The arrogance of the elect is hard to bear, and it is not wonderful that the debate waxed hot. The concentrated religiousness of a town that sought to shut out unbelieving residents made the dispute dangerous. In the rising tempest a ballast of ungodly people might have been serviceable. But in Boston there were few even of the indifferent to be buffers in the religious collision. While the covenant-of-grace people made themselves offensive, their opponents,--Winthrop, the slighted ex-governor, Wilson, the unpopular pastor, and the ministers accused of being under a covenant of works--resorted to the favorite weapons of polemics. They hatched a brood of inferences from the opinions Mrs. Hutchinson held, or was thought to hold, and then made her responsible for the ugly bantlings. They pretended to believe, and no doubt did believe, that Mrs. Hutchinson's esoteric teaching was worse than what she gave out. They borrowed the names of ancient heresies, long damned by common consent, to give odium to her doctrine. That the new party should be called Antinomian was plausible; the road they had chosen for escape from Puritan legalism certainly lay in that direction. But Antinomianism had suffered from an imputation of immorality, and no such tendency was apparent, unless by logical deduction, in the doctrines taught in Boston. The hearers of Mrs. Hutchinson were also accused of having accepted the doctrines of the so-called Family of Love which had of old been accused of many detestable things, and was a common bugaboo of theology at the time. The whole town of Boston and the whole colony of Massachusetts was set in commotion by the rude theological brawl. Such was the state of combustion in Boston that it was thought necessary by the opponents of Vane and Mrs. Hutchinson to hold the court of elections at the former capital, Newtown. The excitement at this court was so great that the church members, who only could vote, were on the point of laying violent hands on one another in a contest growing out of a question relating to the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. Vane was defeated, and Winthrop again made governor. XX. [Sidenote: The Synod of 1637.] [Sidenote: Short Story of the Rise, Reign, etc., _passim_.] [Sidenote: Winthrop's Journal, i, 284, and following.] [Sidenote: Cotton's Way of the Churches Cleared, _passim_.]