Legend has it that in 1630, the Puritan John Winthrop delivered a sermon aboard the ship Arbella while sailing to Massachusetts Bay from England. On the way to the New World, he declared: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”
America existed then only as a smattering of fledgling colonies, of which the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the most prominent. As its first governor—elected in 1629 shortly before leading its settlers to the Americas—Winthrop was proud of his colony. But his message was not self-congratulatory or self-promoting; it was cautionary. If the Puritan colony failed morally, it would fail publicly. Those with wealth and power, he warned, were obligated to attend more to others and less to themselves. Or, in his words, “more enlargement toward others and less respect toward ourselves and our own right.”
Winthrop then quoted a Hebrew prophet who called on people “to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly.” He said “we must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together”—that is how we will live peacefully in society. Living as a city on a hill was a kind of communal test, and the world would take note of whether we passed.
