The Puritan society revolved around God. Everything anyone did had to relate back to their religion and conform with the Puritan rules. In the works of John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards imagery, diction, and syntax are used to support their purposes for writing the different pieces and the idea that the world is God-centered. The pieces prove a God-centered world through devices and techniques that create either fear or awe of God.
In both Mathers’ “The Devil in New England” and Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” the imagery evokes fear from the readers and listeners because it is violent and volatile. In contrast, John Winthrop in his piece “A Model of Christian Charity” uses gentler language but it still upholds the idea of a …show more content…
Winthrop also uses simple words that are easy to understand like “...perfection” (Winthrop 17). He needed the Puritans to have no doubt about what he was talking about and wanted them to do. Winthrop used God to unite the Puritans since that was the one thing all of them had in common. If Winthrop could remind them that they lived in a God-centered world and their purpose for establishing a colony was to serve that God, then he could keep them together and they would succeed.
Unlike in “A Model of Christian Charity”, Cotton Mathers’ piece uses big words such as “...voluntary Harmonious Confession” (Mathers 16). A simpler way to say that sentence would have been: a willing and peaceful confession. By using words many of the uneducated (and unconverted) people who read or heard this piece would not understand, Mathers is making them trust him about the small parts they do understand. Mathers was a church official and the Puritans were taught that religious institutions were trustworthy. In their society, God had bestowed good fortune on those who had achieved high
In both Mathers’ “The Devil in New England” and Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” the imagery evokes fear from the readers and listeners because it is violent and volatile. In contrast, John Winthrop in his piece “A Model of Christian Charity” uses gentler language but it still upholds the idea of a …show more content…
Winthrop also uses simple words that are easy to understand like “...perfection” (Winthrop 17). He needed the Puritans to have no doubt about what he was talking about and wanted them to do. Winthrop used God to unite the Puritans since that was the one thing all of them had in common. If Winthrop could remind them that they lived in a God-centered world and their purpose for establishing a colony was to serve that God, then he could keep them together and they would succeed.
Unlike in “A Model of Christian Charity”, Cotton Mathers’ piece uses big words such as “...voluntary Harmonious Confession” (Mathers 16). A simpler way to say that sentence would have been: a willing and peaceful confession. By using words many of the uneducated (and unconverted) people who read or heard this piece would not understand, Mathers is making them trust him about the small parts they do understand. Mathers was a church official and the Puritans were taught that religious institutions were trustworthy. In their society, God had bestowed good fortune on those who had achieved high