Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/69

 at all in matters of conscience; "his power extends only to the bodies and goods of men." Thus the ferment which produced Puritanism produced also the inquiring mind that denied the essential doctrine of all dogmatic faiths—universal conformity.

"Like Roger Williams or worse," as the perplexed Winthrop exclaimed, was Anne Hutchinson, who landed three years after the young Cambridge scholar. Mrs. Hutchinson was a woman of high courage, fine character, good family, and undoubted ability—"of ready wit and bold spirit," complained the governor whose supremacy she rejected. According to the faithful she brought over with her "two dangerous errors". She espoused the doctrine of justification by faith and declared that the Holy Ghost dwells in every believer. She also cut at the roots of established Puritanism, for she maintained the sovereignty of private judgment in matters religious against the fulminations of the clergy and the penalties of the civil magistrates. Such sentiments, intolerable enough to the authorities of Massachusetts when avowed by a man, were doubly outrageous in their eyes when disclosed by a woman of "feminist" temperament. It soon became evident that there was no room in Massachusetts for people like Williams and Hutchinson, no more than there would have been under the Established Church of Virginia or under the Holy Inquisition of Spain. So they were both banished from the land of the last word and the final good.

Williams, after spending a terrible winter of privation in the forests, gathered five companions around him and founded in 1636 the settlement of Providence at the head of Narragansett Bay. Two years later, Mrs. Hutchinson, fleeing from the same wrath, planted a colony at Portsmouth. In the path of the pioneers came many sectaries, most of them humble farmers and laborers who chafed under the strict rule of the Massachusetts gentry and clergy as the Puritans had chafed under the dominion of Charles I, Archbishop Laud, and the aristocracy.