10
THY KINGDOM COME
The Puritans really believed it,” Peter mused, breaking the heavy silence that hung over the patio.
“Believed what?” asked David, not really caring.
We were sitting in back of Peter’s parents’ house in Florida, where we had met for an editorial conference, and we were facing the fact that our first draft of the Puritan chapters was little more than an outline of history. Gone was all enthusiasm for the material; we sensed that we were missing the point of what God had wanted us to see.
In the aftermath of that confrontation with reality, we were well into despondency. The early morning sun was filtering down through the fronds of the palm trees, bathing everything in a soft, delicate haze. Not a hint of a breeze stirred the trees. But we were oblivious to the beauty around us as we sat staring at our coffee cups.
“They actually believed,” Peter answered, speaking half to himself, “what few people have, before or since: that the Kingdom of God really could begin to come on earth, in their lifetimes. They knew that they were sinners. But like the Pilgrims, they were dedicated to actually living together in obedience to God’s laws, under the lordship of Jesus Christ.”
“Yes, but—” suddenly a breeze came out of nowhere and scattered several chapters’ worth of manuscript across the patio. As we gathered up the pages, it occurred to David that this was the only breeze to stir a paper in the last three days. When we sat back down, he dropped the questioning. All he said was, “Go on.”
Peter paused for a moment to recapture what had started coming to him. “All it needed, they felt, was the right time, the right place, and the right people. It hinged on that: if the right people were willing to commit themselves totally.”
For the next hour and a half, the Holy Spirit gave us insight after insight. The Puritans were the people who, more than any other, made possible America’s foundation as a Christian nation. Far from merely fleeing the persecutions of king and bishop, they determined to change their society in the only way that could make any lasting difference: by giving it a Christianity that worked. And this they set out to do, not by words but by example, in a place where it was possible to live the life to which Christ had called them: three thousand miles beyond the reach of the very church they were seeking to purify.
The Spirit also reminded us that the legacy of Puritan New England to this nation, which can still be found at the core of our American way of life, can be summed up in one word: covenant. We were reminded that on the night of the Last Supper, to those who were closest to him, Jesus said, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28 KJV).
Covenant is a word almost never heard in American life today, for it speaks of a commitment to Christ and to one another that is deeper and more demanding than most of us are willing to make. As a consequence, most of us modern American Christians are of little use to God in the building of His Kingdom. For the building of that kingdom, as the Puritans demonstrated, requires total commitment.
Sitting on the patio that morning, we were convicted that our own commitment did not yet measure up to that of the Puritans.
A candle had been bravely set at Plymouth, the first to confound the darkness of New England—but what of the candles still burning in Old England? What of the Puritans, the white lights of the Protestant Reformation? They were beginning to flicker—not through any faltering of zeal but under the combined pressure of accelerated persecution and the advanced moral decay in their society.
London in the 1620s has been romanticized almost out of reality by most modern writers. “Gay, colorful, lusty, brimming with all the drama of the Elizabethan Age”—this is the stereotype to which we have been conditioned. If one were there, one would breathe in the excitement of just being there, and one’s step would be a bit springier with the zest of it all. For who knew what adventure lurked round the next corner?
The truth of early seventeenth-century London is about as far removed from the paperback notion of it as today’s Manhattan is from “Fun City.” To begin with, you wanted to breathe in as little of old London as possible; in fact, a well-perfumed handkerchief was more a piece of survival equipment than a mannered affectation. And as for your step being springier, it had better be, considering what came flying out of upper windows to the cry of “Gardez-loo!”
No, London was not the sort of place where you would want to take your child for a walk, even in the morning. You would have to step warily to avoid drunkards and tosspots reeling and brawling in the narrow streets. The taverns did a roaring business around the clock as the main source of public entertainment, especially if one were not in the mood for a hanging or a play, or for watching dogs bait a bear or pull a screaming ape apart.1
Running the taverns a close second were the trollops who hung out of windows overhead, displaying their wares and pouring out a stream of commentary on all who passed below. As for adventure lurking around the next corner, thieves abounded in the teeming streets. Though robbery was a hanging crime, life had become so meaningless that it was worth risking in order to steal money enough for a few days’ oblivion in a grog shop. (No wonder there were 137 hanging offenses on the statute books. There had to be in order to maintain even a semblance of law and order.)
