  Critics of women’s preaching typically appealed to the natural inferiority of the female sex, the biblical tale of Eve’s transgression, and Pauline injunctions against women speaking in church. In the anonymous A Spirit moving in the Women Preachers (1646), the author asserts that women preachers transgress not only the rules of nature but also of modesty, divinity, discretion, and civility. On these grounds, the author concludes that women preachers cannot possibly be moved by the spirit of God but must partake in the spirit of darkness, ignorance, and gross error. To support his point, the author notes that the Serpent approached Eve first, because he knew that women were “the silly and weaker Sex” and “naturally apt unto all mischiefe” (Anonymous 1646, 2). In his Antichrist in Man (1655), Joshuah Miller explicitly takes issue with the Quaker practice of permitting women to speak in church by citing two New Testament passages that seemingly forbid women’s spiritual leadership: 1 Corinthians 14:34, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak”, and 1 Timothy 2:11–12, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence”. He asks: