Just a little more than a week will pass until almost all Americans, regardless of their origins and particular creeds, celebrate that most American holiday - the one known as Thanksgiving. Too, most Americans who sit at a table on that final Thursday of each November know that this holiday has something to do with people who called themselves "Puritans." Though their numbers were never very large compared to the other European settlers who came to the "new world" in the seventeenth century, their influence (some say) was the greatest of all. So it seems timely that for your final little essay to invite you to learn a bit more about them, perhaps to wonder in what ways have the values of the earliest arrivals in America, the Puritans of New England, influenced the national "ethic" of the modern United States of America? On page 483, your textbook (The Western Heritage) provides one way to do so by reproducing an excerpt from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (written in 1629) and prompts you to consider a few questions based upon the text - which I reproduce for you here (along with the introductory questions):

=========================================

1. How does Winthrop put the emigration of the Puritans into the pattern of biblical history?
2. What are the signs of religious conviction that he sees in Europe and England?
3. What steps, if any, might the English monarch have taken to persuade such people to remain in England?

1. It will be a service to the Church of great consequences to carry the gospel into those parts of the world, . . . and raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts.

2. All other churches of Europe are brought to desolation, and our sins, for which the Lord begins already to frown upon us and to cut us short, do threaten evil times to be coming upon us; and who knows that God hath provide this place to be a refuge for many whom he means to save out of the general calamity, 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. . . .

3. This land [England] 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 an horse or a sheep . . . and thus it has come to pass that children, servants, and neighbors, especially if they be poor, are counted the greatest burdens, which, if things were right, would be the chiefest earthly blessings.

4. The whole earth is the Lord's garden, and he hath given it to the sons of men with a general commission [Genesis i. 28] to increase and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it, which was again renewed to Noah; the end is double and natural, that man may enjoy  the fruits of the earth and God might have his due glory from the creature. Why then should we stand here and striving for places of habitation, etc. (many men spending as much labor and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would procure them many, and as good or better, in another country), and in the meantime suffer a whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement?

..................................................................

7. What can be a better work or more honorable and worthy a Christian than to help raise and support a particular church while it is in its infancy, and join his forces with such a company of faithful people as by a timely assistance many grow strong and prosper, and for want of it may be put to great hazard, if not wholly ruined.

Due date will be 9 December.