The familial vision with which John Winthrop identified the Puritan errand finds complex ways of asserting its influence even within the single intellectual and spiritual tradition of New England Puritanism. What Winthrop understood as a public sacrament – the choice of a particular conception of community – Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor both adapted to personal poetic concerns. For Taylor the adaptation was fairly straightforward; he was, after all, a minister, and the sacrament for which his “Preparatory Meditations” prepared him was the most conspicuous visible analogy to the choice of life that Winthrop hoped all the inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay would make. Bradstreet's relationship to the tradition involves more subtle exploitation of the domestic metaphors upon which Winthrop based his model, but Bradstreet too is able to turn the dramatic nature of Moses' farewell and the typological posture of Eve into the substance of a personal drama the outcome of which – like the fate of Winthrop's own appeal to his people – is invested with a potent mixture of hope and uncertainty.

This peculiarly intense degree of insecurity, compressed into a domestic setting, is very much the hallmark of Puritan experience and writing, but it continues to appear in a surprising array of forms throughout the work of the nonecclesiastical writers of the eighteenth century. The central images of the first two books of Gulliver's Travels, for example, employ the shifting status of Gulliver himself, as giant or as pygmy, for many of the same purposes that the shifting status of his own soul had served for Edward Taylor.