They wanted to select their own ministers and decide on their own rules while remaining a part of the Church of England. But a small group of radical Puritans broke away from the Church of England entirely, a breach of English law for which they were persecuted. They were called Separatists. But the Separatists had given up on that goal. They have the same outlook. They follow the same principles. In , about a hundred separatist Puritans fled to the Netherlands, where they hoped to be able to practice their faith freely.
They spent 10 years living in the city of Leiden, but hard work and poor living conditions began to take a toll on their health. They also worried that Dutch youth were corrupting their children. So in , a fraction of the congregation — about 37 Separatists — decided to sail to America to form a new religious colony.
They sailed to Southampton, England, and on September 6, with backing from a London merchant and a patent to settle in the Virginia Colony, they set sail on the Mayflower, headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, which at that time was part of the Virginia Colony. After a rough crossing, the Mayflower arrived at the tip of Cape Cod on November Dangerous sandbars and rough waters prevented them from reaching the Hudson River, so the Pilgrim leaders decided they should remain on the Cape.
Following hard upon the arrival in New England, dissident groups within the Puritan sect began to proliferate— Quakers , Antinomians, Baptists—fierce believers who carried the essential Puritan idea of the aloneness of each believer with an inscrutable God so far that even the ministry became an obstruction to faith. Puritanism gave Americans a sense of history as a progressive drama under the direction of God, in which they played a role akin to, if not prophetically aligned with, that of the Old Testament Jews as a new chosen people.
Perhaps most important, as Max Weber profoundly understood, was the strength of Puritanism as a way of coping with the contradictory requirements of Christian ethics in a world on the verge of modernity. It supplied an ethics that somehow balanced charity and self-discipline. It counseled moderation within a psychology that saw worldly prosperity as a sign of divine favor.
Such ethics were particularly urgent in a New World where opportunity was rich, but the source of moral authority obscure. By the beginning of the 18th century, Puritanism had both declined and shown its tenacity. Puritanism, however, had a more significant persistence in American life than as the religion of black-frocked caricatures.
It survived, perhaps most conspicuously, in the secular form of self-reliance, moral rigor and political localism that became, by the Age of Enlightenment , virtually the definition of Americanism. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. In September , during the reign of King James I, a group of around English men and women—many of them members of the English Separatist Church later known to history as the Pilgrims—set sail for the New World aboard the Mayflower.
Two months later, the three-masted Some people, many of them seeking religious freedom in the New World, set sail from England on the Mayflower in September That November, the ship landed on the shores of Cape Cod, in present-day Massachusetts. A scouting party was sent out, and in late December the In September , a merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, a port on the southern coast of England.
Anne Hutchinson was an influential Puritan spiritual leader in colonial Massachusetts who challenged the male-dominated religious authorities of the time.
Through the popularity of her preaching, Hutchinson defied the gender roles in positions of power and gathered That story is incomplete—by the time Englishmen had begun to establish colonies in earnest, there were plenty of French, Spanish, Dutch and even On May 14, , a group of roughly members of a joint venture called the Virginia Company founded the first permanent English settlement in North America on the banks of the James River.
Famine, disease and conflict with local Native American tribes in the first two years The Protestant Reformation was the 16th-century religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval that splintered Catholic Europe, setting in place the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the modern era.
In northern and central Europe, reformers As a longtime member of a Puritan group that separated from the Church of England in , William Bradford lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade before sailing to North America aboard the Mayflower in Combined with her penchant for basing her teachings on her own direct revelations rather than on the Scriptures, she posed a threat to colonial government that was met with her banishment, with Winthrop serving as one of her judges.
He is co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the First Amendment. This article was originally published in Morgan, Edmund S. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, Harrison, Cynthia. John R.
John Winthrop [electronic resource].
0コメント