powerful bait the Devil makes use of to bribe the conscience, and by degrees to draw off the heart from God, and from sincere love to all righteous and good principles, as in the exercise thereof they lie thwart to its designs.” So, “evil workers” were on the march in the latter days, masquerading as visible saints and securing aid from magistrates, and, all the while, doing the business of devil and Antichrist.[76]

Vane breaks into full Cottonian stride when he fixes his mind, throughout the Meditations but definitively in chapter 16, on what he calls the “legal conscience.” His appreciation for Cotton stands on the legal and evangelical differences that separate the two covenants and on the gracious operations of Christ and the Spirit that animate both. Legalists, he explains, are redeemed, justified, adopted, and sanctified, though only by virtue of the first covenant’s “common” and “conditional” grace.[77] They are joined to Christ’s “natural” body in a union of “marriage” and are restored to Adamic righteousness as it presented itself before the Fall; they “taste” the immanent Spirit and are “enlightened” by it—but none of these blessings proves efficacious for salvation.[78] They are believers, but their “temporary” faith fails, and they “fall away.” “Confident” workers according to the Sinaitic law, they derive “comfort” from their piety and seek “reward” for their works, thereby deluding themselves and making a debtor of God. “Visible saints,” they attract the esteem of whosoever might be impressed by shows of righteousness, and in so doing they nurture “hypocrisy” and “apostasy,” professing allegiance to free grace while persecuting the saints of the “spiritual church.”[79]

Vane is far more inclined than Cotton to enunciate the universal coverage of Christ’s atonement,[80] but far less partial than Cotton to explicating the purificatory blessings of the legal covenant. Cotton, as we saw, deployed the stages of the Spirit’s operation in order to put a fork in the legal covenant’s road, so that preparatory bondage and burning might lead on to efficacious adoption. Vane, less procedurally minded in this respect, nevertheless devised a covenantal fork of his own—one that allows both for an intrusion of unconditional divine initiative and for a clinching measure of human responsiveness to covenantal condition. At first sight it appears that the responsive soul triggers the intrusion of grace, which seems to be entailed by Vane’s intimation of a contractual “if” you perform “then” you will be rewarded. But present in Vane’s discourse, too, is a supervisory plan of election and regeneration operative in a context of divine determination and free grace—from which, in the Meditations, Vane strings lines of unilateral decision and application.

Vane, then, runs with Cotton; but, evading (though not, as we shall see, fully relinquishing) the “preparatory” office of the Spirit, he takes a more direct route. In Cotton, it is the suspension of the Spirit’s purification that strands the reprobate in their depravity; in Vane, the interruption is shown to be much more fully the responsibility of the human soul set in “wilful” resistance to divine counsel.[81] Thus, Vane insists that he who knows Christ “only according to the flesh” (but not according to the cross) faces the prospect of going down one of two paths: either to regeneration or to rebellion. The outcome for the man confronting this fork will depend on how “he demeans himself” byway of “proof and trial, in the renewed exercise of his free will and rectified natural abilities of mind.” This probation, with its subjoined rectification or repristination of inner resources, is one of the blessings of Christ’s universally applied atonement, and is dispensed to the legal conscience in a conditional covenant. But salvation, as yet, is far off. and does not consort with merely “legal righteousness.”[82] Salvation, instead, is contingent upon an act of rebirth, authored by Christ, with which Vane twins a diabolic equivalent to be applied to the reprobate. According, then, to his demeanor of will and mind, the repristinated man “proves” himself “the womb whereinto is received either a divine seed and birth, whereof the mediator in his death and resurrection is the author and parent; or else a devilish seed and birth, whereof the Serpent and old Dragon is the Father, growing up into a wilful and fixed enmity against the Cross of Christ.”[83]

An additional pointer to human responsibility follows: what is pending in the discrimination of “seeds” and “births” is the outcome of a covenantal “trial,” turning on “the evil and unworthy, or the good and worthy use of Christs blood, and the benefits of his death.”[84] The help of angels and the illumination of the Spirit together alert the soul to its responsibility, holding the “serpentine” delinquent “inexcusable for not hearkning to the light and means tendred and afforded to him through the blood of Christ.”[85] As had been the case in Eden, where the conditional covenant took its rise, closure with the serpent is a matter of “free consent,” a rebellion staged “voluntarily.”[86]

But regenerative grace shuts out the serpent. An indomitable power of “regeneration and baptism of fire” is ranged against the “lusting” of “mans natural will.”[87] With this intervention, the will is “prepared, broken and subdued” as per divine requirement. Registering the preparatory breakage and subjection, Vane, for the present, leaves the process unelaborated; and it is not long before he is calling upon “free grace” to erase the contribution of human responsibility to the elect soul’s attainment of “blessed” destiny. The “higher and more excellent birth,” he avers, “is reserved by God as a fruit of his bounty and free grace unto his chosen and beloved ones”; and of such “chosen vessels,” Vane relates that they “are determined from all eternity, and fixed in such a neerness of union with God in their head, that they can never be moved, but are preserved by the power and influence thereof, from all possibility of miscarrying.” Saving grace comes “freely” to the elect, “without condition.”[88]

For the reprobate, however, destiny proceeds differently In the absence of God’s determinative “power and influence,” the man in the dock will be left to demonstrate his unworthiness and suffer the sting of the law’s curse. With Cotton, Vane can tell such a man that divine instruction deprives him of “excuse.” But the sting need not be swift, and Vane, also with Cotton, finds avenue in the legal covenant for revising reprobation and isolating hypocrisy. Thus, the demands of the trial might be accommodated for a time; the legal conscience may protract its display of hypocritical sanctity, devoting itself to the performance of “many wonderful works” and making a “very fair shew in the flesh.”[89] In a penultimate sense, this was a powerful stance for the legalist to adopt. In cultivating sanctity, legalists revealed their credentials as heresy hunters, playing a role in Antichrist’s bloody parody of the kingdom of Christ—itself able to sport a “fair” fleshly show. Led astray by a “false spirit” that works its wickedness “undiscerned and unsuspected,” Vane’s “zealous” legalists were deceiving “themselves and others.” Hypocrites and apostates, they were betaking themselves to the ultimate doom of their own reprobation.[90] Here, another Cottonian gift presents itself.

