"From the Dark Ages to The Intellectual Dark Ages in 2013"

The Witness Of Early Americans

Governor John Winthrop was a Puritan leader who helped to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 and is one of the original founders of the city of Boston. He is most famous for his sermon, given while still on board the ship that brought him to the new world, in which he used the phrase "city on a hill" in reference to the colonization of America. Among his reasons for the Puritan migration were that it would be:

"...a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospel into those parts of the world....and to raise a Bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuits labour to rear up in those parts."

By "kingdom of Antichrist" Winthrop clearly communicated the Reformed belief that the Pope's Holy Roman Empire was the end-time "beast" kingdom, prophesied in the Book of Revelation, which was spreading itself to countries such as China, Japan and India. In North America, Rome's Jesuit missionaries had already infiltrated a number of Indian tribes, making converts to Catholicism. It is worth noting that Winthrop considered opposition to Rome to be an important part of the task in establishing America as a city on a hill. In fact, the Massachusetts Bay colony took strong measures to protect itself from the infiltration of the Jesuit Order: