The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell Read Free Book Online Page B

second-favorite biblical role models are the first-century churches founded by Christ’s apostles and the missionary Paul. The small, local nature of churches such as those at Corinth and Ephesus is where the Puritans get their Congregationalist critique of Catholicism and the Church of England’s Catholic power structure, in which local parishes are beholden to the dictates and whims of faraway bishops. In a Congregationalist church, the church members are answerable only to one another.
    Winthrop quotes Corinthians. Which is to say, he quotes Paul’s letter to the Corinth church admonishing the congregation to stop its bickering and heed Christ’s words of love. Winthrop surely knows that the men and women before him heading to the boondocks of English territory are at least as capable of squabbling as any congregation in the provinces of Rome.
    “Christ and his church make one body,” Winthrop says, paraphrasing Paul (1 Corinthians 12:13-14: “For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body. . . . For the body is not one member, but many”). Furthermore, claims Winthrop, “The ligaments of this body which knit together are love.” Then he quotes Paul’s letter to another church, in Galatia, “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.”
    This body of Christ, connected with the ligaments of love, is not merely pretty poetry or spiritual mumbo jumbo to Winthrop and his people. It is a “bond of marriage between Him and us.” Which is to say it is a contract. Remember, Winthrop was a lawyer. That might be why the final paragraphs of “Christian Charity,” the ones that will be the most quoted later on, are the most profound. Given the task of outlining a binding legal pact between Massachusetts and God, Winthrop comes alive. “We are,” he writes, “entered into covenant with Him for this work.”
    There is no concept a lawyer, especially an English one, cherishes more than that of precedent. And to Winthrop and his shipmates, the tradition of a covenant—a handshake deal between man and God in which man promises obedience and God grants salvation in return—extends, writes Perry Miller, “unbroken from Abraham to Boston.”
    “And I will make of thee a great nation,” God had promised Abraham. The price of such greatness, as Cotton’s farewell sermon already reminded the colonists, is a great big headache. Their duties, writes Winthrop, are these: “Now the only way to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” (Micah, an Old Testament prophet, said that God’s words “do good to him that walketh uprightly”; as for God’s promise to the sinners, “ The mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before a fire.”) Failures of justice, mercy, and humility, Winthrop warns, will cause God to “surely break out in wrath against us.”
    Winthrop uses a word to describe such a calamity that must have been especially terrifying if he was delivering this sermon at sea: shipwreck.
    “ The only way to avoid this shipwreck,” he says, is to be “knit together in this work as one man.”
    Winthrop then utters one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language:
    We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
    I am a reasonably happy-go-lucky person with a serviceable sense of humor and a nice-enough apartment in New York, the most exciting city in the world. Once I decided to devote years of my life to deciphering the thoughts and feelings of the dreary religious fanatics who founded New England nearly four hundred years ago, I was often asked at parties by my fellow New Yorkers the obvious question, “What are you working on?” When I would tell them a book about