"A City upon a Hill" is a phrase derived from the teaching of salt and light in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. Its use in political rhetoric used in United States politics is as a declaration of American exceptionalism to refer to America acting as a "beacon of hope" for the world. "A Model of Christian Charity" This scripture was cited at the end of Puritan John Winthrop's lecture or treatise, "A Model of Christian Charity" delivered on March 21, 1630, at Holyrood Church in Southampton before his first group of Massachusetts Bay colonists embarked on the ship Arbella to settle Boston. In quoting Matthew's Gospel (5:14) in which Jesus warns, "a city on a hill cannot be hid," Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans that their new community would be "as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us", meaning, if the Puritans failed to uphold their covenant with God, then their sins and errors would be exposed for all the world to see: "So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world". Winthrop's lecture was forgotten for nearly two hundred years until the Massachusetts Historical Society published it in 1838. It remained an obscure reference for more than another century until Cold War era historians and political leaders reinterpreted the event, crediting Winthrop's text, erroneously, as the foundational document of the idea of American exceptionalism. More recently, Princeton historian Dan T. Rogers has corrected the record, explaining that there was no grand sense of destiny among the first Puritans to settle Boston. They carried no ambitions to build a New Jerusalem. They did not name their new home Zion, or Canaan, the promised land of milk and honey. They sought only a place to uphold their covenant with God, free from the interference they experienced in England. By the second generation of settlement, New England was a backwater in the Protestant Reformation, an inconsequential afterthought to the Puritan Commonwealth in England and the wealthier Dutch Republic. In truth, America's sense of destiny came generations later.<ref>Daniel T. Rodgers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon, Princeton University Press, 2018; Richard M. Gamble, In Search of the City on