“There is certainly a change upon me, and not one for the better,” he said to himself; “but at the same time the priest, cunning as he is, has been taken in by appearances.  I am just sufficiently changed in my looks to justify and give verisimilitude to the game I am playing.  When Lucy hears of my illness, which must be a serious one, nothing on earth will keep her from me; and if I cannot gain any trace to her residence, a short paragraph in the papers, intimating and regretting the dangerous state of my health, will most probably reach her, and have the desired effect.  If she were once back, I know that, under the circumstances of my illness, and the impression that it has been 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 does the imagination while we are asleep.  Away, then, ye idle brood!  I will none of you.”