Sam’s Reviews > Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America > Status Update

"The people of Massachusetts thought of the family not as an end in itself, but as an instrument of their highest religious purposes. The Puritan writer Jonathan Mitchell declared, 'a Christian may and ought to desire many things as means, but God alone as his end.' This was their way of thinking about the family in particular, which was also described as 'the root whence church and commonwealth cometh.'"