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Updated: October 26, 2025
Hutchinson and her friends were denounced as Familists, Antinomians, etc., after certain early sects who cherished the doctrines of private inspiration and had committed many strange offences. On the other hand, some of Mrs. Hutchinson's friends scornfully referred to the orthodox party as legalists and antichrists, "who walked in a covenant of works."
The Familists held that the essence of religion consists not in adherence to any particular creed or ritual, but in cherishing the spirit of divine love. The general adoption of this point of view was to inaugurate a third dispensation, superior to those of Moses and Christ, the dispensation of the Holy Ghost.
In the spirited dialogue between the two Hunter tells of his ways of extorting money from recusants, seminary priests and neophytes, "whose starting holes I knew as well as themselves"; also, he adds, "I got no small trading by the Brownists, Anabaptists and Familists who love a Barne better than a Church."
An almost indefinite number of such religious bodies arose during the middle years of the seventeenth century Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy Men, Baptists or Anabaptists, Quakers, Ranters, Notionists, Familists, Perfectists, and others. Of these the Quakers are the most interesting in their relations to the New World.
Unless they were mistaken, it was a Toleration to "all the sectaries of the time," whether they were "Anabaptists, Antinomians, Arminians, Familists, Erastians, Brownists, Separatists, Libertines, or Independents;" yea it extended to "those Nullifidians the Seekers, to the new sect of Shakers, and divers others;" and, though it professed not to include "Antitrinitarians, Arians, and Antiscripturists," where was the security that these might not at least print and publish their blasphemies and errors?
Hutchinson is treated, from a hostile and somewhat truculent point of view, in Thomas Welde's pamphlet entitled A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines that infected the Churches of New England, London, 1644.
After a very careful perusal of E. Burrough's answers to Bunyan, it is gratifying to find that the whole truth is set forth in the following pages; some of the facts are worthy of a careful notice. The Baptists and Independents had long existed in this country, and had published confessions of faith. The Ranters and Familists existed not as sects but in name, and soon disappeared.
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