And indeed it needed not to be very prejudiced to agree with Master Welde herein. For Mrs. Hutchinson, though she "sat under" Mr. Cotton and professed great love for his doctrines, was undoubtedly more than tainted by Antinomianism,--a word, in its broad acceptation, signifying the consciousness of "justification by faith," and an abiding justification that could not be shaken even by the commission of sin. Hence, said the enemies of the Antinomians, these latter took advantage of their presumed state of grace to live as they pleased, licentiously or cleanly, they being surely saved by their faith and therefore free to mould their works as they chose. This was carrying to its extreme the theory of sanctification professed by the Antinomians; yet it was not an unfair deduction from the tenets of that body. The Antinomians were looked upon as menaces to the morality of any land in which they took root, as pursuing pleasure and vice under the cloak of fanaticism. To make matters worse in the Boston colony just at this time with which we are concerned, the new governor, Henry Vane, was vehemently suspected of being an advocate of the hated sect; and therefore when Mrs. Hutchinson began to hold women's meetings at which she set forth her religious tenets, which were perilously close to Antinomianism,--though she, as well as her chief ally and brother-in-law, John Wheelwright, never admitted the applicability of the title,--there arose an outcry against these proceedings. Wheelwright was brought to trial on certain counts, and he and Governor Vane, with Cotton himself,--he having been gradually brought into the controversy in a rather singular manner,--formed a party which was opposed to the mass of the Puritans and was considered little less than a scandal. At the end of a three weeks' session, held in Cambridge to deal with this matter of heresy, the first American clerical synod condemned the opinions of the recalcitrants, and then proceeded to adopt a resolution which is of more importance to us than was their general condemnation; it ran thus: "That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another, yet such a set assembly (as was then in practice at Boston) where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way, by resolving questions of doctrine and expounding Scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly and without rule." Though this expression of opinion, for it was after all but little more, on the part of the synod was aimed at the special case of Mrs. Hutchinson, it is none the less of some general interest in its broad statement. Evidently the Puritans were at one with St. Paul in his opinion that women should be silent in the churches.