ey lived or died, young or old, providing they might
be heirs of glory. But with this she could not attain to be satisfied,
but had it for her exercise to seek a child from the Lord, that might
not only be an heir of glory, but might live to serve him in his
generation: whereupon when Mr James was born, she took it as an answer
of prayer, and reputed herself under manifold engagements to dedicate
him to the Lord, who satisfied her with very early evidences of his
accepting that return of his own gift, and confirmed the same with very
remarkable appearances of his gracious dealings with the child. For, by
the time he was two years of age, he was observed to be aiming at prayer
even in the cradle and about it, wherewith his mother conceived such
expectations and hopes, that the Lord would be with him, and do good by
him, &c. so that all the reproaches he sustained, difficulties and
dangers that afterwards he underwent, to his dying day, never moved her
in the least, from the confidence that the Lord would carry him through,
and off the stage in some honourable way for his own glory. His father
also, before his death, (which was Feb. 1, 1679.) obtained the same
persuasion, that his time in the world would be but short, but that the
Lord would make some eminent use of him.

After he had learned to read the Bible, about 6 years old, the Lord gave
him some sproutings of gracious preparations, training him in his way,
exercising him with doubts and debates above childish apprehension,
about the Maker of all things, how all things were made, and for what
end; and with strange suppositions of so many invisible worlds above and
beneath, with which he was transported into a train of musing, and
continued in this exercise for about the space of two years, until he,
by prayer and meditation on the history of the creation, came to a
thorough belief that God made all things, and that all which he made was
very good. And yet after he came to more maturity, he relapsed to a
deeper labyrinth of darkness about these foundation truths, and was so
assaulted with temptations of atheism, that being in the fields and
looking to the mountains, he said, "If these were all devouring furnaces
of burning brimstone, he would be content to go through them all, if so
be he could be assured there was a God." Out of which he emerged through
grace into the sweet serenity of a settled persuasion of the being of a
God, and of his interest in him.

From hi