Two distinct parties were early developed. One was composed chiefly of the older colonists, headed by Dudley, and Phillips, and Wilson, and Winthrop, an able coalition of clergymen and politicians. These were earnest to preserve the state as it was. They discountenanced innovation, and “dreaded freedom of opinion as the parent of various divisions.” They said, “These cracks and flaws in the new building of the Reformation portend a fall.”[971] They were anxious “to confirm and build up the colony, child of their prayers and sorrows; and for that they desired patriotism, union, and a common heart.” They dreaded change, because they knew that, “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.” The other party was iconoclastic. It was “composed of men and women who had arrived in New England after the civil government and religious discipline of the Pilgrims had been established.”[972] They felt cramped under the theocracy; and having come self-banished to the wilderness to enjoy toleration, they resisted every form of despotism over the human mind, and “sustained with intense fanaticism the paramount authority of private judgment.” “They came,” observes Bancroft, “fresh from the study of the tenets of Geneva, and their pride consisted in following the principles of the Reformation with logical precision to all their consequences. Their eyes were not primarily directed to the institutions of Massachusetts, but to the doctrines of its religious system; so to them the colonial clergy seemed ‘the ushers of a new persecution,’ ‘a popish faction,’ who had not imbibed the principles of Christian reform; and they applied to the influence of the Pilgrim ministers the doctrine which Luther and Calvin had employed against the observances and pretensions of the Roman church.”[973] There is an old Latin proverb, “Nulla fere causa est, in quâ non fæmina litem Moverit.”[974] The life and soul of the crusade against the theocracy was Anne Hutchinson, whom Johnson styled, “the chiefest masterpiece of woman’s wit.”[975] Antedating the Cordays, the Rolands, and the De Staels by more than a dozen decades, she was the equal, in tact, and zeal, and honest conviction, of the best of those brilliant women who, in the _salons_ of the French capital, inspired the revolution of 1793. Anne Hutchinson was the wife of a Boston merchant, the daughter of a Puritan preacher in England, and had been one of John Cotton’s most devoted parishioners ere he was driven into exile.[976] In 1634 she followed that eminent divine to America, and was received into his church at Boston,[977] spite of some strange theories which she had avowed on shipboard.[978] Her active benevolence and unflagging kindness to the sick soon wedded to her many hearts.[979] She planted herself deep in the affections of the city.