friendly familiarity. They had never
heard the devil spoken of in this tone before. It was a charming
address, jocund, full of raillery and good-humour, with a dash of
friendliness, as if the two speakers had been cronies and companions
ready to jog along arm in arm to the nether regions. He simply laughs
Satan out of countenance, turns him to ridicule, pokes his fun at him,
scolds and defies him just as he might have treated a person from whom
he had nothing to fear. Nor is that all. He must admonish him, tell him
he has been naughty long enough, and wind up by giving him some good
advice, counselling him to mend his ways. This was certainly without
theological precedent. It was, however, a simple idea which would have
arranged matters splendidly.... Even to-day to speak well of the devil
is an abomination almost as serious as to speak evil of the Deity. There
was assuredly a great fortitude of mind as well as daring of conduct to
write such a piece as this.'

The poem has done more than anything else to kill the devil of
superstition in Scotland. After his death he found, it is averred, a
quiet resting-place in Kirkcaldy, where pious people have built a church
on his grave.

When Burns later in life made the witches and warlocks dance to the
piping of the devil in Alloway's auld haunted kirk, he was but
assembling them in their fit and proper house of meeting. Here had they
been called into being; here had they the still-born children of
superstition been thrashed into life and trained in unholiness. One can
imagine them oozing out from the walls that had echoed their names so
often through centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue of
his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no doubt from the
very spot on which the pulpit once had stood. In the church had
superstition exorcised this hellish legion out of the dead mass of
ignorance into the swarming maggots that batten on corruption; and it
was in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that here their
spirits should abide, and, when they took bodily shape, that they should
assume the form and feature in which their mother Superstition had
conceived them.

Upon the holy table too lay 'twa span-lang wee unchristened bairns.' For
this hell the poet pictures is the creation of a creed that throngs it
with the souls of innocent babes. 'Suffer little children to come unto
me,' Christ had said; 'for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' 'But