Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DEDICATION. To His Excellency, Jonathan Belcher, Esq.; captain-general and governor-in-chief in and over His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts Bay in New-England. andc. To the Honorable Spencer Phipps, Esq., lieutenant-governor; and to the Honorable His Majesty’s Council and House of Representatives of said Province. The Province under your united care, being the principal of the New-England governments, containing especially the two first colonies of Plymouth and the Massachusetts, from whence the others were chiefly derived, and having the greatest share in the following work, to whom could a son of the Province more properly offer this fruit of his labors, than to your excellency and honors ? especially, when he beholds you as mostly, if not wholly, descendants from the worthy fathers of these plantations; whom yourselves and posterity cannot but have in everlasting honor, not only for their eminent selfdenial and piety, wherein they set examples for future ages to admire and imitate; but also for their great concern that the same vital and pure Christianity and liberty both civil and ecclesiastical, might be continued to their successors; for whichthey left their own and their fathers houses, in the most pleasant places then on earth, with many of their dearest relatives, and came over the ocean into this then hideous wilderness; and the peaceful fruits of whose extraordinary cares, labors, hardships, wisdom, courage, patience, blood and death, we under the divine protection, and the justice of the best of kings enjoy. It is to these we firstly owe our pleasant houses, our fruitful fields, our growing towns and churches, our wholesome laws, our precious privileges, our grammar schools and colleges, our pious and learned ministers and magistrates, our good g…