natory and sometimes favorable, would
come in a half- hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten
on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to
this were a fearful melancholy self-contempt and despair.

"Nay, thought I, now I grow worse and worse, now I am farther from
conversion than ever I was before. If now I should have burned at the
stake, I could not believe that Christ had love for me; alas, I could
neither hear him, nor see him, nor feel him, nor savor any of his
things. Sometimes I would tell my condition to the people of God,
which, when they heard, they would pity me, and would tell of the
Promises. But they had as good have told me that I must reach the Sun
with my finger as have bidden me receive or rely upon the Promise.
[Yet] all this while as to the act of sinning, I never was more tender
than now; I durst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as a
straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch;
I could not tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace
them. Oh, how gingerly did I then go, in all I did or said! I found
myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir; and was as there
left both by God and Christ, and the spirit, and all good things.

"But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my
affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes
than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God's eyes too. Sin and
corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water
would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart with
anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me for
inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am
forsaken of God; and thus I continued a long while, even for some years
together.

"And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts, birds,
fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful
nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to
go to hell-fire after death. I could therefore have rejoiced, had my
condition been as any of theirs. Now I blessed the condition of the
dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog
or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting
weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and though I saw
this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which added
to my sorrow was,