SOURCE: Bligh, John. “The Doctrinal Premises of Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” Studies in Scottish Literature 19 (1984): 148-64.

In the following essay, Bligh interprets The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as a didactic but finally ambivalent attack on Antinomian Calvinism and the associated theological doctrine of Predestination.

Since 1924, when André Gide announced that he had read Hogg's masterpiece “with a stupefaction and admiration that increased at every stage,” the Confessions of a Justified Sinner has received a generous measure of critical attention.¹ No one, however, has had much to say about its doctrinal implications. This present essay will attempt to establish that the novel is meant to reveal the dangers inherent in the Antinomian form of Christianity, and that its innovative narrative technique is designed to control the reader's response so that he will hate Antinomianism but will pity (not hate) its adherents. The novel...