There lived at this time in Boston a woman who must have been well known personally by Madam Winthrop, for she was a near neighbor, living within stone’s throw of the Governor’s house, on the spot where now stands “The Old Corner Bookstore.” This woman was Anne Hutchinson. She came with Rev. John Cotton from Boston, England, to Boston, New England, well respected and well beloved. She went an outcast, hated and feared by many she left behind her in Boston. For years her name was on every tongue, while she was under repeated trials and examinations for heresy. In the controversy over her and her doctrines, magistrates, ministers, women, soldiers, the common multitude of Boston, all took part, and took sides; through the pursuance of the controversy the government of the colony was changed. Her special offences against doctrines were those two antiquated “heresies,” Antinomianism and Familism, which I could hardly define if I would. According to Winthrop they were “those two dangerous errors that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person, and that no sanctification can help to evidence to us our justification.” Her special offences against social and religious routines were thus related by Cotton Mather:-- At the meetings of the women which used to be called gossippings it was her manner to carry on very pious discourses and so put the neighborhood upon examining their spiritual estates by telling them how far a person might go in “trouble of mind,” and being restrained from very many evils and constrained into very many duties, by none but a legal work upon their souls without ever coming to a saving union with the Lord Jesus Christ, that many of them were convinced of a very great defect in the settlement of their everlasting peace, and acquainted more with the “Spirit of the Gospel” than ever they were before. This mighty show and noise of devotion made the reputation of a non-such among the people until at length under pretence of that warrant “that the elder women are to teach the younger” she set up weekly meetings at her house whereto three score or four score people would report.... It was not long before it was found out that most of the errors then crawling like vipers were hatch’d at these meetings. So disturbed was the synod of ministers which was held early in the controversy, that this question was at once resolved:-- That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another, yet such a set assembly (as was then the practice in Boston) where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way by resolving questions of doctrines and expounding scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly and without rule.