The religious writings of Vane, of his later years some of which written in prison, were found difficult to understand, even baffling, by readers as varied as Richard Baxter, Clarendon, Gilbert Burnet and David Hume, and continue to be seen so today. Civil War historian Blair Worden comments that "Vane's opaque political ideas and religious beliefs are now barely intelligible", and biographer David Parnham writes "He presented himself as a 'witness' of light, as a spiritualist, as one dispensing advanced wisdoms in the epistemological setting of an imminent and apocalyptic age of the Spirit".