letter, I saw a letter, written from New England, discoursing of an impossibility of subsisting there; and seems to prefer the confession of God’s truth in any condition here in Old England, rather than run over to enjoy their liberty there; yea, and that the gospel is like to be more dear in New England than in Old.  And, lastly, unless they be exceeding careful, and God wonderfully merciful, they are like to lose that life and zeal for God and his truth in New England which they enjoyed in Old; as whereof they have already woful experience, and many there feel it to their smart.”

Mr. Mede’s answer was as follows:—­

“Concerning our plantations in the American world, I wish them as well as anybody; though I differ from them far, both in other things, and on the grounds they go upon.  And though there be but little hope of the general conversion of those natives or any considerable part of that continent, yet I suppose it may be a work pleasing to Almighty God and our blessed Saviour to affront the Devil with the sound of the gospel and the cross of Christ, in those places where he had thought to have reigned securely, and out of the din thereof; and, though we make no Christians there, yet to bring some thither to disturb and vex him, where he reigned without check.

“For that I may reveal my conceit further, though perhaps I cannot prove it, yet I think thus,—­that those countries were first inhabited since our Saviour and his apostles’ times, and not before; yea, perhaps, some ages after, there being no signs or footsteps found among them, or any monuments of older habitation, as there is with us.

“That the Devil, being impatient of the sound of the gospel and cross of Christ, in every part of this Old World, so that he could in no place be quiet for it; and foreseeing that he was like to lose all here; so he thought to provide himself of a seed over which he might reign securely, and in a place ubi nec Pelopidarum facta neque nomen audiret.  That, accordingly, he drew a colony out of some of those barbarous nations dwelling upon the Northern Ocean (whither the sound of Christ had not yet come), and promising them by some oracle to show them a country far better than their own (which he might soon do), pleasant and large, where never man yet inhabited; he conducted them over those desert lands and islands (of which there are many in that sea) by the way of the north into America, which none would ever have gone, had they not first been assured there was a passage that way into a more desirable country.  Namely, as when the world apostatized from the worship of the true God, God called Abraham out of Chaldee into the land of Canaan, of him to raise a seed to preserve a light unto his name:  so the Devil, when he saw the world apostatizing from him, laid the foundations of a new kingdom, by deducting this colony from the north into America, where they have increased since into an