"in prayer, on a sudden I found myself in hell; I know not how I was carried thither; only I understood that our Lord was pleased that I should see the place, which the devils had prepared for me there, and which I had deserved by my sins. What passed here with me lasted but a very little while; yet if I should live many years, I do not believe I should ever be able to forget it. The entrance appeared to me to resemble that of an oven very low, very narrow, and very dark. The ground seemed like mire, exceeding filthy, stinking, insupportable, and full of a multitude of loathsome vermin. At the end of it there was a certain hollow place, as if it had been a kind of a little press in a wall, into which I found myself thrust, and close pent up. Now, though all this which I have said was far more terrible in itself, than I have described it, yet it might pass for a pleasure in comparison with that which I felt in this press. This torment was so dreadful that no words can express the least part of it. I felt my soul burning in so dismal a fire, that I am not able to describe it. I have experienced the most insupportable pains, in the judgment of physicians, which can be corporally endured in this world, as well by the shrinking up of all my sinews, as by many other torments in several kinds: but all these were nothing: in comparison with what I suffered there: joined to the horrid thought, that this was to be without end or intermission: and even this itself is still little, if compared to the agony the soul is in; it seems to her that she is choked, that she is stifled, and her anguish and torture go to a degree of excess that cannot be expressed. It is too little to say, that it seems to her that she is butchered and rent to pieces: because this would express some violence from without, which tended to her destruction; whereas,
