Chapter 6: A Shining City on a Hill. When the Puritan leader, John Winthrop, arrived at Salem Harbor in 1630 aboard his flagship named the Arbella, he gave a sermon to the approximately 1,000 colonists who had accompanied him on the voyage. American Christians today often quote a famous passage from that sermon. "We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.
If we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and of all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants." Winthrop's words proved to be prophetic.
Today, most Americans and much of Europe know about Puritan New England, and what happened in Puritan New England largely flavors the view that secular Americans and Europeans have toward conservative, Bible-believing Christians. And, sadly, it has given the world a negative view of Christians. It has opened the mouths of our enemies to speak evil of the ways of God. But why? A brief review of the history of New England tells us why. The founding of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In England, a number of Puritans were aristocrats, and they had important connections in the king's court. To be sure, the king himself, Charles I, son of King James, didn't like the Puritans. Nevertheless, he had included some of the Puritans in his court, so those Puritans in the king's inner circles began working to obtain a charter for a colony in the New World.
Those Puritans had to pull a number of the strings and even pay some bribes to get it done, but at last they obtained a royal charter creating the Massachusetts Bay Company. King Charles didn't necessarily know that he was creating a Puritan colony. Nothing in the charter says anything about Puritans or a religious refuge. The charter created a trading company and gave it the authority to rule the colony of Massachusetts. According to the charter, the purpose of the venture was for commercial gain.
The other purposes, stated, were to spread the king's dominion and to bring Christianity to the Native Americans. The charter for Massachusetts was patterned closely after the one that King James had granted to the Virginia Company, and it was very generous. It granted full English citizenship to the settlers, their offspring, and anyone else who settled with them in Massachusetts. It also gave the Massachusetts Bay Company and its members the power to appoint a governor and a legislative assembly.
The legislature had the power to pass any laws it wanted, so long as "such laws and ordinances are not contrary or repugnant to the laws and statutes of this our realm of England." In 1626, before the charter was officially issued, about 400 English citizens, who were mostly Puritans, left England for Massachusetts. Their first settlement in Massachusetts was Salem. The next year, the Massachusetts Bay Company selected a London attorney, John Winthrop, to be the first governor of Massachusetts.
Thereafter, he and about 1,000 others set off for Salem. The Arbella Sermon. As I mentioned, when their ships landed at Salem Harbor, John Winthrop delivered a stirring sermon to the new settlers about how they should live in this new land. Most of his advice was very good. Among other things, he told the settlers, "Now the only way to avoid shipwreck and to provide for our prosperity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.
For this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man. We must entertain each brother in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality.
We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as his own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us.
When ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, may the Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." Some Christians have the erroneous view that the Puritans came to Massachusetts to plant a new nation. But that wasn't the case at all.
The Puritans were English citizens who came to New England under the authority of the king. In his Arbella message, Winthrop was saying that if he and the other Puritan colonists would live by the principles he enumerated, then their colony would be the envy of other English colonies such as Virginia. In other words, they, as Puritans, would show the world what a real Christian community looks like. But did they? Dishonest Politics.
Unfortunately, the ideals expressed in the Arbella Sermon floundered almost immediately. The new group of Puritan settlers who came with Winthrop got into arguments with the original Puritan settlers in Salem over various church issues, so Winthrop's group moved from Salem and started a fresh settlement named Charlestown. Before long, Winthrop left Charlestown and started a third settlement at a better location. He named the new settlement Boston after a town in England where many Puritans lived.
As persecution of the Puritans in England grew worse under Charles I, it led to what often is called the Great Migration. Up to 20,000 Puritans left England and came to Massachusetts, so Massachusetts quickly became a large colony and Boston became one of the most important cities in America. Ironically, after setting forth such noble principles in the Arbella speech, John Winthrop was the first to violate them. He dishonestly hid the charter of Massachusetts from everyone for four years.
This allowed him to govern Massachusetts as an autocrat. In some ways, his course of action was not surprising because the Puritans had a deep distrust of democracy. To illustrate, the enormously influential Puritan minister, John Cotton, wrote, "I do not believe that God ever ordained democracy as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people are to be governors, who shall be governed?
