In his successful 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan wooed voters by conjuring an image from one of the most famous sermons in American history - John Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity. America, Reagan declared, remained “a shining city on a hill." But Winthrop’s sermon , preached in 1629 to Puritan exiles aboard the English ship Arbella , was not all brightness and light. Winthrop encouraged the pilgrims that they had been called into a special “covenant” by God, but he also cautioned: "If we should so frustrate and deceive the Lords Expectations ... then All were lost indeed; Ruine upon Ruine, Destruction upon Destruction would come, until one stone were not left upon another." By the 1660s, many New Englanders, hardened by their experience in what was for them a New World, were haunted by this darker side of their conditional covenant. In a famous 1953 article in the William & Mary Quarterly, Harvard historian Perry Miller resurfaced
Life & Death, Faith & Doubt, Here & There