We to-day can scarcely comprehend what these “double weekly lectures” must have been to these Boston women, with their extreme conscientiousness, their sombre religious belief, and their timid superstition, in their hard and perhaps homesick life. The materials for mental occupation and excitement were meagre; hence the spiritual excitement caused by Anne Hutchinson’s prophesyings must have been to them a fascinating religious dissipation. Many were exalted with a supreme assurance of their salvation. Others, bewildered with spiritual doubts, fell into deep gloom and depression; and one woman in utter desperation attempted to commit a crime, and found therein a natural source of relief, saying “now she was sure she should be damned.” Into all this doubt and depression the wives--to use Cotton Mather’s phrase--“hooked in their husbands.” So; perhaps, after all it was well to banish the fomenter of all these troubles and bewilderments. Still, I wonder whether Anne Hutchinson’s old neighbors and gossips did not regret these interesting meetings, these exciting prophesyings, when they were sternly ended. I hope they grieved for her when they heard of her cruel death by Indian massacre; and I know they remembered her unstinted, kindly offices in time of sickness and affliction; and I trust they honored “her ever sober and profitable carriage,” and I suspect some of them in their inmost hearts deplored the Protestant Inquisition of their fathers and husbands, that caused her exile and consequent murder by the savages. Samuel Johnson says, “As the faculty of writing is chiefly a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon women.” As the faculty of literary composition at that day was wholly a masculine endowment, we shall never know what the Puritan women really thought of Anne Hutchinson, and whether they threw upon her any reproach. We gain a slight knowledge of what Margaret Winthrop thought of all this religious ecstasy, this bitter quarrelling, from a letter written by her, and dated “Sad-Boston.” She says:-- Sad thoughts possess my sperits, and I cannot repulce them; wch makes me unfit for anythinge, wondringe what the Lord meanes by all these troubles among us. Shure I am that all shall worke to the best to them that love God, or rather are loved of hime, I know he will bring light out of obcurity and make his rituusnesse shine forth as clere as the nounday; yet I find in myself an aferce spiret, and a tremblinge hart, not so willing to submit to the will of God as I desyre. There is a time to plant, and a time to pull up that which is planted, which I could desyre might not be yet.