Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Send to Kindle
  • Send to Dropbox
  • Send to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

23 results

Page 1 of 2

  • 7 - The Puritan experiment in New England, 1630-1660
    • from Part II: - Beyond England
  • Edited by John Coffey, University of Leicester, Paul C. H. Lim, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism
  • Published online: 28 November 2008
  • Print publication: 09 October 2008, pp 127-142
  • View extract

    Summary

    In March of 1630, John Winthrop preached a lay sermon to the men, women and children who were gathered in Southampton to accompany him on a voyage to America, an errand into the wilderness where they planned to erect a new England. These emigrants were Puritans, departing England because of their belief that the assault on godliness being mounted by the king's bishops would only increase in vehemence. They had decided to uproot themselves and their families in order to found a colony where they could not only preserve the religious reforms they had managed to achieve in their native land, but also further advance the purification of worship and belief. This was not the only plan for Puritan colonisation, nor the best supported, which explains how a modest Suffolk landowner and justice of the peace could emerge as its leader. Providence Island for one, with its lists of investors that reads like a 'Who's Who' of the future Long Parliament, had more cachet. But it would be New England that would achieve the greatest success. In his sermon, later labelled 'A Model of Christian Charity', Winthrop reminded them of the social gospel they had heard many times before. They were, in the New World, to be knit together as one community, to 'partake of each other's strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow, weal and woe'. 'The care of the public must oversway all private respects.' They were entering into a covenant with God in which they pledged themselves 'to improve our lives' and 'to do more service to the Lord'. If they lived up to their obligations, 'the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with', and they would become 'as a city upon a hill'.

Page 1 of 2