Cotton had roused the formidable ire of William Twisse by showing how the covenant of works sponsored conditional reprobation. Cotton’s discussion allowed both for God’s unqualified determination and for his rightful conduct inflected by presupposition of sin: the “absolute preterition” of the decree maker is distinguishable from the “vindicative justice” of the punisher.[91] John Coolidge lashes Twisse for obtusely refusing to credit this foundational distinction, noting that Cotton’s focus upon the “modalities” of God’s historical management of law and grace need not—Twisse notwithstanding—entail a fusion of eternal and temporal horizons.[92] But if Cotton was not the Arminian heretic of Twisse’s imagining, he can at least be found speaking unguardedly or imprudently in referring to “condemnation” as a “decree” and identifying it with the “act of retribution.” Twisse, keen to isolate the eternal from the temporal lest human deeds be depicted as holding sway over divine decrees, pounced upon the implication of Cotton’s dissembling, or at least careless, tongue. Cotton was confusing “an act temporall or transient” (the pronouncement of retribution] with “an act immanent and eternall” (the striking of the decree of reprobation); consequently, he was requiring God, as decree maker, to forsake his prerogative to disregard the “temporall” delinquencies of fallen humankind. As Twisse would have it, Cotton’s language catches him in the act of awarding sinners a certain priority over the decree-making deity; God is obliged to review empirical occurrences that rightly should never intrude upon the divine mind in the eternity of the decretive act. Twisse admonished simply and clearly: “sinne neither is nor can be antecedent to Gods decree.”[93]

Perhaps Cotton was wishing to say no more than that the absolute decree executes its requirements in a manner that consorts with the conditional modality of the legal covenant: scarcely a controversial proposition. Twisse, however, spies a different, more insidious, line in Cotton—the decree that Cotton propounds is itself rendered contingent by virtue of being keyed to human responses to the conditions that it covenantally announces. The subject dethrones the sovereign: sin, that is to say, compels God’s reprobative hand, so that only when the sinner is seen to have broken the covenant is the divine decree struck. Cotton marshals the sins of time to invade the eternity in which destiny is given its shape. Vane added his own voice to this line of argument.

Vane proceeded, clearly and unequivocally, down the conditional path, down the “vindicative” strand of Cotton’s distinction. Whereas, according to Vane, God simply gives the elect to Christ from all eternity, writing their names indelibly within the saving covenant’s book of life, he proceeds otherwise in relation to the reprobate. Names written into the legal covenant’s book can be removed if, as God’s foresight discovers, their covenantal “demeanour” prevents them from answering the covenant’s “condition.” Vane, frequently dilates upon the impossibility of the legalists’ performance of the condition, and upon the “wavering, unstable and conditional terms of their standing and holding communion with God in and by the first Covenant.”[94] And, for all the “gifts” that he confers, the “helps” that he supplies and the “means” that he tenders, God will not release upon the “non-elect” the free grace that has its totalizing way with the elect.[95] Debarring God from coactive “violence,” Vane laces the black decree with a contingency that permits the fully responsible playing out of the free will’s delinquency. “Those that are the number of the non-elect,” Vane declares,

are not necessarily determined so much as in the means leading them to their destruction, but have the free use of their own natural abilities to prevent the same, assisted with all suitable, requisite helps and means from God to keep them from it; who omitteth nothing that is to be done on his part, conducible hereunto, which is consistent with the freedome of mans will.[96]

If a soul is to be “plucked” out of “danger” under the legal covenant,[97] its passage to safety will not be secured by way of worthy use of the repristinated free will. Here, in Vane’s articulation of the indeterminacy that allows legalists to trek their reprobative path, a studied absence of free grace ensures that nature’s rebellion holds by default. For the elect, Christ will indeed come as giver of the free grace of rebirth and as lover offering himself for new marriage in a better covenant.[98] But to such privileges Vane’s legalists are ineligible; they instead, are hamstrung by conditional and revocable blessings of Cottonian issue. Cotton’s “unsafe building” left its residue in Vane as an unhelpful hankering after a foundational “qualification.” Legalists, as Vane put it during his Restoration captivity, review their restored Adamic holiness “as a qualification to entitle them to all the Promises”; and so, apprehending an “interest” in Christ’s death, they “experience such acceptance from Christ, and are in themselves so certain of their good Estates to their Eternal Salvation, that they will not endure to hear, wherein they are in a mistake, nor that it is possible for them to be better.” A moment later hypocrites and apostates are trooping into Vane’s Two Treatises, deceiving themselves and others, and, in a further tribute to Cotton’s model of common grace, falling away “from the Grace and enlightening they have felt and experienced.”[99]

