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The Geneva note claimed that the midwives’ “disobedience was lawful.”
    Even though the King James Version was available to them, the Geneva Bible is the one the Calvinists on the Mayflower and most travelers in the Winthrop fleet carried with them to America.
    Winthrop and his fellow Calvinists believed in the doctrine of predestination. Since God decides everything, God decides whether a person will end up in heaven or hell before the person is even born. The people who are going to heaven are called “the Elect.” This is God’s own aristocracy. And if that sounds like some frolicsome foxhunt, understand that to be a Calvinist is to be the Duke of Discomfort or the Duchess of Fear. Because here’s the thing: How does anyone know ? How does anyone know if he’s saved? He can’t. What he can do is work, try, believe, repent, love God, and hate himself. The diligent, hardworking, and pious are the “visible saints.” If a person seems saved, odds are he is saved. Thus, he will spend every waking hour trying to seem saved, not just to others but to himself. Because if he says or does or even thinks heretical things, isn’t that just proof he was never saved in the first place?
    Let’s hazard a guess that some people are not going to be up for this. The constant uncertainty—is it streets of gold for me or am I merely lighter fluid for the flames of hell?—weighs on the believer. Even John Calvin himself, the French theologian who popularized this school of thought, wrote the following in his last will and testament:
    The will I have had, and the zeal, if it can be called that, have been so cold and sluggish that I feel deficient in everything and everywhere. . . . Truly, even the grace of forgiveness [God] has given me only renders me all the more guilty, so that my only recourse can be this, that being the father of mercy, he will show himself the father of so miserable a sinner.
    So if John Calvin doubts he’s a good enough Calvinist—which is of course the most Calvinist thought he could have—imagine the jangling nerves of John Q. Puritan. In his journal, Winthrop writes the following about an acquaintance who was driven mad by spiritual doubt and took action to decide her fate once and for all:
    A woman of Boston congregation, having been in much trouble of mind about her spiritual estate, at length grew into utter desperation, and could not endure to hear of any comfort, etc., so as one day she took her little infant and threw it into a well, and then came into the house and said, now she was sure she should be damned, for she had drowned her child.
    That’s how heavy the weight of Calvinism can be—that a mother would seek relief in murdering her own offspring.
    But for John Winthrop and the men and women like him, this way of life is a stirring challenge, a thrilling project, and sometimes even a joy. Tallness! Get up early! So much to do! Never bored! Reflect! Overthink! Repent!
    In his sermon “A True Sight of Sin” Thomas Hooker revels in the effort of self-examination. A half-hearted Christian sits in a comfortable chair and peruses his own sins “by his fireside and happily reads the story of these in a book.” A true Calvinist, on the other hand, is a kind of war correspondent on the move, one who has “passed through many countries” of “barrenness and meanness” and witnessed “ruin and desolation.” By going to the trouble of taking a hard look at his own crimes against God, the Calvinist knows “what sin is and what it hath done, how it hath made havoc of his peace . . . and made him a terror to himself.” Which, to these people, is a good thing. This is the terror that keeps the sinner awake to his own shortcomings. And with fear comes adrenaline.
    In the spiritual diary Winthrop started keeping in 1606, he wrote a pious to-do list on May 23, 1613. He was twenty-six. He pledges to God that he will “carefully avoid vain and needless expenses.” He promises to “diligently