“Besides, you know, John, that your crimes are of the most capital nature. You are not only a housebreaker, but a highwayman, and a very notorious offender. You know you have committed crimes enough to hang two or three men, perhaps half-a-dozen. And so far as I can gather from a variety of circumstances, you are the very person that broke open my house over the way, and robbed the poor widow who lives in it. If you committed that robbery, I desire you to confess it before you leave this world; for ‘he that confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall obtain mercy;’ while he that tells lies to conceal them, pulls down double vengeance upon his guilty head. “But whether you committed that robbery or not, I earnestly desire that you will submit to your sentence. I neither can nor will meddle in that affair; nor have I any probability of success if I did. Apply then yourself, night and day, to the King of heaven for grace and mercy. If you cry to Him from the bottom of your heart, as a condemned dying man, who deserves hell as well as the gallows; if you sincerely confess your crimes, and beg the Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, to intercede for you, it is not too late to get your soul reprieved. He will speak for you to God Almighty; He will pardon all your sins; He will wash you in His most precious blood; He will stand by you in your extremity; He will deliver you out of the hands of the hellish executioner; and, though you have lived the life of the wicked, He will help you to die the death of the penitent. He can feel for poor condemned thieves; for He himself was condemned to be hanged on a tree; not indeed for His own sins, for He never transgressed, but for your crimes and mine.” “On Saturday, March 27,” continues Fletcher in his narrative, “I gave a few lines for the keeper of Stafford jail, to Sarah Wilkes, the malefactor’s sister, and to Elizabeth Childs, a serious woman, whom she had got to bear her company; and, when I had recommended in prayer the condemned criminals to the Redeemer’s compassion, and their feeble visitors to the protection of Him Who can give wisdom to the simple, they set out to see John Wilkes, and administer some spiritual comfort to him before he launched into eternity.” The poor women met with a rough reception at Stafford prison. The jailer, a fair specimen of officials in other prisons, at that period, said, “What do you want with John Wilkes? to preach him a sermon, and sing psalms? I know very well what you are, a parcel of canting hypocrites.” Sarah Wilkes and Elizabeth Childs showed themselves to be apt pupils of the Vicar of Madeley. In the Journal of their nine days’ visit they wrote:—