Dorchester annexed to Boston on January 3, 1870 and is now a section of Boston.

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The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this singular book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the town and church documents written and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Unmatched in the breadth of its scope, this study takes into account all of the surviving covenants in all of the New England colonies. Weir's comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England than what emerges from looking at only a few famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. His work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society but also reveals the stress and strains on church-state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more "English" and much less "American" than has often been thought, and that the New England colonies substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.

Excerpt from Records of the First Church at Dorchester: In New England, 1636 1734 The Mary and John arrived at Nantasket May 30, 1630. A few days later the passengers had effected a settlement at Dor chester, being thus about a month earlier than the rest of the Winthrop Colony. On June 6, the first Sunday after the land ing, services of gratitude and praise were held under the open sky.* And this day, which commemorates the planting in the wilderness of the church organized in Plymouth, England, is coin eident also with the settlement of the town. It is not possible to make a complete list of the passengers of the Mary and John. Nor is it possible to give the names of those who constituted the first membership of the church on its organization in England or on its establishment in Dorchester. Prior to 1636 no records of the church are extant. Such names of the first church members as can be discovered must be gath ered from other sources. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.