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   From the Editor

       THE QUESTION OF COMING HOME

   In 1955, Wallace Stevens wrote a piece for Voice of America's "This Is America" program called "Connecticut Composed" in which he said, "It is a question of coming home to the American self in the sort of place in which it was formed." This is the idea that Connecticut is forever attached to the Puritan's "city on a hill" articulated by John Winthrop, and by extension, Thomas Hooker. It is important to remember Winthrop's entire statement: "Consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in the 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."

  As historian Mark A. Signorelli points out, Winthrop intended the prominence of "a city on a hill" not to signify the inherent superiority of the Puritan settlement, but its notoriety. Essentially, it was profoundly self-critical. The wish was not to soothe the Puritan's complacency by extolling their virtue, but rather to awaken their moral vigilance by reminding them of the iniquity toward which the human soul is always inclined.

                                                                                                            Max H. Peters

                                                                                                           Publisher and Editor