Puritan Political Ideas

Book excerpt: In this unique collection, noted historian Edmund Morgan focuses upon three ideas that lay at the root of Puritan political theory and have had a continuing significance in our history: calling, covenant, and the separate spheres of church and state. The selections show the origin of these ideas in the writings of the early English Puritans before the colonization of America, in seventeenth century New England, and finally in new contexts in the eighteenth century. One may read these documents as primary sources of Puritan thought per se, as sources of American intellectual history, or as sources of a political theory that flowered in the early years of the new constitutional republic. --from the Foreword