Besides being the teacher of the new colony, Mr. Cheever entered into other parts of its work.  He was one of the twelve men chosen as “fitt for the foundacon worke of the church.”  He was also chosen a member of the Court for the plantation, at its first session, and in 1646 he was one of the deputies to the General Court.  It is supposed that during this time he wrote his valuable little book called The Accidence.  It passed through seventeen editions before the Revolution.  A copy of the eighteenth edition, printed in Boston in 1785, is now in the Boston Athenaeum.  It is a quaint little book of seventy-two pages, with one cover gone, and is surely an object of interest to all loving students of Latin.  A copy of the tenth edition is found in Harvard College, while it has been said that a copy of the seventh is in a private library in Hartford, Connecticut.  The last edition was published in Boston in 1838.  In a prospectus, containing commendations of the work from many eminent men of learning, the Honorable Josiah Quincy, LL.D., president of Harvard College, said of it:  “A work which was used for more than a century in the schools of New England, as the first elementary book for learners of the Latin language; which held its place in some of the most eminent of those schools, nearly, if not quite, to the end of the last century; which has passed through at least twenty editions in this country; which was the subject of the successive labor and improvement of a man who spent seventy years in the business of instruction, and whose fame is second to that of no schoolmaster New England has ever produced, requires no additional testimony to its worth or its merits.”  A copy of this edition is now in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society.  Dr. David W. Cheever, of Boston, a descendant of the schoolmaster, also has one in his possession.

There is another old book in the Boston Athenaeum, published in 1757, containing three short essays under the title of Scripture Prophecies Explained.  The first one is “On the Restitution of All Things”; the second is “On St. John’s First Resurrection”; and the third, “On the Personal Coming of Jesus Christ, as Commencing at the Beginning of the Millenium described in the Apocalypse.”  These were written by Mr. Cheever, but at what time of his life there seems to be some doubt.  They indicate his religious zeal, which at this time in New Haven was put forth for the good of the church.  Although he was never ordained to the ministry, yet he occasionally preached.  In 1649, however, he dissented from the judgment of the church and elders in regard to some cases of discipline, and for some comments on their action, which seemed to them severe, they brought charges against him.  Two of the principal ones were:  “1.  His unseemly gestures and carriage before the church, in the mixed assembly;” and “2.  That when the church did agree to two charges (namely, of assumption and partiality), he did not give his vote either to the affirmative or the negative.”