It is “by the covenant of works” that Christ is a “husband” to the servile children of the Mosaic law, which the redeemer reissues as the law of a conditional covenant. Christ, here, makes for himself a comely church: he cleanses his spouse with water, anoints her with oil, decks her with ornaments and jewels; he grants sub-evangelical gifts, such as justification, which he may summarily “deny” at his pleasure.[100] The consequences are ominous. Cotton had opined that it was fitter for angelic than for ministerial intelligences to cut the thin “scantling” between the righteousness of hypocrites and of true saints: the “difference ... is very hard to be discerned.”[101] And Vane, having God “lead the true heirs” through the covenant of works “into the glory of their inheritance that is to follow,” will also have him, prior to the glory, conceal the different marks of true and false. The true heirs will be recipients of the “seed of saving faith,” but this is not likely of itself to manifest their special sanctity to other sights, especially in view of the fact that their legalist colleagues have

that workmanship set up in their hearts and minds, which stands in an exact conformity to the Law, or image of Christs natural righteousness and perfection, which is holy, righteous, spiritual, and good: and so having that heart-work in them, whereby they adhere to, and approve the Law ... in opposition to the contrary body of sin and death, which is still in being and exercise in them and with them, ready upon all occasions to return with prevalency, whilst they are still upon this tenure of the Covenant of works.[102]

Together in the same “house,” then, the true heirs live as “fellow servants” with pure-seeming legalists, “undifferenced in any thing from them, though they be [proleptically] Lords of all.”[103] The “Lords of all,” in fact, are known to legalists, and are persecuted by them: the kingdom of Antichrist has its churchly roots here, and the legally rectified are enlisted as pawns in the devil’s assault upon the durably faithful. “Teachers” and “disciples” populate the legal covenant’s persecutory enterprise. Vane shows us “professors, very numerous and famous in their generations,” coming forth “with great confidence and censoriousness” to prosecute their doctrines in arenas of controversy. They play the part of “sound and good Physitians,” laying “Heresie, Blasphemy, and high Notions at the wrong door of others.” Deceived by the devil’s “subtilty” and their own presumptuous self-appraisal, Vane’s learned persecutors are wandering lost in Cotton’s cloud of unknowing.[104] They appear in the Meditations, wretchedly and destructively off-track, as self-proclaimed children of grace but spiritual devotees of the moral law, those “than whom none are more confident of their being within the covenant of Grace, freed from any danger of the covenant of Works.” In their obedience, legalists were “undiscerning” victims of the mystery of iniquity “made to serve a contrary interest unto Christs, by going about to establish their own righteousnesses.” Delving into the covenants, Vane told a Cottonian tale of dissimulation and abuse of power. Unknowingly, the false preceptors of grace “hug in their bosoms the principles and life of the covenant of Works, as that which they will not part with by any means.” The “old Serpent,” it turns out, has seated himself in vulnerable hearts by contriving to “imitate and personate” the righteousness of Christ, “imbondaging and carrying captive” his victims by means of the deception of “transforming” himself into the righteous “image.”[105]

“Knowledge of Christ according to the flesh” serves the serpentine seed as a “cover and vail of their enmity against the Cross of Christ, and Power of his Resurrection.”[106] But Vane dashes serpentine hopes by sending hypocrites to the infernal flames. The covenant that conceals antichristian envy—as “cover and vail”—also reveals a Deuteronomic “pain of the curse,” which it administers to the “children of wrath.”[107] Those married to Christ’s “flesh or natural man” will be “plucked up” upon proof of their “degeneracy” and be “cut off from the vine, as branches fit for the fire.”[108] The hypothetical universalist wreaks his terror with a blazing vengeance.

Amidst the wrath and the kindling of infernal flames, the “Spirit of burning” finally blows into Vane’s tempestuous chapter on the legal conscience, and departs with the destruction still proceeding apace. Cotton has left in Vane’s book an idiomatic mark, but not a procedural mode: Vane’s covenant of works remains the carceral institution from which Cotton had retreated. In the Meditations, the Spirit of burning comes to cleanse and purge, building its chosen escapees from the legal covenant into a “Heavenly Tabernacle,” presumably to flourish henceforth in the covenant of grace. But, as ever, a hellish vision has its way: there are those who will fail to “abide” this purgative “trial of fire” and so “will defile and pollute the Temple and Tabernacle of God, set up in them, in conformity to the flesh of Christ.” Such will be “cut off” or “broken off” and consigned to everlasting flames, having made themselves “fit subjects for God to destroy, and to swear in his wrath, that [they] shall never enter into his Rest.”[109]

Entry to God’s rest is a blessing available in a better covenant, the profile of which is manifestly Cottonian. The ways and means of the covenant of grace flow from the “absolute” beneficence that is grounded in God’s unconditioned determination of his elect.[110] The path of free grace, for Vane, is unilateral and unilinear. The grace that saves is dispensed to its beneficiaries in sublime disregard of foregoing works and qualifications, and it operates without inclination to contract debts or to transact agreements according to terms and conditions. It vanquishes—rather than solicits—human agency. The saving covenant stages a “sharp contest and dispute” between the “heavenly” and “natural” powers of the regenerate soul. Faith will win its victory, achieved, to be sure, in the teeth of fleshly “desires” and entrenched “resistance.” Selfish urges are answered by preparatory grace; regeneration proceeds through the “breaking” and “bruising” of the “natural powers and faculties of the mind,” in discussing which, Vane sets to rights that “first self-sufficiency & ability” that Cotton had targeted as the Adamic peril within. “Flesh and blood,” then, must be put down by sovereign faith.[111] Coincident with the humbling of nature is a Christ- and Spirit-wrought transcendence of soul that intervenes quickly with its gracious pay-off in knowledge and tranquility whenever Vane happens upon the pains of preparation. Saving faith gives “subsistence and reception in the heart to Christ,” enabling the “true saint” to be carried beyond the bounds of natural capacity to a “fountain of action and motion” not previously experienced. Indeed, the “first act” of faith is conflated with the “new birth and reception” of the indwelling Christ; and Vane, with Cotton, fixes upon an act that, from the human perspective, is utterly passive, an act that is acted upon by a higher, inseminating agency.[112] Retreating from the Puritan staple of faith’s “instrumental causality,” Vane gestures at so profound a sense of human passivity and causal indigence as to require Christ to assert a substitutionary faith of his own—a faith that can itself witness to the believing soul and therein release the latter from need to harvest the evidentiary fruits of sanctification. With the notion broached that believers are justified on account of a faith “abiding in Christ, not in us,” Vane is at the point of detaching soul from gift, and decoupling human faith from forensic justification. But a more recognizable counsel soon finds a voice: God never passes justification “upon us, till we be actually believers.”[113]

