The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 6.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

[30] the flesh from the bones; and also it brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, and wants, that my poor family was like to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside. Oh, the thoughts of the hardships I thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces.

Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee. But yet, thought I, I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you: oh! I saw I was as a man who was pulling down his house upon the heads of his wife and children; yet I thought on those “two milch kine that were to carry the ark of God into another country, and to leave their calves behind them.”

But that which helped me in this temptation was divers considerations: the first was, the consideration of those two Scriptures, “Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust in me;” and again, “The Lord said, verily it shall go well with thy remnant; verily I will cause the enemy to entreat them well in the time of evil.”

He was arrested in 1660, charged with ‘devilishly and perniciously abstaining from church,’ and of being ‘a common upholder of conventicles.’ At the Quarter Sessions, where his trial seems to have been conducted somewhat like that of Faithful