“My dear friend,” he said, laying his hand gently upon his arm, “I confess that you greatly alarm me. Consider that, for the first two months after your wound, you were very weak in body; you were often obliged to have recourse to opiates to procure rest; and you was not in a state to examine the impressions made on your mind, and to separate illusion from reality. There is nothing wonderful in these phantasma having floated past your mind’s eye: it is with sounds as with sights; the music of a dream is often clear and ravishing to the mind’s ear; and our name may be thus, to our sleeping fancy, very distinctly called and connected with some message or charge of solemn import spoken as by a voice from Heaven. Or, it may be, Cuthbert, that the enemy of your soul, knowing that you can only be led aside from the path of duty and peace by the fair semblance of true religion and freedom, hath assumed these angel shapes to lure you to your ruin. “I can understand the plain and manly language of a Hampden, but this I cannot. It is unhealthy; it is the false fire of the fanatic. Rouse your intellect, and turn away from these notions, or you will be entangled and overcome: strangle the serpent while you have strength to do so.” Cuthbert replied only by the grave smile of one so firmly persuaded of the truth of his own convictions as rather to pity than resent the very unwelcome effort to disturb them. However, he now communicated to Juxon that, in another month (it being then the end of September), he should accompany his pupil to enter at Oxford, and should there leave him, and proceed himself to join a friend in London. This arrangement, he observed, would enable him to reach the capital about the time when the new parliament was to assemble; for it had been just resolved by the King, in his great council of peers held at York, that a parliament should be called to sit on the third of November following. George Juxon was truly concerned to find that Cuthbert was so far gone in his views, that to reclaim him seemed hopeless; but there were so many amiable and engaging points in his character, that he could not allow any one chance of recovering him from a course which he truly thought would distress his father and destroy his own peace of mind, altogether neglected.