I found it hard work now to pray to God, because despair was swallowing me up

Therefore, I bind these lies and slanderous accusations to my person as an ornament; it belongs to my Christian profession to be vilified, slandered, reproached and reviled, and since all this is nothing but that, as God and my conscience testify, I rejoice in being reproached for Christ's sake.

I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

Prayer is an ordinance of God, that must continue with a soul so long as it is on this side glory.

Great sins do draw out great grace; and where guilt is most terrible and fierce, there the mercy of God in Christ, when showed to the soul, appears most high and mighty.

If that a pearl may in a toad's head dwell, And may be found too in an oyster shell.