thought among us. There
was, indeed, but one way in which a man could learn to think. His mind
became the subject of some serious impression:--he applied to his Bible,
and, in the contemplation of the most important of all concerns, his
newly awakened faculties received their first exercise. All of
intelligence, all of moral good in him, all that rendered him worthy of
the name of man, he owed to the ennobling influence of his church; and
is it wonder that that influence should be all-powerful from this
circumstance alone? But a thorough change has taken place;--new sources
of intelligence have been opened up; we have our newspapers, and our
magazines, and our volumes of miscellaneous reading; and it is now
possible enough for the most cultivated mind in a parish to be the
least moral and the least religious; and hence necessarily a diminished
influence in the church, independent of the character of its ministers."

I have dwelt too long, perhaps, on the conversation of the elder
Burns; but I feel much pleasure in thus developing, as it were, my
recollections of one whom his powerful-minded son has described--and
this after an acquaintance with our Henry Mackenzies, Adam Smiths, and
Dugald Stewarts--as the man most thoroughly acquainted with the world he
ever knew. Never, at least, have I met with any one who exerted a more
wholesome influence, through the force of moral character, on those
around him. We sat down to a plain and homely supper. The slave question
had, about this time, begun to draw the attention of a few of the more
excellent and intelligent among the people, and the elder Burns seemed
deeply interested in it.

"This is but homely fare, Mr. Lindsay," he said, pointing to the simple
viands before us, "and the apologists of slavery among us would tell you
how inferior we are to the poor negroes, who fare so much better. But
surely 'man liveth not by bread alone!' Our fathers who died for Christ
on the hillside and the scaffold were noble men, and never, never shall
slavery produce such, and yet they toiled as hard, and fared as meanly
as we their children."

I could feel, in the cottage of such a peasant, and seated beside such
men as his two sons, the full force of the remark. And yet I have heard
the miserable sophism of unprincipled power against which it was
directed--a sophism so insulting to the dignity of honest poverty--a
thousand times repeated.

Supper over, the family circle widened round t