We are “actually” believers in consequence of being brought into a state of union with the “dead” Christ. The soul, here, is empty and receptive, its powers mortified. It is Christ’s “workmanship,” not faith’s “power,” that authors “all spiritual life and perfection.” The soul does not lay hold of Christ by virtue of its own holy “act.” Thinking in stark dichotomies, Vane is at one with Cotton on the soul’s Spirit-wrought assimilation to Christ’s death. For this is the killer of the soul’s unwarrantable “confidence,” the means by which the soul suppresses its desire to “rest” in devotions premised on fleshly knowledge.[114] Cotton, moreover, had spoken of the Lord’s design to “disenable” the works of the law and Vane, treating the “crucifixion” of the “flesh or natural man in the Saint,” registered an anti-legalist’s concurrence. The saint’s “natural mind,” Vane put it, becomes a captive to faith, rendering it “disenabled to bear or bring forth fruit to its first husband, Christ himself, as made under the Law.”[115] Beyond the devotions of law-bound nature lie the treasures of the Spirit. And Vane, taking Cotton’s quietist mantle once more, prized the Spirit as an irradiator of self-denying seekers of heavenly knowledge. To those who are crucified with Christ and apprehend their own “emptiness” and “nothingness” the Spirit, dwelling within, will speak with an “immediate” voice, granting assurance of salvation, triggering the use of “heavenly faculties” possessed by faithful “seers and contemplators of God.”[116]

And so, in the Meditations, Vane passes from chapter 16, full of the legal covenant’s curses and God’s wrathful punishments, to chapters 17 and 18, where the “evangelical conscience” meets the new covenant’s mediator and finds a way to God’s rest. Vane had his own “helps and means” in making this passage. One such help, shining brightly, was the guiding light of John Cotton.

III. Conclusion

Expatiating upon the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of grace, Cotton and Vane turned to the legal covenant and the gracious covenant in order to schematize, and thus to manage, their concerns and findings. The apparent continuity of idiom, commonality of purpose, and concurrence of mind suggest that, in this case, a torch had been passed from the clerical master to the attentive layman. Digging beneath the plausibly blessed shell of “legal” devotion, Cotton and Vane encountered misconception here, and dissembling there, but they also struck grace: redemption, faith, justification, adoption, sanctification. Extraordinarily, Cotton and Vane verged on extending hypothetical universalism into actual universalism, granting the non-elect “conditional” equivalents of the saving evangelical graces conveyed “absolutely,” and in a better covenant, to the elect. For both men, however, the practical point at issue was not the scope of salvation—which, manifestly, did not match the universal extent of the redemption—but, instead, the danger of hypocrisy. The root of that danger, to be sure, was soteriological: it lay in the generosity of the mediator; hypocrites posed an urgent threat precisely because their pure-seeming ways had been washed in Christ’s blood. Hypothetical universalism frames an explanation for the deceptive righteousness of the serpentine seed. Christ was available to legalists as a marriage partner of sorts, though one who might, in time, relinquish his errant spouse to the infernal flames; and the Spirit was offering its lights to legal minds and giving itself to be “tasted.” How might such an evangelical arrangement environ the mystery of iniquity? The covenant of works held the answer. In that covenant, the mystery of iniquity wore the mask of Christ’s face. The masquerade worked convincingly, and set the scene for a prodigious breeding of hypocrites, because Christ himself, as universal redeemer, had injected his graces into the covenant of works. That the children were hypocrites who might, in time, evolve into apostates could be explained by the fact that the graces that flowed from redemption were administered in discrete editions, bearing differing measures of efficacy and servicing distinct resolutions of intent.

Of our two theologians, Vane was less interested than Cotton in the purificatory offerings of the covenant of works, and so flattened out the spiritual stages that Cotton’s more procedural manner of thinking disposed him to erect. The covenant of works was a place of burning; used rightly, fire will purify rather than destroy, as Cotton was keen to show. Cotton, nevertheless, could envisage cut-off branches and a hundred perishing hypocrites,[117] and Vane followed suit. Vane’s tendency is to depict legalists on course not to a new and better covenant but, instead, to a deserved place in hell’s inferno. Vane’s covenant of works, more so than Cotton’s, is a punitive mechanism. Sensitive to—if not fully approving of—the elaborations of the preparationist heartland in which he lived, Cotton urged that the hand of friendship be extended to his more law-minded New England brethren. Vane, by the 1650s, is far less accommodating. Fired into theological action by diabolic persecutions and usurpations in church and commonwealth, he uses the covenant of works as a tool of combat; he tells “censorious” legalists to review their Mosaic manners, to accept the truth of the other covenant’s free and unconditional grace or be damned. Vane, among the last to take up the covenant of works as an attack weapon, held tenaciously to this element of the Cottonian bequest, giving it a voice long after Cotton himself had returned the weapon to the shelf.[118]

