Love has an object; and, in this case, in the person of Lucy Gourlay it had a reasonable and a noble one.

Revenge has an object; and in the person of Anthony Corbet, or Dunphy, it also had, according to the unchristian maxims of life, an unusually strong argument on which to work and sustain itself.

But, as for Sir Thomas Gourlay's mad ambition, I felt that, considering his sufficiently elevated state of life, I could only compensate for its want of all rational design, by making him scorn and reject the laws both civil and religious by which human society is regulated, and all this because he had blinded his eyes against the traces of Providence, rather than take his own heart to task for its ambition.

Had he been a Christian, I do not think he could have acted as he did.

He shaped his own creed, however, and consequently, his own destiny.