"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.