ediable confusion, with voluble harangue and wealth of stinging
epithet pouring scorn upon the self-selected leaders of the chosen
people.

The harassed magistrates wished only to be rid of them. But unlike
Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Quakers came back as often as they
were banished; and as often as they returned, their conduct became more
outrageous, and, the penalties inflicted more severe. Yet oppression
bore its proper fruit. Persecution engendered sympathy; sympathy ripened
into conviction; and the more heretics were confined in the prisons, the
more heresy flourished in the streets. The popularity of Anne
Hutchinson's teachings had demonstrated how eagerly the average man
turned from the literalism of the Puritan clergy in response to the
appeal of one who spoke "from the mere motion of the spirit." Quakerism
was above all a spiritual gospel addressed to the emotions. Its humane
and liberal teachings, obscured but not concealed by the extravagance of
speech and conduct in its first apostles, stood out in striking contrast
to the repressive policy of the Puritan government as well as to the
cold, gray intellectualism of the Puritan religion. The Quakers were a
political danger as well as a public nuisance; for whether few or many
were likely to profess the Quaker faith, among covenanted and
uncovenanted alike their teachings fell on the fruitful soil of
discontent. The magistrates were well aware at last that a crisis was
impending; and they went steadily forward, with circumspection and not
without apprehension, indeed, but without flinching, to meet the final
test. In 1659 and 1660, according to law established and known, five
Quakers were condemned to death, and four were hanged on Boston Common.

The event was a significant one in early Massachusetts history, for it
revealed, in respect to theory and practice alike, the insecure
foundation upon which the Church-State rested. In respect to theory, the
Quakers were a perplexing problem precisely because they remorselessly
pressed the basic principles of Protestantism to their logical
conclusion. The doctrine of the inner light, like Anne Hutchinson's
notion of personal illumination, was implicit in the premises of Luther,
who had grounded the great protest on the conception of a covenant of
grace, and had laid it down, as the primary thesis, that "good works do
not make the good man, but the good man does good works." Luther's
revolt had, indeed, raised a