failure was the only thing to be expected, and the causes are in
the nature of the time itself, the story of literary development
for that period being as complicated as politics, religion and
every other force working on the minds of men.




CHAPTER VI.

A THEOLOGICAL TRAGEDY.


It was perhaps Anne Bradstreet's youth, and a sense that she could
hardly criticise a judgment which had required the united forces
of every church in the Colony to pronounce, that made her ignore
one of the most stormy experiences of those early days, the trial
and banishment of Anne Hutchinson. Her silence is the more
singular, because the conflict was a purely spiritual one, and
thus in her eyes deserving of record. There can be no doubt that
the effect on her own spiritual and mental life must have been
intense and abiding. No children had as yet come to absorb her
thoughts and energies, and the events which shook the Colony to
the very center could not fail to leave an ineffaceable
impression. No story of personal experience is more confounding to
the modern reader, and none holds a truer picture of the time.
Governor Dudley and Simon Bradstreet were both concerned in the
whole course of the matter, which must have been discussed at home
from day to day, and thus there is every reason for giving it full
place in these pages as one of the formative forces in Anne