Daily Inspiration Quote by Anne Hutchinson

A courtroom sounds like a place for answers, but Hutchinson turns it into a trap for the questioners. “Will it please you” is surface deference, the kind a woman in 1630s Massachusetts had to perform to be heard at all. Underneath, it’s a scalpel: she’s asking the magistrates and ministers to do the one thing their authority depends on pretending is unnecessary - state a clear, consistent rule.

The line is built like a contract. Give me a rule, and “I will willingly submit to any truth.” That conditional “for then” is the fuse. Hutchinson isn’t rejecting truth; she’s calling out a system that labels her “error” without defining the standard by which she’s judged. In the Antinomian Controversy, she was accused of undermining the colony’s religious order by insisting that salvation comes from grace, not from visible “works,” and by holding meetings where she interpreted sermons. The prosecution wanted obedience, not clarity.

Her subtext is almost modern: if you claim to govern conscience, show your method. If doctrine is certain, it can withstand being articulated as a “rule.” And if it can’t, maybe the real issue isn’t her theology but the threat she poses - a laywoman insisting on theological due process.

The brilliance is how she weaponizes submission. She offers compliance so total it becomes an indictment: any truth, she says, as long as you can prove it’s truth and not just power wearing a collar.