The real tragedy of London, however, was not confined to what was happening in its streets. It included what was happening in its heart. In the City, London’s financial district, life behind the massive oaken doors of mercantile power was every bit as brutalizing, even though it was played in Italian silks and fine brocade. For in a godless society, when it was possible to send out a ship and have it return with a cargo worth more than the ship itself, and interest rates of 50 percent were not uncommon, money became almost divine. The men who handled it did so with reverential respect and obeisance—loving, honoring, and worshiping it—while accumulating as much of it as possible, as quickly as possible.
If, as Paul wrote to Timothy, the love of money is the root of all evil, that might explain some of the other evils at London’s heart. Graft and bribery had become an accepted part of daily business. Cheating, double-dealing, betraying one’s word—or one’s friend—were all part of the game. The end invariably justified whatever means were necessary to obtain it.
London was an accurate spiritual barometer for the rest of the country, for England had become a nation without a soul. A beggar could die of exposure in a merchant’s doorway, and the merchant, arriving to open up in the morning would be irate at having to step over the body and would fret about how bad it might be for business until it was disposed of.
An old acquaintance might lose several ships to pirates and find himself fleeing the country ahead of his creditors or end up in a debtors’ prison. In which case, the response of his so-called friends might be: “Too bad about Forsythe, his luck giving out that way. But then, he knew the risks.”
In a transatlantic airliner, as the navigator plots the plane’s projected course, at a certain point he will make a neat dot and draw a tiny circle around it, labeling it PNR. Once that point is passed, for the plane to attempt to go back to its point of departure would require more fuel than remains on board. The plane has just passed the point of no return. America has not quite reached that point—yet.
Elizabethan England reached it in 1628. That was the year that William Laud, the Church of England’s “enforcer,” was made Bishop of London, the most important bishopric in the country. That year also marked the beginning of the Great Migration, which lasted some sixteen years. More than 20,000 Puritans embarked for New England, and 45,000 other Englishmen headed for Virginia, the West Indies, and points south. That may not seem like a significant number, but today it would be like some five million Americans packing up and leaving.
Who were these Puritans, and why was migration their only option? The Puritans were a growing number of people who had entered into a deep covenant relationship with God, through the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. For each, it was the single most important decision of his or her life, changing that life permanently and irrevocably.
If life had little meaning before, now it took on enormous significance. Not only had God Himself created each life; He also cared so much for each person that He sent His only Son to die for each one’s sins, to bridge that irreconcilable gap between them—sin-stained as they were—and a holy, just God. Thus, it became the redeemed person’s daily response to seek the will of the Savior and do it.
The Puritans were never the least bit complacent about their salvation. As the great English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter put it: “Man’s fall was his turning from God to himself; and his regeneration consisteth in the turning of him from himself to God. . . . [Hence,] self-denial and the love of God are all [one]. . . . The very names of Self and Own, should sound in the watchful Christian’s ears as very terrible, wakening words, that are next to the names of sin and Satan.”2
And Thomas Hooker, the most articulate of the New England Puritan ministers, spoke for all of them when he identified their primary adversary as not Satan but self. “Not what Self will, but what the Lord will!” declared Hooker. Self was “the great snare” and “the false Christ,” “a spider’s web [spun] out of our bowels, the very figure or type of hell.” To “lay down god-Self,” to purge “the Devil’s poison and venom or infection of Self,” was “to kill the old Adam in us” and to strike a blow against “Antichrist, that is, the Self in all.”3 The Puritans did not need to be overly concerned with the devil; if they directed their energies toward Christ and against self, Satan would have little enough access to them.
