In another letter, written to Alex. Cunningham in 1791, Burns makes the nearest approach I know to an analysis of his own religious beliefs:-" There are two great pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain stubborn something in man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul, those senses of the mind-if I may be allowed the expression which connect us with and link us to those awful obscure realities, an all-powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field; the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure."

Burns allied himself with the "Common-sense" party, which to-day would only amount to the accepted dictum that religious belief must not violate, though it may outreach human reason. In one of his letters to James Burness of Montrose, he writes, speaking of the infamous doings of a sect called Buchanites :-"This is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and common-sense in matters of religion." In "The Kirk's Alarm," Burns returns to this dislike of reason by the orthodox party:

"There's a heretic blast

Has been blawn i' the wast,

That what is not sense must be nonsense

Doctor Mac Doctor Mac !

You should stretch on a rack,

To strike evil-doers wi' terror;

To join faith and sense

Upon any pretence

Is heretic, damnal le error: "

The "New Lights" were the

"Common sense

party, but the outcome of their views was to reduce religion

to little better than a code of morals not too strict, and with little of the supernatural element in it.

Burns, in

his reaction from the ultra-Calvinism which was still dominant, and which was still held by his own minister (Mr Auld), sympathised with the new party, but was no strict adherent. No one has more vividly pictured the poverty of this pagan moralism than Burns himself, even while caricaturing the opposite party :

Smith opens out his cold harangues
On practice and on morals

What signifies his barren shrine
Of moral powers and reason?
His English style and gesture fine,
Are a' clean out o' season.

Like Socrates or Antonine,

Or some auld pagan heathen,
The moral man he does define,

But ne'er a word o' faith in
That's right that day."

His revolt was from the coarseness with which Calvinism was presented, and from the hypocrisy which he saw around him, and the inconsistency in men who were ready to judge and condemn their fellows. Religion was to him. a refining and sacred influence, and therefore he protested against scenes which did it no credit. That is the explanation of the powerful satire on the "Holy Fair." These sacramental occasions drew together great crowds from all the country-side. Four or five ministers preached in turn through the long day, either in the open air or in a huge tent, no church building being large enough to hold the audience.

It was a strange mixture of piety and carousal :

"Now, butt an' ben the Change-house fills,

Wi' yill-caup Commentators :

Here's crying out for bakes and gills,

And there the pint-stoup clatters:

While thick and thrang, and loud and tang,

Wi' Logic and wi' Scripture,

They raise a din, that, in the end,

Is like to breed a rapture

O' wrath that day."

To Burns the whole scene was redolent of irreverence, and a scandal to the fair name of religion. It was not all evil. There was both piety and deep reverence in many hearts on those great occasions, but there were also undoubted abuses connected therewith, and these Burns attacked. To many these great religious gatherings were no better than Sunday Fairs :

My name is Fun- your cronie dear,

The nearest friend ye hae;

And this is Superstition here,

And that's Hypocrisy.

I'm gaun to Mauchline Holy Fair,
To spend an hour in daffin'."

Hypocrisy was the cardinal sin in Robert Burns's catalogue, and he never spared it. He was no saint himself. He sinned, and sinned deeply, but at least he scorned to pretend to a sanctity which was not his, or to hide his wrongdoing under an outward show of religion:

** God knows, I'm no' the thing I should be,

Nor am I ev'n the thing I could be,

But twenty times I rather would be
An Atheist clean,

Than under Gospel colours hid be,
Just for a screen."

Much of what I have said is the negative side of Burns's religious life. I confess that it is not so easy to get at the positive side.

Principal Shairp marvels that the man who wrote the "Holy Fair" could also write the "Cottar's Saturday Night," but it is just the man who flings his darts of sarcasm against the abuses of religion who bows his head in reverence before the reality. He detects the false because

he has seen the true.

And true religion, beautiful and gracious, has never been pictured more fair than in that lyric which is one of the flowers of literature. None but a man with a soul for religion could write that poem. It is from the heart ::

"The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face

They, round the ingle, form a circle wide ;
The Sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride;
His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside,

His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare ;
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales a portion wi' judicious care ;

And Let us worship God,' he says, with solemn air.

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs,
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad."

In the "Cottar's Saturday Night" we get Burns's true conception of religion, and the homage of the world to this poem is the testimony that not a false note has been struck throughout.

Burns was full of a pride which feared to let his jovial comrades know that he could not sin without suffering, or could not silence the voice of conscience which shamed

him in his own eyes. But behind that rollicking manner flashed the "red lightnings of remorse," Carlyle justly remarks.

"Of all the numerous ills that hurt our peace

That press the soul, or wring the mind with anguish,

Beyond comparison the worst are those

That to our folly or our guilt we owe.

In every other circumstance, the mind

Has this to say-It was no deed of mine ; '

But when to all the evil of misfortune
The sting is added-- Blame thy foolish self ! '
Or, worser far, the pangs of keen remorse,
The torturing, gnawing consciousness of guilt-
Or guilt, perhaps, where we've involved others,

The young, the innocent, who fondly loved us ;
Nay more, that very love their cause of ruin !
Oh, burning hell! in all thy store of torments
There's not a keener lash!"

Conscience never had her full way with him, for the strong passions of the man-" passions raging like demons" -as he himself says, were left untouched by the rebukes of the orthodox school and by "the cold harangues on practice and on morals" of the "Common-sense" party. Burns, however, clung to his church, and attended its services with commendable regularity. I have sat in St. Michael's Church, Dumfries, behind one of the pillars where was Burns's family pew, and where he was a regular worshipper. Mr Gray, the teacher of the parish school of Dumfries, has left it on record that no parent watched more carefully over the education of his children than Burns did, and spent many an evening tutoring the children for the morrow's lessons. Clark, one of Burns's farm servants at Ellisland, has said that during the six months of his service he never once saw his master intoxicated, and that while he might give them a dram when extra work needed to be done he was not overflush with drams, and discouraged drinking by any in his employ. In Dunscore he started a parish library in order to spread among his neighbours the refining influence of sound literature, and it may surprise the one-sided conception of the character of Robert Burns to know that it was his regular custom every evening at Ellisland to gather his household for family worship, to read to them from the Word of God, and then, "kneeling down to heaven's eternal King," offer up prayers in words of his own. We have, happily, preserved to us the prayers at family worship of Robert Louis Stevenson. Would that we had also preserved to us the prayers which Robert Burns prayed with his family and servants at the Throne of Grace.

RONALD G. MACINTYRE, M.A., B.D.