ANTINOMIANS:--The origin of this heresy is attributed to Luther contemporary and fellow townsman, John Agricola, of Eisleben in Saxony (1492-1566); but the Antinomians of New England, and their chief Mrs. Hutchinson, had recently been more heard of. The story of poor Mrs. Hutchinson, the chief of these New England Antinomians, has already been told by us (Vol. II.371-7), as far as to the beginning of 1643, when we left her, a widow with a family of children, including a married daughter and that daughter's husband, beyond the bounds of New England altogether, and seeking rest for her wearied mind, and a home for her little ones, in the Dutch plantations somewhere near what is now New York. The sad end has now to be told. The Indians and the Dutch of those parts were then at feud; and in September 1643, in an inroad of the Indians into the plantation where Mrs. Hutchinson was, she and all her family were murdered, with the exception of a little daughter eight years of age, who was carried into captivity among the Indians, and not recovered till four years afterwards. The news of this tragic end of Mrs. Hutchinson had been brought across the Atlantic, and had added to the interest of pious horror with which her previous career of heresy in Massachusetts had been heard of by the orthodox in England. Mrs. Hutchinson and her Antinomianism, in fact, were already the subjects of a dreadful popular myth. Here, for example, is old Father Ephraim's account of the New England Antinomians, as he had compiled it from information received direct from America:--"Some persons among those that went hence to New England being freighted with many loose and unsound opinions, which they durst not here, they there began to vent them ... working first upon women, traducing godly ministers to be and preach under Covenant of Works, dropping their baits by little and little and angling yet further when they saw them take, and fathering their opinions on those of the best quality in the country; and, by means of Mrs. Hutchinson's double weekly lecture at Boston, under pretence of repeating Mr. Cotton's sermons, these opinions were quickly dispersed before authority was aware." But at length, when the infant church in America had been thus "almost ruinated," the judgments of God overtook the prime fomenters of the heresy in a notorious manner. "As, first, Mistress Hutchinson, the Generalissimo, the high-priestess of the new religion, was delivered at one time of 30 monstrous births, or thereabouts, much about the number of her monstrous opinions; some were bigger, some less, none of them having human shape, but shaped like her opinions: Mistress Dyer also, another of the same crew, was delivered of a large--" [here follows a minute description of a feminine monster that would have made the fortune of any travelling showman, so complexly-horrible was its physiology]. Thus God punished those monstrous "wretches," But the civil authorities of New