"And to you I confess it," he says, "(though it ought perhaps to be a cause for shame,) that I have felt great desire to go or do anything for the love of JESUS, and that I have even wished, if it were the Lord's will, to go as a missionary to foreign lands." It is very remarkable that this thought should have occurred at such a moment to one who only became a missionary thirty-five years later, at a summons from without, not from within.

The distinct mission impulse passed away, but a strong desire remained to devote himself to the ministry of the Church.

He tried to stifle it at first, lest it should be a form of conceit or pride; but it only grew upon him, and at last he spoke to Mr.Eyre, who promised to broach the subject to his parents.
His father was strongly averse to it, as an overthrow to all his plans, and Mr.Eyre, after hearing both sides, said that he should give no opinion for a year; it would not hurt Daniel to remain another year in the warehouse, to fulfil the term of his apprenticeship, and it would then be proper time to decide whether to press his father to change his mind.

It was a very sore trial to the young man, who had many reasons for deeming this sheer waste of time, though he owned he had not lost much of his school learning, having always loved it so much as to read as much Latin as he could in his leisure hours.

He submitted at first, but was uneasy under his submission, and asked counsel from all the clergymen he revered, who seem all to have advised _him_ to be patient, but to have urged his father to yield, which he finally did before the year was out; so that Daniel Wilson was entered at St.Edmund's Hall, Oxford, on the 1st of May, 1798.