Puritan Aspiration, Puritan Legacy: An Historical/Philosophical Inquiry

Extract

The historical has a way of not staying put. The materials which constitute the subject of historical inquiry, the public documents, texts, correspondence and artifacts associated with an individual or with a community may remain unchanged, but interpretation of those sources may vary from one generation to another. In the schoolroom textbooks of generations, the early settlers of the North American continent were noble minded immigrants, in the Old World persecuted for their religious faith and in the New bent on the creation of a more congenial society. A romantic view of the colonists may yet pero sist in the popular mind, but the principles which animated that colonial mind are far from accepted today. From the ranks of the reformers who settled in the New World between 1620 and 1630 emerged a theocracy which was to prevail in New England through the latter part of the seventeenth century and most of the eighteenth century. It was a theocracy that came to be replaced by a democracy for reasons internal to its own conception of God's plan for mankind.