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84 Winthrop and America’s Point of Departure for the poor, broad democratic engagement, an often warm union of fellow citizens, optimism and industriousness in the face of great obstacles, and a stirring sense of human mission beyond one’s own time and place. Much of this was directly born of the Puritans’ heartfelt love for God and man bound up with their preliberal Protestant commitments to individual conscience and consent. There is also, though, the more infamous side of Massachusetts, a side often overdrawn and overemphasized but all too real, where a certain public paranoia—neighbors watching neighbors not watching God—fosters punishments without sense of proportion , a significant suppression of individual belief and preference, and a much restricted sense of mercy for those who act at odds with the colony’s expansive covenant.49 This too is an expression of the Puritans’ sense of charity, bound up with their perceptions of a harsh and punishing God and the responsibilities to other human beings that flow therefrom. Winthrop appears to have had his own feet in both cities, though they were planted in the first far more solidly than in the second. Surely this helps explain and affirm Hawthorne’s complex sketch of Winthrop and his Puritan state discussed in the introduction of this section. Winthrop ’s understanding of and commitment to a genuine sense of Christian love very much makes him a plausible object of admiration and affection for Hester and Pearl, and for many Americans today. But his love and leadership cannot finally and fully redeem the excessively repressive and harsh civil structure of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, primarily because that structure was an expression of that love. Perhaps in the end, then, the wisest contemporary reaction to Winthrop in particular can be summed up by what appears to be Hawthorne’s reaction to Puritanism in general: Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.50 Notes 1. Nearly every adult male (minus indentured servants) who traveled over in 1630 officially joined a New England congregation, yet for some the religious dimension of their journey was more significant than for others. See Bremer, John Winthrop, 164–65, 209. Hugh Dawson makes much of the line in this same passage ‘‘though we Two Cities upon a Hill 85 were absent from each other many miles,’’ arguing that this, among other passages, suggests that Winthrop’s model of charity included the saintly members of the Massachusetts Bay Company remaining behind in England, which it probably did. See ‘‘Rite of Passage’’ and ‘‘Colonial Discourse.’’ But this does not diminish that most of Winthrop’s rhetorical energies appear spent not on England and those remaining behind, but on those departing and life ‘‘where we go’’ (‫ن‬ 41). 2. That grace works gradually and leaves room for outside teaching, correction, and incentive was not idiosyncratic to Winthrop; it was most prominently preached by William Perkins, who died in 1602. See Miller, Errand, 59–60. Also see Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 90. 3. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 33. This and the next few paragraphs borrow liberally from Edmund Morgan’s chapter on church-state relations in early Massachusetts (62–85) in Roger Williams and Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 89–94, 102. 4. Morgan, Roger Williams, 63. Cotton’s statement in particular is worth reading in full. ‘‘It is better that the commonwealth be fashioned to the setting forth of God’s house, which is his church: than to accommodate the church frame to the civil state. Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the sovereignty to himself, and setteth up theocracy in both, as the best form of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the church’’ (letter to Lord Say, 1636, as found in Hall, Puritans, 172, emphasis added). 5. Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 122. See all of chapter six for an extended discussion of the Puritan state. 6. As quoted in Morgan, Roger Williams, 66. 7. Winthrop, Journal—Abridged, 170. 8. Morgan, Roger Williams, 63; Dreisbach, ‘‘Sowing Useful Truths,’’ 71, 76–79. 9. Winthrop, Journal—Abridged, 280–84. 10. For the ‘‘Little Speech,’’ see Winthrop, Journal—Abridged, 281–82...

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