As we have seen, his "Errand into the Wilderness" article proposed a greater importance for the Modell of Christian Charity than previous scholars had supposed. Although he himself was an atheist, Miller admired the Puritans' intellectual world and did a great deal to rehabilitate them for the twentieth-century academy. A professor of literature at Harvard, Miller rescued the Puritans from the ill repute to which previous generations of historians had consigned them. The transformation of the image began with Perry Miller's revisionist work in the second third of the twentieth century. Indeed, over the next century, writers who quoted from the document almost never drew attention to the "city on a hill" passage at all. Few observers in the 1830s noted its appearing, and none thought they saw the origins of the American mission in its contents. When Edwards used the image, however, he was not alluding to Winthrop's vision, because A Modell of Christian Charity was not published until 1838. Jonathan Edwards, for example, used the image in the 1730s to describe his Northampton congregation, but did so usually to chastise his church for failing to uphold true godliness. Proceeding in time, Gamble traces the fate of the "city on a hill" throughout American history. In any case, Gamble points out, Winthrop could hardly have been envisioning the United States, whose tenets of toleration, individualism, and democracy the governor would have found appalling. Indeed, since no one onboard the Arbella (the ship that transported the Puritans from England to Massachusetts) ever left any record of the message, and since Winthrop himself never mentioned giving the speech in his journal, Gamble concludes that it is possible that the governor never delivered the discourse at all.
Much is unknown about the circumstances surrounding the sermon's composition. Gamble begins the book with surprising observations about Winthrop's famous discourse, A Modell of Christian Charity. He argues that the phrase "city on a hill" (found in Matthew 5:14) originally described the mission of the church, but that over time the secular state has come to exert a near monopoly over the image. Gamble of Hillsdale College traces the evolution of the phrase's meaning in American history. In a wonderfully enlightening book, In Search for the City on a Hill: the Making and Unmaking of an American Myth (Continuum, 2012), historian Richard M. Today Democrats and Republicans alike employ the image to describe the example they believe the United States should set for the rest of the world.īut to previous generations of Americans, the connection would not have been obvious. Anyone familiar with the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, for example, knows that the president frequently connected the two ideas, adding the adjective "shining" to describe the model city. To students of American religion, this connection between the "city on a hill" and the mission of the United States is hardly a new concept. To buttress this view, Miller seized upon several lines of Winthrop's now famous Modell of Christian Charity: For wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us." At the conclusion of his article, Miller even implied that there was a direct connection between Winthrop's vision and the founding of the United States: "Having failed to rivet their eyes upon their city on a hill," he wrote, "they were left alone with America." Expanding upon themes he had developed in The New England Mind (1939), Miller proposed that John Winthrop intended the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be a model for Europe (and perhaps the rest of the world) to imitate.
Perhaps the most famous article in all of American religious history is Perry Miller's 1953 piece in the William and Mary Quarterly entitled, "An Errand into the Wilderness." Originally delivered at a meeting of the John Carter Brown Library in 1952, "An Errand into the Wilderness" reconceptualized the idea of a Puritan mission to the New World.
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