Since how a Puritan was faring in the battle against sin and self was more important than anything else, many of them kept spiritual journals. In England, one of the most dedicated Puritans was John Winthrop. Cambridge-educated and the owner of a sizable estate in Suffolk, Winthrop was an attorney in the Court of Wards and a Justice of the Peace. He penned these lines in 1612 at the age of twenty-four:
I desire to make it one of my chief petitions to have that grace to be poor in spirit. I will ever walk humbly before my God, and meekly, mildly, and gently towards all men. . . . I do resolve first to give myself—my life, my wits, my health, my wealth—to the service of my God and Saviour who, by giving Himself for me and to me, deserves whatsoever I am or can be, to be at His commandment and for His glory.4
And in 1616 he wrote:
O Lord . . . Thou assurest my heart that I am in a right course, even the narrow way that leads to heaven. Thou tellest me, and all experience tells me, that in this way there is least company, and that those who do walk openly in this way shall be despised, pointed at, hated by the world, made a byword, reviled, slandered, rebuked, made a gazing stock, called Puritans, nice fools, hypocrites, hare-brained fellows, rash, indiscreet, vainglorious, and all that naught is. Yet . . . teach me, O Lord, to put my trust in Thee, then shall I be like Mount Sion that cannot be moved.
Life was an unending battle between flesh and spirit for young Winthrop, as it is for most Christians.
Before the week was gone about, I began to lose my former affections. I upheld the outward duties, but the power and life of them was in a manner gone. . . . And still, the more I prayed and meditated, the worse I grew—the more dull, unbelieving, vain in heart, etc. so as I waxed exceeding discontent and impatient, being sometimes ready to fret and storm against God, because I found not that blessing upon my prayers and other means that I did expect. But, O Lord, forgive me! Searching my heart at last, I found the world had stolen away my love for my God. . . . Then I acknowledged my unfaithfulness and pride of heart, and turned again to my God, and humbled my soul before Him, and He returned and accepted me, and so I renewed my Covenant of walking with my God, and watching my heart and ways. O my God, forsake me not.
The American Antiquarian Society of Worcester owns the better-known of the two existing portraits of Winthrop. The viewer’s first impression of the painting is that Winthrop’s demeanor is a prime example of the stereotypical (and false) image that modern Americans have of the Puritans. His face is narrow and pinched, with a long nose leading to a mustache and a beard that nestles in a white ruff. His long brown hair falls below the ears, and his steadfast brown eyes gaze at us under high-arching eyebrows with solemnity. He is wearing a black doublet—which, his biographer Francis Bremer indicates, was not black because he was a Puritan, but rather was a sign that he was a man of some means. (Black was a costly color for clothes since it could not be produced by natural dyes). Both the doublet and the glove he holds in his right hand are silk, revealing his status as a successful magistrate.5
If one knows nothing of John Winthrop’s true character and holds to the typical image of the Puritans as sour, dour, gloomy, and judgmental prudes, one might look at this portrait and conclude that the stereotype is correct. But for Winthrop, as we shall see, that conclusion would be patently false. In point of fact, throughout Winthrop’s career as an attorney and a magistrate on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, he drew criticism for being too merciful in his judgments on lawbreakers. That hardly fits the image of the Puritans as stern and uncompassionate.
Winthrop’s covenant relationship with the Lord deepened through the years. His was to be a towering commitment to Christ, reminiscent of the French and Spanish missionaries before him. And as is often true of God’s saints, Winthrop’s union with his Savior and his corresponding compassion grew as the result of fiery personal trials. Impetuously wed at the age of seventeen to a spiritually indifferent Mary Forth, he fathered two daughters and two sons. But Mary died in June 1615 after giving birth to another daughter, who outlived her mother by only three days.
Six months later John married Thomasine Clopton, a devout Christian woman, “truly religious and industrious [who] did plainly show that truth and the love of God did lie at her heart.”6 Incredibly, tragedy again struck young Winthrop. At the end of November 1616, Thomasine gave birth to a daughter who lived only two days. Then she herself died on December 10, the day after their first wedding anniversary.
