given. She claims for herself the peculiar power of distinguishing
between the chosen of man, and the sealed of Heaven, and affirms that
her gifted eye can see the glory round the foreheads of saints,
sojourning in their mortal state. She declares herself commissioned to
separate the true shepherds from the false, and denounces present and
future judgments on the laud, if she be disturbed in her celestial
errand. Thus the accusations are proved from her own mouth. Her judges
hesitate; and some speak faintly in her defence; but, with a few
dissenting voices, sentence is pronounced, bidding her go out from among
them, and trouble the land no more.

Mrs. Hutchinson's adherents throughout the colony were now disarmed; and
she proceeded to Rhode Island, an accustomed refuge for the exiles of
Massachusetts in all seasons of persecution. Her enemies believed that
the anger of Heaven was following her, of which Governor Winthrop does
not disdain to record a notable instance, very interesting in a
scientific point of view, but fitter for his old and homely narrative
than for modern repetition. In a little time, also, she lost her
husband, who is mentioned in history only as attending her footsteps,
and whom we may conclude to have been (like most husbands of celebrated
women) a mere insignificant appendage of his mightier wife. She now
grew uneasy away frown the Rhode Island colonists, whose liberality
towards her, at an era when liberality was not esteemed a Christian
virtue, probably arose from a comparative insolicitude on religious
matters, more distasteful to Mrs. Hutchinson than even the
uncompromising narrowness of the Puritans. Her final movement was to
lead her family within the limits of the Dutch jurisdiction, where,
having felled the trees of a virgin soil, she became herself the virtual
head, civil and ecclesiastical, of a little colony.