A History Of The End Of The World - Plot & Excerpts
HERMAN MELVILLE, White Jacket (1850) When the Arabella sailed from England in 1630, the little ship carried a contingent of Puritan families who were setting out to colonize the raw North American wilderness. The passengers gathered on deck to hear a sermon delivered by a fiery Puritan minister, John Cotton (1585–1652), who stirringly characterized their destination as “the new promised land,” a place that had been “reserved by God for his elect people as the actual site for a new heaven and a new earth.”1 Thus transplanted to the rich soil of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Apocalypse flowered in new, remarkable, and enduring ways. “Christ by a wonderful Providence hath dispossessed Satan, who reigned securely in these Ends of the Earth, for Ages the Lord knoweth how many,” declared another Puritan minister, Increase Mather (1639–1723), after his arrival in America, “and here the Lord has caused as it were New Jerusalem to come down from Heaven.”2 The author of Revelation may have set down his visions on an island off the coast of Asia, but his remarkable little book promptly began to move ever westward.
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