Practically, perhaps, it was the result of reaction from the rule of outward austerity under which she lived. It must have escaped persecution, had she not employed it (in this, again, anticipating the sectaries of the commonwealth) as a weapon of offence against the puritan ministers. It was the custom in the colony to hold weekly exercises, in which lay people expounded and enforced the sermons heard on Sunday. Mrs. Hutchinson was allowed to hold such an exercise for women, and unhappily soon turned exposition into hostile criticism. This roused the fury of the more rigid professors, who demanded her death as a heretic. Vane protected her, and in consequence, though supported by the Boston people, was superseded by Winthrop in the annual election of governor. This led, soon afterwards, to his return {294} to England; not, however, before Roger Williams had, through Vane’s influence with the Indians, obtained a settlement at Rhode Island, and there, for the first time in Christian history, founded a political society on the basis of perfect freedom of opinion. In Rhode Island Mrs. Hutchinson found shelter, but was pursued by the clergy with hideous stories of her witchcraft and commune with the devil. These Baxter with malignant credulity was not ashamed to accept, and to ascribe her cruel murder by the Indians to the judgment of heaven. [1] [_Strafford’s Letters_, i. p. 463.] [2] [_The life and Death of Sir Henry Vane_, by George Sikes, p. 8, Ed. 1662.] I dwell at some length on this story, because it exhibits in little the forces whose strife, tempered but not governed by the practical genius and stern purpose of Cromwell, formed the tragedy of the commonwealth. Here we find the puritan enthusiasm by a necessary process, when freed from worldly restraints, issuing in the sectarian enthusiasm, and then weaning and casting out the child that it has borne. We see the rent which such schism makes in a society founded not on adjustment of interests but on unity of opinion, and may judge how fatal this breach must be when the society so founded, like the republic in England, is but the sudden creation of a minority, and exists, not in a new country with boundless room where the cast-off child may find shelter, but in the presence of ancient interests, which it ignores but can neither suppress nor withdraw from, and in the midst of an old and haughty people, proud in arms, whom it claims to rule but does not represent. In detachment from both parties stands the clear spirit of Vane, strong in a principle which can give its due to both alike, yet weak from its very refusal to obscure its clearness by compromise with either. This principle, which became the better genius of independence in its conflict with presbyterianism, I will endeavour to state as Vane himself conceived it.