Murphy, Peter (1996) Peregrini. Thesis Eleven, 46 (1). pp. 1-32.

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Abstract

[Extract] The Protestants who came to America considered themselves an elect people. Their ministers told them that God periodically chose a people for deliverance from bondage into the Promised Land. The ancient Israelites, the children of Abraham, were the first such chosen. The American Protestant settlers, their spiritual descendants, had a divine obligation to fulfill: to journey into the wilderness, tested along the way by trials of temptation and purification, until they reached the land of deliverance. Theirs was a God-given mission to settle the Western lands, and establish the New World Israel. The American wilds were vast and dangerous, inhabited by Indian tribes who fought against the intruders on their lands. But the American Israelites- with a conviction in this aspect more Augustinian than Old Testament - believed themselves a providential people, subject to divine providence. God, they were convinced, would watch over them in the midst of the howling wilderness.¹ God would guard them, and build a wall of fire around them. They knew, whatever the danger, they had God on their side. This was a powerful theology, and one at odds with a civic or classical order of things. Ideas of providence, redemption, the protection of an all-powerful God, and the journey into the wilderness were all foreign to the classical (Homeric or Virgilian) spirit.

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