Introduction
John Beardsley
This is Winthrop’s most famous thesis, written on board the Arbella, 1630. We love to imagine the occasion when he personally spoke this oration to some large portion of the Winthrop fleet passengers during or just before their passage.
In an age not long past, when the Puritan founders were still respected by the educational establishment, this was required reading in many courses of American history and literature. However, it was often abridged to just the first and last few paragraphs. This left the overture of the piece sounding unkind and fatalistic, and the finale rather sternly zealous. A common misrepresentation of the Puritan character.
Winthrop’s genius was logical reasoning combined with a sympathetic nature. To remove this work’s central arguments about love and relationships is to completely lose the sense of the whole. Therefore we present it here in its well-balanced entirety. The biblical quotations are as Winthrop wrote them, and remain sometimes at slight variance from the King James version. This editor has corrected the chapter and verse citations to correspond to the King James text, assuming that the modern reader will wish to conveniently refer to that most popular English version of the Bible, as the Governor lays out his argument for charity and decent human behavior in the community.
Winthrop’s intent was to prepare the people for planting a new society in a perilous environment, but his practical wisdom is timeless.
Redacted and introduced by John Beardsley, Editor in Chief, the Winthrop Society Quarterly. Copyright 1997. The Introduction and Gov Winthrop's writing appear here with the kind permission of Mr. Beardsley. You are invited to visit the web site of the The Winthrop Society.
 ~Evil kitty Princess~ · Thu Aug 30, 2007 @ 04:21am · 0 Comments |
