his God. He had learned that religion is a thing of the spirit, and not
a matter of creeds and catechisms. Of Robert Burns's own religion it
would be impertinent to inquire too curiously. The religion of a man is
not to be paraded before the public like the manifesto of a party
politician. After all, is there a single man who can sincerely, without
equivocation or mental reservation, label himself Calvinist, Arminian,
Socinian, or Pelagian? If there be, his mind must be a marvel of
mathematical nicety and nothing more. All that we need know of Burns is
that he was naturally and sincerely religious; that he worshipped an
all-loving Father, and believed in an ever-present God; that his charity
was boundless; that he loved what was good and true, and hated with an
indignant hatred whatever was loathsome and false. He loved greatly his
fellow-creatures, man and beast and flower; he could even find something
to pity in the fate of the devil himself. That he was not orthodox, in
the narrow interpretation of orthodoxy in his day, we are well enough
aware, else had he not been the poet we love and cherish.

In his early days at Mount Oliphant there is a hint of these later
satires. 'Polemical divinity about this time was,' he says, 'putting the
country half-mad, and I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between
sermons, in conversation parties, at funerals, etc., in a few years
more, used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion that I
raised a hue and cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this
hour.' And heresy is a terrible cry to raise against a man in Scotland.
In those days it was Anathema-maranatha; even now it is still the
war-slogan of the Assemblies.

The polemical divinity which he refers to as putting the country
half-mad was the wordy war that was being carried on at that time
between the Auld Lights and the New Lights. These New Lights, as they
were called, were but a birth of the social and religious upheaval that
was going on in Scotland and elsewhere. The spirit of revolution was
abroad; in France it became acutely political; in Scotland there was a
desire for greater religious freedom. The Church, as reformed by Knox,
was requiring to be re-reformed. The yoke of papacy had been lifted
certainly, but the yoke of pseudo-Protestantism which had taken its
place was quite as heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had
been new; so long as it had been of their own choosing, it had been