Part 35 (1/2)

Boston seems to have become religious in a pervasive way, and in 1635 measures were taken to prevent persons who were not likely to unite with the church from settling in the town. In this community, which had no intellectual interest but religion, and from which ordinary diversions were banished, there were sermons on Sunday and religious lectures on week days and ever-recurring meetings in private houses.

The religious pressure was raised to the danger point, and an explosion of some sort was well-nigh inevitable. Cotton's enthusiasms were modulated by the soft stop of a naturally placid temper, but when communicated to others they were more dangerous.

XV.

[Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson's character.]

[Sidenote: Wonder-working Providence, ch. lxii.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

[Sidenote: Short Story, etc., p. 31.]

[Sidenote: Cotton's The Way of the Churches Cleared, Part I, p. 51.

Short Story, 31.]

[Sidenote: Short Story, 34.]

Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been one of Cotton's ardent disciples in old Boston. She crossed the sea with her husband that she might sit under his ministry in New England. She was a woman cursed with a natural gift for leaders.h.i.+p in an age that had no place for such women. ”This Masterpiece of Womens wit,” the railing Captain Johnson calls her, and certainly her answers before the Ma.s.sachusetts General Court go to show that she was not inferior in cleverness to any of the magistrates or ministers. Winthrop, whose antipathy to her was a pa.s.sion, speaks of her ”sober and profitable carriage,” and says that she was ”very helpful in the time of childbirth and other occasions of bodily infirmities, and well furnished with means to those purposes.” In the state of medical science at that time such intelligent and voluntary ministration from a ”gentlewoman” must have been highly valued. Almost alone of the religionists of her time she translated her devotion into philanthropic exertion. But a woman of her ”nimble and active wit”

could not pa.s.s her life in bodily ministrations. Power seeks expression, and her native eloquence was sure to find opportunity.

Mrs. Hutchinson made use of the usual gathering of gossips on the occasion of childbirth to persuade the women to that more intimate religious life of which she was an advocate. It was the custom to hold devotion at concert pitch by meetings at private houses for men only; women might be edified by their husbands at home. Mrs. Hutchinson ventured to open a little meeting for women. This was highly approved at first, and grew to unexpected dimensions; fifty, and sometimes eighty, of the princ.i.p.al women of the little town were present at her conferences.

XVI.

[Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson's doctrines.]

[Sidenote: Compare Whelewright's Sermon in Proc. Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc., 1866, 265. Cotton's Sermon on the Churches Resurrection, 1642.]

In these meetings she emphasized Cotton's favorite doctrine of ”a covenant of grace.” Her sensitive woman's nature no doubt had beat its wings against the bars of legalism. She was not a philosopher, but nothing could be more truly in accord with the philosophy of character than her desire to give to conduct a greater spontaneity. Cotton himself preached in the same vein. In addition to the Reformation, of which Puritans made so much, he looked for something more which he called, in the phrase of the Apocalypse, ”the first resurrection.”

Mrs. Hutchinson, who was less prudent and more virile than Cotton, did not hesitate to describe most of the ministers in the colony as halting under a ”covenant of works.” Her doctrine was, at bottom, an insurrection against the vexatious legalism of Puritanism. She carried her rebellion so far that she would not even admit that good works were a necessary evidence of conversion. It was the particular imbecility of the age that thought of almost every sort must spin a coc.o.o.n of theological phrases for itself. Spontaneity of religious and moral action represented itself to Mrs. Hutchinson and her followers as an indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the believer and as a personal union with Christ whom they identified with the ”new creature” of Paul. Such a hardening of metaphor into dogma is one of the commonest phenomena of religious thought.

XVII.

[Sidenote: Vane's arrival, 1635.]

[Sidenote: His election as governor, 1636.]

Sir Henry Vane the younger, who had become an ardent Puritan in spite of his father, landed in Boston in October, 1635. He had already shown those gifts which enabled him afterward to play a considerable part in English history. His high connections made him an interesting figure, and though only about twenty-six years of age he was chosen governor in May, 1636. Ardent by nature, and yet in his youth when he ”forsook the honors and preferments of the court to enjoy the ordinances of Christ in their purity,” nothing was more natural than that he should be captivated by the seraphic Cotton and that he should easily adopt the transcendental views of Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop, the natural leader of the colony, having given place in 1635 to Haynes, perhaps in order that Hooker's party might be conciliated and the Connecticut emigration avoided, was a second time thrust aside that a high-born youth might be honored. Winthrop was utterly opposed to Mrs.

Hutchinson, in whose teachings his apprehensive spirit saw full-fledged Antinomianism, and, by inference, potential anabaptism, blasphemy, and sedition. The Hutchinsonians were partisans of Vane, who adhered to their doctrine. The ministers other than Cotton and Whelewright, stung by the imputation that they were under ”a covenant of works,” rallied about Winthrop. Political cleavage and religious division unfortunately coincided.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Arrogance of the Hutchinson party.]

[Sidenote: 1636.]

[Sidenote: Cotton's Churches Resurrection, p. 27.]