Finally, in the following year God brought him together with the lovely, gracious, and deeply pious Margaret Tyndal, who proved to be the love of his life. In one of his courtship letters to her before their marriage in 1618, he wrote: “The ground and pattern of our love is no other but that between Christ and His dear spouse (the Church). . . . Love bred our fellowship, let love continue it. And love shall increase it until death dissolve it.”7
During these years of Winthrop’s life, the Puritan movement was gaining momentum. When the radical, life-changing experience of conversion happened to a person, the natural thing was to share it with friends. God was now blessing these lives that were being lived for Him instead of primarily for self. This, in turn, made the Puritans ever more desirous of living according to His will. Since God’s will was made known to them largely through His inspired Word, they naturally wanted to get as close to a scriptural order of worship as possible. Indeed, what they ultimately wanted was to reform the spiritually stagnant Church of England and bring it back to the purity and simplicity of New Testament Christianity.
What they did not want was to tear away from the Anglican Church. They criticized the Separatists (Pilgrims) for this and pledged themselves to bring about the purification of the church within its framework by their own enlightened example. However, the bishops in charge of the church saw no need for any such purification and resented the Puritans for what they considered to be their intrusive, presumptuous, divisive, and holier-than-thou ways. The more the Puritans pushed, the more the bishops resisted, until there was open enmity.
The Puritan dilemma was similar to that of many newly regenerate Christians in our time. They faced a difficult choice: should they leave their seemingly lifeless churches to join or start a new one? Or should they stay where they were, to be used as that small candle to which William Bradford referred? Many of them felt that God had called them to walk the harder way of staying, so they stayed.
Too often, however, the attitude of their hearts was anything but submissive—and sooner or later this attitude was going to make itself known. Thus, many newly converted Puritans must have manifested—along with their contagious enthusiasm for the Christian life—a degree of self-righteousness, impatience, and spiritual superiority. As the Puritan movement came of age in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, it matured considerably. Adherents from all social classes and walks of life began to be attracted to it, including Oxford- and Cambridge-trained clergy and some of the most brilliant scholars and theologians of the age.
Now they faced their first hard testing, for Jesus had warned His disciples that the world would hate anyone who truly determined to follow Him. The Puritans were despised but were not hated as much as the Separatists, who had given up their homes, their jobs, their country—everything—to live as Jesus had called them.
Here was the core difference between the emigrating Puritans and Pilgrims: step by step God was leading the Puritans to the place where they would be willing to give up what the Pilgrims had already given up. For the Puritans had more than the Pilgrims—more money, more servants, more friends in high places, more power, more education, more business experience. They had more of everything except one thing: compassion.
Compassion is not something that can be learned, put on, or even prayed for. Compassion is produced through living out the daily sufferings and sacrifices of a life freely given to God. For the Pilgrims, compassion was the fruit of undergoing persecution so severe that they had to leave their native land or lose their lives; of twelve years of hard, penurious exile; of four months of dark, tossing, stinking, soaking torment; and four more of cold and sickly mortal suffering. It was the fruit of coming to know the depths of one’s sinful nature and the cleansing of daily repentance and forgiveness. It was experiencing the peace and joy that comes from knowing that one could do absolutely nothing without the grace of God and the Lord Jesus.
It was the greater depth of Christlike compassion and humility that for a few years marked the difference between the Puritans and the Pilgrims (with such notable Puritan exceptions as John Winthrop and Thomas Hooker). Moreover, the selflessness and caring of the Pilgrims happened not in a remote, cloistered setting or far-removed missionary hospital, but in America’s fields and woodlands. It is this spirit of compassion that continues to draw tourists to Plymouth in such great numbers, though perhaps not one in a thousand is consciously aware of it.
God was also bringing the Puritans into compassion and humility. For many of them it happened as He allowed the pressure of mounting persecution to come upon them. They accepted it with grace, and as persecution often does, it served to rapidly deepen and mature the movement, bonding them together in common cause and making them more determined than ever to live as God had called them.
