Public Life In John Winthrop's A Model Of Christian Charity
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John Winthrop shouldered the responsibility of governor in “The Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England” in October 1629 (pp. 206), establishing a new Puritist colony that had emigrated from England to the New World, for the next twenty years. Winthrop’s sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, delivers the struggles of the Puritans concerned with the ethical means of monetary gain and loss. Yet how could a group of pious and profit-seeking merchants, who had emigrated away from severe economic depression, reform to not only avoid the same consequence but also fulfill a righteous path according to the Word of God? Public life in the Puritan community has ultimately resorted to a complete paradigm-shift for a new unification: the premise of…show more content… In other terms, why are there poor people at all? Most people will assume that the Puritans were just a group of white folk toting their buckled hats, trying to reform into a central government, similar to the one back home in New England. However, after closer inspection, it could be speculated that Winthrop had an outlier perspective of unification: faith, not a hierarchy of titles and ranking, could unify a diverse group of people: “the definition which the Spirit gives us of live is this: ‘Love is the bond of perfection.’” (211) The Puritans were pushed out of their own homeland because of their religious beliefs so to address the communal aspect of this situation was indefinitely a serious issue. In Winthrop’s idealized Christian community, he sets a precedent that those who are set apart- wealth being only one of the factors that established social classes-, whom are holy: these distinctions are appointed by