"A particular faith had been unaccountably produced in my father's heart,
and in my own, that God will carry him unto England, and there give him a
short but great opportunity to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ, before his
entrance into the heavenly kingdom. There appears no probability of my
father's going thither but in an agency to obtain a charter for the
college. This matter having been for several years upon the very point of
being carried in the General Assembly, hath strangely miscarried when it
hath come to the birth. It is now again before the Assembly, in
circumstances wherein if it succeed not, it is never like to be revived
and resumed any more....
"But the matter in the Assembly being likely now to come unto nothing, I
was in this day in extreme distress of spirit concerning it.... After I
had finished all the other duties of this day, I did in my distress cast
myself prostrate on my study floor before the Lord.... I spread before him
the consequences of things, and the present posture and aspect of them,
and, having told the Lord, that I had always taken a particular faith to
be a work of heaven on the minds of the faithful, but if it should prove a
deceit in that remarkable instance which was now the cause of my agony, I
should be cast into a most wonderful confusion; I then begged of the Lord,
that, if my particular faith about my father's voyage to England were not
a delusion, he would be pleased to renew it upon me.
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