Un-Christicm Soldier

THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER (230 pp.)--James Hogg--Chanficleer ($2.75).

"Lord, I give him into Thy hand, as a captain putteth a sword into the hand of his sovereign, wherewith to lay waste his enemies. May he be a two-edged weapon in Thy hand and a spear coming out of Thy mouth, to destroy, and overcome, and pass over; and may the enemies of Thy Church fall down before him, and be as dung to fat the land!"

After his martial admission to "The community of the just upon earth," i.e., a tiny fictional subsect of the Scottish Reformed Church, young Robert Wring-him put on the full armor of God, and then some. The story of his un-Christian soldiering is told in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by

James Hogg (1770-1835), who was otherwise known in early Victorian times for his biography of Sir Walter Scott and two collections of Scottish ballads.

Pods on the Stream. Almost since it was written, in 1824, this grim, mocking little book has lain like a corpse in the cellar of English literature; people forget it is there until some literary busybody begins nosing around, gets a staggering whiff, and cries for everybody to come see what he has dug up. This printing is only the second in more than a century, and the first ever made in the U.S. Yet Hogg's story is no mean satire; it might serve today as a text on the disease of pride; and above all it is one of the few horror stories in the language that really reaches the bottom of the well of evil.

The same day Robert was "justified," he met himself in a wood. "What was my astonishment! ... I conceived that my guardian angel had appeared." For hours the two rowed their theological pea pods up & down the mainstream of early Calvinist theology--the predestinarian doctrine that man is saved or damned in the mind of God before he is born. Soon they were in a dangerous eddy: that it doesn't really matter what sins a man commits in this life, as long as he is one of God's elect.

That concept included murder "by the commission of heaven," said the "guardian angel," who reluctantly gave his name as Gil-Martin. He indicated a certain anti-predestinarian divine: "If the man Blanchard is worthy, he is only changing his situation for a better one; and, if unworthy, it is better that one fall than that a thousand souls perish." Robert agreed, and did the deed with a little golden pistol his guardian gave him.

Next came Robert's elder brother,

George, who was "wallowing" in such sins as tennis and profanity. "Besides," said Gil-Martin, "you ought to consider what great advantages would be derived to the cause of righteousness and truth were the estate and riches of that opulent house in your possession." Robert considered, and ran his brother through the back one moonlight night.

"All for the Best." After that, Robert was not himself. He lost track of time for long periods, and came to his senses only to discover that in his amnesia he had committed some monstrous crime."Either I had a second self ... or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit ... I felt as one round whose body a deadly snake is twisted, which continues to hold him in its fangs, without injuring him, further than in moving its scaly infernal folds with exulting delight, to let its victim feel to whose power he has subjected himself."

Gil-Martin comforted Robert with the thought that, after all, his crimes did not count, since he was one of God's elect. And when Robert (or his second self) murdered his mother and sweetheart, and was forced to flee, Gil-Martin convinced Robert that one of God's elect was justified even in taking his own life.

Robert hanged himself on a rope of hay, to which his tortured spirit gave a last ironic twist: "I have done all for the best, and as I was prompted, by one who knew right and wrong much better than I did." He never knew in this life that that "one," the dour guardian angel Gil-Martin, was actually Satan.

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