A Model of Christian Charity Summary & Analysis

Winthrop suggests that inequality proves God’s love, since it allows God to change one life differently from another. By establishing God’s power and love, Winthrop reasons that inequality is an unavoidable and essential element of life. So if it can’t be avoided, it must be embraced. This factual foundation clears the way for Winthrop’s third reason: that inequality exists so people can rely on each other. This marriage of inequality and “brotherly affeccion”—which he later calls love—provides the main thesis for his sermon. Eager for the Massachusetts Bay Colony to run like a well-oiled machine, he has calculated this message to inspire his audience into a happy coexistence.

Here, Winthrop explains how love unites humans in a society. He introduces the concept of mercy. which is the impulse that moves humans to act compassionately towards one another, to give, and to help their neighbors. Coupled with mercy is justice, which loosely corresponds to the laws dictated by the Bible and by society. Winthrop’s distinction here—between people’s intrinsic ability to act morally (mercy), and the extrinsic laws enforced upon them (justice)—suggests the heavy emphasis he places on human’s inner decision making. What kind of Christian acts moral only when scared of getting in trouble? Instead, people must absorb Christian teachings into their private habits. He stresses this inner motivation throughout the sermon, urging his colonists to cultivate their own moral compasses while living in Massachusetts, rather than relying entirely on the laws of the Bible.

Winthrop keeps his definition of mercy vague to enable the broadest possible moral interpretation. But it’s clear from his discussion of lending that he has financial charity in mind—giving money to those in need. Probably this financial element is in part a reaction against his job as middle-class landlord in rural England (despite the sermon, Winthrop was never a churchman); throughout the early 1600s, the countryside was changing, capitalism was growing, and Winthrop would have seen new pressures on landlords like himself to hike rent and evict rural tenants in favor of grazing fields, a lucrative but ruthless agricultural transformation called “enclosure.”

Winthrop’s pseudo-communistic urging to give “liberally” with no worry of repayment is profoundly uncapitalistic; it stands in stark contrast to the prevailing economic attitudes of the time, and it speaks volumes to the selflessness of the society he envisions in Massachusetts.

Here, Winthrop explains that his reasoning for such selfless liberality is a Protestant conception of humans as nothing before God, as unworthy of possessions, and therefore as unentitled to regard the material world as truly their own. In order to emphasize the purity of his colonists’ religious views, he makes reference to early Christians who followed Christ’s teachings before the Catholic Church introduced its many rituals and scriptural interpretations.

“Love”—the essential theme of the sermon—is front and center here. In this passage and the one to follow, Winthrop uses three distinct images to illustrate humanity’s unity and the love with which the colonists ought to treat one another, starting here with the image of clockwork and then moving into the image of the human body and the knitting of fabric. It is not these items themselves that are important to Winthrop, but rather the unifying forces that make them useful. A clock’s kinetic energy, the body’s ligaments, and a fabric’s interlocking weave all represent harmonious combinations of disparate elements. Individual parts (gears, organs, and thread) only work in tandem.

While a grammarian might say that Winthrop is mixing his metaphors (that is, confusing different types of figurative language), the fact that Winthrop crams these images together into such a dense verbal patchwork shows the urgency of his thoughts on love and his desire to communicate poetically. He extends his body metaphor especially far here, turning from the individual human body to the abstract image of Christ’s body and the “body” of the Christian Church; all of these extensions reinforce the godliness of the type of love he advocates.

Eager to explain that brotherly love is a naturally occurring feeling—and thus a worthy social principle—Winthrop delves into a psychological account of the emotion. Although it’s easy to be selfish, he says that humans’ desire to be around others like themselves is a stronger feeling. Humans naturally group together because they are born liking things that resemble them—so why not embrace this in civic life, and form a mutually dependent society?

