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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Model of Christian Charity, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inequality and Love
Possession and Selflessness
Instinct, Law, and Scripture
Summary
Analysis
An epigraph at the top of the page notes that Winthrop penned this sermon while he and his fellow colonists were aboard the Arabella en route to New England from Great Britain in the year 1630.
Much of Winthrop’s sermon centers around life’s difficulty and inequality, which would have resonated with his audience of Puritan colonists on the eve of a very difficult relocation to a fledgling society. Their beliefs had been maligned by the established government, and their only way out—a relocation across the Atlantic—was going to be extremely difficult.
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Winthrop then introduces his sermon with an observation: God has created a world in which some people are rich while others are poor, and some are powerful while others are lowly and weak.
Almost all sermons open on a section of the Bible—Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is a good example. Bucking this tradition, Winthrop opens with a simple observation: life is unfair and inequality is everywhere. This is a strongly Protestant way of preaching; it suggests that anyone can arrive at moral truths not just by reading the official sacred text (the Bible) but also by simply observing the world around them.
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Winthrop does not demarcate sections in his sermon, but his argument naturally unfolds in five parts. In the first of these, Winthrop unpacks his observation about social inequality, addressing the question of how a loving God could allow pain in the world. Winthrop offers three reasons why God has created inequality. One is that the variety inherent in disparity (that people are rich or poor, strong or weak, etc.) accurately reflects the breadth of his creation.
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Another reason is that, since everyone is so different, God can enter their lives in equally different ways, which is further proof of his variety and greatness. The third—and most important—reason that God has placed people in such different fortunes is so that they might discover a need for one another. This need, says Winthrop, is the unifying “bond of brotherly affeccion.”
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Expanding on his third reason, Winthrop outlines two necessary means by which the “poor” and the “rich” uphold lasting “brotherly affeccion”: justice and mercy. These terms, says Winthrop, represent the laws of “nature” and of “grace,” respectively, “the morrall lawe or the lawe of the gospel.” The law of nature, says Winthrop, applies to humans “in the estate of innocency,” while the law of grace to humans “in the estate of regeneracy.” He twice quotes Christ’s Sermon on the Mount to illustrate the social compassion represented by mercy: namely, “Whatsoever ye would that men should doe to you.”
In his second section, Winthrop describes the kind of behavior mercy inspires in those who feel it. It asks people to give, to lend, and to forgive. Winthrop gives his audience six important practical considerations for a merciful life in society. These have to do with “liberallity” (giving money or goods) or lending. The first consideration is that people ought to give charitably whenever possible. However, as Winthrop adds in his second consideration, the needs of one’s family come first. Third, citing Christ’s Sermon again (“Lay not upp for yourselves treasures upon earth”), Winthrop advises against “layeing upp,” or stockpiling wealth, because such hoarding neglects the present needs of others.
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Winthrop’s fourth consideration is that giving is particularly necessary when the borrower cannot repay the debt, as this signifies great need. Fifth, with reference to Christ’s Golden Rule (“Whatsoever ye would that men should doe to you doe ye the same to them allsoe”), Winthrop urges regular forgiveness of debts incurred even through business.
Winthrop’s last consideration for the merciful life explains why he urges his audience to give so much “with more enlargement towards others and lesse respect for our selves.” He claims no one truly owns “that which he possessed,” reminding his audience that the ancient “primitive churche” adopted a communistic view of worldly possessions without ownership.
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Winthrop’s third section probes the feeling behind mercy: brotherly affection, or love. Just as a clock, once wound, strikes the hour on its own, humans act mercifully to each other when “love [is] in the heart.” Love, says Winthrop, must be felt intuitively (i.e., “not by force of argument,” law, or scripture) in order to inspire action. But once truly felt, love will “natively bring forthe” mercy and liberality, “as any cause doth produce the effect.”
The result is a happy social unification. Just as the human body unites disparate body parts into one entity, love, “the bond of perfection,” “knitts” humans together. Winthrop invokes “the most perfect of all bodies[,] Christ and his church,” as an example of this ideal unity. Winthrop concludes that all humans are symbolically “of one body” and must therefore “partake of each others strength and infirmity, joy, and sorrowe, weale and woe.”
The image of one continuous, sympathetic body bound by the “ligamentes” of love leads Winthrop into his fourth section, a psychological account of how love works on the human mind. Activated by feelings like “sensibleness” and “Sympathy,” people naturally group together because the human mind is attracted to things like itself.
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Although every man (and woman, despite Winthrop’s male-centric language) “is borne with this principle in him, to love and seeke himself only,” this fondness for the self can in fact, with Christ, turn outwards to embrace other people. He quotes a Latin saying as evidence: simile simili gaudet, meaning “like will to like.” Just as “the Lord loves the creature” he fashioned in his godly image, so too man (or any human) “cannot but love him as he loves himself.” Winthrop cites biblical stories—Eve’s love for Adam, and Jonathan’s “hearte knitt[ing]” to David’s—for further evidence.
Love, says Winthrop, is the best feeling on earth, says Winthrop; “nothing yeildes more pleasure and content […] for to love and live beloved is the soules paradise, both heare and in heaven.” After an aside on romantic love—in which he suggests that social love among neighbors is more durable—Winthrop concludes that “love among Christians is a reall thing not imaginarie.” Further, love is essential to the Christian life; in fact, it brings people closer to the level of God, who has infinite love.
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Winthrop’s final section makes an “applicacion” of his arguments about love to his colonists’ future in Massachusetts, since “wee ought to account our selves knit together by this bond of love.” This invisible spiritual unity connects them all not only to each other in the colony but also to their “farre distant” mother church in England. In the colony, “civill pollicy”—“not onely conscience”—must defend “publique” against “perticuler” needs.
Winthrop reminds his fellow colonists that they will be serving God and must guard against “the common corruptions of this evill world.” Their mission is “extraordinary, therefore wee must not content our selves with usuall ordinary meanes.” They must “love brotherly without dissimulation,” love “fervently,” “beare one anothers burthens,” regard “the things of our brethren.”
Because of their colony is “extraordinary,” Winthrop warns that the moral weight to his colonists’ Puritan project is greater than ever before. God’s punishment of their moral failings, he says, will be more severe in Massachusetts than it was in England. This is because their new bond with God will be “more neare,” and thus more subject to God’s “jealous[y].” This nearness is partly because Puritans like himself and his audience have rejected the “strange fire and strange sacrifices” of the Catholic Church. Lastly, their Puritan society in Massachusetts constitutes a promise to God, punishable by God’s “wrathe” and “prosecut[ion]” if broken.
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Winthrop ends these thoughts on his colonists’ severe moral pressures, by sketching an image of their destination as a “citty upon a hill,” visible to all globally and in “posterity.” Since they are “professours for Gods sake,” examples to the world of the Puritanical life, it is imperative that they succeed as a functioning colony, “knitt together in this worke as one man.”
