One of these was Mary Matthews, who, listening to the reproaches cast upon Fletcher, was greatly prejudiced against him. At length, she went to hear him. Mary thought herself very good, but Fletcher showed she was very vile. For two years, she was an earnest penitent, and then, by faith in Christ, found peace with God. Mary was brought before magistrates for opening her little house, in Madeley Wood, for preaching, but she continued faithful; and, in 1788, passed away to heaven, her last words being, “I am almost at home. Farewell! God bless you! God for ever bless you!” Another was Mary Barnard, who lived to the age of ninety, was very lame, but always crawled to Madeley church when the weather would permit. Totally without education herself, she had a son who became a Methodist local preacher. Her death occurred in 1797, and her last message to Fletcher’s widow was,—“The covenant is signed and sealed between my Lord and me. I am His by a marriage bond; and He is mine. And now I set to my seal, that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin.”[82] Footnote 82: _Methodist Magazine_, 1800, pp. 219–223. Such conversions were among Fletcher’s encouragements; and he greatly needed them. His preaching saved some, but offended others. In one of his unpublished manuscripts, dated “Madeley, February 28, 1762,” he notes a somewhat remarkable occurrence:— “Last Sunday, only one objection was made against the doctrine I preached in this church, and that, I think, was a poor one, as it was supported by no argument and no Scripture. The sum of it was this, ‘It is hard to say that one breach of the law brings a man under the curse, and exposes one out of Christ to the damnation of hell.’ To this I answer by four arguments. “The first is taken from matters of fact in the Word of God. By one sin, and by the offence of one, condemnation came upon all men, namely by the one sin of Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit. And a more awful example you have in the sudden destruction of Ananias and Sapphira his wife _for having told one single lie_. “The second argument is taken from common sense, which tells us that one leak in a ship unstopped will sink it in time, as certainly as a hundred; one piece broken out of a glass makes it a useless glass, as much as if it was dashed into twenty pieces; one stab of a dagger through the heart kills a man as much as a hundred would. And so one sin uncancelled by Christ’s blood will as surely destroy an unconverted man as a hundred, though his destruction will not be so terrible as that of him who has committed a hundred.