![]() At first she worried that she had committed the ‘unpardonable sin’ mentioned in the Gospels, but soon she concluded that that sin was for amateurs and she had committed even worse: ‘My Answer was, “Therefore my condition is unparalleled there was never such a one since God made any Creature, either Angels or Men, nor never will be to the end of the world.”’ She begged friends not to pray for her, since ‘it would but sink me the deeper into Hell’. ‘We do not read of such a thing in all the Scripture.’ But Allen would not be reasoned with. Surely not, said the aunt: God would not send a miracle to convince someone of their damnation. Once she heard a thunderclap, and told her aunt it was a message from God that she was damned. What matters for us is that during her struggles, her family repeatedly tried to persuade her of God’s mercy, but she would have none of it. In the end the fog gradually lifted, which she ascribed to God’s mercy, her family’s love and the passage of time. She considered suicide, repeatedly harmed herself, and once crawled into a roof void in order to starve to death (her resolve broke after three days). ![]() She found a more even keel when she married, but when her husband died in 1664, her spiritual agonies returned worse than ever. As a teenager in the 1650s, Allen went through a period of despair in which she was convinced she was damned. ![]() ![]() G.’s sufferings were positively transient compared to Hannah Allen’s. ![]()
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