Page:Anne Bradstreet and her time.djvu/137

Rh Public admonition was ordered, but before this her two sons had been publicly censured for refusing to join in signing the paper which excommunicated her, Mr. Cotton addressing them "most pitifully and pathetically," as "giving way to natural affection and as tearing the very bowels of their souls by hardening their mother in sin." Until eight in the evening, an hour equivalent to eleven o'clock with our present habits, the congregation listened to question and answer and admonition, in which last, Mr. Cotton "spake to the sisters of the church, and advised them to take heed of her opinions, and to withhold all countenance and respect from her, lest they should harden her in her sin."

Anne Bradstreet must have listened with a curious mixture of feelings, though any evidence of them would naturally be repressed. Once more all came together, and once more, Anne Hutchinson, who faced them in this last encounter with a quiet dignity, that moved the more sympathetic to pity, denied the charges they brought, and the three years controversy which, as Ellis writes, "had drawn nearly the whole of the believers in Boston—magistrates, ministers, women, soldiers, and the common multitude under the banners of a female leader, had changed the government of the Colony, and spread its strange reports over Protestant Europe, was thus brought to an issue, by imputing deception about one of the most unintelligible tenets of faith to her, who could not be circumvented in any other way."

The closest examination of her statements shows no ground for this judgment. It was the inferences of her opponents, and no fact of her real belief that