eighty, of the principal women of the little town were present at her conferences. XVI. [Sidenote: Mrs. Hutchinson's doctrines.] [Sidenote: Compare Whelewright's Sermon in Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1866, 265. Cotton's Sermon on the Churches Resurrection, 1642.] In these meetings she emphasized Cotton's favorite doctrine of "a covenant of grace." Her sensitive woman's nature no doubt had beat its wings against the bars of legalism. She was not a philosopher, but nothing could be more truly in accord with the philosophy of character than her desire to give to conduct a greater spontaneity. Cotton himself preached in the same vein. In addition to the Reformation, of which Puritans made so much, he looked for something more which he called, in the phrase of the Apocalypse, "the first resurrection." Mrs. Hutchinson, who was less prudent and more virile than Cotton, did not hesitate to describe most of the ministers in the colony as halting under a "covenant of works." Her doctrine was, at bottom, an insurrection against the vexatious legalism of Puritanism. She carried her rebellion so far that she would not even admit that good works were a necessary evidence of conversion. It was the particular imbecility of the age that thought of almost every sort must spin a cocoon of theological phrases for itself. Spontaneity of religious and moral action represented itself to Mrs. Hutchinson and her followers as an indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the believer and as a personal union with Christ whom they identified with the "new creature" of Paul. Such a hardening of metaphor into dogma is one of the commonest phenomena of religious thought. XVII. [Sidenote: Vane's arrival, 1635.] [Sidenote: His election as governor, 1636.]