<p>"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</p><p><br></p><p> 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 <em>God's Promise to His Plantation</em>. </p><p><br></p><p>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 <em>A Model of Christian Charity</em> (also from Cosimo Classics), it became a principal document of the history of the Puritans in the New World.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p> </p>