14 DR. BENJAMIN ALLEN, OF BRAINTREE.
Shortly after [pp. 347-348], Allen enters at length his "Rea-
sons for Dissenting from the Church of England," but here,
again, his remarks partake so much of the nature of rough memor-
anda, intelligible only to the writer and almost meaningless to
anyone else, that they need not be reproduced. Allen's matter-
was, at all times, singularly muddled and lacking in lucidity.
We gather, however, that Allen had consulted Ray upon the
subject; for he says:—
" When I came to inform myself of Mr. Ray['s view], he told me the
writers for the ceremonys never shew any power given them to alter what
our Saviour had instituted, nor to add [thereto], and that he had consulted
foreign churches and they only told him the great commandments of Love
and Peace would excuse a complyance, but not an approbation [and so on]."
The fact that Allen has inserted such a statement leaves
little doubt that he had left the Church of England, and had
become a member of the still-existing Independant Congregation
at Bocking, which had been founded by Dale and others in or
about 1707; but, the early registers of the Chapel having dis-
appeared, it is impossible now to obtain precise information on
the point.
Four or five pages are devoted to a record of dreams, testify-
ing to Allen's firm belief in these phantoms as divine warnings of
coming events, as noticed in my previous paper.30 These dreams
have, however, no greater interest for us than those in the pre-
vious volume, with the exception of one. This gives us [p. 357]
another version of the dream in reference to Ray,31 which may be
be worth quoting, as it shows trifling verbal differences from that
already given:—
" I dreamt [sayd Allen], just before Mrs. Mary Ray fell ill, that I was
walking in Rain Lane with Mr. Ray and [that] from a tree there [I] gathered
an apple hardly ripe and gave him, which he took and presently he was
within the field and I in the road as before, so that we walkt and talkt,
but a hedge parted us all the way ; and so it was his daughter dyd, and it
bred a distance [between us] without [our actually] falling out, tho' he
had no such caus from me, for the steel'd wine he had of me months and
would not give it (which cur'd his other daughter, Mrs. Margaret, soon
after in the same case, which was an Icterus upon a green sickness)
[would have cured her].."32
30 See ante, xvi., pp. 162-163.
31 See ante, xvi., pp. 151-153.
32 See ante, p. 10.