n occasioned by her
refusal to marry Dunroe, she will yield; especially as I shall put the
sole chances of my recovery upon her compliance. Yet why is it that I
urge her to an act which will probably make her unhappy during life?
But it will not. She is not the fool her mother was; and yet I am not
certain that her mother was a fool either. We did not agree; we could
not. She always refused to coincide with me almost in everything; and
when I wished to teach Lucy the useful lessons of worldly policy, out
came her silly maxims of conscience, religion, and such stuff. But yet
religious people are the best. I have always found it so. That wretched
priest, for instance, would give up his life sooner than violate what
he calls--that is, what he thinks--his duty. There must be some fiction,
however, to regulate the multitude; and that fiction must be formed by,
and founded on, the necessities of society. That, unquestionably, is the
origin of all law and all religion. Only religion uses the stronger and
the wiser argument, by threatening us with another world. Well done,
religion! You acted upon a fixed principle of nature. The force of the
enemy we see not may be magnified and exaggerated; the enemy we see not
we fear, especially when described in the most terrible colors by men
who are paid for their misrepresentations, although these same impostors
have never seen the enemy they speak of themselves. But the enemy we see
we can understand and grapple with; ergo, the influence of religion over
law; ergo, the influence of the priest, who deals in the imaginary and
ideal, over the legislator and the magistrate, who deal only in the
tangible and real. Yes, this indeed, is the principle. How we do fear a
ghost! What a shiver, what a horror runs through the frame when we think
we see one; and how different is this from our terror of a living enemy.
Away, then, with this imposture, I will none of it. Yet hold: what was
that I saw looking into the window of the carriage that contained my
brother's son? What was it? Why a form created by my own fears. That
credulous nurse, old mother Corbet, stuffed me so completely with
superstition when I was young and cowardly, that I cannot, in many
instances, shake myself free from it yet. Even the words of that priest
alarmed me for a moment. This, however, is merely the weakness of human
nature--the effect of unreal phantasms that influence the reason while
we are awake, just as that of dreams