In the course of the first clause of their accusation, the women say: "Claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry." In view of the fact that Paul frequently alludes to the teaching and ministrations of women, it has come to be generally thought among Christian scholars, I believe, that this injunction that they "keep silence in the churches," referred to the propriety of their conduct in the moral,--or rather the immoral,--atmosphere by which the Church at Corinth was surrounded. This seems reasonable, because it may be observed that, in writing to Timothy, who was in Macedonia, to Titus, who was in Crete, and to the Church at Ephesus, while he repeats his general injunctions of woman's submission to man, and especially to her husband, he says nothing relative to her public work in the church. But if Paul had been writing to the church in New England, in 1634, and in New York in 1774, his injunction to silence might well have been applied to the first woman preachers to whom Americans were called upon to listen. When Anne Hutchinson, in Boston, preached that "the power of the Holy Spirit dwelleth perfectly in every believer, and the inward revelations of her own spirit, and the conscious judgment of her own mind are of authority paramount to any word of God," she shook the young colony to its foundation, as no man had shaken it. The militia that had been ordered to the Pequot war refused to march, because she had proclaimed their chaplain to be "under a covenant of works, and not under a covenant of grace." Her influence, and not her ballot, if she had one, threatened anarchy in the state, and caused a schism in the church such as might have crushed out the life from the infant body to which Paul was writing. In 1774 appeared the next public woman preacher, Ann Lee. She proclaimed that God was revealed a dual being, male and female, to the Jews; that Jesus revealed to the world God as a Father; and that she,--Ann Lee, "Mother Ann,"--was God's revelation of the Mother, "the bearing spirit of the creation of God." She founded the sect of Shakers, whose main articles of belief, besides the one above mentioned, were: community of goods; non- resistance to force, even in self-defence; the sinfulness of all human authority, and consequently the sinfulness of participation in any form of government; absolute separation of the sexes, and consequently no marriage institution. Her mission as "the Christ of the Second Appearing," began with her announcement of God's, wrath upon all marriage, and the public renunciation of her own. In New York, as in New England, her proclamations against government and war tended directly to anarchy, and in the momentous year 1776 she was for that reason imprisoned in Poughkeepsie, whence she was released by Governor Clinton's pardon.