As for monarchy and aristocracy, both of them are clearly approved and directed in Scripture." The colonists in Massachusetts didn't like John Winthrop's autocratic rule. So finally, in 1634, the colonial deputies demanded to see the charter that Winthrop had kept hidden from them. When Winthrop finally relented and let them see the charter, the deputies learned that the charter required all laws to be made by the legislature, called the general court, not by the governor.
So the deputies demanded that the charter be enforced to the letter. Winthrop initially refused to do so, but he eventually gave in. When the legislature eventually met, they promptly voted Winthrop out of office. Massacring the Indians. The Indians living in Massachusetts were generally willing to accommodate the new Puritan settlers, just as they originally had accepted the pilgrims. However, this was only so long as these new English settlers remained in small numbers.
Had only 1,000 settlers come, there would have been sufficient room for the colonists and the Indians to live side by side. But, as I've said, in a span of little more than a decade, up to 20,000 Puritans came to New England. This put a severe strain on the limited hunting and fishing grounds of the local Indians. Before long, the Indians realized that if they didn't fight back, they would be pushed out of their land altogether.
But when the Indians started fighting for their rights in their land, the Puritans viewed it as though the red Canaanites were unfairly and viciously attacking them. In the Puritans' minds, this gave the Puritans the justification to retaliate. Sadly for the Indians, the Puritans had powerful weapons with which to strike back. What particularly makes the Puritans look bad today in the eyes of the world is the Mystic Massacre.
In 1637, word had reached the Puritans that the Pequot Indians were planning to attack them. As had the pilgrims before them, the Puritans decided they would attack the Indians first. So one night, Captain John Mason led a band of Puritan soldiers as they stole upon a Pequot village near the Mystic River in Massachusetts. The village itself was protected by a palisade fence, a barrier made of pointed sticks. The Puritans, who were accompanied by Indian allies, surrounded the Pequot village.
Then some of the Puritan militia slipped through the gate. They began slaughtering the sleeping Indians at random. Then Captain Mason grabbed a burning stick and threw it on the roof of one of the huts. The Indian huts were made of woven straw mats, and they were packed very closely together, so the fire spread instantly. The Puritans ran out of the burning village, shut the gate behind them, and waited outside with their guns.
Within minutes, the entire village was in flames, and nearly all of the Indian men, women, and children were burned alive. If any Indians tried to flee out of the gate or climb over the fence, the Puritans shot them down with their muskets. After annihilating the main village of the Pequots, the Puritans then hunted down the Pequots from other villages, driving them into a swamp. Here, they gave the Pequots the choice of either being slaughtered or surrendering and being sold as slaves.
The women who surrendered were made domestic slaves. The men who surrendered were shipped off to the West Indies to work as slaves on the sugar plantations, where they quickly died. Afterward, one of the Puritans gloated, "Doubtless there was no other way better to chastise the insolence of these insulting homicides than a sharp war pursued with dexterity and speed. Virginia, our mother plantation and for her precedent, has taught us a rule as to what to do in these difficulties.
Forewarned, forearmed, the Virginians were endangered by their friendship and peace with the Indians." The pilgrims were in the process of joining up with the Puritans for the attack on the Pequots, but they arrived after the battle was already over. Still, they heartily approved of what had taken place. William Bradford, the pilgrim leader, later described the incident from eyewitness reports, "It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire, with streams of blood quenching it.
The smell was horrible, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave praise to God who had worked so wonderfully for them." After the Mystic Massacre, the Puritans fought other bloody Indian wars. Eventually, the Puritans exterminated most of the Indian population of Massachusetts and Connecticut. By their actions, the Puritans showed that they had no real understanding of the kingdom of God. They imagined they were like the Israelites in Canaan and were being attacked by the Philistines.
Somehow, they never grasped the kingdom teachings of Jesus. They said they trusted in God, but their violent methods showed they actually trusted in their superior weapons. Unfortunately, the Mystic Massacre was only the beginning of the Puritans' trampling on Christ's teaching. As to trusting in God, things only went from bad to worse.