For John Winthrop, the loss of two wives and what would turn out in the end to be a total of seven children was working not only compassion into his heart but also a genuine warmth and generosity of soul.
Now, however, there was some question as to the nature of God’s call on their lives. During the reign of King James I (1603–25), the persecution of the Puritans grew. The King filled vacancies in Church dioceses with anti-Puritan bishops and began listening to the advice of bishops like William Laud, who wanted to institute harsh measures against the reforming Puritans. When Charles I took the throne in 1625, Laud and his party of anti-Puritans came into control of the Church leadership. The situation became even worse for the Puritans. No sooner had the King made William Laud the Bishop of London in 1628 than Laud presented him with a list of English clergy. Behind each name was an O or a P. If Orthodox, they were in line for promotion; if Puritan, they were marked for suppression. Within a year Laud had created a network of informants within the churches to report on Puritan ministers who refused to conform to the new edicts and regulations, such as the one requiring clergy to read divine service in the proper vestments of surplice and hood.
For a number of Puritans, this was the last straw. Reformation of the Church of England from within no longer seemed possible.
Would they now have to go underground and start worshiping in secret? If so, they might as well face the fact that they were following in the footsteps of the Separatists, and separation was against everything the Puritans believed in. They were not revolutionaries, they insisted; they believed in orderly reform. The trouble was that the King and his bishops were not living in righteousness. Together, they were leading the people away from true New Testament Christianity.
To separate or not to separate? Out of this sharpening tension grew a startling alternative, one so radical that at first it was hard to contemplate, let alone pray about it. The possibility: the Church could still be reformed—but from a nine-hundred-league remove. It could be done in America.
Why not a settlement of Puritans there, loyal to the Crown and to the Church but sufficiently removed to have a chance to live in true obedience to God? There they could start over and demonstrate what could happen when a body of Christians was allowed to live wholly and totally unto God. Surely the fruits of living that way would not only stir up the Church, they would be a beacon to all Christendom.
The right place, the right time, and the right people . . . America was obviously the right place. Virginal, wild, and as yet untainted by the godless corruption that had befouled the known world, she was peopled with savage heathens who had never heard the Gospel and whose hearts therefore were not hardened against it.
These heathen, to be sure, could be used by Satan; John Winthrop and other Puritan leaders had read the writings of John Smith and Hakluyt and knew all about Virginia’s starving time and the great massacre of 1622. Perhaps they had also read of the early missionaries who were martyred by the savages they were trying to lead to Christ. But if God was with them, all the powers of hell could not prevail against them. The place, then, was America, and more specifically, New England. For the reports out of Plymouth were uniformly encouraging and reliable, in stark contrast to the gruesome accounts out of Virginia.
And the time was surely now: London was a veritable sink of depravity. And now in 1629 that the King had dissolved Parliament and announced that he would run the country by himself, it was not a question of when, but how soon.
A few farsighted Puritans could sense God’s hand in a coincidence of timing that was too extraordinary to be accidental. Had Columbus landed farther north . . . Had the Spanish colonization of Florida been successful . . . Had Raleigh succeeded in settling Roanoke . . . Had Jamestown been less of a catastrophe . . . Had America’s very existence not remained cloaked until the Reformation . . . Had her northeastern coast not been reserved for the Pilgrims and Puritans . . . To some, it must have seemed almost as if they were standing in the middle of a gigantic model of one of those newfangled pocket watches, with the wheels and gears of “coincidence” swinging around and meshing and turning other gears, which swung and turned others.
But they could see only behind them. Today we can see what lay ahead of them as well and sense just how extraordinary was the timing of the Puritan exodus. If Bishop Laud had not come to power and abetted King Charles in his drive to bring the Puritans to heel, or if the English Puritans’ revolution of 1642 had begun ten years earlier, there might not have been a Puritan exodus of sufficient numbers to seed America with spiritual liberty. For there were not nearly enough Pilgrims to do the work that was needed, let alone withstand the concerted pressure of Church and Crown. The Puritans were the right people.
