dreaming or madness; or, as he says to Mr. Watson, a
religious parable, on purpose to illustrate something scarcely
tangible, but to which he seems to have attached great weight. Were the
relation at all consistent with reason, it corresponds so minutely with
traditionary facts that it could scarcely have missed to have been
received as authentic; but in this day, and with the present
generation, it will not go down that a man should be daily tempted by
the Devil, in the semblance of a fellow-creature; and at length lured
to self-destruction, in the hopes that this same fiend and tormentor
was to suffer and fall along with him. It was a bold theme for an
allegory, and would have suited that age well had it been taken up by
one fully qualified for the task, which this writer was not. In short,
we must either conceive him not only the greatest fool, but the
greatest wretch, on whom was ever stamped the form of humanity; or,
that he was a religious maniac, who wrote and wrote about a deluded
creature, till he arrived at that height of madness that he believed
himself the very object whom he had been all along describing. And, in
order to escape from an ideal tormentor, committed that act for which,
according to the tenets he embraced, there was no remission, and which
consigned his memory and his name to everlasting detestation.

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a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg

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