burned in the spirit of these old Puritans, even though the
stroke of iron was needful visibly to call it from their flint. In Anne
Hutchinson that overpowering quality of enthusiasm was to be found in a
superlative degree, and thus, above all, we find in her the type of the
coming woman of America.

Hardly had the echoes of the Antinomian controversy died away when there
came to New England a yet more rending cataclysm, in which women were
again the leading spirits. This was the "intrusion" of the Quakers. To
us it may seem as absurd as wonderful that the noble doctrines of the
Society of Friends should once have been regarded as especially dictated
by the Father of Lies; but when the Quakers reached at last the shores
of New England with their "pernicious doctrines," it seemed to the
Puritans that the devil had been unchained in their midst. When on July
11, 1656, there arrived in the port of Boston a ship which among other
passengers brought to the colony two women, Ann Austin and Mary Fisher,
who were known to be members of the accursed sect, there ensued a
general consternation which was well satirized by Bishop in his _New
England Judged_, when he writes: "Two poor women arriving in your
harbour so shook ye, to the everlasting shame of you, as if a formidable
army had invaded your borders." It would require little less than a
volume to set forth the reasons which caused the Puritans so to hate and
fear the Quakers; but it is enough for our present purpose that we
understand that not a plague of small-pox or cholera could have created
such consternation as did the coming of these two feeble women. Mary
Fisher, a most enthusiastic follower of Fox, had already undergone
martyrdom in the attempt to spread the faith of her co-religionists,
having been imprisoned in England for months and whipped "until the
blood ran down her body." She was later to travel even as far as the
dominion of the "Grand Turk" and hold speech with that potentate, and at
last to die, an old woman, at Charleston, South Carolina. When she and
Ann Austin made their appearance in the harbor of Boston--more terrible
to the Puritans than the sea-monster to Andromeda--they were promptly
imprisoned and their tracts, with which they were of course provided,
were burned in the market-place. They were held in bondage for some
weeks and were then placed on board their ship and exiled. But they had
done their work, if only in exciting terror, and the fire t