He is led to commit fratricide, which at first enables him to become heir to the estate of Dalcastle, but his narrative ultimately culminates in exile and suicide. Wringhim’s confessional text, said to be uncannily recovered from his grave and presented as an authentic manuscript by an “Editor”, recounts how he comes to take the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to its antinomian extreme – becoming convinced by a mysterious figure, Gil-Martin, who may be either a figment of his diseased imagination or the devil himself, that as one of the ‘elect’ he may never truly sin. In James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), when the eponymous “justified sinner,” Robert Wringhim, first contemplates the possibility of publishing his memoirs he declares, “I thought if once I could print my own works, how I would astonish mankind, and confound their self wisdom and their esteemed morality – blow up the idea of any dependence on good works, and morality, forsooth!” (152).
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