the
rules which his Church enjoined. It was no proof of magnanimity in
Burns to use his talent in reviling the minister, who had done nothing
more than his duty. One can hardly doubt but that in his inmost heart
he must have been visited with other and more penitential feelings
than those unseemly verses express. But, as Lockhart has well observed,
"his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates know (p. 017)
how little he was able to drown the whispers of the still small voice;
and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease within himself
escaped--as may be often traced in the history of satirists--in angry
sarcasms against those who, whatever their private errors might be,
had at least done him no wrong." Mr. Carlyle's comment on this crisis
of his life is too weighty to be omitted here. "With principles
assailed by evil example from without, by 'passions raging like
demons' from within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings to
whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat
if he were already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his
mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides
there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him.
Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world; his
character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted
worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his
only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is
but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation gathers over him,
broken only by the red lightnings of remorse." Amid this trouble it
was but a poor vanity and miserable love of notoriety which could
console itself with the thought

The mair they talk, I'm kent the better,
E'en let them clash.

Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self-reproach?

This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his parish, and
the bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious bosom, at once
launched Burns into the troubled sea of religious controversy that was
at that time raging all around him. The clergy of the West were divided
into two parties, known as the Auld Lights and the New Lights. (p. 018)
Ayrshire and the west of Scotland had long been the stronghold of
Presbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit; and in Burns's day--a
century and a half after the Covenant--a large number of