God’s determinative ways assert themselves most clearly in the covenant of grace. For Cotton and Vane, this is a place of mystery and revelation, where grace operates freely to hand out its gifts, where the Spirit infuses an unfailing faith that unites the soul to the redeemer, where knowledge and assurance are granted in a flash. It is here that the “conditional” beneficence of the covenant of works is superseded by that which is “absolute”—by that which refuses to condition and possibly disqualify itself by transacting with human qualifications and works. The soul, emptied of self and acknowledging its nothingness, is filled by the divine. At this point the efficacy of Christ’s blood has settled on a less-than-universal congregation. For only the elect were genuine deniers of the self. Cotton showed Vane how hypocrites and apostates comported themselves in the world, ascending rungs in “temple” and “government” in order to serve a devilish design. He also showed Vane how saving grace deconstructed and renewed the soul, rendering it immune to the temptations of the “old Serpent.” Hypocrites might go only so far in simulating godliness, and here once more the Cottonian compound of soteriology and polemic makes its mark in Vane’s Meditations: hypocrites were strangers to the interior emptiness and nothingness that permitted the “right heirs of salvation,” under the covenant of grace, to know and experience their Lord.

Notes

1. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636—1638: A Documentary History (ed. David D. Hall; 2d ed.; Durham, N.G.: Duke University Press, 1990), 61.
2. A fine account of New England’s free-grace ructions, and one that stresses the centrality of Vane, is Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636-1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
3. See, for example, Violet A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London: Athlone Press, 1970); Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648—1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 38-41, 109; Paul Harris, “Young Sir Henry Vane’s Arguments for Freedom of Conscience,” Political Science M) (1988): 34-48; Ruth E. Myers, “Real and Practicable, Not Imaginary and Notional: Sir Henry Vane, A Healing Question, and the Problems of the Protectorate,” Albion 27 (1996): 37-72; David Parnham, “Politics Spun Out of Theology and Prophecy: Sir Henry Vane on the Spiritual Environment of Public Power,” History of Political Thought22 (2001): 53-83; Parnham, “The Nurturing of Righteousness: Sir Henry Vane on Freedom and Discipline,” Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 1-34. For analysis of Vane’s writings, see David Parnham, Sir Henry Vane, Theologian: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Religious and Political Discourse (Cranbury NJ.: Associated University Presses, 1997).
4. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630—1649 (ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 200-201,2 03-4; Martin Finch, Animadversions upon Sir Henry Vanes Book, Entituled The Retired Mans Meditations (London, 1656), passim; see also Thomas Shepard, quoted in Winship, Making Heretics, 52.
5. Winthrop, Journal, 203-4, 208.
6. Sikes devotes two sentences to Vane’s “ripening” in New England “into more knowledge and experience of Christ” than could be borne with, but says nothing of the Cotton connection: The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, Kt. (London, 1662), 8.
7. Winship, Making Heretics, esp. 87- 88, 191, 245.
8. David Parnham, “Soul’s Trial and Spirit’s Voice: Sir Henry Vane against the ‘Orthodox,’“ Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (2007): 365-400.
9. On whom, see Winship, Making Heretics.
10. Winthrop, Journal, 208-9; also Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 206, 209-11.
11. William Pemble, Vindiciae Fidei (Oxford, 1629), 23, 155; John Preston, The New Covenant, or the Saints Portion (London, 1629), 317, 348-49; Remaines of that Reverend and Learned Divine, John Preston (London, 1637), 263.
12. Pemble, Vindiciae Fidei, 23-24.
13. Richard Sibbes, Works (ed. Alexander Grosart; 7 vols.; Edinburgh, 1862-1864), 7:482-83. For Sibbes’s conversion of Cotton, see Larzer Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 30-31.
14. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 133-34, also 92-93.
15. John Cotton, A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (London, 1671), 68-69, 74-76, 87-88. First published in 1654, and revised and expanded in the 1659 and 1671 editions, the Treatise is based on sermons that Cotton preached during the free-grace controversy. See Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 245-46 n. 22.
16. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 178, also 56; Cotton, Treatise, 40, 104.
17. Hall, Antinomian Controversy 132, also 53-54, 56, 85, 98-99, 117-18, 123, 126, 133.
18. Cotton, Treatise, 66, also 37-39.
