Isaiah, that Burns was irreligious. Many so-called critics of Burns attribute his attacks on the church to motives of personal rancor; but how little they understand the poet! The true poet sees the very soul of things. The rottenness was in the church, and it was this corruption, this humbug and hypocrisy within the church that stirred the ire of Burns as it stirred the soul of the ancient prophet under similar circumstances in the religion of Israel.

Burns had no patience with the new moon, the sabbath, the appointed feasts, the solemn meetings, and the many prayers uttered from the lips. They were to him as they were to Isaiah an abomination, because, in the language of Burns, these things were done:

"In all the pomp of method and of art,

When men display to congregations wide,
Devotion's every grace, except the heart.

He had no patience with such lip service, but that he was devoutly truly religious, his poems abundantly prove. No one can read "The Cotter's Saturday Night," which contains that beautiful description of religious life in the home of the poor peasant-his own father's home-without feeling that Burns was essentially and truly religious. In his epistle to the Rev. John McMath, he says:

"I gae mad at their grimaces.

Their sigh'n, cantin' grace-proud faces,

Their three-mile prayers and half-mile graces."

And in this same epistle he apostrophizes thus:

"All Hail, Religion, Maid Divine,
Pardon a muse so mean as mine,
Who in her rough, imperfect line,
Thus dares to name thee;

To stigmatize false friends of thine,
Can ne'er defame thee."

It seems to me quite obvious that Burns, like the earlier prophets, was fighting the devil and his imps, even though such imps were dressed in cloth and wore the livery of heaven. It seems to me that he was only proving

how truly religious he was when fighting and opposing, tooth and nail, as he always did, sham and cant, and those, as he puts it,

"Who take Religion in their mouth, but never have it elsewhere."

This seems so plain to me that it is hard for me, not wearing orthodoxy's hood, to understand how anyone could ever have questioned Burns' religious nature. If Burns had never known and felt the purity and holiness of religion, if he had never known religion in its reality, he could never have satirized its bastard offspring as he did in "The Holy Tulyie," "Holy Willie's Prayer," "The Holy Fair," and the address to the "Unco Guid." If his own religious feeling was not genuine, whence came his burning indignation at the "false sighin', cantin', grace-proud faces, three-mile prayers and half-mile graces."

Burns did not believe in the orthodox Hell, nor in the doctrine of eternal damnation as taught by the church; "The fear o' Hell's a hangman's whip,

To haud the wretch in order,

But where ye feel your Honor grip,
Let that ay be your border."

I conclude by calling your attention to a scurvy screed written by Elbert Hubbard, a king among fakirs, who makes books for a living. The screed is one of his little journeys, entitled "Robert Burns." It should be entitled "Elbert Hubbard," for, it is evidently evolved from his inner consciousness, is not based on the life and work of Burns, and is so palpably an effort on the part of Hubbard to drag the gifted Burns down to his own level that the pamphlet is positively disgusting. It is so flattering to a small soul to find that Burns went a kennin wrang, but the poor fellow whose morals are so frayed and tattered, and whose vision is so blurred and dimmed as to be able to see in the "Cotter's Saturday Night" only a tip to t'other side, that is, the side of excess and vice, is, indeed, to be pitied. This poem, Hubbard says, was written after

a debauch, just as after a debauch a man might sign a pledge and swear off, and that this is true of all of Burns' religious poems. This great critic at East Aurora says that all of Burns' religious poems were simply a recoil from excesses of the flesh; and thus hath another selfappointed commentator on Burns damned himself out of his own mouth.

Burns has been criticised, his life and his life's work discussed by a number of the British essayists, including Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Thomas Carlyle and Robert Louis Stevenson; his work as a poet has been discussed by professors of universities, bearing all kinds of degrees, and it remains for this wise man at East Aurora, in the State of New York, to discover the real origin of Burns' greatness as a poet.

Christopher North, in his "Recreations," said of

Burns:

"When he sings, it is like listening to a linnet in the broom, a blackbird in the brake, a laverock in the sky; they sing in the fullness of their joy, as nature teaches them; and so did he; and the man, woman or child, who is delighted not with such singing, be their virtues what they may, must never hope to be in Heaven."

And so I may well say of the man who in all seriousness writes and publishes in this day and generation that the "Cotter's Saturday Night" is the result of a debauch, he can never hope to escape Hell-he is already there.

SCOTTISH Day at the World's Fair was celebrated August

15, 1904, the anniversary of the birth of Sir Walter Scott. A company of Highlanders escorted other Scottish organizations of St. Louis through the grounds to the Burns Cottage where President David R. Francis extended a welcome in behalf of the Exposition management. W. R. Smith, curator of the Botanical Gardens at Washington, a lover of Burns, of international fame, responded. The Scottish flag was raised. Auld Lang Syne was sung. In the Hall of Congresses, the celebration was continued, with Joseph A. Graham presiding. A poem on Robert Burns, by Willis Leonard McClanahan, was read by Maye McCamish Hedrick. Ingersoll's tribute to "The Place Where Burns was Born" was read. Frederick W. Lehmann, a member of the Exposition board and chairman of the committee on International Congresses, later solicitor general of the United States, delivered the address.