![]() ![]() ![]() This divine plan would eventually transform the world into the Kingdom of God. Consequently, they believed themselves sent by God's divine providence into exile in America to establish Christ's Kingdom upon the stage of the world. Believing that they lived in a special dimension of time-the millennium being at hand-which would culminate in the Second Coming of Christ, Puritans left England both because they had given up all hope of achieving genuine reformation there and because they were deeply convinced that the Old World would be destroyed by the eschatological and apocalyptic violence that would precede the millennium. Ultimately, as a powerful mode of conviction and persuasion, the Puritans' sacred imagination played a crucial role in shaping social and political action during the early years of Massachusetts Bay Colony. They played a role in shaping the holy effort to build Congregationalism in New England. Yet the Puritans' apocalyptic ideology of history and their pursuit of the millennium were crucial forces in their migration to America. Few historians have shown much appreciation of the extent to which those efforts were crucially informed by sacred imaginative visions, especially in regard to eschatological and millennial expectations. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835 The Puritan holy experiment in seventeenth-century New England has traditionally been considered in terms of Puritan efforts to establish a true system of church-polity or Congregationalism. If the human mind be left to follow its own bent, it will regulate the temporal and spiritual institution of society in a uniform manner, and man will endeavor, if I may so speak, to harmonize earth with heaven. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1979 By the side of every religion is to be found a political opinion, which is connected with it by affinity. There is energy in its margins and unstructured areas. Its outlines contain power to reward conformity and repulse attack. This image has form it has external boundaries, margins, internal structure. It is potent in its own right to control or to stir men to action. 27, Issue 1 Database: Academic Search Premier THEOCRACY IN MASSACHUSETTS: THE PURITAN UNIVERSE OF SACRED IMAGINATION The idea of society is a powerful image. Title: THEOCRACY IN MASSACHUSETTS: THE PURITAN UNIVERSE OF SACRED IMAGINATION, By: Zakai, Avihu, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 0039-3819, March 1, 1994, Vol.
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