19. Pemble, Vindiciae Fidei, 23-24, 151-57, 168-70.
20. Henry Burton, The Law and Gospel Reconciled (London, 1631), 24-29, 40-41.
21. Preston, New Covenant, 317-25, 383- 84, 443-45, 447-48; see also, on Preston and the covenant of works, Michael McGiffert, “The Perkinsian Moment of Federal Theology,” C7J29 (1994): 128, and, on Cotton’s conversion of Preston, Jonathan D. Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism: John Preston and the Softening of Reformed Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 5.
22. For a comprehensive telling of this story, see David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre- Civil-War England (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004).
23. For temporary blessings and graces delivered via the covenant of works, see Cotton, Treatise. 26-27, 30, 32 (redemption), 27, 89 (union with Christ), 27, 30, 41-44, 53 (faith), 29 (justification and adoption), 26-32, 38-40, 42-43, 45-49, 161-65 (sanctification).
24. Ibid., 30, 110, 157.
25. Ibid., 19, 46, 56, 132, 165, 180, 202.
26. Ibid., 32-33, 40-41, 48, 53, 59, 156-57, 197, 202. See also, on the general redemption and common grace available in the covenant of works, William Twisse, A Treatise of Mr. Cottons, Clearing Certaine Doubts Concerning Predestination (London, 1646), 62-63, 72-73, 100-101, 118-19, 259-60.
27. Cotton, Treatise, 51-52, 120.
28. Ibid., 30-32, 45-46.
29. Ibid., 16, 18, 34, 36, 43-45, 53, 110, 115-16, 118-19, 127-29, 132, 141, 200-202; Haft, Antinomian Controversy, 56.
30. Cotton, Treatise, 48-49.
31. Ibid., 14-15, 32-33, 51-52, 120, 126; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 122.
32. Cotton, Treatise, 39, 46, 51-52.
33. See Moore, English Hypothetical Universalism.
34. Cotton, Treatise, 133-34.
35. Ibid., 39-43, 45-48, 51-55, 65-66.
36. Ibid., 33-34.
37. Twisse, Treatise of Mr. Cottons.
38. Pemble, Vindiciae Fidei, 152-53.
39. Cotton, Treatise, 15-17, 34, 43, 53, 118.
40. Ibid., 27, 40-41,48, 51-52, 99.
41. Ibid., 134, 67; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 40, 92, 176, 193.
42. Cotton, Treatise, 43-45, 108, 110, 119-20, 128, 132 (strength), 116 (sufficiency), 200-201 (righteousness).
43. Ibid., 117.
44. Ibid., 14-19, 24, 34-36, 41, 45, 52, 114-20, 127, 169; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 54, 178.
45. For “confidence,” see n. 29 above, and for “comfort” in the covenant of works, see Cotton, Treatise, 16, 28, 44, 53-54, 71-73, 85, 89-91, 126, 129; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 54, 85, 122, 178; Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 248. For the unitive Spirit, see Cotton, Treatise, 17-19, 20-22, 24, 35-37, 97-98, 108-9, 120-21, 155, 189, 218-19; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 41-42, 82. See also, on the admonitory, punitive, and preparatory ministrations of the covenant of works, Cotton’s 1636 Salem sermon, printed in John Cotton on the Churches of Mew England (ed. Larzer Ziff; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 41-68.
46. For the “taste” of the Spirit and the “snare” of legal obedience, see Cotton, Treatise, 40-41, 48, 52, 59, 72, and for “common” grace, see Cotton, Treatise, 48, 53, 59, 156-57, 197, 202; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 92- See n. 23 above for temporary faith and conditional justification. And, for temporary faith considered more broadly as an evangelical topos, see R. T Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Michael P. Winship, “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s,” Cf/70 (2001): 462-81; Karen Bruhn, “‘Sinne Unfoulded’: Time, Election, and Disbelief among the Godly in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century England,” CH11 (2008): 574-95.
47. Cotton, Treatise, 83-85, 89, 164, 174; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 98, 127, 186.
48. Cotton, Treatise, 59, 70, 73, 157.
49. McGiffert, “Perkinsian Moment,” 145.
50. Cotton, Treatise, 19-20, 37, 61, 65-67, 86, 133-34; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 91-93, 96-100, 110-11, 175-76.
51. Cotton attended constantly during the free-grace controversy to the Spirit’s role as witness bearer and revealer and to the freeness and absoluteness of God’s saving beneficence.
52. Cotton, Treatise, 156-57, also 48, 59, 70.
53. Ibid., 40-44, 48.
54. Ibid., 89.
55. Sibbes, Works, 1:43.
56. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 61, 66-67.
57. Ibid., 57, 84, 86-87, 98, 121, 126.
58. Ibid., 91, 95.
59. Ibid., 85, 96-97, 121-22, 136-37.
60. Ibid., 30, 37-38, 40, 55, 196-98, 402; Cotton, Treatise, 100, 109, 122-24, 132-33, 163, 217, 221.
61. Cotton, Treatise, 112-1%; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 127, also 87, 111, 137, 179-80.
62. Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 69-70, 73-74, 181.
63. Ibid., 85, 87, 134-35.
64. Ibid., 57, 84, 86-88, 98, 108, 112, 119, 135, 138, 142.
