In London, 1685, he became ordained in the Church of England, and at the request of Henry Compton, the Bishop of London (responsible for the colonies), Blair travelled to the New World with a mission to "revive and reform the church in the Virginia Colony." .
Almost 70 years later, with encouragement from the Colony's House of Burgesses and other prominent individuals, Blair prepared a plan, believed by some historians to be modelled after the earlier one from Henricus, and returned to England in 1691 to petition the monarchy for a new college.