Certain select cases resolved specially tending to the right ordering of the heart, that…

I Dare not multiply many words in acknowledging and professing my own unfitness and insufficiency to yield your loving and most welcome Letter, that satisfaction which both your Self desire, and it deserves: Neither yet will I be so unfaithful to you (seeing your expectation •uts me to reply) neither ought I (I think) be so unserviceable to Jesus Christ, who in you, and by you, beckons to me to take this call to write to you, and not to neglect so fa•r a season, seeing especially it may be possible my dy•ng Letter to you, before I depart from hence, and return to him, as not knowing but our •ast disasters and Sea-straits (of which I wrote •o you) may be but preparations for the execution of this next approaching voyage. Yet our •eies are to the hills, and our desires are your prayers; and at this time my endeavour shall ⟨p. 2⟩be in respect of your self, to break open that light to you, and to prepare it to you, with that brevity I may, and with what plainness I am able; beseeching the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who must be when all fails, the wonderful Counsellor, to give you the spirit of revelation, and that after you have suffered a while by these outward temptations, doubts, fears, desertions, distractions, which the Letter mentions, he would make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, and settle you. And this I verily think will be the unexpected, yet happy, joyful, and most glorious end of them; For since I have observed and seen the lamentable ruins of the soul, and seeming graces of many men, by being rocked a sleep in a quiet, still, calm, easy performance of duties; without such awaking temptations and tumults within, which it self complains of: I say since I have observed what a deal of mud is in the bottom of such standing Pools, and what a deal of filth is in such Moats, which are inwardly at ease, and not emptied from vessel to vessel, next unto the donation of the Lord Jesus to a man, I have accounted such tumultuous heart-storms and uproars, together with the fruitful strange effects of them, the second mercy. For I never saw that man kept from secret putrefaction and corruption, that was not usually salted with such temptations (especially in a Christians first Apprenticeship) which usually preserve him entire till death.