Instinct, Law, and Scripture Theme Analysis

John Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” is remarkably free from the fear-mongering and moral injunctions typically associated with early American Puritanism. Though a short passage on God’s “wrath” comes near the end, Winthrop’s pressing insistence throughout the sermon is on “brotherly love,” “affection,” and “sympathy.” He does not define laws in the vein of the Ten Commandments, nor does he define the exact rules of a model Protestant community. Winthrop’s love and affection are abstract psychological concepts, and his arguments about them—that people ought to listen to their innate impulses to charity—rely above all on human intuition. Winthrop implicitly suggests that though Scripture, laws, and rules certainly have their place in Christianity, Christians should also let their natural inclinations to be loving and charitable guide their behavior.

Much of what Winthrop urges is a sensitivity to innate human feelings—an urging that will develop into his insistence that Christians can derive instruction from their own feelings, not just from scripture. Brotherly love, argues Winthrop, is something all humans are born with. To overcome selfishness and hardship is just a matter of listening to one’s instincts. Winthrop spends a good deal of time exploring subtle psychological instincts that constitute this “bond of love,” like “sympathy,” “sensibleness,” and “mercy”—all instincts that rely on human connections and experience. He infers from these instincts certain important moral attitudes, namely that humans want innately to be together and to cooperate. For instance, he states that “Nothing yields more pleasure and content to the soule then when it findes that which it may love fervently.” From here, he concludes that in the happiness occasioned by the company of others, people can allow love to rule them. After “these affeccions of love in the heart” are discovered, they “natively bring forth” charity, “liberallity,” and mercy—essential components of communal life. This exploration of human psychology is quite radical for a sermon of the time, when most Puritans would not have ventured beyond the Bible to back up their claims. Winthrop does quote the Bible a lot, but he also makes important observations from common sense and life experience to convince his company that love forms the basis of a good society. Much of Winthrop’s sermon describes the way humans can operate if they so choose, rather than prescribing the exact ways in which humans must behave. Rather than laying ground rules for their new community, Winthrop hopes to instill in his colonists a sensitivity that will let them coexist peacefully on their own.

The opening of Winthrop’s sermon helps communicate this moral intuition. Rather than a traditional sermon opening, with a biblical quote, Winthrop merely observes a state of affairs in the world: the social inequality inherent to social life. From the beginning, then, he asks his auditors to rely on their own experience in corroborating his claims. To open on a note of human experience and observation sets the tone for the type of moral life he will describe, and the ways in which he will describe it. The public nature of this observation—a general truth about social life—also fits the communal tenor of a sermon written to inaugurate the founding of a new society.

Once Winthrop has launched into his arguments about love and human connection, the types of evidence he uses reflect his stress on moral intuition, suggesting that Christians ought to cultivate and follow their innate moral compasses rather than solely obey law and scripture. Though, like any sermon of the time, Winthrop uses many quotes from the Bible, he relies heavily on the four Gospels, a series of books that center on the exemplary life of one man, Christ. He mines this biographical material for “patterns,” much in the way one would draw from literature to support an argument. Winthrop also makes many appeals to symbols, metaphors, and common sense, most notably in his citation of the Latin adage simile simili gaudet (literally, “like rejoices in like”). The use of classical literature as morally exemplary was not as widespread as it is today, especially not in Puritanical circles. And by calling this quote a “maxime of philosophy,” Winthrop was making a very clear distinction as to what kind of evidence he deemed worthy of moral use. His most likely source for this quote was Erasmus’ anthology of classical quotes, one of the foundational works of humanist scholarship—that is, scholarship that drew explicitly from Roman and Greek writers, rather than the Bible. That he alludes to a famous humanist scholar in his argument about humans’ psychological disposition towards one another suggests that he found the broader world of history, classics, and literature valuable to the Christian moral life.

Winthrop’s appeals to human experience, common sense, personal emotional life, and the classical world all emphasize a very clear moral stance: that the personal quest for moral knowledge does not take place entirely in the Bible. One can find moral knowledge in the broader range of human experience. This message, reflected by the types of evidence Winthrop uses, helps him to communicate his message that brotherly love and communal peace are well within the grasp of his nervous colonists on the eve of their departure.