of the reformer. She drew around her the women of the colony, first, innocently enough, simply repeating to them the sermons she had heard in the meeting-house, but later acting as interpreter and critic. Now we have seen that the Puritans would tolerate no attempt on the part of the people to depart from the Word of God as it was given to them by their ministers, and they, despite all their pious humility and their constant reiteration of unworthiness, were fully conscious of their position of commanding importance in the community, and for the preservation of their own privileged class permitted no rival prophets. Neological tendencies were sternly suppressed. The Puritan ministers at the beginning of Massachusetts were lawgivers as well as teachers, and their authority rested on the blind obedience with which they were obeyed by their congregations. We do not often associate the idea of superstition with the Puritans, and yet, in a sense, the Puritans were no less superstitious than any other religious sect who passively submitted to a narrow and dogmatic creed and disciplined themselves to accept without question the rule of life as expounded to them by their spiritual leaders.

Mrs. Hutchinson not only arrogated to herself, in flat defiance of the clergy, the ability to interpret the Scriptures, but she was possessed of something of which even the most learned and godly among them were deficient. She professed at times to feel the

Spirit of God upon her and to speak from the inward knowledge that had come to her. She disclaimed the gift of prophecy or that she was divinely inspired, although it is not easy to see where she drew the shadowy line, but she asserted that she was apart and different from ordinary women; and this claim to a precious gift was the one thing to condemn her in the eyes of the clergy. Grace came from without, not from within, which was the presumption of sin and not the humility of the regenerate struggling to be made strong. In the eyes of the ministers, Mrs. Hutchinson, by her claim to mantistic qualities, was guilty of blasphemy, and of course there was always the suspicion of the devil's help. Mr. Hales, "a young man very well conceited of himself and censorious of others," after Mrs.

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Hutchinson's removal to Aquidneck, was also taken with her heresies, and in great admiration of her, so as these, and other the like before, when she dwelt in Boston, gave cause of suspicion of witchcraft." 1

It is proof of that immanent sense of personal liberty so deeply rooted in the English character, which has manifested itself in the whole history of the race, that even in that early day of the minister-ridden Puritan colony Mrs. Hutchinson should have been able to gather around her a following who with vigor and courage supported and defended her. Winthrop declared that the whole

1 Winthrop: History of New England, vol. ii, p. 10.

church of Boston, with few exceptions, had become her converts; Welde, who was to become her chief accuser, lamented that persons of quality and gentlemen and scholars were among her adherents. Deep down in the hearts of those gentlemen and scholars, there must have been the quickening thought that Puritan oppression was no less to be feared than the oppression from which they had fled in England; it was a protest against the attempt to stifle individualism. It was the beginning of the great Antinomian controversy that raged with such bitterness in New England until the Puritan theocracy ceased to exist.

Theological controversies, it has been truly observed, are as a rule among the most barren of the many barren fields of historical research; and the literature of which they are so fruitful may, so far as the reader of to-day is concerned, best be described by the single word impossible.' It would weary the reader to translate into modern language the curious jumble of words which were the weapons employed by these valiant champions, nor is it necessary in a work of this character. It would be profitless to discuss the merits of the Covenant of Grace as distinguished from the Covenant of Works; and these obscure theological disputes about trifles that mean nothing, which aroused passion and rooted bigotry deeper, and advanced the world not one iota, and contributed nothing to 1 Adams: op. cit., vol. i, p. 366.

the happiness or the welfare of mankind, seem to us now so childish that we are amazed that men of common sense should so foolishly waste their time and their energies when much better things were waiting to be done.

Mrs. Hutchinson's teachings had now reached that point when they threatened the disruption of the colony, and she was brought to trial before the General Court. It was a trial typical of the time and the Puritan character. The woman, shortly to become a mother, made to stand in the presence of that august tribunal until "her countenance discovered some bodily infirmity," unprovided with counsel, her witnesses browbeaten, the few members of the Court who were well disposed towards her rebuked by their associates, faced her accusers boldly and showed her skill in dispute; she met the subtle arguments of her persecutors with the ingenuity for which she was famous and more than once disconcerted her judges; but nothing moved them. Passionless they would have gazed on the lustrous bosom of Phryne as they looked without emotion on the mock humility of their victim. Pleading, but defiant, when Governor Winthrop pronounced sentence of banishment she asked: "I desire to know wherefore I am banished," to which Winthrop replied: "Say no more. The court knows wherefore, and is satisfied." It was indicative of the farcical proceedings. The Court was satisfied; the reasons it was not necessary to

state, for every one understood; the justice of the sentence no one considered. There are Massachusetts historians who regard the trial and banishment of Mrs. Hutchinson as a stain upon the Puritan Commonwealth and wish it could be expunged, but they are oversensitive. The men who banished Mrs. Hutchinson were men of the seventeenth century who were under the influence of their age. To have expected them to show the liberality and tolerance of the twentieth century would have been an anachronism.

The great Antinomian controversy and the banishment of Mistress Anne Hutchinson stamp the character of the Puritan and the peculiar institution which he founded in Massachusetts. It revealed at once his whole theory of government and the relation existing between the church and the state. It is perfectly intelligible and entirely logical when we realize that the Bible was the Puritan Constitution; it is mystifying and confusing when that salient fact has not been grasped. Doyle, with all his learning and painstaking research, seems to have missed the key to the Puritan character, without which it can never be understood. Referring to the church at Salem having appointed, against the remonstrances of the General Court, Roger Williams as its pastor, Doyle says: "For this contumacy, and for its supposed complicity in Williams's seditious courses, Salem was punished by being disfranchised till it made an apology. Such an incident oddly