" Howes forgot that what might cause only a ripple in London might
overwhelm the tiny Colony in Boston. Two years later, he writes more
philosophically, and perhaps with a gentle irony, concerning "two
monstrous births & a general earthquake." He hints that the people of the
Bay might perhaps as well take these signs to themselves as lay them at
the door of Mrs. Hutchinson and what not. "Where is there such another
people then [as] in New England, that labors might & main to have Christ
formed in them, yet would give or appoint him his shape & clothe him too?
It cannot be denied that we have conceived many monstrous imaginations of
Christ Jesus: the one imagination says, _Lo, here he is_; the other says,
_Lo, there he is_; multiplicity of conceptions, but is there any one true
shape of Him? And if one of many produce a shape, it is not the shape of
the Son of God, but an ugly horrid metamorphosis. Neither is it a living
shape, but a dead one, yet a crow thinks her own bird the fairest, & most
prefer their own wisdom before God's, Antichrist before Christ." Howes
had certainly arrived at that "centre" of which he speaks and was before
his time, as a man of speculation, never a man of action, may sometimes
be. He was fitter for Plotinus's colony than Winthrop's.
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