Daily Inspiration Quote by Anne Hutchinson

A single sentence, framed as a question, turns hospitality into a political act. Hutchinson is not pleading for tolerance; she is asserting a duty that outranks the colony’s rules. “Must not I” is the hinge: it casts her choice as necessity, not preference, and dares the listener to admit that coercing her would be coercing conscience itself.

The key move is in “entertain the saints.” On its surface, it’s domestic and dutiful: receiving fellow believers, offering shelter, sustaining a godly community. In Puritan New England, though, “entertaining” could also mean hosting meetings, circulating ideas, and building an alternative network of authority in the home. Hutchinson’s opponents understood that a kitchen table could rival a pulpit. Her word “saints” is loaded, too. It implies she can identify the truly faithful without clerical mediation, a direct affront to ministers who claimed stewardship over orthodoxy.

“Because I must keep my conscience” lands like a legal brief disguised as piety. Conscience here isn’t private feeling; it’s a binding covenant between the individual and God. The subtext is blunt: if civil and ecclesiastical leaders demand the opposite, they are demanding sin. That’s why the line works rhetorically: it forces a crisis of legitimacy. Either the authorities permit dissenting practice, or they reveal themselves as tyrants over the soul.

Hutchinson’s context - Antinomian controversy, tightening clerical control, fear of social fracture - makes the question combustible. It’s a quiet refusal that exposes how fragile “godly” order becomes when one woman insists that obedience has a higher address.