When one considers the major events swinging slowly around on the biggest gears—the American Revolution, the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, the rise and wane of empires, the gradual aligning of the forces of darkness and light, and the gradual dimming of the brightest Light—time seems much compressed. It becomes apparent what the Bible means when it says that to God a thousand years is as a single day. Knowing human nature and knowing how few would freely choose His way, God knew what the twentieth century would hold in store—the totalitarian darkness that would arise out of Europe, Russia, and Asia—and knew that England alone would never have the spiritual power to stop it. And so, early in the seventeenth century He planted the seeds of Light that would make a difference hundreds of years later. The alignment of all the factors of time and place reminds one of what NASA calls a launch window—an interval of a few hours during which every predictable factor that might affect a moon shot or an outer space probe would be as favorable as it could be. Once the window passes, it might be weeks, months, or even years before conditions again line up as favorably.
The launching of the Puritan exodus to America was more awesome. From our vantage point, it looked as if in all the years of Christendom there was only one brief window, one main chance. And rather than lifting off from a stationary launch pad, it seemed as if the Puritans were a stone placed in a whirling sling and let fly just as the tiny window hove into view. Up and out they went, arcing right through it, clear to their landing place in America.
The right place, the right time, the right people. It remained to be seen if the right people would be willing to give themselves totally.
As the prospect of a Bible-based commonwealth in New England became a real possibility in the thinking of the most dedicated Puritans, events began to move quickly. First, the New England Company was reorganized as the Massachusetts Bay Company. A new, enlarged charter was routinely processed through Parliament and presented for His Majesty’s signature. But the King failed to notice that there was no mention of where the company’s meetings were to be held. He signed it and forgot about it. The wondrous timing of God can further be seen in the fact that less than a week later the King dissolved Parliament and took the reins of the country entirely into his own hands, thereafter jealously scrutinizing every document to ensure that his authority was in no way diminished.
The Massachusetts Bay Company’s partners were privately jubilant. Now there was nothing binding them to England, nothing to prevent them from moving to New England themselves and taking their charter with them. Once removed from the suspicious eyes of Church and Crown, the company could become a self-governing commonwealth with the charter as their statement of authority. But now they would be governed by the laws of God, not merely the laws of human beings. Not since God had brought the first chosen people into the first Promised Land had a nation enjoyed such an opportunity.
The Puritans’ exodus conspiracy shifted into high gear. Preparations had long been made, and soon after the new charter was secured, two ships with some two hundred people aboard sailed past Land’s End. As the coast of Cornwall faded in the distance, their leader, the Reverend Francis Higginson, exclaimed to the passengers: “We will not say, as the Separatists were wont to say at their leaving of England, ‘Farewell, Rome!’ or ‘Farewell, Babylon!’ But we will say, ‘Farewell, dear England! Farewell, the Church of God in England, and all the Christian friends there! We do not go to New England as Separatists from the Church of England, though we cannot but separate from the corruptions in it, but we go to practice the positive part of Church reformation, and propagate the Gospel in America!”8
The exodus had begun. But in order to gain the necessary momentum, it would need a Moses. The principal partners had such a man in mind—John Winthrop. But Winthrop himself was not at all sure that it was God’s will that he go. On such major steps as this, he knew that God sometimes seemed to withdraw Himself in order to give the individual the opportunity to sift and sort all possibilities and move out on faith. And so he did what so many Christians have done in similar situations: he drew up a list of pros and cons (which was later published9 and helped thousands of Puritans to clarify their own decisions).
His reasons for undertaking the intended plantation in New England included:
[It would be] a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospel into those parts of the world. . . .
All other Churches of Europe are brought to desolation . . . and who knows but that God hath provided this place to be a refuge for many whom He means to save out of the general calamity. [La Rochelle, the seaport bastion in which the French Huguenots had held out for two years, had just fallen to Cardinal Richelieu, and in Germany, Wallenstein was pulverizing the armies of the Protestants.] And seeing the Church hath no place left to fly into but the wilderness, what better work can there be, than to go and provide tabernacles and food for her against [that time when] she comes thither.