65. Ibid., 402; Cotton, Treatise, 129; and n. 60 above. See also Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 265-67.
66. Cotton, Treatise, 4, 13, 25-26, 67, 193, 213-14; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 98-99, 137, 139.
67. Cotton, Treatise, 90-91; Tobias Crisp, Christ Alone Exalted: Being the Compleat Works of Tobias Crisp. D.D. (London, 1690), 40-41, 49-50, 458. Bozeman notes that Cotton and Crisp stand together in shared animosity toward the “qualifications” beloved of the “pietist tradition”: Precisianist Strain. 255. For recent evaluations of Crisp, see David Parnham, “The Humbling of ‘High Presumption’: Tobias Crisp Dismantles the Puritan Ordo Salutis,” JEH56 (2005): 50-74, and Parnham, “The Covenantal Quietism of Tobias Crisp,” CH75 (2006): 511- 43.1 address the antinomians and their Puritan provenance in Parnham, “Motions of Law and Grace: The Puritan in the Antinomian,” WTJ 70 (2008): 73-104.
68. On the doing of duties and the beneficial uses of the law—set forth in a context of freedom from the burdens of the legal covenant—see Cotton, Treatise, 23, 50, 64, 68-107.
69. Ibid., 91.
70. Ibid., 22-23, 36-37, 190-91; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 49, 80, 105, 141, 196.
71. The Correspondence of John Cotton (ed. Sargent Bush Jr.; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 283. On the “delusions” of heretics, see Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 365; Peter Bulkeley The Gospel-Covenant; or the Covenant of Grace Opened (London, 1651), 148-49, 326-27; Thomas Hooker, The Application of Redemption, by the Effectual Work of the Word, and Spirit of Christ, for the Bringing Home of Lost Sinners to God: The First Eight Books (London, 1656), 29-30, 46, 159-60; Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins (Orlando, Fla.: Soli Deo Gloria, 1990), 197, 346.
72. Sir Henry Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, or the Mysterie and Power of Godlines Shining Forth in the Living Word, to the Unmasking the Mysterie of Iniquity in the Most Refined and Purest Forms (London, 1655), 347, 201, also 64-65, 69, 289, 308; Vane, Two Treatises (London, 1662), 18; Vane, A Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise, by the Light of the Vision of Jacobs Ladder and Faith (London, 1664), 13.
73. Winthrop, Journal, 195-97, 200; Vane, Meditations, 123, 423-24.
74. Richard Baxter, ReliquiaeBaxterianae (ed. Matthew Sylvester; London, 1696), pt. 1:75; Baxter, A Key for Catholics to Open the Juggling of the Jesuits (ed. J. Allport; London, 1839), 374, 381-82, 391, 395.
75. Vane, Meditations, “To the Reader”; Sir Henry Vane, A Healing Question (London, 1656), 2-8, 13-17; The Proceeds of the Protector (So Called) and His Councill against Sir Henry Vane, Knight (London, 1658), 6-9.
76. Vane, Meditations, “To the Reader”; and see, for discussion of Vane’s political eschatology Parnham, Sir Henry Vane, Theologian, ch. 4.
77. Vane, Meditations, 95, 105-7, 118-19, 123, 127, 190-93, 211, 328-32, 334; Vane, Two Treatises, 27 (justification, adoption, sanctification); Vane, Meditations, 59-61, 74-75, 83, 105-6, 108, 119-20, 123, 145, 157, 161,170-71, 190, 194, 204, 331-32, 337-39; Vane, Two Treatises, 12, 19-20,24-25,28, 30, 67, 84-85; Vane, Pilgrimage, 19, 32, 36-38,47-51, 58-61, 67, 69, 99-100, 102; ForsterMs48.D.41: Victoria and Albert Museum—sermons and correspondence of Vane transcribed by his daughter Margaret, fols. 292, 295-96, 382 (common and conditional grace).
78. Vane, Meditations, 105, 117-18, 151, 188, 190-91, 193-96, 204-5, 208, 331; Vane, Pilgrimage, 8 (union with Christ); Vane, Meditations, 83, 151, 188, 192; Vane, Two Treatises, 26, 31; Vane, Pilgrimage, 51, 57 (Adamic righteousness); Vane, Meditations, 79, 108, 119-20, 127-28, 131-36, 152-55, 158, 167-68, 171, 193, 331, 362, 364, 368, 379; Vane, Two Treatises, 13, 27; Vane, Pilgrimage, 36, 50-51, 54, 61, 101 (taste and enlightenment). On Adamic righteousness under the Gottonian covenant of works and the better-than-Adamic estate of regeneration, see Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 51, 104, 143-44, 222.
79. Vane, Meditations, 118-19, 134, 136, 152-53, 157, 208, 210-11, 224, 342; Vane, Pilgrimage, 100, 102 (temporary faith); Vane, Meditations, 108, 134, 157-58, 185-86, 193, 224, 331-32, 338-39, 362; Vane, Two Treatises, 27; Vane, Pilgrimage, 61 (falling away); Vane, Meditations, 59, 127, 134, 152-53, 155, 157-58, 200-201 (confidence, comfort, and reward); Vane, Meditations, 128, 136-37, 153-54, 363-64, 369; Vane, Two Treatises, 98 (visible saints); Vane, Meditations, 136, 161, 224, 341-42, 362-70, 373-75; Vane, Two Treatises, 25-27, 30, 66, 80, 82, 98; Vane, Pilgrimage, 83, 101 (hypocrisy and apostasy); Vane, Meditations, 83, 154, ch. 13, 231-32, 295; Vane, Two Treatises, 42-57, 71-72, 80, 82-83, 87-92; Forster MS 48.D.41, fols. 279-83, 300-302 (persecution).
