Mission with Prophetic Power: The Journal of John Woolman (SRSC 12)

Chapter 8: Finishing Well (1772)

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Worship.” His mind seems to have been greatly exercised* by a sense of the intimate connection of luxury and oppression; the burden of the laboring poor rested heavily upon him. In his lonely wanderings on foot through the rural districts (for he did not feel free to use the post on account of the hard* treatment of the horses), or in his temporary sojourn in crowded manufacturing towns, the eager competitions and earnest pursuit of there, but before it was over he was taken ill of the smallpox. Our friend Thomas Priestman, and others who attended him, preserved the following minutes* of his expressions in the time of his sickness: First day the twenty-seventh of Ninth Month, 1772.—His disorder appeared to be the smallpox. Being asked to have a doctor’s advice, he signified he had not freedom or liberty in his mind so to do, standing wholly resigned to His will who gave him life, and whose power he had witnessed to raise and heal him in sickness before, when he seemed nigh unto death; and if he was to wind up now, he was perfectly resigned, having no will either to live or die, and did not choose any should be sent for him; but a young man, a pharmacist, coming of his own accord the next day and desiring to do something for him, he said he found a freedom to confer with him and the other Friends about him, and if anything should be proposed as to medicine that did not come through defiled channels or oppressive hands, he should be willing to consider and take it, so far as he found freedom. Second day.—He said he felt the disorder to affect his head, so that he could think little and but as a child, and