Massachusetts -- Church history; Massachusetts -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; Puritans -- Massachusetts
“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. All this while my heart had the coldness of a stone upon it,
and the straitness that is to be expected from the lone exercise of
reason. But now all on the sudden I felt an inexpressible force to fall
on my mind, an afflatus, which cannot be described in words; _none knows
it but he that has it_.... It was told me, that the Lord Jesus Christ
loved my father, and loved me, and that he took delight in us, as in
two of his faithful servants, and that he had not permitted us to be
deceived in our particular faith, but that my father should be carried
into England, and there glorify the Lord Jesus Christ before his passing
into glory....
“Having left a flood of tears from me, by these rages from the invisible
world, on my study floor, I rose and went into my chair. There I took
up my Bible, and the first place that I opened was at Acts xxvii.
23-25, ‘There stood by me an angel of God, whose I am, and whom I serve,
saying, Fear not, thou must be brought before Caesar.’ ... A new
flood of tears gushed from my flowing eyes, and I broke out into these
expressions. ‘What! shall my father yet appear before Caesar! Has an
angel from heaven told me so! And must I believe what has been told me!
Well then, it shall be so! It shall be so!’”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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