Ann Hutchinson, American religious leader, 1591-1643
"As I understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for
those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway."
Against [a] legalistic religion of rules and commandments, with its remote, absentee God, she set what she called the "covenant of Grace." By this she meant, and so did her contemporaries, a religion grounded in a direct experience of God's grace and redeeming love, a religion not of pious performances, of solemn fasts and somber faces, of painful search after the exact requirements of the law, but a religion which began and ended in triumphant certainty of Divine forgiveness, Divine fellowship, and present Divine illumination.