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 made against her, but inference, then as now,
made the chief ground for her enemies. Excommunication followed at
once, and now, the worst having come, her spirits rose, and she
faced them with quiet dignity, but with all her old assurance,
glorying in the whole experience so that one of the indignant
ministers described her manner with deep disgust, and added: "God