This edition has been reviewed and lightly edited to simplify some aspects of the original novel's sentence structures to make the narrative more appealing to a modern reader, while retaining the greater part of the original writing. 'As I went my way, I beheld a young man of a mysterious appearance coming towards me. I tried to shun him, being bent on my own contemplations; but he cast himself in my way, so that I could not avoid him. But more than that I felt a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him. It felt like the force of an enchantment, which I could not resist. As we approached each other, our eyes met and I could never describe the strange sensations that thrilled through my frame at that moment; a moment to me fraught with the most tremendous consequences; the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled me, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it. That time will now soon arrive...' In Ediinburgh, in the eighteenth century, a devout follower of Calvinism, Robert Wringham, meets a curious stranger who convinces him that those that have been preordained to be by God's side - the elect - can do no wrong, and are bound by no ordinary moral principles. He is set upon a path that leads to murder and destruction. Is the young stranger that he meets Satan, or a fallen angel, like Lucifer? Or is his account of his meeting and all the subsequent events merely in his imagination? Edited and lightly abridged by James Scobie. Published A. Bridge & Co through FICTION FACTION
