‘O Derby! as the waters run away when the flood gates are up, so doth the visitation of God’s love pass away from thee, O Derby! therefore look where thou art, and how thou art grounded; and consider, before thou art utterly forsaken. The Lord moved me twice, before I came to cry against the deceits and vanities that are in thee; and to warn all to look at the Lord, and not at man. The wo is against the crown of pride, and the wo is against drunkenness and vain pleasures, and against them that make a profession of religion in words, and are high and lofty in mind, and live in oppression and envy. O Derby! thy profession and preaching, stinks before the Lord. Ye do profess a Sabbath in words, and meet together, dressing yourselves in fine apparel; and you uphold pride. Thy women go with stretched forth necks, and wanton eyes, &c. which the true prophet of old cried against. Your assemblies are odious, and an abomination to the Lord; pride is set up, and bowed down; covetousness abounds: and he that doth wickedly is honoured: so deceit doth bear with deceit; and yet they profess Christ in words. O the deceit that is within thee! it doth even break my heart to see how God is dishonoured in thee, O Derby!’ After he had written this, he perceived that his imprisonment there would not continue long; for the magistrates grew uneasy about him, and could not agree what to do with him: one while they would have sent him up to the Parliament, and another while they would have banished him to Ireland. At first they called him a deceiver, and a blasphemer; and afterwards, when the judgments of God befel them, they said he was an honest virtuous man. But their well or ill speaking was nothing to him; for the one did not lift him up, nor did the other cast him down. At length they turned him out of jail, about the beginning of the winter, in the year 1651, after he had been prisoner in Derby about a year: six months whereof in the house of correction, and the rest of the time in the common jail and dungeon.