The Connecticut rulers acted at first as a government subordinate to Massachusetts; but the settlements, except that of people from Roxbury at Springfield, were south of the line of the Massachusetts colony, and it was not in the nature of things that Hooker and Haynes should subordinate themselves to Cotton and Winthrop. There was indeed no little exasperation between the two colonies. An independent constitution was adopted in Connecticut, on principles which Hooker thought he found in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, and which were not exactly those that Cotton had managed to deduce from Scripture in his Model of Moses his Judicials. The Massachusetts people, whose government aspired to dominate all New England, seem to have been angered by Hooker's secession and by his refusal to subordinate the new state to their own. Massachusetts asserted its authority over Springfield, which was within its limits, and every effort possible was made to prevent new emigrants who landed at Boston from going to the west. Even in England accounts adverse to Connecticut were circulated. Hooker, the real head of the new state, resented this in a letter of great vigor and some passion. XII. [Sidenote: Instability of a theocracy.] In its early years Massachusetts had no rest. Three profound disturbances--the expulsion of Williams, the secession of Hooker and his followers, and the Hutchinsonian convulsion--followed one another in breathless succession, and a dangerous Indian war ran its course at the same time. That the early settlements were founded on "rocks and sands and salt marshes" was not the chief misfortune of the Bay colony. Its ecclesiastical politics proved explosive, to the consternation of its pious founders, who like other settlers in Utopia had neglected to reckon with human nature. XIII. [Sidenote: Severity of Puritanism.] It has been the habit of modern writers on the subject to dismiss the Hutchinsonian controversy as a debate about meaningless propositions in an incomprehensible jargon. Yet there was in it but the action of well-known tendencies in human nature which might almost have been predicted from the antecedent circumstances. Puritanism had wrapped itself in the haircloth of austerity, it took grim delight in harsh forbiddings, and heaped up whole decalogues of thou-shalt-nots. Nor did it offer, as other intense religious movements have done, the compensation of internal joys for the gayety it repressed. Theoretically Calvinist, it was practically an ascetic system of external duties and abstentions, trampling on the human spirit without ruth. [Sidenote: Reaction toward a subjective joyousness.] [Sidenote: Magnalia B. III, c. I, 32.] [Sidenote: Compare Cotton's Fountain of Life, 35.] [Sidenote: Note 4.] [Sidenote: Note 5.] [Sidenote: Shepard's Memoirs in Young, 505.]