“Most gracious Lord God, my merciful Father; my creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter! thou soundest and searchest the depths and secrets of all hearts; thou acknowledgest the upright; thou judgest the hypocrite; vanity and crooked ways cannot be hid from thee.

“Remember, O Lord, how thy servant has walked before thee; remember what I have first sought, and what has been principal in my intentions. I have loved thy assemblies; I have mourned for the divisions of thy church; I have delighted in the brightness of thy sanctuary; I have ever prayed unto thee, that the vine which thy right hand hath planted in this nation, might have the former and the latter rain, and that it might stretch its branches to the seas and to the floods. The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in my eyes; I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart; I have, though a despised weed, endeavored to procure the good of all men. If any have been my enemies, I thought not of them, neither has the sun gone down upon my displeasure; but I have been as a dove, free from superfluity of maliciousness. Thy creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more so. I have sought [pg 408] thee in the courts, the fields, and the gardens; but I have found thee in thy temples.

“O Lord, my strength! I have, from my youth, met with thee in all my ways; in thy fatherly compassions, in thy merciful chastisements, and in thy most visible providences. As thy favors have increased upon me, so have thy corrections; as my worldly blessings were exalted, so secret darts from thee have pierced me; and when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before thee. And now, when I have been thinking most of peace and honor, thy hand is heavy upon me, and has humbled me according to thy former loving-kindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a bastard, but as a child. Just are thy judgments upon me for my sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but which have no proportion to thy mercies. Besides my innumerable sins, I confess before thee, that I am a debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces; which I have neither put into a napkin nor placed, as I ought, with exchangers, where it might have made best profit; but I have misspent it in things for which I was least fit: so I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage. Be merciful unto me, O Lord, for my Savior's sake, and receive me into thy bosom, or guide me into thy ways.”