John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity外文电子书籍.pdfVIP

John Winthrop, A Modell of Christian Charity New Englands Puritans dissented not only from the Church of England, but from Englands social and political order as well. Seeking alternatives to established institutions, they turned on the one hand to Scripture and on the other to their common experience for precedents. Of this extraordinarily learned and articulate group (the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century boasted more college graduates per capita than England itself), few gave more careful thought to the purposes of the Puritans errand into the wilderness or to the proper foundations for the colonys institutions than, John Winthrop (1588-1649). Winthrop was a representative of the new gentry that flourished under the Tudor regime. His grandfather, Adam Winthrop, was a country boy who went to London, made a fortune as a clothier, and then purchased a manor (one of the many properties seized by Henry VIII from the church). His son, also named Adam, trained as a lawyer, but spent his life farming and governing his estate in Suffolk. The habit of governing others came naturally to John Winthrop. After attending Trinity College, Cambridge for two years, he returned home, where he was appointed Justice of the Peace and, a few years later, steward -- in which capacity he acted as his fathers chief financial and administrative officer. Despite his privileged position, John Winthrop, like many other educated Englishmen of the period, became increasingly disenchanted with corrupt and oppressive Stuart monarchy. When Charles I decided in the spring of 1629 to rule without parliamentary consent, imprisoned Puritan parliamentary leaders, and banned Puritans from the practice of law, Winthrop decided to emigrate. 1 While en route to New England in 1630, on board the Arabella, Winthrop wrote an essay on charity (which he presumably preached as a sermon) whi