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These Massachusetts Bay Puritans vested their enterprise with cosmic implications. It was probably aboard the Arbella, the ship that carried Winthrop and other future leaders of Massachusetts, that Winthrop preached his sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity. In this sermon, Winthrop clarified the importance of the Puritan community. Wee shall be, he said, as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all the people are uppon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present helpf from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Nothing ever written better expresses the American sense of destiny. Daniel Boorstin observes that The Puritan beacon for misguided mankind was to be neither a book nor a theory. It was to be the community itself. America had something to teach all men: not by precept but by example, not by what it said but by how it lived. Or, as Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury state the case in From Puritanism to Postmodernism, migrants were seen as new Israelites, small bands placed firmly on the stage of cosmic history. . . . [Their] arrival in the New World marks a specific point on a historical continuum which had begun with creation and will cease only with the apocalyptic fullness of Gods final judgment
This emphasis on the community gave Puritanism a practical bent in spite of its origins in the minutiae of Protestant theological doctrine. It is instructive that in the very first year in America Winthrop called a meeting of freemen to agree to their frame of government and to elect their leaders. Even with a royal charter, Winthrop believed consent of the governed was required for a due form of government. Fundamental deviation from the Puritan theological system was simply unknown. On those few occasions where it arose, in the case of Roger Williams most especially, it was silenced by banishment or, in the case of Mary Dyer, execution. More typically, controversies centered on practical matters of governance. Laws were modeled closely on the Bible. In 1647 at Cambridge a Synod defined the role of the magistrates as nursing fathers to the church within their bounds.
With this emphasis on community and with their predisposition not to separate, i.e., to accommodate insofar as possible, we see the beginnings of the New England Way. Until the time of Jonathan Edwards in the middle of the eighteenth century, again if we except Roger Williams, there was hardly an important work of speculative theology produced in New England. Instead there came from New England an abundance of sermons, statutes, and remarkable works of history. Their disputes were more practical than theoretical. They experienced crises over who should rule, whether the towns should be represented in the General Court as they were after 1634 by deputies, a system that by 1644 produced a bicameral legislature. They argued over the power or representation of different classes,
whether penalties for crime should be fixed by statute, whether the deputies should have a veto, whether outlying towns should have greater representation in the General Court. Again to quote Daniel Boorstin, if, indeed, the Puritans were theology-minded, what they argued about was institutions. Their attention focused less on doctrine than on the living community. Alternative points of view were not welcome. In 1647 Nathaniel Ward spoke for Massachusetts Bay in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam when he declared: I dare take upon me, to be the Herauld of New-England so farre as to prroclaime to the world, in the name of our Colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts, shall have free Liberty to keep away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better. In their very success in keeping the community orthodox, the Puritans made it sterile of speculative thought. This sterility and intolerance is probably the most unattractive element of Puritan thought, and it has been noted by every critic from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. The boundless physical space, the surrounding wilderness into which dissenters were driven, deprived New England ministry of the need to develop within its own theology that spaciousness, that room for variation, which came to characterize Puritanism in England. Thus it was English Puritans, not their American cousins, who first developed ideas of toleration in the English-speaking world. Persons looking for the ideological roots of liberty, for a firm commitment of these early Americans to toleration and respect for others, will be profoundly disappointed. Nearly every American, unless educated in history, naively believes that these hardy pioneers were dedicated to freedom; it is almost an embarrassment to discover that they never even wrestled with the idea. Yet, this very failure was for a time a source of strength. They focused on community building, and orthodoxy strengthened their practical bent.
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