The Nature and Necessity of Repentance

This book is a facsimile reprint of the 1728 book The Nature and Necessity of Repentance by the Reverend John Rogers. It was originally a sermon Rogers had preached in response to the Great Earthquake of 1727, which struck New England on November 10, 1727. With an epicenter somewhere off the New Hampshire and Massachusetts coasts, the earthquake shook buildings from Maine to Connecticut and was felt as far as Can­ada. Many ministers, including Rogers, interpreted the earthquake as a sign of God's wrath. He preached his sermon on Sunday, December 21, 1727, which was the day of a colony-wide fast held in response to the earthquake.

Rogers was born to Dorcas and Jeremiah Rogers, Jr. on November 22, 1684 in Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony. Exact details about his ancestors' immigration to the New World are unknown, but it is clear that he was at least a third-generation American.

After graduating from Harvard, in 1708 he became the minister for the first church of Boxford, Massachusetts (which still exists to this day, as the First Church Congregational, Boxford). He served until 1743, during which time church membership grew more than it ever had before.

Rogers sometimes clashed with the austere Puritan Congregationalist norms of the day. For example, he supported the "popish" practice of singing in parts with written music. It was written of him that "[h]e was a man honest, frank in conversation, one who held to his own opinion, and a man of power and forceable and earnest."

Reverend Rogers's numerous descendants pioneered and settled across most of North America. The Nature and Necessity of Repentance, however, has been out of print and inaccessible for nearly three centuries. Rogershaven Books is proud to make it available once more.