80. Vane, Meditations, 74-75, 84-85, 89-91, 95, 104-9, 113, 118-19, 125, 131, 144-45, 159-60, 165-66, 171-72, 175, 181-82, 184, 194, 198-200, 204-5, 315, 328, 331, 361; Vane, Healing Question, 6; Vane, Two Treatises, 12, 67, 69; Vane, Pilgrimage, 14-15, 19, 22, 31-35, 37-39, 48, 50, 67, 69, 100; Forster MS 48.D.41, fols. 381, 385. For Cotton, see Twisse, Treatise of Mr. Cottons, 62-63, 259-60.
81. Vane, Meditations, 79-80, 106, 108, 119, 151, 166, 170-71,211, 361; Vane, Pilgrimage, 19,21, 28, 34, 36, 59, 67.
82. Vane, Meditations, 186, 193.
83. Ibid., 166, also 167, 169-71, 208, 214, 219, 221, 297, 299; Vane, Pilgrimage, 36, 42, 48-49, 56, 63-64, 69-70,73,81, 101-2. And see, similarly, Cotton in Twisse, Treatise of Mr. Cottons, 118-19.
84. Vane, Meditations, 166, also 208-9, 211.
85. Ibid., 68, 167-68; Vane, Two 7feate,28, 52; Vane, Pilgrimage, 15, 19,48, 67; ForsterMs48.D.41, fol. 381.
86. Vane, Meditations, 59-60, 167-68, 170-71; Vane, Pilgrimage, 28-31, 34.
87. Vane, Meditations, 167, also 206.
88. Ibid., 170, also 40.
89. Ibid., 211, 333, 362; Vane, Two Treatises, 46, 74.
90. Vane, Meditations, 362-71.
91. Twisse, Treatise of Mr. Cottons, 42-43, 62-63; see also McGiffert, “Perkinsian Moment,” 142-43; David Gomo, “Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560—1660 (ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier; Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), 77-84.
92. John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 116-19.
93. Twisse, Treatise of Mr. Cottons, 42, 109-11.
94. Vane, Meditations, 23-24, also 79-81, 170-71, 194, 197, 199, 211, 361; Vane, Two Treatises, 30; Vane, Pilgrimage, 56, 60-61, 83, 100-101.
95. Vane, Meditations, 68, 79, 81, 131, 167-68, 170; Twisse, Treatise of Mr. Cottons, 110, 207-8, 228-44, 259-60 (gifts, helps, and means); Vane, Meditations, 39-40, 79-82, 94, 123, 166, 170, 220-21, 226; Vane, Two Treatises, 29, 85; Vane, Pilgrimage, 9, 18-19, 34, 36-37, 50, 64-67 (free and irresistible grace administered to the elect).
96. Vane, Meditations, 170.
97. Ibid., 177-78.
98. Ibid., 76, 83, 105, 111, 121, 123, ch. 18; Vane, Pilgrimage, 69-70.
99. Vane, Two Treatises, 26-27, 30, 66, 80, 82, 98.
100. Vane, Meditations, 127, 129, 133, 135, 141-42, 149-53, 174, 190, 195-96, 208; Vane, Two Treatises, 25; Vane, Pilgrimage, 8 (Mosaic dispensation); Vane, Meditations, 132, 191, 196, 207-8 (comely church), 193, 332 (denial of justification).
101. Cotton, Treatise, 39, 41-42.
102. Vane, Meditations, 193.
103. Ibid., 192, also 212, 224, 311, 335, 375; Vane, Pilgrimage, 95, 99.
104. Vane, Meditations, 196-98, 200-201, 313, 317, 369.
105. Ibid., 200-201, 318; Vane, Two Treatises, 31.
106. Vane, Two Treatises, 88-89. On fleshly knowledge of Christ under the legal covenant, see Vane, Meditations, 166, 185, 188-89, 191, 202, 207, 299; Vane, Pilgrimage, 11.
107. Vane, Meditations, 66, 74, 101, 112, 119, 193, 196, 331.
108. Ibid., 165-66, 185, 188-89, 191, 193-94, 196, 202-3, 207, 211, 299, 364.
109. Ibid., 206-7, 105, and, for other ferocious pronouncements on the ignition of wrath in the legal covenant, see 75, 79-81, 108, 132-34, 136, 150-51, 158, 166-67, 193, 195-96, 197, 209, 318, 364-65, 379; Vane, Two Treatises, 13, 28, 42; Vane, Pilgrimage, 8, 18,21,28,36,48,50,56,59-61,67, 101.
110. Vane, Meditations, 39-40, 105-6, 108, 114, 120, 122-23, 139, 190, 194; Vane, Two Treatises, 27, 67, 85; Vane, Pilgrimage, 38-39, 46, 48, 62, 64, 73; Forster ms 48.D.41, fol. 293.
111. Vane, Meditations, 227-28, 230, ch. 18; Vane, Pilgrimage, 29, 67 (faith’s victory); Vane, Meditations, 71, 93-94, 105-6, 167, 214, ch. 18; Vane, Pilgrimage, 17, 70-71 (preparatory breaking and bruising).
112. Vane, Meditations, 214, 223; Cotton, Treatise, 22-23, 36-37.
113. Vane, Meditations, 98-99, 114, 225-26. The opinions had been expressed (and condemned) in New England that it is Christ, not the saint, who believes, that the Spirit unites the soul to Christ without need for a human “act,” that justification is pronounced in abstraction from human faith: Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 202-3, 226.
114. Vane, Meditations, 226, 229, 297. On the saint’s conformity to the image of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, see Vane, Meditations, 71, 74-76, 94, 105-6, 110, 124, 155-56, 191,202,214-15, 230-31, ch. 18; 351-52; Vane, Pilgrimage, 15,22,47,55,65,68-71,73, 107; Forster ms 48.D.41, fols. 68-74, 80-85, 93, 105; Cotton, Treatise, 188; Hall, Antinomian Controversy, 81, 104.
115. Vane, Meditations, 289, also 71, 97-98, 143, 230, 305.
116. Vane, Meditations, 229 (emptiness and nothingness); Vane, Meditations, 75-76, 98-99, 137-39, 219, 309, 351-52; Vane, Two Treatises, 29, 31; Vane, Pilgrimage, 9-10, 20, 41, 66, 68-69, 74-75, 102-3; Forster MS 48.D.41, fols. 240-41 (spiritual witness and vision of faith).
117. Cotton, Treatise, 51-52.
118. I owe this point to the kindness of Michael McGiffert. Not for the first time, Michael McGiffert sent me on my way, and so I thank him, again.