1588-1649 · English Puritan lawyer and longtime governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
About John Winthrop
John Winthrop (1588-1649) was an English Puritan lawyer and landowner from Groton in Suffolk. Elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, he led its main fleet to New England in 1630, helped found Boston, and was chosen governor in many of the colony's annual elections until his death. His journal, later published as The History of New England, is a principal source for the colony's first two decades.
“Wee must delight in eache other; make other's conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body.”
A Model of Christian Charity is a lay sermon or discourse that John Winthrop composed in 1630 for the company of Puritan emigrants he was leading from England to Massachusetts Bay. The surviving heading says it was written in his passage across the Atlantic, and it has traditionally been pictured as preached aboard the flagship Arbella, though some historians think it was delivered before the fleet sailed or circulated in manuscript.