eft the colony. The English aristocratic Puritans, Saye and Sele,
Brooke, and others, who planned to leave England in 1635, found
themselves so out of accord with the Massachusetts policy of limiting of
the suffrage to church members--and to church membership as determined
by the clergy--that they refused to go to Boston, and persisted in their
plan for a settlement at Saybrook. The Massachusetts system had thus
become not a constitutional government fashioned after the best liberal
thought in England of that day, but a narrow oligarchy in which the
political order was determined according to a rigid interpretation of
theology. This excessive theocratic concentration of power resulted in
driving from the colony many of its best men.

More notorious even than the political dissensions were the moral and
theological disputes which almost disrupted the colony. The magistrates
and elders did not compel men to leave the colony because of political
heresy, but they did drive them out because of difference in matters of
theology. Even before the company came over, Endecott had sent John and
Samuel Browne back to England because they worshiped according to the
Book of Common Prayer. Morton and six others were banished in 1630 as an
immoral influence. Sir Christopher Gardiner, Philip Ratcliffe, Richard
Wright, the Walfords, and Henry Lynn were all forced to leave in 1630
and 1631 as "unmeete to inhabit here." Roger Williams, the tolerationist
and upholder of soul-liberty, who complained of the magistrates for
oppression and of the elders for injustice and who opposed the close
union of church and state, was compelled to leave during the winter of
1635 and 1636. But the great expulsion came in 1637, when an epidemic of
heresy struck the colony. A synod at Newtown condemned eighty erroneous
opinions, and the general court then disarmed or banished all who
persisted in error.

A furor of excitement gathered about Anne Hutchinson, who claimed to be
moved by the spirit and denied that an outward conformity to the letter
of the covenant was a sufficient test of true religion unless
accompanied with a change in the inner life. She was a nonconformist
among those who, refusing to conform to the Church of England, had now
themselves become conformists of the strictest type. To Mrs. Hutchinson
the "vexatious legalism of Puritanism" was as abhorrent as had been the
practices of the Roman and Anglican churches to the Puritans, and,
though