Puritans Benefits

1179 Words5 Pages
The idea of non-profits and charities dates back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the times of the Puritans. The term “Puritan” is used to describe English Christians who became dissatisfied with the state of the Church of England. This group of individuals had different opinions on what in particular was wrong with the established national church. Most Puritans were dissatisfied because of the Roman Catholic traditions the Church of England had adopted and the involvement with politics, like the English monarchy. They also believed that they needed to have a less elaborate form of worship, so they though they needed to “purify” the Church’s practices and ceremonies. When the Puritans lived in England under Queen Mary I, in 1553,…show more content…
In this process they came up with a fixed conception of life called Calvinism. Calvinists believed that life is a curse, and that all humans were born sinful, but one can redeem himself by doing penance. The Calvinists also believed that God appointed some people to go to heaven, and the other were left to go to hell, and living a life of grace and belief offered evidence that one’s soul was sent directly to heaven . In England of 1588, a boy named John Winthrop was born, as a child he was taught by a private tutor. He then attended Cambridge and moved on to studied law, during which he developed his strong Puritan belief, later on becoming Lord of the Manor, in 1613. In 1628 the fur- and fish-trading company, Massachusetts Bay Company, was founded, which consisted of some investors that wanted to get a land grant for the…show more content…
The Puritans bought out the stock of the Massachusetts Bay Company and made plans to sail soon. Winthrop and the others made sure that the settlers, not all Puritans, had enough doctors, servants, and laborers to build a community, regardless of their religious beliefs. More than one-fourth of the settlers died before reaching America. The arrival to the New World firmly established Salem, the new settlement of Boston, and the surrounding area as an independent Puritan society in the New World. During the three month journey, Winthrop wrote and delivered a sermon entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” also known as "A City on a Hill.” It described the ideas and plans to keep the Puritan society strong in faith as well as comparing the struggles that they would have to overcome in the New World. The sermon begins with a proclamation regarding inequality in human society, and he goes on to list the reason why God would want such inequality to exist. First, Winthrop suggests that God created inwquality to deal with the differences that are found in the rest of the natural world. Winthrop
Open Document