"Moreover, I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more." -2 Samuel 7:10
John Cotton, a distinguished minister in England in the early seventeenth century, had been for years in contact with John Winthrop, a future leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in New England. When Winthrop decided to depart with a fleet of ships carrying Puritans to New England in 1630, Cotton traveled to the English town of Southampton and preached his famous farewell sermon
God's Promise to His Plantation
.
This sermon's purpose was to encourage emigration and to offer a religious argument for the journey to the New World. Like Winthrop's sermon
A Model of Christian Charity
(also from Cosimo Classics), it became a principal document of the history of the Puritans in the New World.