This land grows weary of her inhabitants, so as man, who is the most precious of all creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth we tread upon, and of less price among us than a horse or a sheep. . . .
. . . All arts and trades are carried in that deceitful and unrighteous course, [so] it is almost impossible for a good and upright man to maintain his charge and live comfortably in any of them.
The fountains of learning and religion are so corrupted as most children are perverted [and] corrupted.
Then Winthrop went on to state objections against the plantation and provided his answers. For example:
Obj: The ill success of other plantations may tell us what will become of this.
Ans: None of the former sustained any great damage but Virginia, which happened through their own sloth. . . . There were great and fundamental errors in the former which are like to be avoided in this, for their main end was carnal and not religious; they used unfit instruments, a multitude of rude and misgoverned persons, the very scum of the land; and they did not establish a right form of government.
Obj: It is attended with many and great difficulties.
Ans: So is every good action. . . . The way of God’s Kingdom, which is the best way in the world, is accompanied with the most difficulties.
Thus did John Winthrop come to be persuaded that it was God’s will for him to go to America. But in addition, there was an intensely personal struggle that he did not mention: on the one hand, there was his old friend and advisor, Robert Ryece, saying, “the Church and commonwealth here at home hath more need of your best ability in these dangerous times, than any remote plantation.” On the other hand, the principal Partners, who were preparing to go themselves, considered his presence so essential that they gave him an ultimatum: if he would not lead them, they would not go either, and the founding of the plantation would be doomed.10
It was settled then: he would go. As he put it: “I have assurance that my charge is of the Lord, and that He hath called me to this work.”11
On August 16, 1629, he met with the other principals at Cambridge, where many of them had attended university together. They put their lives where they had already put their money and their mouths (in contrast to the Virginia and Plymouth backers). The Cambridge Agreement, as it was called, stated that “It is fully and faithfully agreed amongst us . . . we will be ready in our persons . . . to embark for the said plantation by the first of March next . . . to pass the seas (under God’s protection) to inhabit and continue in New England.”12
As historian Perry Miller wrote, “Winthrop and his colleagues believed . . . that their errand was not a mere scouting expedition: it was an essential maneuver in the drama of Christendom. The Bay Company was not a battered remnant of suffering Separatists thrown up on a rocky shore; it was an organized task force of Christians, executing a flank attack on the corruptions of Christendom. These Puritans did not flee to America; they went in order to work out that complete reformation which was not yet accomplished in England and Europe.”13
Three days after the Cambridge Agreement, the decision was approved by the general membership, and on October 20 the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Company unanimously elected John Winthrop as their governor. He was soon burdened with the enormous headache of arranging passage for more than a thousand Puritans who were waiting to emigrate. But as was typical of Winthrop, the ships were ready on schedule.
By now a farewell sermon had become a tradition, and it was preached by a stalwart young Puritan minister named John Cotton, whose star was also destined to rise over New England. He preached on 2 Samuel 7:10 (KJV): “Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more, as beforetime.”
“Go forth,” Cotton exhorted, “with a public spirit,” with that “care of universal helpfulness. . . . Have a tender care . . . to your children, that they do not degenerate as the Israelites did.”
Samuel Eliot Morison put it thus: “Cotton’s sermon was of a nature to inspire these new children of Israel with the belief that they were the Lord’s chosen people; destined, if they kept the covenant with Him, to people and fructify this new Canaan in the western wilderness.”14
Cotton concluded his sermon with these words:
What He hath planted, He will maintain. Every plantation His right hand hath not planted shall be rooted up, but His own plantation shall prosper and flourish. When He promiseth peace and safety, what enemies shall be able to make the promise of God of none effect? Neglect not walls and bulwarks and fortifications for your own defense, but ever let the name of the Lord be your strong tower, and the word of His promise, the rock of your refuge. His word that made heaven and earth will not fail, till heaven and earth be no more.