Winthrop pulls in three kinds of evidence to convince his audience that people need each other: Biblical stories that show figures bound emotionally to one another, psychological descriptions of familiar feelings like “sympathy” (above), and classical wisdom from the Roman era. These last two types of evidence are out of place in a Christian sermon, meant to argue only from Biblical evidence. Radically, Winthrop’s psychologizing and classical learning suggest that humans can arrive at moral truths (i.e., truths about how humans ought to live pious social lives) from their own life experience, their own self-observation, and their wider reading. The Bible, for Winthrop, is not the only place where one can find truth. This is a very “humanist” rather than Christian approach, one more associated with Renaissance writers like Shakespeare. The ancient Latin saying he quotes (Simile simili gaudet) means literally that “similar things rejoice in each other”; it had most famously appeared in a book that had nothing to do with Christianity, the Adages of Erasmus of Rotterdam, a great humanist scholar of Greek and Latin. It had been reprinted in London as recently as 1621, eight years before Winthrop was writing. It might have been familiar with the more well-read of his colonists, who would have recognized the extremely broad reach of Winthrop’s moral argument.

Winthrop punctuates his arguments about love with two main points: that love is the greatest feeling on earth, and that this feeling, though an invisible emotion, is a very real thing (much like the invisible kinetic energy that moves the cogs of a clock). He emphasizes these things to convince his audience that something as intangible as an emotion can in fact become the foundation of a successful society. And in a putdown where readers discover Winthrop’s cheeky side, he drives his message home by suggesting that while spouses may tire of each other, neighbors can uphold this love and channel it into a functioning society.

Winthrop refers back to the Church of England—the entity from which his colonists are about to split off—not with animosity at its degradations into King Charles I’s overt Catholicism, but with more love. He asks his colonists to regard their Puritan utopia as a satellite church to “farre distant” England, not as a divorced refugee from it. This emphasis on the mother church says a lot about Winthrop’s motives in starting a Puritan colonial outpost. He wants the English church to reform itself based on their example, not to sink further into sin. The body metaphor extends across the Atlantic, not just within his Massachusetts Bay Colony; he hopes one vigorous appendage will heal the rest of the body. To further celebrate “publique” over “perticuler” needs, he finds yet another example: the Waldenses, a sect of 12th-century rebellious Christians in Lyon who rejected the Catholic Church centuries before reformers like Martin Luther. Winthrop invokes their tight-knit society to tempt his colonists into godly communism.

Winthrop heightens the drama of their colony by discussing its “extraordinary” status. Nothing like it has ever existed before, so it is doubly important that his colonists love each other “fervently” and “without dissimulation” (meaning openly, without concealing one’s thoughts). Further, his colonists must “beare one anothers burthens” (an old spelling of “burdens”) and watch out for each other’s “things” (not material things, but, rather, each other’s affairs). This passages shows the importance of transparency and fellowship to Winthrop’s ideal society.

The stereotype about Puritan sermons is that they are scary, threatening, and always about damnation. Winthrop has delivered a full sermon on the topic of love, but he now briefly introduces the threat of God’s wrath. He does so in order to stress two things: the gravity of his colonists’ project in New England, and that the “love” he has been discussing is not an airy romantic feeling but rather a very real social bond upon which a community might be built. He also alludes to “strange fire and strange sacrifices”—an oblique reference to the incense-burning and ritual-heavy Catholic Church which he and his Puritans don’t like. They see their stripped-down, Scripture-based approach as more “pure,” and more “neare” to God himself; because they are so near God, Winthrop says, they are in even more danger of incurring his wrath should they fail.

Winthrop ends his sermon with another point about the moral pressure his colonists are under. In his most quoted passage (which borrows from the Book of Matthew), Winthrop calls his Massachusetts Bay a “citty upon a hill” in order to stress its visibility. Their project is so unique that everyone is paying attention. Should their community fall into strife, or otherwise fail, everyone in the world will take note and discount Puritanism as a viable type of Christianity; in doing so, they will have failed God, whose only hope for an anti-Catholic resurgence lay with them.