In 1637 a synod of the church was called at Newtown and, although Cotton, Vane, and Wheelwright, together with all but five members of the Boston church, had become warm partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson, her tenets were among the eighty-two opinions condemned as erroneous. A few months later, she was summoned before the General Court and, after a trial of two days, sentenced to banishment from the territory of Massachusetts. That her loss was felt by the church which had excommunicated her may be inferred from the effort made to reclaim her by a deputation sent for that purpose to the Island of Aquidneck, afterward called Rhode Island, where she had found a refuge. After the death of her husband in 1642, she removed to the Dutch settlement, then at war with the Indians, by whose hand she, with all her family, save one child (carried captive), cruelly perished. This experience of the church was not calculated to encourage the public preaching of women, nor incline it, a score of years later, to receive with open-armed hospitality the two Quaker women, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, whose books and trunks were burned on shipboard, and who, upon landing, were haled to prison, in the same spirit of persecution which had driven them from England to the West Indies, and thence to this so-called “land of liberty.” Vainly searched for signs of witchcraft, they were then banished for heresy. Yet the mild doctrines of the Quakers were destined to take root upon American soil, and do their full share in the liberalizing of thought and especially in securing to woman that freedom to preach which has made itself felt in other Christian denominations. The name of no preacher among the Quakers, or “Friends,” as they prefer to be called, stands above the name of Lucretia Mott, whose history is too well known to demand more than a word concerning her call to such public service, as given by herself: “At twenty-five years of age, surrounded by a little family and many cares, I felt called to a more public life and devotion to duty, and engaged in the ministry in our Society, receiving every encouragement from those in authority, until a separation from us, in 1827, when my convictions led me to adhere to the sufficiency of the light within us, resting on truth as authority, rather than taking authority for truth.”